What advice would you give Christians facing such rapid cultural marginalization?
In the great battle that is the culture war Christians are in rapid and chaotic retreat. On issues of sexuality we are deemed backward, hateful and hypocritical. To speak in defense of marriage is, in the minds of the world, on par at best with denying the holocaust, at worst to perpetrating it. We have not just lost our place at the table, but in the building. We are on the outside looking in.
First, accept it. I’m not suggesting surrender mind you. I am, however, suggesting that denying the obvious helps no one. Sure Fox wallops MSNBC. Of course abortion mills are shutting down. But the cultural ethos is still hostile to us, and it’s only going to get worse. I fear that too often our fear is losing privilege, that we fight our rearguard action to protect wood, hay and stubble. The reputations we too often seek to defend are our own, rather than our Lord’s.
Second, embrace it. The church historically has made its greatest gains when it was under the most pressure. Heat removes dross and we have far more dross than we ought in the body. To be purified, to be chastened by our Lord, is the very mark of what it means to be a child of God. Paul reminds us in I Corinthians 1 that it is God’s holy habit to use the weak and the despised to show forth His strength. Pounding our chests, building our strategic alliances simply encourages the One True Power to abandon us to our own devices. When we are weak, He is strong.
Third, give thanks for it. We are, of course, called to battle, to tear down strongholds, and every lofty thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ. But even our losses are victories. So He tells us in the Sermon on the Mount, reminding us that we are blessed when we are persecuted for His name’s sake. His blessing is the victory. What a privilege to share in His shame. It’s how we come to share in His exaltation.
Fourth, pray for our enemies. For for them, every victory is a loss. The deeper the culture falls into sin the more misery it faces. Bruce Jenner, when he received the Arthur Ashe award for courage from ESPN was in deeper despair than he was when he first saw lying chemicals as the solution to his ills. Those who have been given over to their own dark desires may march in the streets to demonstrate their pride, when the truth is they are consumed by shame. Pity, rather than hatred, ought to be what motivates our prophetic call to repentance.
Finally, pray for each other. The deepest danger of cultural decline isn’t the self-destruction of goats who love death but the temptations that come to the sheep. Our children are being raised in a world without the blessing of social taboo, in a culture that has lost the ability to blush. And we face the temptation to walk the wide path of destruction, protecting our standing by betraying Him. Jesus prayed for Peter. Let us pray for one another.
Jesus is on His throne, bringing His purposes to pass. And we are seated with Him in the heavenly places. We are kings and queens dressed in beggars’ clothes. May we have the eyes of faith to see it.
Tonight, 7:00, we conclude our study in Hosea, The Bride Wore Red at Christ our Treasure Church on Getz Road. All are welcome.
Some time ago I binge watched HBO’s ten part mini-series, Band of Brothers. It was most excellent and I commend it to you. Based on Stephen Ambrose’s book of the same name, the account, based on real persons and events, follows Easy Company, part of the 101st Airborne from training to D-Day to Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge, to the liberation of a death camp to the occupation of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. The closing episode deals in part with an issue not many of us have had to think through- the American soldiers coming to grips with the humanity of the Germans. Turns out they’re human after all.
Which doesn’t undo what they did. We comfort ourselves in dehumanizing the Nazis because such makes them something other than us. If their great crimes are an aberration, an anomaly, then we are safe. Then we don’t have to see ourselves in them. Nazis, however, is what we are. It is our nature to hate our enemies. It is our nature to kill all who stand in our way. It is our nature to smugly assume all the world needs is to be reduced down to me, and people just like me. When the war ended, however, instead of realizing we are as bad as they are, we made the mistake of thinking they’re not so bad after all; they’re just like us. What we should have concluded is we’re not so good after all; we’re just like them.
I’m not arguing for a ham fisted moral equivalency. I’m not suggesting that no person can be more wicked than another, no government more wicked than another, no nation more wicked than another. What I am arguing is that all of those levels of wickedness are decidedly human manifestations. What I am arguing is that, as humans, we are all quite capable of all the sins other humans have committed, and more. Sin, no matter how heinous, is never simply a “them” thing but is always an “us” thing.
We don’t ever get past the storm because it goes where we go; we are the storm. Its being, its essence, its nature is sin, as is our nature. We carry the storm with us. It is joyfully true that in some circumstances, in some times, our Lord is pleased to declare to the storm, “Peace, be still.” But when He does, the peace we enjoy is what He wrought, not what we brought to pass. It is His grace, and His grace alone, that restrains me from killing my enemies, even those who merely inconvenience me.
Which, of course, leads us back to that immovable world changing calling- to repent and believe the gospel. I am the storm, He the peace. As I acknowledge, submit to both truths, I remember that He became the storm, and has blessed me with the peace. I remember that the real battle is within me, and rejoice in His assurance that He will win. Surrender.
Thesis 15- We must come together to renew covenant.
