Thesis 59 We must seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness.
It’s a pretty simple concept that we let slip too easily out of our hands, because it reveals our weaknesses. The concept is this- when the Bible warns us against something, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll be tempted to do just that. The point is not that we are so contrarian that when a new rule comes to us we just have to break it. Rather the point is that the Lord does not waste His holy breath on things we are not prone to falling into. He warns us against real dangers, that are dangerous to us.
In His Sermon on the Mount Jesus takes the time to redirect our priorities. He warns us,
“Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
“So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’” (Matthew 6: 25-31).
There is plenty of encouragement for us here. We’re called to trust our Father, to rest in the glorious truth that we matter to Him. There’s a gentleness in this warning from Jesus, but it is a warning, a rebuke even. We worry about the things we ought not to worry about and fail to worry about what we ought to worry about. Francis Schaeffer suggested that the god of this age is “the god of personal peace and affluence.” And, like our fathers before us, we are masters at melding together the worship of the living God and the worship of the god of the age. Jesus is telling us to stop. He’s telling us to tear down the idols we have set up and serve, and to devote ourselves single-mindedly to the making manifest the glory of the His kingdom, to pursue obedience.
Reformation requires of all of us that we reform our value systems, that we toss overboard that which weighs us down, that we break through every barrier, including those that reside in our hearts. Reformation, in other words, requires that our hearts be re-formed by His Spirit, for His ends and to His glory.
Friends,
Tonight, 7 eastern, we continue our study, The ABC’s of Theology, looking at A is for Atonement. Need a basic refresher? Feeling a mite light in your theological credits? Better still, would you like to know God better? Join us online at RC-Lisa Sproul on Facebook Live, or in person at our home in Fort Wayne. All are welcome.
In the ethics class I teach I typically ask my students this question, “Should people be able to freely make their own economic decisions without the approval of the government?” Almost always the whole class responds “Yes.” Then I ask this question, “If I ask Bob here if he’d like to come clean my gutters, and that I would pay him $5 an hour to do so, and he agrees, should we be able to reach that agreement?” Almost always the whole class stays with “yes.” Then I point out what should be obvious, “Bob and I, as things stand today, could both be arrested for reaching that agreement. It is against the law for me to pay him $5 an hour and against the law for him to work for $5 an hour.” Suddenly, my students, most of them working entry level jobs, and entering the classroom all in favor of minimum wage laws are transformed into lovers of liberty. They see the affront to the dignity of us all that is inherent in such laws. That, however, is just one reason minimum wage laws are terrible.
That said, one common objection betrays an ignorance of how economics works. Many who are on the side of the angels in opposing such laws are on the side of the serpent in their reasoning. “If President Biden succeeds in making $15 an hour the minimum wage across the country it will cause all sorts of prices to dramatically rise. The Big Mac you may pay $5 today will suddenly cost $15. Nope. It won’t. The reason it won’t is because the price of a Big Mac has precious little to do with the cost to bring one to market. Don’t believe me? Try this experiment. Suppose instead of costs going up, they drop dramatically. Someone discovers a way to make Big Macs for 5 cents. Will the cost drop to 15 cents? Of course not. The Big Mac will fetch what it can from the market. That is, it’s sale price is determined not by its production costs but by the consumer. Just about no one would pay $15 for a Big Mac, whatever it might cost to produce one. Just about no one would sell one for 15 cents, whatever it might cost to produce one.
The reason this matters is because it gets at the real problem of minimum wage laws. They do not raise costs. Instead they price unskilled labor out of the market place. Just like no one would pay $15 for a Big Mac, no one would pay $15 for an hour of labor from an unskilled laborer. It has nothing to do with the kindness or cruelty of ownership, everything to do with the market for labor. The government, no matter how powerful it may be, hasn’t the power to make consumers value a good or service (including the labor of others) differently than they value it.
But shouldn’t a person be able to make a decent living working 40 hours a week? Says who? As a writer, one successful enough to have published more than a dozen books with legacy publishers, successful enough to publish thousands of articles over the course of the last 35 years I would guess I’ve earned about $100,000, not a month, not a year, but in total. That’s less than $3000 a year. Taking into account all the hours I put in in both research and writing, I’ve earned considerably less than $3 an hour. That is not a decent living and is the fruit of actual skilled labor. Why are my earnings so low? Because no one is interested enough in my writing to pay more for it. There is insufficient market demand for me to make a decent living working this job for 40 hours a week. That’s ok. The market doesn’t owe me a living. My publishers are not mistreating me. My audience isn’t cruel and uncaring. The only ones cruel and uncaring are those politicos who say to those whose labor the market values at less than $15 an hour, “No work for you.”
