It doesn’t happen often, but it had happened. A book written for businessmen had jumped a fence and become something of a universal bestseller. Like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People before it, and Good to Great after it, people were talking about this book, including in the office where I worked. As I passed by the receptionist’s desk, she had it open, reading during her lunch. “What do you think?” she asked innocently enough. “Well,” I answered, “there may well be some good wisdom in that book. If there is, however, that wisdom isn’t unique to that book. And if there is anything unique about that book, I suspect it isn’t wisdom.”
Because the Bible equips us for every good work, the truth is that we already have all that we need. Our best teachers then are not those bringing us new truths, but those bringing us old truths. While the world may celebrate creativity, the creation of previously unknown ideas, the church celebrates fidelity, the propagation of previously revealed ideas.
Jesus Himself, while noted for the authority with which He spoke, was always quick to remind His audience that He didn’t speak His own words but the words His Father gave to Him (John 12:49). Even the notion that we must be born again in order to enter into His kingdom is something Jesus assumes the Pharisee Nicodemus must already know about (John 3:10). Jesus is about the business of reminding His own of what they have forgotten.
The same, of course, is true about His call to us that we should pursue His kingdom, and His righteousness. This is not some sort of course correction. The message of Jesus is not, “Well, the prophets did their best, but they steered you wrong. That’s why I have come, to tell you to stop listening to them, and start listening to me.” The pursuit of His kingdom, and His righteousness was always God’s call on our lives. Adam and Eve, as they left the garden, were called to pursue His kingdom, and His righteousness. Noah, and his family as they walked out of the ark, were called to pursue His kingdom and His righteousness. Abraham, by faith was called righteous and was called to seek that city whose builder and maker is God.
Because we are 21st century westerners, we think of that which is old as passé, outdated, and that which is new as improved. The truth is we are called to move forward. We should be enjoying in the church generational sanctification, as we stand on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders of those who stood on the shoulders. But we get better not by getting newer, but by getting older. We are Reformers, not revolutionaries.
I am reminded of this every time I am blessed to sing All People That on Earth Do Dwell, the “Old 100th.” We sing the same song the people of God have sung for 3,000 years. To be sure, we don’t know what tune David composed. And we sing an English translation rather than in Hebrew. But we are going back to the wisdom of God revealed to our fathers in the days of David. We too are called to make a joyful shout to the Lord, indeed we are the “all you lands” that were called to so shout. We too are called to serve the Lord with gladness, to enter His gates with gladness, to be thankful to Him and to bless His name. We are the sheep of His pasture precisely because He is merciful.
The Psalm ends with this reminder of why all our reforming is a returning- “And His truth endures to all generations.” We are not modernists trying to climb an intellectual tower of Babel. We are not evolving toward wisdom. We are instead always reforming because we are always returning, back to our Father, back to the Word, back to our primordial paradise.
In eternity it will be the same. There we will never have to unlearn, for we will be without sin. But we will continually learn more and more, know more and more, the glory of our heavenly Father. We will move further up and further in, growing into all that He will reveal. He is wisdom, precisely because He is the Ancient of Days. And to the everlasting glory of His name, we rejoice in knowing that we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.
Immanuel Kant, though a rather bright fellow, built an imaginary wall. He taught that there are two worlds, the noumenal and the phenomenal. The latter was that world which could be experienced by our senses, what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell. The former was where the actual thing-in-itself dwelt. God Himself, being spirit, resides exclusively in the noumenal realm, since the wall between the two worlds is unable to be scaled. According to Kant, you can’t get from the phenomenal world to the noumenal. Paul, inspired by the far brighter, indeed omniscient Holy Spirit, disagrees, arguing in Romans 1 that we know the unseen God by the things we see. But, being sinners, we suppress that truth in unrighteousness.
The unbelief of the unbeliever, according to Paul, flows out of their own belief. That is, knowing they stand guilty before a holy God, and not being too copacetic about so knowing, they posit a universe with no god, and more important still, no holiness, no guilt, no law that they fail to measure up to. Trouble is, because they yet bear the image of God they are utterly unable to leave law behind. They deny the existence of a transcendent law-giver, and a transcendent law, but can’t keep themselves from scolding the rest of us. A naturalistic, or phenomenal world, is one in which we may be able to learn a thing or two about what is. But it is impossible to move from is to ought. Nothing of what is can tell us what ought to be.
