When I grumble that some people aspire to be “more pious than God” my beef isn’t that these folks are adamant in their pursuit of godliness. My beef is that their standards are more narrow than the liberty God has given us. It is one thing to heed God’s command to be modest. It is another thing to suggest that anything more revealing than a burka is an abomination. It is one thing to rightly note that God hates divorce. It is another thing to therefore forbid divorce where God leaves room for it.
Yet another place this propensity pops up is in our insistence that we never give up in seeking to persuade others of biblical truths. Which, of course, misses this biblical truth, that we are commanded by the living God to shake the dust off our feet (Matthew 10:14), to not answer a fool (Proverbs 26:4) and to not cast our pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6). We are not out pious-ing God when we leave the dust on our feet, answer the fool and cast pearls before swine. We are demonstrating our own foolishness.
Of course one may make the mistake of shaking off the dust too early, of prematurely judging someone as a fool or as swine. We can also, however, stubbornly refuse to see the brick wall right in front of our nose. We may as well talk to our own hand, because the wall isn’t hearing us. The democratization of discourse that social media has wrought not only requires of us that we all have a take on everything, but encourages us to defend our take against all challengers and to challenge all takes we disagree with.
There are blessings that come with this wide open agora. One is that someone may just help me. I’ve had takes that were challenged, and challenged well. I’ve actually changed my mind about something because someone, a stranger I didn’t even know, had an argument superior to my own that they made across the interwebs. One sure way to recognize a fool is that the fool despises wise counsel. The counsel you may be seeking to give at any given moment may not be so good. But if the person you are giving it to has never, ever, not even once so much as conceded that he might need to rethink something, chances are, even if your counsel were good, it would still be wasted. Shouting louder won’t help those with their own fingers in their ears hear you. It will just make you look like a shouting fool.
Walking away doesn’t make you intimidated, impious or incapable. It may demonstrate your own wisdom. It may also be the best thing you can do for those whose dust you leave behind. As long as they are arguing, trolling, or have their fingers in their ears, that is, as long as you continue to engage, they won’t have the blessed opportunity to be alone with their thoughts and face the emptiness of their arguments.
It isn’t piety, persistence or passion that keep us talking to brick walls, but a desire to win, a desire to be thought pious, persistent and passionate. It is us with our fingers in our ears as the God of heaven and earth speaks to us.
The serpent, who is more cunning than any of the beasts of the field, is a counterfeiter. It is his wily custom to not merely construct an alternate realm to the realm of Christ, but to craft every piece of that realm as a copy of the real. He is a mimic. Anti-Christ does not merely mean “against Christ” but likewise means “instead of Christ.” He is a false messiah of a false kingdom. And like the true Messiah, he is seeking those who would worship him. As such, he is a false prophet, a false priest, and a false king. For every blessing our Father above bestows upon His children, the Devil below has a faux blessing. And it is his unholy habit to encourage us to confuse the two.
One of the telling measures of our own cultural decline is the steady erosion of a sane understanding of the family. Family, we should remember, is on one level what we call a common blessing. God has not restricted the freedom to marry and to raise up children to His redeemed. He has instead blessed all mankind with that liberty, with that calling. The serpent, however, has countless versions of the false family, a dizzying array of communities held together by base and foolish affections. He entices us to look for love in all the wrong places, to draw circles in the sand that will wash away with the tide.
Some draw their lines through their experience, seeking family in those who shared a common illness, or even a common hobby. They see themselves as united with those who have survived cancer like them, or who raise prize roses, like them. Or as united with those who vote like them. Still others draw lines based on secondary genetic markers. They believe that their family consists of those who share a common genetic makeup. Their loyalties go to a particular skin color. These folks consider my own family to be “race traitors” because God has blessed us with two young men whose ancestors hail from Africa. They may have brown hair, brown eyes, and brown knees, but they are Sprouls, and like the rest of us, they are called to seek first the kingdom of God.
