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.
It may be a sign that we are in a technological age that we tend to equate technology with machines, but technology is not just about machines. Technology includes in its range of meaning the entire idea of techniques. Human technology need not refer to mechanical pacemakers, but instead can refer to the systems by which we bring about changes in humans. Both a ten-ton bottle-capping machine and an insightful question are tools. One keeps a bottle of soda from spilling and going flat on the way to market; the other, one hopes, provides insights toward spiritual growth. The difficulty is when we begin to see our friends, families and our churches as an assembly line of bottles, in need of the right cap.
Much of the wise criticism that has been made against the church over the last ten to twenty years falls into one of two jeremiads. Sometimes we chasten the church for succumbing to that spirit of the age that we call the therapeutic revolution. Other times we chasten the church for bedding down a different spirit of the age that we call the managerial revolution. In the former the church exists to soothe the tender spirits of the congregants, to keep the pop from losing its fizz, with a dose of pop-psychology. In the latter the spiritual CEO organizes the troops and motivates them until they become an efficient ministry, what else, machine. These two models for the church share two things in common. First, they are utterly unbiblical. Second, they are both technologically minded. They see the church, and its members, as products to be manipulated to bring about a desired end.
The Bible never describes the church in these technological terms. Never is the church called that which guides the soul toward health, nor that which provides the greatest efficiency for the building of the kingdom. The Bible has all sorts of analogies for the church, none of them technological. Instead each of them is organic. The church is not a set of gears and levers, covered in a faux veneer of vitality, a clockwork orange. Rather it is a set of limbs and appendages, or as Paul describes it in I Corinthians, a body. Of course that might not steer us completely clear of our problem. We’re so technological that we have come even to think of God’s great gift of our own bodies as yet another machine to be tweaked to maximize efficiency. We see our parts as parts, and miss the holiness of the whole.
Paul has another image for us, however, that is hard to reduce to something made down at the machine shop. Paul says that we are, the church as a whole, the bride of Christ. Brides are not given to technology. I’m not saying that tools are a man thing, and ladies should stand clear. Rather I’m saying that when we think bride, we necessarily think in organic and not in machine terms. No one says as the bride walks the aisle, “Mercy, look at the torque she’s able to handle with her medial collateral ligaments.” No one says to the bride, “You know, that veil of yours is not ergonomically designed for the giving of a kiss. Why not leave it off?” No one brings a stopwatch to measure the bride’s time in getting up the aisle. A bride is not meant to be efficient, but to be beautiful.
We will not, however, ever read a church bulletin that reads, “First Community Church By the Freeway’s purpose is to look really, really nice for Jesus.” Or, “Our first priority here at Our Lady of the Perpetual Committee Non-Denominational International Family Center is to clean ourselves up good for the wedding day.” That, however, is the health and the business of the church. I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be proclaiming the good news, or that we must cease and desist from visiting the sick. I’m not saying we can never have a church picnic for the sake of fellowship, or never deliver turkeys to the poor. Instead we do these things, all that we do, in order to make us more beautiful as a bride. We are not a machine that needs to be honed, but a bride that needs to be beautified. That’s what the Groom has not only called us to do, but what He is doing in us.
That’s not all though. Brides do far more, though never less, than look their best. We are indeed a trophy to our Lord, but we are more. Brides have other callings as well, the first of which is to love and to honor the Groom. The problem with machines is that they lack heart, something the church must cultivate. We are to grow in our love of Christ, to love Him more daily not with our gears and our levers, but with our hearts and souls, minds and strengths. That’s why we study Him and His Word, why we meet Him at His table. That is why our preachers preach His glory, to fill our hearts with sincere affections.
That we are a bride is a given. We were made for such. And so when we take a technological approach to our calling, we turn our Groom into a machine. He is not a machine. He is not a tool by which, if we punch in the right code, we can have happy, successful, well-ordered lives. He is not a means, which is all tools are, to some other end. Instead our Groom is the end. He is our delight and our joy, not because of what He has done, what He now does, or because of what He will do, but because of what He is.
He will succeed. He will, because our Groom is altogether sovereign in authority and in power, get us to see what He has already told us, that we are His spotless bride. And when we see it, maybe then we will be spotless, besmirched with neither grease, nor sin.
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We are all tempted to be practical deists. The deists were the poster children for god-of-the-gaps theology. That is, because they wanted the universe to make sense, but didn’t want to have to answer to the living God, they posited a creator god (for how else could we have gotten here?) who, after creating the universe, took a walk, never to return. God explains the universe, but is not active in it. If He’s watching at all, it is from a distance, and with a deep indifference.
A practical deist isn’t someone affirming deism but who also is handy with tools, but rather is someone who would never affirm such a doctrine but lives as if that doctrine were true, a deist in practice if not confession. And that’s where we come in. We who are Reformed confess with our fathers this- What are God’s works of providence? God’s works of providence are, his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions (Westminster Shorter Catechism 11). But we act as though all His creatures and all their actions are somehow outside His control. We too often treat answered prayer as a vaguely embarrassing pseudo-charismatic event. God, we seem to believe, may be Lord of space and time, but is an absentee Lord.
The proof is in the worry. Don’t get me wrong- the doctrine of God’s providence doesn’t mean that unpleasant, or horrific events will not come to pass. Worry, however, isn’t the understandable fear that something terrible might happen but foolish fear that things outside His sovereign plan might happen. Worry is the implicit denial of the promise of God in Romans 8:28, that all things, that is, all things, work together for good for those who love the Lord, who are called according to His purpose.
The solution is to cease living by sight. All that we see is real enough. The actions of wicked men, at the abortion mill, in the middle east, the ravages of disease, these are all real as well, and have genuine causal power. They bring things to pass. But each of them is but a secondary cause, a tool in the hand of the One who governs all the creatures and all their actions. He is sovereign over men and over disease, and always brings His sovereign will to pass, even when such violates His revealed will. Indeed such is how we have been saved. He brought to pass the greatest evil ever, and by it redeemed our souls.
But even here we can still be stuck in our deism. If we who confess to His sovereignty merely see Him as the one who wrote the full story of history, who numbered our days before there were days, who planned the descent of every hair falling from my head did not write the story and sit back to watch it play out. The glorious, though invisible truth is that He wrote Himself into the story. He who created space and time, who is above space and time also enters into space and time. The king’s heart is in His hand. And so is mine. Great and small, the good Lord is at work in them all. He is here and He is not inactive.
Be of good cheer. For though He is risen, though He is seated at the right hand of the Father, though He is exalted, having received all authority in heaven and on earth, lo He is with us always. What we cannot see is more real than what we can.