Which doesn’t stop them from trying. Those of us who affirm a transcendent law-giver are regularly pilloried for being judgmental, insensitive, hypocritical, haters. Suppose that is precisely what we are. Why, I can’t help but wonder, do these folks think we ought to change? I mean, it is what it is. They may privilege latitudinarianism, sensitivity, consistency and love, but who died and made them the royal court? Abolish the law that makes homosexuality, abortion, fornication and drunkenness sin, and you have no law left to make insensitivity a sin. If there is no law you can’t even complain if those of us who believe there is a law impose it on you with all the swagger and gentility of the Nazis. Well, you can complain, but it places not the least obligation on us to stop doing so. They’re just appealing to a law they deny exists.
I regularly challenge my students this way- when one of your friends comes around with their moral relativism, their denial of a transcendent standard of right and wrong, see how long it takes for them to affirm such a standard. How soon will they be telling someone what ought to be done, hating on some person or behavior? They can’t help themselves. Even the motive to persuade us that they are correct is grounded in an ought rather than an is- that we ought to believe what’s true.
Here though is one final ought. I’ve written this not so we can laugh at the folly of unbelievers. Rather my desire is that we would have pity on them, stuck in their own is-ness. We ought not to laugh, but to seek to help these image bearers to see that they and their worldview fell off a great wall, and that only the King’s Man can put them back together again.
First, a disciple is just a student. It’s neither a magic nor an unusual word, but a simple one. We rightly distinguish between the twelve before the ascension of Christ and the twelve after, referring to the former as disciples and the latter as apostles. While a disciple is a student, an apostle is a messenger, sent by and with the authority of the Master. (Which is one important reason we must never fall into that temptation of pitting Jesus’ teaching against that of the apostles. “Oh, Jesus never talked about THAT. Only Paul did” is grievous error, and a denial of the authority of Jesus.) The disciple learns what the Master says. The apostle proclaims it.
Students have teachers, as do disciples. These, teachers, are among the gifts Christ gives to the church (). Disciples also, however, have curricula. Jesus calls us in the Great Commission not just to make disciples, but defines for us what our students are to be taught, “teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you” (). A disciple, in the context of the Great Commission is one who is being taught to observe all that Christ commanded.
Who are these disciples? They are the nations. The Greek word translated nations in is ethnos, from which we get our word ethnic. Some argue that Jesus is here commanding and affirming the catholicity of the church. That is, the disciples are charged to disciple men all over the planet, from every tongue and tribe. Others would argue, however, that, without excluding the call to disciple individuals from across the world, the text includes a call to disciple the “nations.” That is, we are to instruct and see to it that the institutions of the world, governments, cultures, educational institutions, that these all be taught to observe all that Christ commands.
Either way, when we divide the Great Commission, when we push apart soul winning from discipleship, when we find the latter to be beside the point, a distraction, we are failing as students of all that He commanded. Jesus is bringing all things under subjection, including every bit of ignorance and rebellion that still resides in me. Jesus is seeing to it that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord. Jesus changes everything.
As His students, then, we should be learning His commands. As students we should be obeying His commands, that we teach others to obey His commands. As students we should be learning to become teachers. As students we should be learning to speak His Words, to become apostles, sent messengers from the One who is the Word. As students we should eschew that lie from the serpent that doctrine divides, that a faith unsullied by study is more holy and pure than one marked by study. As students we need to learn that He has commanded us to not just be hearers of His Word, but doers. As students we need to hunger and thirst for His righteousness. As His students we need to seek first His kingdom.
Even in the midst of these strange times, our days still carry the rhythm of the normal. We may be hiding behind masks, but the blossoms of Spring are still breaking out, naked and unashamed. Our days may be empty, but they nevertheless grow longer as darkness sneaks through the door just at its widening curfew. In addition, despite the shutout of March Madness, the closing down of the NBA and NHL and uncertainty over if and when the boys of Summer might come out to play, we still had what has always been the most significant Spring day in sports, the NFL draft.
