How easily our familiarity with the Bible sets a trap for us. Our eyes run across the page and we realize we’re about to read about the Good Samaritan. We know that story. We race at best to get to it, at worst to get through it. And so we miss what comes before it. Consider the few portentous words out of the mouth of the lawyer who prompted the story. He, you will remember, asked Jesus how he might be saved. Jesus, in turn, asked the lawyer what is written in the law. The lawyer gives the two great commandments, and Jesus replies, “You have answered rightly; do this and you will live.” Now here comes the telling part, “But he, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘Who is my neighbor?’” Isn’t that something? He wanted to justify himself. Now why would that be?
The law, of course, condemns us sinners. Sinners that we are, we seek then to blame the law rather than ourselves. We suggest to ourselves either that the law is unclear, or unreasonable. We, ironically, seek to law ourselves away from the law- The party of the first part, unable to determine the party of the second part is hereby absolved of all wrongdoing toward the party of the second part. That’s the gist of where this lawyer was going in asking who his neighbor was. What is interesting is that Jesus doesn’t tell the lawyer who is neighbor is. He tells the lawyer instead that He is the neighbor. Our attempts at earning God’s favor in keeping His law leave us naked, battered and in desperate need of rescue. Jesus alone can rescue us. He must carry us to safety. He must pay our debts, that our wounds might be healed. And He promises to come back for us. In short, we cannot justify ourselves by asking who is our neighbor. Instead we can only be justified by the One who is our neighbor.
Though the story does not say so, I suspect that when the man was healed sufficiently to go one with his life, he went through his days filled with gratitude for the Samaritan neighbor. I suspect, on the other hand, that he too remained something like the lawyer. I suspect that he too, from time to time, faced the temptation in the face of the law to justify himself. He, like the lawyer who first asked the question, had a fool for a client. We all do the same. Even we who confess our dependence on the finished work of Christ alone do not always and everywhere when confronted with the law rejoice in the provision of the Great Neighbor. Too often we seek to justify ourselves. We make excuses. We rationalize. We object to the one Judge in all the universe who must always judge rightly. We seek to justify ourselves to the one Judge in all the universe who wants only one thing of us, that we would repent and believe still more.
The message here is less “Be a good egg and rescue people who are stranded on the side of the road” and more, “I am in a desperate situation, and Jesus is always and everywhere the answer. He has provided for my need, and I need no longer seek to do the impossible, to justify myself.” Would that we would always have ears to hear.
Thesis 33- We must believe God loves us.
Love is one of the good words. Just as no one particularly labors to have words like death, or cruelty associated with themselves or their ideas, so everyone wants to lay claim to love. The devil is quite content for all of us to love love, as long as he maintains the power to define the term. The mainline American church follows mainstream American culture and defines love principally in permissive terms. Love means never requiring others to say they are sorry. God’s love for us, in this scheme, makes our sins insignificant (as well as the atonement of Christ.) God winks us into heaven, because we’re so valuable and lovable, and He’s such a swell guy (or girl).
The devil’s goal in promoting this nonsense, is not, in the end, directed at either liberal professing Christians nor those who are not professing Christians. Instead, his enemy is always those who trust in Christ alone. In getting us to embrace this foolish idea of love, he tempts us to deny or at least diminish the sound idea of God’s love. Evangelicals, at least the fundamentalist and the Reformed wings, want to affirm the reality of God’s wrath. He is a just and holy God. His wrath, justice and holiness are more real than we will ever realize. But they ought never to be contrasted with His love. We should not diminish any attribute of God to emphasize any others. The Lord our God is one. The Bible tells us time and again that we are loved by God. Our duty is to believe Him.
This is, in the end, the very end of the work of Christ. God’s goal was not merely that we would end up forgiven for our sins. This was but a step in a longer process whereby we who are by nature children of wrath become His own children. Our justification is in the service of our adoption. Jesus, His beloved Son, suffered for our sins so that we might become by grace His beloved sons.
I spent much of my public ministry seeking to make known this startling reality- that if we are in Christ, we are loved by our heavenly Father as much now as we will ever be. Even when we remember our evangelical theology, even when we sing with our lips that we are justified by faith alone, too many of us too often seem to think that God is angry with us when we sin, and that we keep His anger far from us by not sinning. We long for heaven in part because we know that there we will sin no more. Guilt will no longer stand between us and our Father. The truth is, however, that guilt does not stand between us. Our guilt was driven away as far as the east is from the west two thousand years ago. God’s anger at our sins was spent on Calvary.
I have been repenting of preaching this message. I no longer believe that I ought to be seeking to persuade people that God loves them now as much as He ever will love them. My goal now is to persuade Christians of this truth, far more shocking still- if you are in Christ, God loves you now as much as He loves His own Son. This is the good news. Not only were our sins forever expunged at Calvary, but the very obedience of Jesus became ours. He is as pleased with us as He is with His first born Son. We are now joint heirs with Him. We are in union with Him.