It is sad to see those outside the kingdom looking for identity, looking for belonging in such pointless ways. Sadder still, however, is that the same kinds of ties bind too many of us within the church. We call ourselves Christians, but we are more loyal to our favorite football team (and its fans) than we are to Christ and those He has bought. We call ourselves Christians, but we would rather spend our time with a peer group defined by age, gender, and socio-economic status. We call ourselves Christians, but we define ourselves, and those around us, by just about anything but the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Our Father in heaven told us all, that is, all that are His, to pray to Him as our Father in heaven. This is what defines us, as us. We are those who have God as our Father. Our lines of loyalty then are clearly drawn. My kin are not bald fifty-somethings. My kin are not those who can trace their lineage back to the British Isles. My kin are those who have been bought by the blood of the Lamb. They are my brothers and my sisters, even if they root for the wrong football team. My calling is to love them like family, for they are family. They, like me, have been born a second time, born into the family of God. We share a common Father, we share a common mother, the church, and we share a common brother, Jesus our Lord. This is now how our family is described,
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2: 9–10).
May we by His grace live as sojourners and pilgrims, our identity held not here on earth, but with our Father in heaven. May we live as His family.
By calling them, along with the marrieds, to repent and believe the gospel. I don’t want to diminish the hardship. The church is full of single people wishing they weren’t single. I do, however, want to suggest that such questions mean little to the work and calling of the church.
The church has a call to deal with people as people. Each of us, parent and child, married and single, man and woman, tall and short, do not have our final identity in those distinctions, but in Christ. What I needed as a single man is what I need as a husband is what I needed as a boy- Word and sacrament. The problem the church is called to help the whole congregation with isn’t singleness but sanctification, not aloneness but growth in grace.
That is not to say, of course, that the church has no calling relative to different life circumstances. Widows in certain circumstances are to be cared for. Both the elders and the deacons have a calling to serve faithfully those who are not blessed with husbands. Younger men are to be taught by older men, younger women by older women. Certainly a church vibrant with family life can lose sight of these specific callings, and ought not to do so. The danger, however, on the other side of the horse, is dividing our congregations into different demographics with different programs. Isn’t it ironic that the one place the Bible speaks of older and younger men, older and younger women, it speaks of bringing them together rather than keeping them apart (Titus 2)?
For those who feel that awkwardness, my best counsel is to seek to get over it. Singles may not feel like they have much in common with bustling young families. Marrieds might feel like we don’t have much in common with singles. But we have in common all the things that matter most- we have been reborn, redeemed. We are being remade, and will all one day be like Him, seeing Him as He is.
The church is a family of families. It is one family together, and thus no member therein is without family. Families, however, don’t need programs. They merely need to love and welcome one another, to practice hospitality. They need to sacrifice one for another, and encourage one another on to righteousness. But the “they” I’m speaking of is all the members of the church. Singles need to not merely ask of the church, “What are you doing for me?” but also, “How can I serve this body?” Every family member participates in the work of the family. Those called to lead the church lead the church to do the work of the church:
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; (Ephesians 4:11-13).
It can happen even in careful systematic theology. How much more so in popular parlance? We take what the Bible actually teaches, rephrase it so we can understand it, and end up believing our own phrasing, rather than the actual biblical truth. It’s not malicious, but it is dangerous. What follows are four common thoughts, common expressions, within the evangelical church that just aren’t so.
“All sins are equal in the sight of God.” Well, no. It is true enough that every sin is worthy of God’s eternal wrath. It is true enough that if we have broken part of the law we have broken the law (James actually says this.) It is true enough that unjust anger is a violation of the commandment against murder (Jesus actually says this.) None of this, however, means all sins are equal in the sight of God. To say that because all sins deserve eternal wrath means they are all equal is like saying that all numbers over 100 are equal. The truth is that Jesus said of the Pharisees that while they rightly tithed their mint and their cumin, they neglected the weightier matters of the law (Matthew 23:23). No sin is weightless, but some weigh more than others.
