Today we begin a new series of posts, New Theses on a New Reformation. Once a week I will be posting a brief challenge to us as individuals, as families and as the church, encouraging us all to repent and believe the gospel and re-form our understanding in line with the Word of God. I pray you find it useful.
When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said “Repent,” He called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
Thus begins Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, a list of disputations first nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Thus began the Reformation. I would add to Dr. Luther’s wisdom this nugget, “When our Brother in the faith, Martin Luther, said “Reform,” he called for the entire life of believers to be one of reforming.” These two sentiments, in the end, mean the same thing.
Both repentance and Reformation involve a nuanced understanding of change. In both instances there are things we keep, and things we toss aside. No matter how much dust and ashes we heap upon ourselves in our repentance, there must remain something in us that we do not repent for. That is, we hold on to that which is good in us, while turning our back on that which is not. Before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, thinking I’ve denied total depravity, note that I am instead affirming irresistible grace. We do not repent until we have been regenerated. And we not only do not but cannot repent for what the Holy Spirit has wrought in us. We repent for the death in us, and give thanks for the life in us.
By the same token, Luther sparked a Reformation, not a revolution. His goal wasn’t to raze everything that came before him and start from scratch. His goal was to recover the wisdom of the ages, to strip away the accretions that came through time, slowly choking away the very power of the gospel. His goal was to recover what we lost, not to destroy what remained.
Both are true in our own lives, in our churches, our families and ourselves. What we need is what the people of God have always needed, to repent and to reform. Neither should be pinpoints in time, but should instead be a way of life. Both are indeed the way of life. We fail to repent and to reform precisely because we love what is unlovely in us. We want to hold on to our sin, to deny its power and reality. This is the way of death.
If Jesus is indeed our Lord and Master, and if Luther is indeed our Father in the faith, we have no choice but to repent and to reform. Better still, we have no reason not to. Jesus knows our sin far better than we. Yet He loves us. Luther saw far greater weakness in the church than we see, yet he loved her. We have nothing to hide. We have nothing to lose, save that which is dragging us down. We have everything to gain- life, and life abundant. A life of repentance and reformation is not a life of sorrow and sadness, but a life of peace and joy. May we, by the grace of our Father in heaven believe our Master, and Brother Luther, as they call us to repent, and to believe.
Lord Acton was absolutely right, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He may have been more right, however, if he had adapted a bit of biblical wisdom in articulating the dangers of power. What if he had said instead, “The love of power is the root of all kinds of evil.” Just as greed is not the exclusive province of the rich, so the hunger for power extends well beyond the powerful, and with it goes all manner of evil. Those without power often seek power by sidling up to the powerful. If you have no power, the next best thing may be to get close to those who do.
We see this principle worked out in spades in the English Reformation. The Reformation came to England not because of a popular uprising of the people. It was not rooted in the heartfelt convictions of the clergy. The Reformation came to England because a king wanted a new wife, one who would bear him a son. The king thought he was pulling the strings of the clergy to get what he wanted, while the clergy believed they were pulling the strings of the king to get what they wanted. O what a tangled web they weaved when the English Reformation was first conceived. At any given moment, the shape of that Reformation was determined not by the Word of God, but by who had the king’s ear. The inauspicious beginning laid the groundwork for what would ensue, centuries of confusion, death and strife.
Trying to untangle the knots created by shifting alliances, convicted consciences and the providence of those born to inherit thrones may make for an interesting historical survey. What may be better, however, would be for us to consider our own failures and weaknesses as we set about the business of Reformation in our own lives. Whose ears do we seek access to, and to whom are we listening? Rather than trying to divine whether the church of England skewed too Romish or whether its problems grew out of its Erastianism may just be a distraction from examining our own lives.
Reformation, rightly understood, is nothing more than dominion. Adam and Eve, in being called to rule over the creation were called to re-form the world. After the fall the call to dominion abides, and so does the call to re-form. Now we are not merely turning jungle into garden, but are at the same time turning sin into righteousness. Our re-formation is, by the power of the Holy Spirit, remaking the sinful dust of our fallen father Adam into the glorious gold of our elder brother, Jesus, the second Adam. The Reformation not only is not over, but it will not end until all things are brought into subjection. Those “all things” certainly includes the rulers of England, both ecclesiastical and civil. They certainly include all who rule here in these United States. They include our churches, our culture, our labors. But they begin with our families, ourselves, our hearts.
