He was at least an insightful man, if not a wise man, who first said, “I care not who writes a nation’s laws, as long as I write the nation’s songs.” He understood that what shapes our lives is rather more potent than that which merely hedges our lives. We are at least obtuse men, if not foolish men, when we labor so hard to seize the engines of political power for the sake of the kingdom. It is a good thing that we aspire to see every knee bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. His reign indeed covers all things political. But tt is a bad thing that we would rather see His Lordship confessed in a courtroom, than in song.
While we rightly affirm that man is soul and body, (not as we too often think, souls in bodies) we would be wrong to pass over the remaining distinction between mind and heart. We are two things, the material and the immaterial, and that which is immaterial is at least two things, what we think, and what we feel. A man of integrity has mind and heart in harmony. Few of us are there however. Excitement, more often than not, is a function of the heart more than the mind. As we consider law, usually our minds are more engaged than our hearts. It is a rare bird indeed whose nerves begin to twitter when he hears, “In re: Carleton versus the state of Nevada…” or “Whereas the charter of the town of Lycippus gives license to all who live therein to…”.
Music, on the other hand, has charms. Music has the unique ability to bring together heart and mind, to both teach and inspire at the same time. It, more than abstract arguments, more than abstract law, shapes souls. We are what we sing. Which is why He who is wisdom wisely gave us songs.
One of the weaknesses of the loss of Psalm singing in the church is that we have lost sight of the power of Psalms as song. We know that the Psalms are God’s Word. We know that they contain wisdom. We may even read and study them in an attempt to internalize the wisdom they contain. They become fodder for sermons, proof texts for sundry theological positions. But that’s not the way God intended us to be shaped by the Psalms. He wrote them so that we would sing them. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that this is all we might sing. Sadly, however, too many of us who conclude we may sing songs that are not Psalms don’t take the trouble to sing the Psalms. We seem to think our only choices are Psalms only, or no Psalms at all.) Singing the Psalms moves their wisdom from our brains into our hearts. And our hearts are the font of our actions, our lives.
It seems even the world is beginning to figure this out. A recent study (apparently sponsored by the Institute for the Incredibly Obvious) demonstrated that the more teenagers are exposed to sexually explicit media, whether it be television, video games, movies or music, the more likely they were to engage in sexual behavior at an earlier age. The world has not yet passed laws requiring teenagers to be sexually active. While we’re busy creating political action committees to keep condoms out of “our” schools, while we push for “Abstinence training” in “our” schools, “our” ear buds are telling us (and forgive the anachronism) that we feel like making love, that what we need is sexual healing. The ear buds win every time.
If we who serve Christ sing His songs, the songs of wisdom, and the world outside the church sings songs of folly what we would expect is different worlds. We should expect our lives to be marked by wisdom, by fidelity, by godliness. What we find, again according to sundry studies, is that evangelicals, both unmarried young people and married adults, are roughly as likely to be fornicators or adulterers as their unbelieving counterparts. The reason is likely this, we don’t listen to the music of wisdom, but instead listen to the music of the world. Our ears are as plugged into folly as the ears of our neighbors.
James Adams, in his fine book War Psalms of the Prince of Peace, affirms that the Psalms, however a rich source they might be on the life of David, exist first to tell us the story of Jesus. The Psalms cover the gamut of human experience. You will find there triumph and defeat, confidence and uncertainty, joy and despair. It is because these songs tell us the story of Jesus, however, that they are songs of wisdom. As these songs indwell us, as they shape not just our thinking but our feeling, we will become more like Jesus, who is the very personification of wisdom. As these songs proceed from our lips, we not only speak wisdom, but speak Jesus, showing forth His glory.
We ought to be distinct from the world around us. We are called to be a set apart people. Perhaps by His grace we might become distinct, if we would sing an old song to the Lord, if we would sing the Lord’s songs to the Lord. If we would sing wisdom, perhaps Wisdom might bless us.
There’s a great deal of history and nuance to this question. One could argue that the terms are identical. Both groups trace their roots to a prior term, and the shift to the new term to the same source. That is, in a very real sense these once were synonyms for the prior term Protestant. At the time of the Reformation Protestants were those who affirmed the solas of the Reformation. That remained true across the board among Protestants until the rise of theological liberalism. Liberalism had its historical roots in Protestantism, but it not only denied the solas, but even creedal affirmations that transcend the Reformation- the miracles in the Bible, the deity and resurrection of Jesus. This is why J. Gresham Machen titled his landmark work Christianity and Liberalism, because he rightly saw them as two different faiths. Now there were two groups among the Protestants, those who affirmed the fundamentals, and those who would not.