“Hell is the absence of God.” Well, no. If God is omnipresent, and He is, is there anywhere He can not be? David understood this, and thus affirmed, “If I make my bed in Sheol, Thou art there” (Psalm 139:8). Hell isn’t the absence of God, but the presence of His wrath. God is there, but His grace, His kindness, His peace are not. God is the great horror of hell.
“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Well, not if your name is Esau. Okay, there certainly is a kind of universal love that God has for all mankind. And certainly all those who repent and believe will be blessed. And certainly God calls all men everywhere to repent. But it is also true that God has prepared vessels for destruction (Romans 9:22). Being prepared for destruction likely wouldn’t be considered “wonderful” by anyone. We don’t know God’s hidden plans, and thus should preach the gospel to all the world. But we shouldn’t, in so preaching, promise what He hasn’t promised.
“Money is the root of all evil.” Well, no. Actually this one is wrong on two counts. First, the text (I Timothy 6:10) tells us that it is the love of money, not money, and that it is all sorts of evil, not all evil. If money were the root of all evil, all we would need to do to bring paradise on earth would be to have no more money. If money were the root of all evil, the problem would be out there, rather than in our hearts. Sin is not an it problem, but an us problem.
The devil isn’t lazy. He will take the breaks we give him. Myths and half-truths are perfect opportunities for us to miss who we are, who God is, and how He reconciles His own to Himself. Perhaps were we more faithful to His Word, we might just be more faithful.
There is no need to give a defense of the conviction that Christians are given to tribalism. Thankfully, there is no “there is no tribalism” tribe in the church. One wag once said something to the effect that the sinfulness of man is that Christian doctrine for which there is the greatest empirical evidence. Everyone can see it. Our tribalism is simply another manifestation of our sin.
We are not the first believers to be guilty of it. The church at Corinth was infested with the problem, but they didn’t start the fire. The disciples were guilty of it. The children of Israel were guilty of it. The root is sin. The trunk is pride. Tribalism is the branches.
First, tribalism feeds off our need to think our distinctions are what earn God’s favor. Thinking that because I believe in the doctrines of grace, or because I’m missional, or because I’m open to the Spirit at work, or because I have maintained a place at someone else’s table, all of them are nothing more than hooks to hang our self-justification hats on. It is the ground of our higher life, second blessing that sets us higher than the poor benighted fools that will only make it into heaven by the skin of their teeth.
Second, tribalism feeds our need to be in the inner circle, also a function of pride. We create our He-man Egalitarian Hater’s Club or our Knox-ious Arminian Bible Thumping Club or our More Winsome Than Thou Chamberlain Club we not only get to look down our individual noses at other believers but also get to learn the secret handshake, the quote the acceptable sages to one another. We get to belong. That hunger to be in the inner circle is not silly little temptation. It did great damage to the body in birthing Gnosticism and does so today in sustaining Gnosticism.
Third, tribalism gives us a battlefield where we can win glory. When we seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness we will acquire no medals for extraordinary courage. Our exploits will not be recounted around the campfires of the future. We will die gloriously forgotten. When, however, we enter the twitter-fray armed with 280 smooth characters by which we slay the Philistines in the other camp, we get likes and retweets and followers. We become the champion of our cause, fighting against the cause of our Champion.
Which brings us to the solution. We need to repent and believe the gospel. Not create the Repent and Believe the Gospel tribe, but to actually repent and believe the gospel. We are together, every believer out there, the compromised and the worldly, the pure and the disdainful, the sound and the wacky, full enough of blindness, sin, pride, folly, that not one of us has any business looking down our noses at others. We are together bought with a price, precious in the sight of our Lord. Oh the shame that I snicker against those for whom He went through His passion.
Can we disagree? Of course. Do secondary matters matter? Secondarily, most certainly. Secondary errors carry with them dangerous trajectories. So too, however, does turning secondary matters into primary matters. The former may lead in the end to a denial of the gospel. The latter has already done so. Oh Lord, give us unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and in all things, charity.