Believing this precious truth changes everything. So much of our fear, our weakness is driven by a failure to rest in this truth. We long for the approval of men, because we do not believe we have the approval of God. And so we fail to be faithful. Faith, however, is believing God. He has told us that He loves us. He has told us that He has made us His Sons. By his grace may He bless us with hearts that believe Him.
There are precious few sins that automatically slide off evangelicals like Teflon. It is precisely because we evangelicals are so worldly that it often happens that what we condemn in those outside the camp is soon enough found in the camp. In short, of course there are evangelicals who are guilty of cancel culture, and evangelicals who are victims of cancel culture. Such, however, doesn’t mean that victims within our camp are to blame. If karma is real, the last thing anyone ought to do is cheer when it catches up with others.
Jonathan Merritt, a gifted writer who manages to reach audiences both within and without the evangelical fold published this piece that could be read as taking delight in evangelicals getting cancelled. I get that temptation, having been cancelled myself by evangelicals. Fairness, however, would recognize that there is a fundamental difference between publicly recognizing when someone abandons a core value of a given group and when someone merely expresses a politically incorrect opinion. I’ll grant that it’s a nuance, but it is an important one.
Jonathan himself, not yet cancelled as far as I can tell, recently posted this which seems to suggest that one can enter the kingdom of God without repenting of one’s sins. I asked him if such was what he intended to say. He declined to respond. If someone says, “You can enter the kingdom of heaven without repentance” they are not evangelical. And evangelicals have no obligation to provide a platform for anyone whose message runs contrary to evangelicalism. It is not a sign of small-mindedness to warn people about this message, but a sign of fidelity to Jesus.
Sadly, cancel culture inside the church can be vicious. Some would insist not only on cancelling Jonathan, but cancelling anyone who didn’t think such needed to be done. Worse still, we cancel people not because they deny the gospel but when they confess their need for the gospel. As my friend Tullian Tchividjian has wisely pointed out, we all want a pastor that is zealous to confess from his pulpit that he is a sinner. If, however, he actually names the sin, he’ll be tarred, feathered and driven out of town. This is precisely what we mean when we bemoan the hard truth that the church of Jesus Christ is the only army that shoots its own wounded.
Grace. Grace is patient with anything but this- the denial of grace. Grace means that even if we end up “cancelling” someone for leaving the faith, we do so with tears, and with fear and trembling knowing we could be next. It means we seek restoration and reconciliation, and hold no grudges when the repentance comes. In I Corinthians Paul rebukes the church for turning “grace” into license as they paraded their broadmindedness in not disciplining the man who had his father’s wife. Paul insisted that the man be excommunicated. In II Corinthians Paul rebukes the church for turning their backs on the same man after he repented. And yet Paul corrected the church graciously.
Evangelicals are swiftly being cancelled en masse by the broader world. Pray we learn from the experience both our need for God’s grace and our calling to show it.
Don’t forget that this Monday, July 13, at 7:00 eastern we begin a new study, working together through my father’s classic work, The Holiness of God. We will cover this week chapter 1. All are welcome to join us online. If, however, you are in the area, you are welcome to join us in our home. We serve a meal to our guests at 6:00. Do please let us know if you’d like to be here in person for the study or both the meal and the study. We hope to see you here.
Our view of the Lord’s Table is stunted, anemic. Too often we see this sacrament as merely quiet time with a snack. We reflect on our sins, which we ought to do. We reflect on what Christ has accomplished for us, which we ought to do. If we’re fortunate, we remember to reflect on the glory of coming into Christ’s presence, that we are at His table with Him. But it is a rare thing indeed for us to remember that it is we who are at His table. We usually come alone.
Communion speaks not only of our union with Christ, though it does speak of that. It also speaks of our union with each other. And the two are inseparably bound together. You cannot have union with Christ and not have union with His people. You cannot have union with His people without having union with Him. Communion is neither just me and Jesus, nor just me and my friends. It is Jesus and me and my friends.
Friends, of course, is not the right word for it. The communion of saints is not some sophisticated way of talking about fellowship. Rather we come to the table with all those who, like us, are in covenant union with Jesus. We come together as the body of Christ. We are not merely a collection of like-minded people, we are instead a collection of body parts, feeding upon the body of Christ.
Apart from the table of the Lord, however, we do not fly apart. We are still and always the body of Christ, knit together by the fact that we are knit together with Christ. And this ought to have a profound influence on how we see each other. Because we are in union with Christ we ought to look at our brothers and sisters as Christ looks at them, namely, as those who are in union with Christ. When the Father looks at us, because of our union with Christ, He sees Christ. When we look at our brother, we ought to see the same thing.
