I ran headlong into my sin. He ran headlong into my punishment. I denied Him. He affirms me. I cried out, “Crucify Him!” He cried out, “Forgive him.” I claimed to be innocent, knowing I am guilty. He claimed to be guilty, knowing He is innocent. I earned the Father’s wrath. He earned the Father’s favor. I receive the Father’s favor. He received the Father’s wrath. The Father embraced me. The Father forsook Him.
I crucified the Lord of Glory. The Lord of Glory laid down His life for me.
1. Because the Bible commands us not to forsake the gathering together of the saints (Hebrews 10:25). Before you ask if meeting online is really the gathering together of the saints you should know that such a question sounds to me an awful lot like, “And who is my neighbor?” It’s not a good look. I’m happy to concede that our online gatherings are not at all what God designed, that they are woefully lacking when compared with the real deal. I understand as well that there are careful arguments to be had about Romans 13, the 1st Amendment and the relative merits of social distancing. But those arguments are not relevant here. If your church is “gathering” online only, gather with them.
2. Because while the togetherness isn’t the togetherness of physically coming together, it is far greater than merely logging on to an earlier service or listening to a podcast of a sermon. Real time interaction is, however de-humanizing it may be to do it online, far more humanizing than not doing it at all. Your capacity to identify and empathize with your brothers and sisters will grow when you are doing the same thing at the same time, in the same conversation with the same people.
3. To encourage my pastor. As a public speaker it is my habit to always seek out, early on, a smiling face. When I find one I will return to that face time and again along the way. It lifts my spirits, reminds me that I’m communicating something important, and that there is an end goal well beyond hearing my lips flap. My pastor is likely unused to speaking to an empty room. Knowing there are people listening in real time will help him to do better, given him some level of feedback, and help him rest easier in knowing that the sheep he loves and sacrifices for are receiving the food he is laboring to being to them. I am not simply downloading information from his mind to mine, wherein I can do it at any time, or get any information from any other shepherd. I am connecting. That I can’t connect as I used to do, being face to face, is a terrible reason to connect even less than I am still able to do, online.
4. To be fed by my pastor. I need to hear what the pastor God has given to me has to say to me about what God’s Word has to say to me for such a time as this. These are not ordinary days, but God is still pleased to use ordinary means. He expects me to go the shepherd He has given me to look for what He has to give me. And when the pastor says it’s feeding time, a healthy sheep doesn’t say, “Put mine in the oven to keep it warm. I’ll eat it later.”
5. To feel the pain of God’s judgment and respond in repentance. The last thing I want is for us to reach the conclusion that church online works just fine. No need to shower, shave, or even get out of bed. What could be better? What God has designed is better. He has taken away our ability to meet together. He has done this for more reasons than I could imagine. Those reasons, however, would include, to drive us to repentance. When we gather online it should be a comfort to us, that God has allowed us, in the midst of His judgment, this capacity. And when we gather online it should be a heartache to us, that God has taken from us the ability to meet face to face.
No one will notice if I blow-off online church. Except the One who calls me to worship Him, and me, the one called to come. Come and worship Him. Assemble together with the saints. Repent. Give thanks. Sing praises. And resolve that you will never again take for granted all the blessings He has wrapped up in corporate worship.
God is in the business of tearing down our idols. We, because we are yet sinners, desperately seek to prove Jesus wrong, to successfully serve two masters. But our Master won’t have it. He will not share His glory with another, nor our allegiance with another. But we still try.
Three and a half years ago God’s idol destruction machinery took the form of my arrest. I had looked to a bottle to give me what I wanted. God showed me what a miserable failure of a god alcohol is. But He wasn’t finished. The security and peace that I found in my financial standing went up in smoke at the same time. The delight I took in my public reputation, though it had been bruised a time or two before, this time was down for the count. Self-sufficiency was yet another casualty.
Too many of us find it too easy in these difficult times to wring our hands and wonder aloud why God doesn’t do something. What we miss is that He is doing something. He is doing what He always does- washing us and glorifying Himself. He is tearing down our idols. When we weep and moan to see our second master bruised and bloodied, in need of a ventilator and on the brink of death, fools that we are we ask the true Master to rescue him. Meanwhile He is busy killing him.
What if God, wanting to help us learn to trust Him and not our health or our earning power or our government or our safety, or our barns filled to the brim, burned them all to the ground, smashed them to tiny pieces, gave them a deadly pestilence? What should we do? Not mourn the death of our idols, but rejoice in the life of the living God. Not weep for the rust on our treasure, but sing the glory of the Pearl of Great Price. Not ask Him to raise our idols from the dead, but believe His sure and certain promise that He will raise us from the dead on that great day.
What if God sent us a calamity so severe that all our strategies to defeat it, redirect it, mute it, overcome it were doomed to failure, no matter what? What if rather than calling us to change our circumstances, our Father who loves us is calling us to change our perspectives? What if this is actually a good thing? A gift? An affirmation and a proof that He loves us and wants to set us free?
