Tune in. You know you can’t help it.
Thesis 67- We must not confuse worship with evangelism.
All those opposed to evangelism raise your hands. It would be, if it even existed, a rather lonely clique, the “Christians against evangelism” club. Every believer believes in evangelism. And when we believers get together every Lord’s Day, wouldn’t it be a great thing to have an evangelistic service? I mean, we’ve got a band there ready to play. We’ve got a pastor there ready to preach. We even have counselors standing by to pray. Perfect timing, right? Wrong.
There are any number of good things, great things, gifts from God most high that are not designed to be a part of a worship service. Preparing a Thanksgiving feast is a good thing. But not something we should all be doing at church Sunday morning. Steam cleaning the carpet is a great thing to do. But not while God’s people are gathered for worship. Worship is family time, the people of God gathering in the presence of God, drawing near to Him in a posture of intimacy. Evangelism is the people of God being used to draw those yet outside the kingdom in. That’s a whole different thing.
Is there overlap? Of course there is. I’m not suggesting that every church install a Holy Spirit detector at their front door and only let in those who pass the test. Nor would I ever suggest that the gospel doesn’t need to be preached every Lord’s Day. Of course it does. Every mother’s son of us needs to hear the gospel, not just because we might not be saved but because it is the power of God. The goals, however, of worship and evangelism are different. I rejoice when those gathered with the church come to saving faith. I rejoice also when those in the faith, when doing the work of evangelism, are moved to worship. But those are collateral benefits, the fruit of the richness of God’s grace. They are not each other’s reason for being.
Marva Dawn has wisely and insightfully described worship as “a royal waste of time.” It is royal, of course, because we are appearing before and by the redeeming power of the King of Kings. It is a waste of time not in the sense that it has no meaning, but because it is no means. It is strictly an end. That is, we don’t worship for the sake of some other thing. Every other thing exists for the sake of worship. It is the final end, the ultimate telos, our very reason for being.
Let us never be found denigrating either evangelism or worship. Let us never be found, however, confusing them. Evangelism, like missions, exists, in the words of John Piper, because worship doesn’t. We don’t worship that people might be saved. Rather we long to see more people saved that they might worship. Remember that soteriology serves eschatology. And eschatology serves Christology. We are saved for the sake of the kingdom. The kingdom exists for the King.
Tonight, 7 eastern, we continue our ABCs of Theology Study, looking at I is for Irresistible Grace. All are welcome in our home or on FB live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We pray you’ll join us.
This question has to be right up there with “Why can’t two men get married?” and “Why can’t a woman decide she’s a man?” as questions no one would have foreseen anyone, let alone a Bible believing Christian, asking in their own lifetime even forty years ago. Foolishness, however, begets foolishness. When you push back against biology and God’s Word bad things happen. The denial of genuine, top-to-bottom, inside-to-outside essential differences between men and women is the bedrock of this lunacy.
When the Bible says, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27) God is affirming not just that He is our Maker, not just that we are, male and female, made in His image, which is the source of our equal value and dignity, but that He created them male and female. The difference is not culturally conditioned, though some applications could be. Rather it is innate, God-made, true. It is deep-real.
One of those key differences is here- boys protect girls. This is not cultural, for it began at the beginning. Adam was called to protect his bride. That he failed to do so reminds us not only that the reality goes back to the beginning, but that denying that reality goes back to the beginning. That is, from the beginning boys were to protect girls. From the beginning the first boy and girl threw off their roles, and here we are in a fractured and distorted world.
Though the failure of boys to protect girls goes back to the garden, I can’t help but believe that we are reaching a new low. Because men and women are made in the image of God, for almost all of human history men went to battle to protect the women and children who did not. In Asia, in Africa, in Europe, in North and South America, in Australia, going back through recorded history this was the pattern. Of course, though perversion was surely around as well, no culture until decadent 21st century western culture has ever denied marriage was not possible for two men or two women. Nor has any affirmed that gender is a just social construct.
In the news of late this question has come up yet again. Conservatives are bemoaning the lowering of standards in the military to make room not just for women, but women carrying babies inside them. Conservatives also make a great deal of hay about how dangerous it is to send women off to war. Liberals on the other hand rejoice in this folly and refuse to acknowledge reality. How few, however, have rejected sending women off the war not because it’s not safe, not fair, not a place for social experimentation, but because it’s wrong? Complaining about PREGNANT women in combat is like complaining about unsanitary abortions. The issue isn’t the status of the women, but that they are women. And the issue isn’t the filth in the abortion mill but the murder of the babies. Men are made to protect women. Women are made to care for children.
Is there more? Of course there is, for both men and women. Can we imagine exigent circumstances? Of course we can, on both counts. Does that change reality? Not in the least. Men, protect the women in your life, not just from the perils of carnal warfare but in the midst of the perils of spiritual warfare. And train your men to be men.
Are you having fun yet? It sure looked that way to me back when we first crossed paths. My mom took me to the movies, and there we met. I was rather like you, though perhaps not quite so daring and dashing. I was young, and quite pleased to be that way. My favorite thing to play was always pirates. My little friends and I would treat our little barn as a great ship. We would don our eye patches and cutlasses. We would peer through our spyglasses, and we would arrrrrgue about who got to be the captain. It was a delightful boyhood. One time the bigger kids in the area blessed us little by burying treasure for us, and providing us with a map. The treasure chest was a paper sack, the treasure itself a veritable trove of penny candy.
I don’t, I hope you see, begrudge children their childhood. I do not look at all upon my own youth as wasted. It is a delightful time chock full of blessings from the hand of God. It creates memories that we will carry with us into eternity. It even has its own set of virtues that are hard to hold onto as we age, wonder and trust, and peace. Our Lord enjoins us to hold onto these virtues as we age, that we would have faith as children.