In the economy of God, we do not re-form by seeking power. We do not re-form by seeking the ear of those in power. The only way to re-form is to die. The dead have no lust for power. They have no ears to be tickled. They have no lips with which to seduce others. Indeed this is where our power is found. By being powerless we are beyond the seducing power of power. By being dead we strike fear in the hearts of the powerful, for their power has no sway over us.
In the economy of God, the great things that we do for the kingdom we do in peace and quietness. When we speak to our children of the things of God, we are bringing Reformation. When we visit the widow on our block, we are bringing Reformation. When we sit down in a moment of quiet and meditate on the powerful Word of God, we are bringing Reformation. When we wash the dishes after sharing a feast with our fellow saints, we are bringing Reformation. We bring Reformation to the world in the very ordinary tenor of our lives.
We have no need to sit next to kings, for we are seated beside the King. Indeed we are kings and queens with Him, seated in the heavenly places. We do not need to seize the engines of ecclesiastical authority, for we are already a royal priesthood. We need not seek positions of power and influence, that we might whisper in the ears of the powerful. Instead we must make known our desires to the Almighty, Him whom we are instructed to call, “Our Father, who art in heaven…” We need not tear out the great weeds of unbelief that infest the church at large. We need only tear out the great weeds of unbelief that infest our tiny little hearts, that we might instead bear much of the fruit of the Spirit.
We must re-form our understanding of Reformation. The world is changed through service, not power. It is changed by service to “the least of these” rather than the powerful. Perhaps to better understand this we ought to tell ourselves, the next time we find ourselves changing a dirty diaper, “Be of good cheer. For in this deed we shall light a fire across the globe such as shall never be put out.” Perhaps that is what it means to play the man.
Tonight, 7 eastern, at our home or on Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul we begin our celebration of Advent. All are welcome.
Sometimes, indeed often, we build and maintain our paradigms for our own comfort. Our worldview is usually less the result of careful, dispassionate, sober-minded analysis, and more the result of self-serving, special pleading, rationalization of our sin. We believe what we believe not because these beliefs commend themselves to our minds, but because in our minds the beliefs commend us. It is these habits of our desperately deceitful hearts that make us miss the voice of God. He speaks, and we hear what we want to.
We come to our Bibles with this most fundamental presupposition- whatever the Bible may be saying, it can’t be telling me that my life needs to be fundamentally changed. Wherever the Bible calls for such change, it must be addressing someone else. Out of this presupposition flows what I call “the diabolical art of simultaneous translation.” This is what happens when our eyes roam across the very words of God in Scripture, but our mind changes what we read into something safe, something reasonable, something inoffensive. Jesus, for instance, tells us not to worry about what we will eat or what we will wear, that this is what the Gentiles worry about, and we ought to know that we are under God’s care. What our mind hears is something like this- Those people who are more prosperous than I am need to stop worrying about money. When I get as prosperous as they are, I will be pious enough to no longer worry. Those worrying prosperous people really ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
Jesus tells us to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and we hear, “Those people who don’t believe, who aren’t in the kingdom, who don’t have the righteousness of Christ, need to get serious about pursuing these things. Thank heavens I already have this covered. Because I have already done this I can now devote my time to something important, worrying about what I will wear and what I will eat.” When the Bible steps on our toes we try to quietly tiptoe away. What we’re supposed to do is face up to our sins. What we’re supposed to do is repent and believe.
One way we might begin to do battle against this weakness is to come to the Bible with a prior commitment to this basic truth- whatever this text or that text is saying, it is likely that it is speaking to me and my sin. Before we decide whether a covenantal paradigm makes more sense or a dispensational paradigm, before we settle the vexing question of who wrote Hebrews or which gospel was written first, before we figure out whether Genesis 1 and 2 are history or poetry or both, we need to come willing and eager to have the mirror of the Word show us our sins. That will happen when we expect it to show us our sin.