Every bit of shame, every drop of hardship, every ounce of loss that pulled me over that dark night was a tender and loving, hand-picked gift from my heavenly Father who loves me today, and loved me that night, as much as He loves His Son. For all those in Christ, this is true. He is not just setting us free from the penalty of sin, He is cutting loose the bonds of the snares of sin, even though every cut pierces our dark hearts. Our calling is to praise and to thank Him. Not despite the hardships, but for them. He loves us too much to leave us loving the lifeless, unfaithful bastards we seek out and pursue. He tears them down, for our good and for His glory.
Thesis 20- We must preach the Bible.
Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone is a fine doctrine. Martin Luther fought on the side of the angels when he argued that the Scripture alone has the power to bind the conscience of man. We must not think, however, that after Luther’s bold stand that the serpent slithered away believing he could no longer assault the Bride. Indeed the serpent is quite content for us to believe in the doctrine of sola Scriptura, so long as we do not avail ourselves of the power of the Scripture. It is one thing to believe that Scripture alone has the power to bind the conscience. It is another thing altogether to yoke ones conscience to the Scripture.
Too often, even in evangelical churches, sermons are delivered that did not have as their starting point the Word of God. Too many pastors begin their sermon preparation by considering what point they would like to make, and then turn to the Bible to find a proof text to use to back up that point. Here the Bible is merely a tool, a footnote to the wisdom of the preacher. Worse still, in too many evangelical churches the Bible is not consulted at all. A sermon built out of wisdom gleaned from Dr. Oz is not much worse than a sermon built out of the wisdom found in the Westminster Confession of Faith. God does not call the preacher to preach his own wisdom, the wisdom of secular gurus, not even the wisdom of the great men of God in church history. Instead He calls us to preach the Word, in season and out of season.
A second problem keeps us away from the power of the Word preached. While no one would want to suggest that it is a bad thing to study the Bible on ones own, too many of us substitute our own private studies of God’s Word with availing ourselves of the Word of God preached. God is pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of preaching (). It isn’t simply the Word itself but the Word preached. Preaching that is not preaching the Word is not what we are called to. Simply reading or studying the Word, without the Word preached is likewise not what we are called to. The Robinson Crusoe approach, just me and my Bible, is a recipe for making shipwreck of our souls.
And there is a third potential problem. In too many evangelical churches, especially Reformed evangelical churches, we are willing to preach through books of the Bible, but we tend to spend all our time in the epistles of Paul. We do not start out deciding to teach on predestination, but we pitch our tents in those places where predestination is front and center. We ought not, of course, run from any text. Instead we ought to get behind the Bible, to follow it, rather than trying to lead it.
We are the bride of Christ. Our husband, the great shepherd of the sheep, has called those who shepherd under Him, to wash us in the water of the Word, that we might be sanctified. This will only happen as we repent, and preach that Word, in season and out.
Yes, yes, and no.
The first yes is the easiest. It is a gross misunderstanding of the gospel to believe that our sins are only forgiven as long as we keep up with them perfectly. We don’t enter into a state of grace when we pray for forgiveness then fall out of it when we sin. Too often people reason that those who take their own lives cannot enter the kingdom for this very reason- they didn’t have time to repent. The truth is all of our sins, past, present and future are covered by the blood of Christ the moment we rest in His finished work alone. And nothing can change that.
Which brings us to our second yes. It is precisely because we are sinners in need of grace that we are so profoundly ignorant of how sinful we are. If our repentance, in order to be genuine, required that we have an exhaustive knowledge of our sins, no one would ever be forgiven. We’re so bad that we haven’t the first idea of how bad we are. We’re so bad, in fact, that one of the ways the devil discourages us is by harnessing this counter-intuitive truth- the better we become the more aware we become of how terrible we are. To put it another way, the closer we get to the goal, the more fully we understand just how far we have to go.
Is there value in looking deep into our own sin? Of course there is. I’m not saying, “You’ll never be able to see them all, so don’t bother looking.” The glory of pursuing a deeper understanding of our own sin is that it gives us a deeper grasp of the beauty and scope of His grace. It also encourages us to greater patience over the sins of others. Best of all, the more aware we are of our own sin, the better able we are able to fight against it.
So where is the “no”? We can’t go to heaven with unrepentant sin when we are confronted about our sin, have no remorse over our sin, and make a decision to cling to it, rather than to Jesus. We all, I trust, struggle with what we call “besetting sins,” sins that seem to not want to let us go. That’s not what I’m talking about. For while we may often lose the battle against these sins, we are battling them. It’s when we give up that we are in trouble.
Please don’t misunderstand. I am neither saying that the ground of our forgiveness is the purity of our repentance, nor that a believer can lose his salvation by refusing to repent of a sin. What I’m saying instead is that a refusal to repent for a known sin is a sign that one has not in fact embraced the work of Christ. It doesn’t make you lose your salvation; it demonstrates that you never had it. Our peace with God is grounded in the finished work of Christ for us. That work becomes ours when we repent and believe. That repentance and belief both continue to grow as we begin the process of being remade into the image of the Son.
If you are struggling with a besetting sin, keep struggling. If you are struggling with the fear that your repentance isn’t good enough, repent for thinking it ever could be. It’s always a good thing, after we have repented, to repent for the weakness of our repentance. If you are struggling with a fear that a sin might sneak in between your last repentance and your death, repent for having such little faith in Jesus. If we are in Him, we are safe. Give thanks.
