I won’t say it’s certain, but it seems likely there will soon be some unrest in our nation. We are in an era of profoundly contentious politics, a day when frustration and dissatisfaction is paraded down our burning and blockaded streets. There are myriad questions about how we got here, about how Christians should view their voting strategies and political alliances. There is also, however, the here and now. We need, as some of our own hotheads love to remind us, to know what time it is.
While irrational racial animosity certainly played a part, the wedge between the Jews and the Samaritans was hammered in place by genuine conflicts and disagreements. There were surely centuries of debates between the two sides. Note how the woman at the well, a Samaritan, jumped quickly in her conversation with Jesus to the question of where worship was to take place (John 4:20). Note too, however, how His answer rose above geography.
The same is true in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Finding the Jewish gentleman battered, bruised and bereft, the Samaritan didn’t try to solve that riddle of where worship was to take place. He didn’t say, “If you hadn’t been headed to Jerusalem, this wouldn’t have happened. This is God’s judgment on you for making such a big deal out of Jerusalem.” No, he helped. Because his neighbor was in need. Were there answers to the questions dividing these two peoples? Yes. Did they matter at that moment? Not especially.
If unrest comes, we would be wise to keep this in mind. We ought not ration our care for those who are deemed to be on what we consider the correct side of our cultural divide. We don’t add to the turmoil in support of “our side.” Instead we remember our calling to live in peace and quietness with all men, as commanded (I Thess. 4:11). Instead we rest in the promise of Jesus that both peacemakers, and those persecuted for His sake are blessed (Matt. 5).
I’m not arguing for pacifism. I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with self-defense. I am arguing that we walk in gospel offense.
Anger will likely spike in our country post-election. We may find it mostly among those deemed to have lost. We may find it among those deemed to have won. Either way, Christians must embrace this opportunity to shine our light before men. We must embrace the opportunity to follow the example of the true Good Neighbor. We mustn’t let our political allegiances, as important as they may be, cause us to lose sight to our ultimate allegiance, to the Lord of Glory, the One who commands us to love our enemies.
It is both an important time and an easy time to remember that we are engaged in the great war between the Seed of the Woman and the seed of the serpent. It is likewise an important time, but a difficult time to remember that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, that we war not with flesh and blood. Let us put on the full armor of God (Ephesians 6). May we walk by faith, and serve our neighbor in need.
Tonight we continue our study on I Thessalonians. All are welcome to our home at 7 est, or you may join us for dinner at 6:15. We will also stream the study at Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
The New Testament is chock full of warnings against going back to the shadows, to maintaining all those elements of worship that Jesus fulfilled. Yea and amen says me. It is a mistake, however, to utterly separate Old Testament temple worship from our worship in our new covenant context.
We must, of course, jettison anything that would suggest that the once for all sacrifice of Jesus is somehow incomplete. Animal sacrifices, an important part of temple worship, are no more. Even when our sacraments have a connection to Old Covenant sacraments, like the Day of Atonement and the Lord’s Supper, circumcision and baptism, our sacraments are to be bloodless.
But there was more to temple worship than sacrifices, and more to sacrifices than blood. First of all, prayer was a central part of temple worship. Jesus Himself, when tossing the moneychangers out of the temple, explained that the temple is to be a house of prayer. Prayer is increasingly being pushed aside in the contemporary church to make room for more entertainment. Jesus might not drive the moneychangers out in our day but He might drive out the “coffee brewers.”
Second, temple worship was musical. David, with respect to the tabernacle, and Solomon with respect to the temple, brought the beauty of music praising the living God into the worship of God’s people. We are called to sing. Along with our prayers ascending as a sweet smelling aroma to the Lord, so our songs of praise ascend to His throne, which is itself the praises of His people (see Psalm 22:3).
Finally, temple worship was sacrificial, and so ought the worship of the church be. Of course Jesus died once for all. Of course “it is finished.” Such was the case in the New Testament, yet we are repeatedly called to offer up ourselves, our praises as sacrifices before God. We go to present ourselves not to atone for ourselves, but in response to our having been atoned for.