Once again a government power grab gets disguised as compassion. Once again the ones “helped” are hurt the most. Once again the correct answer is liberty.
Was blessed to be a guest on this helpful podcast. We covered whataboutism- what it is and what it isn’t. Check it out.
Posted by RC-Lisa Sproul on Saturday, January 23, 2021
Denominations, we are told, divide. We are told by apologists for the one true church, both the one true church that bows toward Rome and the other one, those who bow toward Constantinople, that our divisions are damning evidence against us, that we cannot possibly be true Christians because we are not united.
What is perhaps most maddening, at least about the latter group, is that they do not bolster their view with an appeal to tradition, but by turning to the Word of God. In what has come to be known at Jesus’ High Priestly prayer, Jesus Himself petitions the Father, “And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth. I do not ask in behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one” (John 17: 19-21a). If Jesus asks that His church may be one, and if Jesus has now received all authority in heaven and on earth, then isn’t it necessarily the case that His church is one? And if we have many denominations, and many more truly micro-denominations (those little denominations that have only one church in them, the independents that may think they are avoiding the problem by being non-denominational), then manifestly we cannot be the church of Jesus Christ.
The first premise is, to my way of thinking, compelling. If the prayers of a righteous man availeth much, what must the prayers of Jesus avail? What He prays for He gets. The sleight of hand comes in the second premise. It comes by way of equivocation and question begging. Yes, the church must be one. But is being one the same thing as having the same guy sign all our checks? In the Roman Catholic religion we have everyone from a squishy pope, to the liberal Hans Kung, to devout laity, to old order Romanists who think the only trouble with Trent was that it didn’t go far enough, and the only trouble with the Reformation is that it didn’t wait until Vatican II. These are the folks more Catholic than the Pope. Are all these really one?
This, of course, isn’t a new phenomenon. The church at Rome has always had factions, divisions, differing views on this critical issue and that. That they remained one visible institution establishes exactly what? The one true church of the Eastern Orthodox has much the same problem. Every time you show them a church father teaching an ancient version of sola Scriptura, or a patriarch embracing Calvinism, they tell you, “Oh, that’s not the authentic tradition.” How can you tell the authentic tradition? By the convictions of the Orthodox guy you’re talking to at the time. I’ve even had the privilege of watching two “brothers” in this one pure tradition go at it like cats and dogs.
Unity then, cannot be found maintaining some form of institutional connection. If that were the case one could argue that all denominations that are part of the National Association of Evangelicals are “one.” Neither, on the other hand, is unity something utterly invisible. We can’t claim of our unity, “Well, it’s there, you just have no way of knowing. Trust me on this.” There is a visible unity of the church.
It is not in the Apostles’ Creed, but in the Nicene Creed that we confess that we believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. What makes us one is that we are visibly, or perhaps more accurately, audibly, the apostolic church. Any denomination that upholds the essentials of the apostolic faith, is by definition, a part of the one true church. In fact, the only thing that can unite the church of Christ is the confession of Christ. I am far more tightly bound with Charles Stanley than even Hans Kung is bound with the Pope. I have a greater unity with some eighty-year old sister down at the local AME church than the Patriarch of the Serbian Church has with the Patriarch of the Greek church. She and I have the same Spirit indwelling us because, though we differ on many issues, we profess together the same faith. All that the patriarchs share is their delusions.
We can do better. We can bring into sharper focus the visible unity that Christ calls us to. But the pathway there isn’t by going to Rome, or to Constantinople, nor back to the mainline churches- all three of which have denied the faith. The pathway to unity is to hold with both vigor and precision to the essentials of the faith, and to show forth the love of Christ to those who likewise hold to that faith. Paul and Barnabas went their separate ways. They did not share a common strategy. But they separated in unity. They did so sharing the burden to preach Christ, and Him crucified. They did so as part of the one body of our Savior, whose prayers never return void. Our great High Priest has made us one, and nothing can, or ever will undo that.
