Dunamis Fellowship and Sovereign Grace Fellowship continue tonight our weekly Bible study at 7 eastern. Tonight is part four of our look at the Lord’s Prayer, Lord, Teach Us to Pray. All are welcome to attend at our home. You can even come early (6:15) and we’ll feed you a meal. You can also watch on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you join us as we consider together the Lord’s Prayer.
I get that some Christians don’t like snow. They associate it with bitter cold, backbreaking labor, dangerous travel and expensive heating bills. One day all these men and women will be fully sanctified, and will no longer make that mistake. Snow is not just an astonishing gift, but it is a gift with God’s own signature on it. My own associations with snow include childhood, which was a blessed time for me. They include snow-skiing, sled riding, hot chocolate, crackling fires, Steelers playoff football, Christmas, quiet, spotlessness, snow days, snow men, snow caves, even snow dragons. When I was a boy growing up at the Ligonier Valley Study Center it was not uncommon for the students, the staff and their families to light up a few Coleman lanterns, clear off an acre of snow and enjoy ice skating on Mr. Campbell’s pond late into the night.
Those are all great reasons to be moved by snow. Every one of them would be just as potent if the snow itself were simply innumerable copies of each other. None of those blessings listed above require that each flake, from every snowfall, every neighborhood, every year, be a distinct, unique creation unlike any other flake that has ever fallen. That is God showing off. That is God winking at us. That is Romans 1 in a warm, white blanket. Why does He do it? Because He can. Because He is not the God of either/or but the God of both/and. He is the profligate God, doing it exactly right precisely by overdoing it. He is the God of excess, of extravagance.
And He is the God who is beauty. I confess that I am no expert on beauty. I know enough to know that “Beauty is in the eye of the behold” is just as dumb and likely just as dangerous as “We all have our own truth.” Defining beauty, however, is where it gets tough. One cannot measure it in a test-tube. Beauty is elusive, ephemeral, quicksilver. There is one other thing I know however. The essence of beauty is the harmonization of complexity. It is taking the many and making it one. It is hundreds of instruments played by hundreds of musicians becoming symphonic. It is no wonder that the Creator of the universe, itself an immeasurable ode to the pleroma of God, would take the staggering diversity of trillions of unique ice sculptures and bring them together in unity, in the harmony of a tapestry in countless shades of white.
Is snow cold? Of course it is, but not as cold as the heart that can’t be warmed by it. Is snow wet? Of course it is, just wet enough to bring life to the dry and desert land of the hearts of those who don’t love it. Is snow heavy? Of course it is, just heavy enough to lift our downtrodden spirits. Snow is a good and perfect gift from our heavenly Father who loves us all together in the swirling move of the Spirit and one at a time in union with our Lord.
It is not an insignificant afterthought that the children of Israel spent forty years wandering the wilderness grumbling and complaining against the God who rescued them. It’s not due to the unpleasantness of the desert. It’s not due bad leadership skills of Moses. Nor did it flow out of the psychic trauma of 400 years of slavery. It came from the sinful hearts of the grumblers, the same kinds of hearts we likewise have. Israel leaving slavery and heading to the Promised Land is a picture of believers being rescued from slavery to sin and led to the Celestial City. Which means that we grumble and complain quite a bit ourselves. Their weaknesses are just like ours because we are just like them.
There is, of course, a great difference between grumbling and lamenting. The former looks to God in accusation, the latter looks to God for deliverance. I’m not grumbling about lamenters but lamenting about grumblers. And, confessing that I have plenty of both inside me. Grumbling is not, as we tend to see it, a mere sin of a lack of manners. The problem with grumbling isn’t that it is rude, but that it is idolatrous, in at least two ways.
Grumbling is idolatry first because it presents God as He is not. Whether our grumbling is built on the premise that God has let us down because He’s not loving enough to do better or strong enough to do better, it is built on a lie about Him. He loves us. By name. Personally. Emotionally. Truly. And He is almighty over all things. There is nothing that can thwart His sovereign will. When we are going through hardship, the deepest, soul piercing hardship, it is precisely because He loves us and has ordained our hardship for our good and His glory. When Job affirmed “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” he acknowledged that both his blessings and his suffering ultimately come from God’s omnipotent hand. When he added, “Blessed be the name of the Lord” Job acknowledged that God does all things for the good of His children and for His glory.
Grumbling is idolatry second because it appeals to a god that does not exist, a god above God. Grumbling says to the living God, “You are not measuring up to the standard of a god I have invented in my own head. That god insists that my life be different, more comfortable. You, Lord, are letting him down. If You’re not careful, You may find Yourself under his judgment.” You can’t “tell on” God not just because the Judge of all the earth always judges rightly, but because there is no court of appeal over Him. Who you gonna call?
When, on the other hand, we lament, we go to our loving and all powerful Father, asking Him to deliver us. We do not distort His character nor do we posit a god above Him. He is our hope, our redeemer, ruler of heaven and earth, our Father which art in heaven. Hallowed be His name, on our lips and in our hearts, whether we abound or are abased.
Will going to church eventually lead to conversion, or must one be born again and then desire to belong to the Boby of Christ?
Believe, then belong. However, it is certainly possible that one might attend, then believe, and then belong. That is to say, church membership is for those who have a credible profession of faith. By credible we do not mean after going through a long term exhaustive process by which your true spiritual status can be perfectly deserved. We just mean we have reason to believe it is true. The church is not a civic association, a country club, or any such thing. It is a local body of professing believers in the finished work of Christ.