Sacrifices, however, while certainly very much about substitution, are not only about substitution. In temple worship the death of the sacrifice was not the end. The burning of the sacrifice was not the end. The end was the feasting, the meal shared among the priest, the family offering the sacrifice and the Heavenly Father that welcomes them into His blessed presence.
Temple worship was not merely the downloading of information from the priest into the minds of the congregation. It was even more entering into the presence of the living God. We do not merely pray and sing our praises about God, but bring them to God.
Worship is the fulfillment of His will being done on earth as it is in heaven, the undoing of the division rent between us and our Father in the fall. He calls us. Because of Jesus He welcomes us. We draw near. And He feeds us. May He open our eyes to see all that He has given us in worship, to see Him.
This is the eighteenth installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we at Sovereign Grace Fellowship meet this Sunday November 3 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
Pop culture is a sanitizing force. No, it doesn’t make the world a cleaner place. It just makes us all the more the same. We are a world awash in golden arches, swooshes, and the real thing. Because people in Maine stream the same television shows, listen to the same radio programs, and use the same social media as folks in Oklahoma, we are losing not only our national distinctives, but our regional distinctives. Our language is becoming homogenized, and our accents are going the way of the dodo bird.
Local cultures, however, fight back from time to time. Southern culture, and more widely, rural culture, as a whole fits that bill. I’ve been a transplant to the south, having been born and raised just north of the Mason-Dixon line. But whatever faults southern culture might be guilty of, one can’t escape its charms.
Consider the different ways one receives directions. In the Midwest, where the land is flat, you will be told to follow this road this many miles, and then turn east. You’ll turn north again after the next light, and what you’re looking for will be on the south side of the road. For those of us who grew up amidst rivers and mountains, and twisting, turning roads, such is pure gobbledygook. Where I grew up you told people which roads one should turn left or right on, and that was it.
In the south, however, the whole process is different. “You come up on the Kinderhook farm …” (and here we pay close attention, because we must turn soon) “…and you go right past that. Not long after you’ll pass Barnrock church. Just keep going. When you get to Nordyke road, you’ll see a log cabin up on the hill. That belongs to the Kisers. Keep going straight.” Directions, to the southerner, aren’t instructions in how to get from place to place, but a travelogue about the journey, and an introduction to all of the neighbors.
My conviction is that this strange reality is an expression of a stranger, more hidden reality. People in the country don’t see places as means of travel, but as the setting of their lives. The farms and the rivers and all the other landmarks aren’t places to turn, but places to return to our past, our roots, our broader community. In such cultures it is easier to remember that what we are is bigger than ourselves.
Which may help explain America’s Bible belt. Some cultural patterns make the Gospel easier to grasp, others make it harder. A culture where fathers are largely absent and irresponsible, for instance, is one that will find it hard to understand the love of our heavenly Father. In turn, a culture given to extreme individualism is one in which one man living and dying for another just doesn’t make sense. A culture where one’s identity is more corporate than singular is one that can in turn identify with a substitutionary atonement.
Such is not to argue for the superiority of rural culture to city culture. Both have weaknesses and both have strengths. That our culture tends to put up roadblocks to our faith doesn’t mean, however, that we devise detours. That some subcultures lack many loving fathers doesn’t mean we change the message that God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son. And that His life for ours is a puzzle to our insulated world doesn’t change the fact that He gave His life for ours.
We do not contextualize our message, but contextualize the culture. That is, we are about the business of building a culture, a kingdom, where, though it is foolishness to the Greeks, and a stumbling block to the Jews, the death on the cross is for us the power of God unto salvation. We have a message that creates a new culture, and will change that message for no one.
The cross of Christ is our landmark, our direction, and the very context of our lives. It is where we have come from, where we are heading, and what attends us along the way. Christ died for sinners, wherever they may live, whatever their cultural distinctives. What never changes is our most sacred faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.
If ever there was a theological boogey man, it is this- the notion that if God is sovereign over us and our choices, such makes our love for Him inauthentic and worthless, turns us into robots or puppets. Without humans having libertarian free will, the ability to do that which we do not wish to do, calamity ensues, and every ounce of meaning and purpose in all of reality sinks into a foul smelling goo.