So what is it that divides these two groups who affirm the fundamentals? That’s where it gets a smidge fuzzy, more cultural than propositional. Fundamentalists by and large adopted an ethic of separation that evangelicals would not accept. The fundamentalist is one who not only rejects those who reject the fundamentals, but rejects those who will not reject those who reject the fundamentals. Or, to put it in more technical terms, they practice and promote second degree separation.
To grasp this principle, let’s apply it to a contemporary situation. TD Jakes, a wildly popular author, will not affirm the historic doctrine of the Trinity. As such, any confessional person or body ought to see him as outside the universal church. A sound evangelical and a sound fundamentalist would not invite the man to preach in his pulpit. But suppose someone were comfortable inviting the man to come participate in an in-house discussion among brothers about how to do ministry. A sound, historical evangelical would not do this. He would, however, be willing to overlook, or forgive someone else for doing so. The fundamentalist, however, would not only reject TD Jakes for his egregious error, but would reject those who don’t reject him, including the pastor who invited him. Perhaps in turn the fundamentalist would even be willing to reject any who don’t reject the inviting pastor.
This distinction, in turn, may reveal something of a deeper divide between the two groups. One cynical, but perhaps insightful wag once described an evangelical as one who says to the theological liberal, “I will call you brother, if you will call me scholar.” Fundamentalists, to their credit, are not terribly interested in the applause and approval of the world. Evangelicals tend to be more hungry for such. There are other distinctions as well. Fundamentalists tend to adopt a more dispensational eschatology. Evangelicals do tend to be more scholarly. Fundamentalists tend to be more separatist, evangelicals more worldly.
What we have in common, however, is far more than what separates us. And, I would argue, what separates us is where we ought to learn from each other. Fundamentalists would be well served to learn to distinguish between actual guilt and mere guilt by association. They would do well to allow their zeal for the authority of the Word to undo their commitment to that hermeneutic, dispensationalism, which divides and ultimately misapplies the Word. But evangelicals could learn from their brothers a healthy indifference to the approval of the world. We could learn a deeper hunger for the approval of our Lord, who told us that if we are His, the world would hate us as it hates Him. We could learn from our fundamentalist brothers something of the spirit that birthed us both, that we are called to say to the watching world about the Word, “Here we stand. We can do no other.” In the end, where evangelicals are at their best, fundamentalists are on the same page. And where fundamentalists are at their best, evangelicals are on the same page. Evangelicals believe the fundamentals. Fundamentalists are evangelical. And all of us need and rest on the grace of God in Christ alone.
Even Jesus was known to have a Scottish revival or two. A Scottish revival, if you’ve not heard the term, is pretty much the opposite of a revival. It’s where the crowds get smaller and smaller instead of bigger and bigger. And it happened to Jesus in John 6. First, the crowds came. He fed the five thousand and they, understandably, thought it a rather nifty trick. Jesus, like Gideon obeying the Lord, decides to thin the crowd, first by speaking about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Not exactly a delicate topic of conversation. The crowds began to fidget and grumble, so Jesus reached in His bag of sweet and winsome things to say to win them back. “And He said, “Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father” (verse 65). Nothing like a good shot of total depravity to draw them in. The next thing you know the crowd suddenly found better things to do.
Not very strategic of Jesus. Had He been surrounded with evangelical counselors they would have explained to Him that such was no way to reach the lost. You couldn’t go around telling them about their inability to repent. You should never talk about something as strange and foreign to them as sacraments. You need to connect with them, and give them some news they can use. They would have told Jesus how the Sadducees had grown from a 1 percent to an 18 percent market share in just over three years by emphasizing the quality coffee they served at their meetings.
We have come to believe that an audience is more important than a message, whereas Jesus grasped that no one in any audience can be served by the wrong message. The offense of the gospel is the gospel. Take away the offense and you have taken away the gospel. Jesus was right- the only ones who can embrace the message are those who are given that ability by their Father in heaven. Our methods, our strategies, our attempts to woo people into the kingdom are worse than useless. They are uselessness gift-wrapped in pride.
Jesus, seeing that many of His disciples had abandoned Him, asked the twelve if they were leaving too. Peter, God bless Peter, didn’t say, “Jesus, You’re the best. We’re all in with You. Those poor people just don’t understand. I’m sure if they weren’t so confused they’d still be here with us. Let’s work on the message, and we’ll win them back.” There is almost a resignation, a sense in which Peter fully understood what had turned off the crowd. He hit the nail on the head, however, when giving the reason they wouldn’t leave, “You have the word of eternal life.”