I am writing, however, not to agree with you, but to challenge you, to invite you into the deep end of the pool, where the water is just fine. You are wise to rejoice in your youth, and a fool for wanting to never leave. I recognize both of these, because I have been there myself. When there is no Never Never Land on which one could land, when age comes inevitably, we make your mistake by flying to the island of nostalgia. We pine for what we have lost. We take our minds to a magical land where we are young again, remembering only the good, the bad buried within the belly of the alligator time.
The trouble is, whether we are in the land of Nostalgia, or if we are in Never Never Land, in both cases we never land at home. We were made to be men. We were made to lead not other boys, but women. To put it bluntly, what you are missing is Wendy. And one step beyond that, you are missing boys that would be yours, that you would not merely lead, but raise. It is not enough that you should be a hero in battling Hook. It is far better that you should lead a woman, that you should defeat your foe, and that you should raise your children to defeat the children of your foes.
This is the offer that comes to you if you would but accept the call to grow up- you will be allowed to live bigger than yourself. You will multiply your life far beyond what you will have by merely extending your childhood. Stay young as long as you like, but eventually, one way or another, you will face what comes to all men, and all boys- death. If you would live forever, you will have to live not as a boy, but as a man, and through the lives of others. Peter, let me encourage you to put aside all the effort you expend to be a boy, and invite you again to be a man, and so to live forever.
To embrace adulthood isn’t, however, merely to embrace the future, but is to embrace the past. When I, for instance, take on the man’s job of standing in the pulpit to deliver the Word of God, I am not there alone. Now I am no longer the boy of my father, but the man my father has raised. Perhaps better still, I am a man in a long line of men. I get to be in the family portrait. I stand there with both my father, and my fathers. You may have heard, even where you live, of the Reformation. There men, not boys, stood not just with their earthly fathers, but with their heavenly Father. They did real work, and were real heroes, something a boy can never be. One of those heroes, John Knox, was forced to flee his native Scotland for his life, as Bloody Mary was breathing down his neck. He escaped to Geneva where he learned from and worked with John Calvin. When conditions allowed for his return, Knox went home to his native Scotland. There he was reported to have cried, as the gospel spread across the globe, “Give me Scotland, or I die.” That he might secure Scotland, that the light of the gospel might spread across that land, and outlast Knox, he set about establishing the church of Jesus Christ. He prepared other men, not boys, for the gospel ministry. And the first man he ordained there was my ancestor, Robert Campbell Sproul. As a man, and as a minister of that same gospel, I get to share in that calling, in that suffering, in that opportunity to be a hero.
You have fame. Decades after your story was first told, children still read your story. Children still line up to watch your story on the silver screen. But, and pardon me for my frankness, yours is a story of a boy winning a boy’s battle. You are bold and exciting, but you are, if only because you are a boy, less than a hero. Leave the land of Never Never, or you will never live forever. Leave the land of Never Never, or you will forever be a boy, exciting perhaps, but less than significant.
You have been a boy long enough. The time has come to be a man. The time has come to enter into the very purpose of your existence. The time has come to enter into your life in its fullness. Be a man.
In the King’s Service,
R.C. Sproul Jr.
or, Silence of the Clams
It’s a simple rule really, but a powerful one, one I have found quite helpful to my peace of mind, making the best use of my time and my mental energy. I follow this rule- anyone unwilling to say who they are gets none of my time or mental energy. If someone hides their identity before pontificating over this theological debate, that scandalous accusation, or even my own sins, real or purported, if they clam up their mouth before announcing who they are, I will clam up my ears before listening to a word they have to say. I don’t care what the anonymous have to say to me, about me, or about others.
Perjury Penalties
There is a reason our justice system gives the accused the right to face their accusers. Because without such the system is not just. The accuser has everything to gain and nothing to lose. Biblical justice requires the same thing, but adds another element. A person convicted of perjury at the federal level would face five years in prison. A person convicted of perjury in the Bible would face whatever punishment the accused would have faced had he been convicted. Lie in a murder trial in Old Testament Israel and you would be put to death.
Opening with Dishonor
When we give ear to the anonymous we give voice to those already committed to dishonesty and injustice by the sheer evil of their anonymity. We empower those whose character and voice reflect that of the Slanderer himself. In short, listening to the anonymous, or those who hide behind pseudonyms, is like listening to the devil himself. Which is something I don’t need.
Fellow Travelers
I have, over the years, been contacted by people who actually use their real names, who ask, gently and kindly, if I would give my side of things on this accusation or that, some accusations that have been made about me, others about people I’ve known and cared for. They’d read something ugly about me or my friends and wanted to give me the chance to rebut before reaching any conclusions. They too receive the same response. “Tell me who this accuser is, and I will be happy to reply. Otherwise, my counsel is that you stop giving ear to anonymous character assassins.”
Advocates for the Devil
Those who use their own names but protect those who will not, who pass themselves off as “protecting their sources” are not heroic journalists fighting the good fight. They are advocates of the devil, distorting justice, smearing names and refusing to take responsibility. And leading astray fools. The wise, on the other hand, build their house on the Word of God. They feast upon that Word, rather than the choice morsels of gossip offered by the devil.
Peace and Liberty
Oh the peace I’ve found. What liberty I’ve been given. I can not only get my mind off my accusers, but more important still, get my mind off myself. Because they don’t matter, and neither do I. Leave the clams in the sandy banks they live in. Soon enough the water will wash them away, while what rests on the Rock stands firm.