Which, if it were true, would seem to make heaven a rather unpleasant place. This dawned on me some years ago when I received a question from a dear saint who worried that there could be sin in heaven. I addressed her concern here. Her fears were misguided, but precisely because there is no possibility of sin in heaven. No possibility of sin, in the minds of many, means no possibility of obedience, love, authenticity.
But it gets worse. If love cannot be genuine unless there exists in the one loving the capacity for love to change into hate, then God Himself has become a robot. His love for us, if this were true, must either be mutable or inauthentic. Yikes. Heaven now becomes not only a place where we can sin and descend into judgment, but becomes a place where God can simply choose to hate us and send us to hell, even if we love Him there faithfully.
I get the desire we have to not be robots. I get the importance of love being genuine. Amen. The trouble is in assuming that any of this requires libertarian free will. The trouble is libertarian free will, if it were a thing, would lead to horrors far worse than our being mere puppets.
One way I seek to give a modicum of peace to those who think this way is to remind them that we are as free as God is, and He is as bound as we are. This Jonathan Edwards so masterfully explained, unpacking the same points made centuries before by Augustine. We always choose according to our nature. We are absolutely free to do so. We cannot, however, choose against our nature. We are constrained, not by a puppet master, not by a robot engineer, but by our very selves, to only choose according to our nature. Just like the God whose image we bear.
Apart from His sovereign work of regeneration, our inclination is only to evil (Gen. 8:21). We are “free” to do good, but never will. At our glorification, our inclination is only to good. We will be “free” to do evil, but never will. God’s inclination is only to do good. He is “free” to do evil, but never will. Not because there is a power above Him constraining Him from evil, but because of who He is.
This is not the destruction of love, but it’s outworking. Lord, teach us to fear You, and not the boogey man we have made up in our minds.
It stretches credulity to suggest that anyone would answer this question in the affirmative. We know better than to say such things. It also stretches credulity, however, to deny that we in the church have a terrible time grasping the ongoing significance of the gospel to our lives. We are more than willing to admit that it was how we were saved. We’ll also admit that it is how we will enter into heaven. Between these two events, however, we have a hard time seeing its relevance.
I suspect such is mostly because we have such a narrow view of the impact of the gospel. It is absolutely true, gloriously true, that because Jesus led a perfect life in our place we are declared just. Because He died an atoning death in our place our sins are forgiven. Our debt has been wiped clean, and hell receives notice to cancel our reservation. The gospel solves the one real problem we’ve ever faced. We were under the judgment of the living God.
The gospel, however, does not stop there. It does not merely move us from the guilty to the innocent column. It moves us from the enemy to friend column, from the stranger to child column. It changes us from the evil witch to the beautiful princess. It does those things, but it also reconciles us to each other.
The gospel tells us that we have been forgiven much, empowering us to forgive much in others. The gospel tells us our worth is not in ourselves but in Him, empowering us to let go of our need to protect our worth and value. The gospel tells us we have not just the forgiveness but the love of the One who knows us completely, so there is no reason to cover up our sin. The gospel tells us that we have been given joy, peace, security, provision, treasure, Jesus Himself, and so there is no reason to look for these things from other cracked earthen vessels.
The gospel in turn gives us who have already been saved, our purpose, and our marching orders. We are to pursue the kingdom, disciple the nations, mortify our flesh, tell other beggars where the Bread of Life found us. We are set free from the folly of seeking meaning and purpose in the same empty cupboards that the world looks in. We are set free from chasing after the wind.
Best of all, the gospel leads us all to worship. It is both how and why we praise Him, delight in Him, honor Him. Which is just what we need, all of us. The gospel must be preached every Lord’s Day not because someone there might not be saved, but because no one there doesn’t need to hear it. No one there will be anything but blessed by hearing it. Everyone there needs to go tell it to others.
If we think, consciously or otherwise, that the gospel is the beginning and then we move on, we need to go back to the beginning.
Tonight we begin our new study on I Thessalonians. All are welcome to our home at 7 est, or you may join us for dinner at 6:15. We will also stream the study at Facebook Live, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