Which He has given to us to steward. How could we possibly think it wise to bury or worse trade them in for some of our own wisdom? Our words are the words of eternal death. We have been called to give up relevance, esteem, respect, friendship from and with the world. All so we might speak the words of the Word, the One who redeems us.
The heart of magic is misdirection. Sure, there are specially made tools of the trade. There is well-trained prestidigitation. There are moments of art and flourish. The magic, however, is to get the audience to look one direction while you do something decidedly ordinary in plain sight. That’s how we start with an empty hat, and end up with a fluffy bunny.
It is much the same in all manner of intellectual magic. If we can get our intellectual opponents to overlook the fact that we are bringing something out of nothing, we can wow them all the way to the bank.
Consider first naturalistic science. Here we begin with one of two hats, both of them black. Some will say that all of reality was compressed into a point of singularity that existed from all eternity. Did you see what they did there? They explain the creation of the universe by presupposing the existence of the universe. We ask, “If you deny that God made everything, where did everything come from?” and they reply, “Well, everything was really squished together…” We let them get away with a universe, and a profound change (the explosion of the point of singularity) from and by nothing. The second option is more brazen. On the one hand these scientists are more honest, affirming that there was nothing. And then they get more dishonest, when they tell us “it” exploded into everything. Wait. There was no “it.” There was nothing, not even a hat surrounding the emptiness. And now it’s everything?
They don’t, of course stop there. Evolution takes center stage for act two. We’ve got everything, but how are we going to make it better? How do we go from chaos to cosmos? The magicians flourish again and tell us, “Everything gets better.” We ask, , “But how? Where’s the oomph?” They tell us, “Everything gets better. It’s science.” More order, more information jump out of the hat as fish take a walk on the dry side. All by themselves.
Consider second economics. An honorable politician promises to defend our wealth. A truthful politician promises to take some of this one’s wealth for the benefit of another. A common politician promises he can make us all richer by taking from all of us. Once again the common politician is the magician. He wants us to forget that the state has nothing it can give that it did not first take from another. He may take it via taxes. He may take it by inflating the money supply. But he will leave it out of the equation, pulling bunnies out of hats. And worse, getting us to pull levers behind the curtain at our voting booths.
Consider third man’s will. Those who believe in the doctrines of grace are quite content to confess that men are free to do what they want, to act according to their nature. Indeed we affirm we must do what we want, and can do no other. Those who don’t believe in the doctrines of grace, on the other hand, define freedom of the will as the ability to do what you don’t want to do. You choose without the desire for what you choose. This too is something out of nothing. Two men are presented with the gospel message. One embraces it, the other does not. How’s come? If we confess the difference in the man, it is the man God made, the man for which God is the ultimate cause. (And of course the wiser man would have something of which to boast (Ephesians 2:9)). If we confess the difference is in God, well, welcome to the doctrines of grace.
All three, like magic, claim to give us effects without causes, something from nothing. All three depend on our willingness to be distracted, to be misdirected. All three are rabbits out of hats, and hats out of thin air.
Dear Friends,
“Shame held my head down. Fear lifted it up. I was chained, shuffling my feet into the jury box along with other chained men. I was not there as a juror, but a prisoner.” Thus begins my latest book, Growing Up (with) RC. While the book itself is a loving remembrance of all the ways my father spoke to me about the grace of God, the introductory chapter, dealing with my DUI reveals why I so deeply need the grace of God.
It has been nearly three years since that life-changing night. I have, during that time, sought to use the gifts God has given me to serve the kingdom quietly. I have done some ghostwriting. I have done quite a bit of editing the books of others. I wrote my new book, co-wrote another and I have prayerfully meditated long and hard on the grace of God and its life-giving power.
Over the past few months those thoughts and prayers have found their way into the broader world through my blog and my podcast, Jesus Changes Everything. I am seeking, like Peter before me, to steward my failures, and to strengthen the brethren, to live not just in the forgiveness won by Jesus on the cross, but in the power demonstrated when He walked out of the grave.
Which is why, after earnestly seeking His will, we have recently begun a new ministry- Dunamis Fellowship. Our mission is to labor to see His church filled with and led by humble servants who are trained in His Word, consumed by His glory, captured by His grace and compelled to spread His gospel. We seek to do so through exhortation, education and empathy.
1. Exhortation– through social media, blog pieces, conferences, speaking/preaching
2. Education– through public Bible studies, book publishing and the establishment of a pastors’ training college both online and brick and mortar for underserved and aspiring pastors.
3. Empathy Continue reading