It was a wise man who first said that the good is sometimes the enemy of the best. Much of what has come to be known as the church growth movement fails to grasp this nugget of wisdom. It is a good thing to desire, as the great hymn, For All the Saints suggests, to “see our churches full.” It is a great thing to have a burden for the lost. It may even be a wise thing to construct a format for gathering the lost so that we might proclaim to them the good news of Jesus Christ. All of which can become a bad thing when it pushes aside the worship of the living God.
When God’s people gather together for the Lord’s Day, they ought not gather together for reaching the lost. They ought not to gather together to enjoy the blessings of fellowship. They ought not to gather together to receive sound teaching. All of these things are good in themselves. But when God’s people gather on the Lord’s Day, they ought to gather together to renew covenant.
There are essentially two schools of thought on how we ought to worship. The less conservative view holds that we may, when we gather together, do whatever we wish, so long as God does not forbid it. God does not forbid skits, interpretive dance, video clips and stand-up routines. Therefore, they must be okay. The more conservative view holds that we may only do those things that God commands in His Word. The trouble here, God nowhere gives us a new covenant order of worship. Folks who take this view find themselves constructing an order of worship out of bits and pieces culled from this text and that.
There is a better way. When the people of God move from the old covenant to the new, there is both continuity and discontinuity. God hasn’t changed. His way of dealing with us hasn’t changed. What has changed is that Jesus has come and made His once sufficient sacrifice for our sins. The Old Testament sacrificial system pointed forward to Christ and His work. Our worship should in turn point back to that work. They had symbols and we have symbols. The difference is that our symbols are now bloodless, for His blood needed to be shed only once.
If this is right, our worship should not be modeled after our own imaginations. Neither should we model it after what we guess synagogue worship might have been like. (While Scripture certainly recognizes that worship happened in synagogues, it nowhere suggests either that it should be done, nor how it should be done.) Instead, our worship should be modeled on that which God did command- temple worship.
Temple worship had very simple elements. The people of God approached, recognizing that God had called them. They understood, however, that they were not able to stand in God’s presence because of their sin. So they brought a sacrifice. God accepted the sacrifice, and those who brought it, and welcomed His people not merely into His presence, but to His table, feeding them with His sacrifice. The same is true when we renew covenant. We gather because He calls us. We confess before Him our sins. He pronounces, on the basis of the sacrifice of Christ for us, His forgiveness of us. And He invites us to dine at His table, as we partake of the bread and the wine.
Worship is not a pep-rally for the lost. Neither it is an academic lecture where information is downloaded from pastor to laity. It is a meeting with God, where we remember His grace in Christ. We enter into His rest, as we enter into His presence.
There are at least two different ways we struggle with assurance, two different truths we want and need to be assured of. The first is the truth of the gospel. What if the Bible is just the opinions of men? What if Jesus is still dead? This struggle is real, but rather rare. The far more common struggle is over this truth- I am a child of God. Our doubts typically are less about Him, more about us. We know He is faithful and true. We doubt our faith is true.
One of the sources of that doubt, or perhaps better, that fear, is the devil himself. I would suggest that even when the devil is seeking to tempt you toward some sin the end goal isn’t merely that you’d commit the sin, but that having done so, he can use it to assail you as unworthy of God’s grace (which is true enough) and outside of God’s grace (which is a deep lie.) Second, he uses hardship in much the same way. He encourages us to believe that if we had God’s favor our lives would look a lot different. We would, if He loved us, enjoy greater wealth, greater health, greater everything. Our lack in these areas is his exhibit A that we are not under grace.
A second source of doubt is ourselves. And that can be a good thing. When we find ourselves buried deep in grievous sin, it’s a good thing to stop and consider, “Am I a child of God?” When David received the report that Uriah was dead his conscience should have assailed him. He was a murderer and an adulterer. His assurance should have been plummeting. It should not, however, stay there. Grievous sin, like all sin, should drive us toward Him, should lead us back to the cross, and to a deep confidence in His grace, including His grace toward us. Of course we’re not worthy of grace. No one is, or ever could be. A person worthy of grace is a square circle.
The third source I’d like to consider is mysterious. It is something I know precious little about. What I do know is that more often than not, when doubt is present, so is this- OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a broad term describing that which drives some people to wash their hands over and over, others to never step on a crack in the sidewalk. The brain fixates on this or that, and is unable to escape. It can be the source of laughter, but it can also be debilitating. Where it comes from I don’t know. The cure for it I don’t know. I do know that I have had many conversations in which I am asked for counsel from someone who is afraid their faith isn’t deep enough, who fear they are not elect, who despair that they have committed the unpardonable sin. And when I ask them, “Have you ever been diagnosed with OCD?” they invariably reply, “How in the world did you know that?” Because the two, for whatever reason, tend to go together. And when they do, the sufferer doesn’t have an assurance problem, but an OCD problem.
God is always faithful. We never are. We are not repentant enough, trusting enough, obedient enough. Only Jesus is. If we rest in Him, we receive all that is His. One cannot “Rest harder.” One can only rest. We can all only cry out, “Lord be merciful to me, a sinner.” And then we can go home, knowing we have been justified.