That’s not always so easy. How often we have heard, or made the lament, “Loving Christ is easy; it is loving Christians that is hard.” What we see in the church is not often terribly lovable. Our siblings in the church, like our siblings in our homes, have the capacity to get under our skin. We irritate each other. Worse, we sin against each other. How can our communion be sweet when we have to contend with so much contention and bitterness in the church? The answer is not found in some pop-psychology feel-good exercises to teach us to be nice. We don’t need sensitivity training. We don’t need a bootstrap effort to just try to get along. The answer instead, as is so often the case, lies in believing the gospel.
When we believe the gospel, first we believe that God Himself has already judged those sins our brothers have committed against us. There is no need to nurse a grudge when God Himself has been satisfied. Second, when we believe the gospel, we believe that we ourselves are utterly unworthy. We realize that we are still sinners, and that we get under the skin of others. We no longer take offense when we are not treated with the dignity and respect we deserve, because we know we deserve no dignity and respect. We know what we are, and we know that Jesus got what we deserve. And so we learn to forgive others as we would have them forgive us.
When we believe the gospel, we look forward in hope to the end of our salvation. We long for the day when we will be what we were redeemed to be, blameless and upright, when we will be in ourselves what we are in Christ. We will watch for signs that we are progressing, that we are growing in grace. And we will delight to see those signs manifest in our brothers and sisters. We will remember that we will be with them for eternity, and that we will, when we and they are fully sanctified, we will love them fully.
When we believe the gospel, we will believe that in union with Christ we can do all things, including loving the unlovable. We will not give in to carnal sloth, and rest in a merely future hope. We will believe that He is at work in us to give us faith and hope, and the greatest of these, love.
When we believe the gospel, we will, perhaps most importantly, believe that our brothers and sisters are in union with our heavenly husband, Jesus. When we look at them, if we would believe the gospel, we must see Him. He loves them as a husband loves His bride, and as our husband, commands us to love them as well. But we can do it because He is there. He is one with them. If we believe the gospel, we will not need Him to tell us when we gave Him food when He was hungry, when we clothed Him when He was naked, because we will already know that because of our union with Him, when we do these things to the least of our brethren, we do them unto Him.
When we believe the gospel, we will know that the Lord’s Table is not required to come coram Deo, before the face of God. We will know that we are before His face every instant we are in the presence of those who are in union with Him. We will enjoy the mystic, sweet communion of the saints whenever and wherever the saints are gathered. Wherever we are, He is there among us, because we are in union with Him.
As one reads through the history of Judah and Israel it is hard to miss the truth that Judah was blessed with many more good kings than their neighbors to the north. Often, however, these good kings do not escape their own history unscathed. After acknowledging their overall good behavior the text often says words to this effect- “King Jeunpronouncable did not remove the high places.” These were unauthorized places of worship. Sometimes that worship was devoted to the living God, other times not. It was never, however, authorized by the living God.
While our circumstances are different, we no longer are commanded to worship in just one place, our propensities are the same. We’re sinners just like God’s people in the Old Testament. We have blind spots and our own gods that we blend together with the living God. It has always been so. The practice of chattel slavery in American history, with the blessing of huge swaths of the church would be one example. God’s people should have known better.
In our own day I would suggest three high places that stand head and shoulders above the rest. First, there is the approval of men. We syncretize this with true worship by claiming we seek nothing more than to be all things to all men. But the honest truth is we crave standing, acceptance, respectability. We, on this high place, are willing to offer as sacrifices the plain teaching of God’s Word, to lay down our prophetic mantles. We cavort with that temple whore known as Political Correctness and take her diseases into our bodies.
Second we, not surprisingly, worship mammon. When Jesus warned His audience that they would not be able to worship both God and mammon He didn’t pick mammon by accident. He picked something with virtual universal appeal, something we love from top to bottom. Some of us are more crass, preaching a gospel in which the good news is the promise of health and wealth. Some of us are a touch more subtle, lifting up the well-off as the very model of Christian success. Some of us cut ethical corners to get more. Others of us burn the candle at both ends to get more. All of us are drawn to its false worship.
Third, we worship pleasure. More often than not, that pleasure is sexual in nature. We treat fornication as a rite of passage, adultery like a peccadillo. When reality doesn’t measure up to our imaginations we race to the airbrushed realm of the web to get our fix. And if the Bible says no homosexual behavior, well then, the Bible will have to go.
These are our high places. What we tolerate in the good times always becomes the deadliest of snares in the bad. Our calling, kings and queens as we are in the kingdom of God, is to tear them down ruthlessly. Our calling, as beggars, is to walk right past the poison repast and to long for the bread which comes down from heaven. Our calling is to return to our Father’s embrace and to feast at His table, as His children. Lord, help us to not be too easily satisfied. Help us to find our rest in Thee.