There is, however, a discordant note this year. No, not the spectacle of having the draft spectacle come to us from the basements of sundry head coaches and football bureaucrats. The discordant note for me comes not in the draft picks being phoned in, but in the absence of the post draft phone call with my father. I have paid attention to the draft all along the way. I have my tentative opinions (positive ones as it turns out) about the players the Steeler brass chose. What I don’t have is my father insisting on hearing my tentative opinions and his even more earnest insistence that he be given a chance to share his opinions with me. It’s what we did, every, single, year.
If there was a great battle being fought in the evangelical world, a tussle over gender neutral Bibles, a schism brewing over how we see Roman Catholicism he would talk with me about it. He would in fact go over these issues with me first, whenever we would get together. Not because these issues were what was most pressing on him, but so we could get over it, and move on to the Steeler talk. Those theological issues were real and important, like eating your vegetables is real and important. The Steeler talk was the dessert, and he wasn’t a man given to missing dessert.
In my book, Growing Up (with) RC, one of my goals was to give those who knew my father as a man in a pulpit a glimpse of the man in his easy chair. Despite rumors to the contrary, no skeletons were released from any closet. In fact, the only jangling you’ll hear coming from that closet are just some misshapen hangers bumping into each other. I have, for decades now, been saying to all who would listen, all those who “loved” him and now miss him, “You don’t understand. He’s a dad. A good dad. A great dad. He’s my dad.”
Now He is a dad far off, distant, beyond. The good news, however, is the good news. The same news that he defended and proclaimed is, most important of all, the good news he rested in, the good news he preached to me all his days, the good news that will, one day, reunite us. I love the Steelers. So did my dad. Better still, we loved each other. But best of all, we are loved by our elder brother, Jesus the Messiah. Give thanks.
Thesis 23 We must preach rather than teach.
I don’t know if it happens at all seminaries, but it happened at the seminary I attended. Seminaries, presumably, are established to prepare men for gospel ministry. But where I went more young men than not were there preparing not to serve in the church, but in the seminary. They came, they looked up to their professors, and they dreamed that one day they too would be professors. Trouble was, precious few of them make it that far. The pressures of families and work cause most who had hoped for an academic career to “settle” for a pastoral one. What tends to console those who “settle” I suspect, is the prospect of having a flock of sheep to serve as a substitute for a classroom of seminarians. These men can pretend to be professors, because they are given, as pastors, a captive audience. The result? Sermons that sound, feel, and act more like lectures than sermons. Preachers who are really teachers. And sheep with swollen heads and shriveled hearts. What we are too often left with is “worship” where we hurry through the preliminaries so we can get to the good stuff, where the pastor downloads his knowledge into the heads of the flock.
We, especially those who us who consider ourselves heirs of the Reformation, have jumped from the wise belief that sound thinking can change our hearts to the foolish notion that sound teaching will automatically change our hearts. We react against the sloppy sentimentalism of the broader evangelical church, where we are told that doctrine divides, and we are encouraged to merely emote when we gather together for worship, and fall off the other side of the horse. We think that if we have all our theological ducks in a row, then we are ready to inherit the kingdom.
We need to reform our thinking about our feelings. We need to confess that “dry orthodoxy” is not only real, but is pandemic. What we need is preaching. Preaching, like teaching, certainly involves and includes the passing along of information. But unlike teaching, it is designed to go through the mind and into the heart. Preaching not only explains, but exhorts. It not only proclaims, but pierces. Preaching causes those who hear it not merely to affirm that what they have heard is true, but causes them to cry out, “Brethren- what must we do to be saved.” Preaching causes hearts of flesh to burn with joy for the glory of the Son.
We must put away the pride that says, from the pulpit, “I must give the people some new insight they could not have discovered on their own.” We must put away the pride that says from the pew, “Let us see if the pastor can come up with something that is both new, and orthodox.” We must come to the preaching of the Word prepared to be changed. The Word is not smarter than a super computer, but sharper than a two-edged sword. Teaching talks about the sword. Preaching wields it.