The Word of God consists of the words of God. Their meanings tell us what His meaning is. They are little mirrors that build the big mirror. They are also, however, little hammers that together make up the sledge hammer God uses to smash our recalcitrant hearts. Because our hearts are hard we insist on soft words. When alone with our Bibles we soft sell our Bibles, translating our hammers into pillows. When in the pew on Sunday morning we insist on preaching that does not offend, that does not confront, that does not strike, that rests lightly on our stony hearts.
God’s hammer smashes not just the icons of the world around us. It also smashes the idols of my heart. It is hard, heavy, even painful, precisely because of the love of the One who wields it. Because He has promised not only to forgive me for my hard heart, but has promised to soften it. He has promised to beat it into submission. As He pounds my heart He in turn opens my ears. Thus we move from grace to grace, from life to life, from faith to faith.
When our stony hearts are beaten, they do not merely turn into gravel. Instead they turn to soil- soft, welcoming soil. And then the Word no longer comes as a hammer, but comes as seed. The soft ground of our hearts welcomes that word, and soon it bears fruit, multiplying thirty, sixty, even a hundredfold. Soon we find that we have ears to hear and eyes to see and the very mystery of the parables unfold before us. If we would hear, we must be willing to hear. If we would be willing, He must make us willing.
His kingdom is that place where His Word is heard, welcomed and obeyed. That same Word has promised if we will drop everything for the sake of the kingdom, all these things will be added to us. His kingdom is therefore in turn where worry about tomorrow is banished. God’s Word is a hammer. But it is a hammer that speaks blessing to us. May He be pleased to give us ears to hear the blessings that He speaks.
No, there are no gray areas from God’s point of view. Neither should there by gray areas from our point of view. There are, however, issues that are not moral issues. Suppose, for instance, that the dictionary suggests that both “grey” and “gray” are fitting spellings for that color that is somewhere between black and white. If I choose “grey” over “gray” I have not fallen into gray, or grey matter. If I asked you pick a number from one to ten, I can’t imagine what sin I would charge you with should you choose 7, or 2, or in fact any number from one to ten. This does not mean these are what we call grey matters. They are instead what we call adiaphora, matters not touching on morals.
This is important to understand especially when we find ourselves trying to make important decisions. We are so eager to know “God’s will” that we sometimes seek that will where He has not spoken. When a person is trying to decide, “Should I take this job or that? Should I buy this house or that?” my counsel is usually, “Try to discern if either choice is sinful. If neither is, do the spiritual thing, and do what you want.”
That said, we often fall off the other side of the horse by forgetting to apply broader moral principles. That is, we may think, “If the Bible does not say, “Thou shalt not buy the house on 13 Mockingbird Lane” then it must not be a sin, when in fact it could be a sin. Perhaps the house is more than you can afford, and buying it would be poor stewardship. Perhaps it sits right next to a cigar store, and you have in the past allowed tobacco to rule over you, and wisdom suggests you flee temptation. This kind of moral calculus can certainly be subtle. It can lead us into some deep waters. God, of course, always knows what is right. We don’t always know, but we should. Now, suppose I think it is foolish to buy the house, but you think it wise. Suppose we break out our moral calculus, and are not able to agree. But suppose we agree that it is a close call, that it looks from our limited perspective to be “grey.” Such ought to mean that we not get in a horrible tussle over the issue. It does not mean, however, that there is no right answer.
Here’s a real life example- headcoverings. I believe that the Bible teaches that husbands should have their wives cover their heads when we gather together for corporate worship. I believe it for exegetical reasons, and for historical reasons. I think those who don’t so believe are wrong in the issue, wrong in their exegesis, and wrong in their understanding of history. I also think that many of the men who hold this different view are far more godly than I am. I am willing to concede that some things in the Bible are more clear than others, and that the case against headcoverings isn’t completely out in left field. There’s still a right and wrong, and God knows it clearly. But God has made it clear that we ought not to be jumping down each other’s throats on matters that are less clear. How do we know which issues are less clear? There’s the rub. In most disagreements, the real disagreement is here. One helpful hint for my own practice is to look again to church history. If the church has felt that issue x is clear and important, I want to submit to that. If the church has recognized the issue to be less clear, I want to treat it that way.