Attendance is another thing altogether. While corporate Lord’s Day worship is designed to be the assembling together of the saints, and not an evangelistic event per se, at the same time the gospel is made known, or should be, when the saints gather. The Puritans wisely believed not that “going to church [will] eventually lead to conversion,” but that God the Holy Spirit is far more likely to give new life to a man sitting under gospel preaching than a man sitting on a bar stool Sunday morning. It is always a wise thing to sit under the faithful preaching of the Word of God. Faith, after all, comes by hearing.
If God has indeed given a man new life, his immediate obligation is to be baptized (if he has not already been baptized) and to come under the authority of a local body of believers. He ought not to wait for there to be the desire, but ought to be instructed that such is his calling. When we join a local church our faith is nurtured and fed, both in Word and sacrament. We are protected by the grace of church discipline. And we are given an opportunity to serve the body as the Spirit equips us for ministry.
One of the great successes of the serpent in our own day is that he has persuaded too many of us that joining a local church is unnecessary and superfluous. Many claim to be members of “the invisible church.” Others argue that church membership vows are not in the Bible. That is true enough. The Scriptures do, however, call us to submit to those in authority over us, even those who will give an answer for our souls (Hebrews 13). If you are willing to publicly acknowledge your obedience to that particular command, and name a particular body of elders, you have joined a church.
On the other hand, obviously church membership will save no one. One of the dangers of the view that one can belong first and then believe is the temptation to believe that belonging is what matters. Too many of us have said of this loved one or that, “Well, he’s not a Christian, but at least he attends a church.” If such a man does not believe, his membership in the body will only bring greater judgment, especially if he profanes the Lord’s Table by eating there without saving faith.
Perhaps the most subtle verbal sleights of hand are acts of equivocation. Equivocation is when we use one word, but with two different meanings. The change happens so fast we miss the palmed meaning, and are made fools. The classic illustration is in this syllogism — God is love. Love is blind. Ray Charles is blind. Therefore Ray Charles is God. Something isn’t right there, and what it is, is shifting meanings.
It is when dealing with pronouns that we face the toughest temptation. Antecedents get lost in a sea of pronouns, and soon enough we not only don’t know what he said but don’t know who he is. And where confusion abounds, there you will find the devil. It is one of his favorite weapons.
Consider for a moment the wisdom in the Bible about loving one another. Love is indeed a dominant theme in the Bible. The Bible is so full of injunctions to love that we in turn have great difficulty reconciling that teaching with this: “Oh Lord, dash their little ones against the rocks” (Psalm 137:9). The Bible, in addition to sundry summons to love, includes what we call imprecatory psalms, wherein the psalmist calls down God’s judgment on His enemies. Read through Moses’ celebration of the deliverance of the people and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army, and you probably won’t feel the love. How do these things cohere? Lest you think the solution is a division between the old and new covenants, give a read to Paul in thundering against the Judaizers in Galatians.
While it is true that there is a kind of love we are called to toward those outside the kingdom, (that is, we are called to love our enemy), that in turn matches a kind of love God Himself has for His enemies (the love of benevolence). By the same token, we are called to love discriminately. We have different kinds of loves for different kinds of people. I love my wife one way, and I love my neighbor an entirely different way. We have missed this, because our enemy has confused us on the pronouns. The Bible’s call that “we” love “one another” isn’t ultimately about man’s call to love man. The “we” isn’t human beings, but the redeemed.
Those wolves in the church, liberal clerics and theologians, began this sleight of hand when they first spoke of the “universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.” The idea, as with so many from this particular pit of hell, became eventually accepted wisdom in the evangelical church. It operates under the assumption that God has a duty to treat all people exactly the same way, an assumption that the Bible explicitly denies: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Rom. 9:15). There is no getting around the fact that God did not treat Esau as He treated Jacob, and this before either had been born. And He does not treat the seed of the serpent the same way He treats us, the seed of the woman.
Why not? What accounts for the difference? The answer is simple enough — our union with Christ. Pardon the confusing pronouns, but while we love Him because He first loved us, He first loved us because He first loved Him. We are in ourselves, just like the seed of the serpent, merely dust and rebellion. But in Christ we are altogether lovely. It is not for mere pity that He loves us, but for His Son.
But what of His love for the lost? If they are not in union with Christ, why would they be loved at all? What would account for what the theologians call this “love of benevolence”? What accounts for this love, and the kindness that flows from it, bringing the rains upon the fields of the unjust, isn’t union with Christ, but is the image of God. There is, in short, something lovely about the lost, the very remnants of the image of pure loveliness. What God loves in the reprobate isn’t the reprobate, isn’t the Son, but is Himself, something indeed worthy of His love.
And we who are in union with Christ not only bear that same image, but are called to polish it, to improve upon it, to labor with the Holy Spirit that we might more and more reflect His glory. Which in turn means that we too ought to love the lost, for the very same reason. We love one another with a holy love, because we are together in union with Christ. But we love outside the circle of the kingdom because they yet maintain the fragments of the image of God. In their depravity, they do everything they can to smash that mirror to ever tinier pieces. Indeed their degeneration is nothing more than leaving that image behind until finally, at their death, they reach reach utter horror. They become nothing but dust and rebellion, enveloped in eternal flame.
But not here and not now. Ironically, it is for His love for us that He shows them kindness. If He released the restraints, we would find ourselves living in a living hell. But by His grace toward us, He restrains them, and He kindly showers them with His beneficent love. In His grace toward us, He teaches us our pronouns, so that like Him we too would love His sheep as His sheep, and love the goats for the image of the Shepherd in them.
