The Oxymoronic Arrogance of Reformed Folk

Posted on November 12, 2024 by RC

It’s an irony that hits close to home, so it’s one I make note of regularly. We who confess to being Reformed, Calvinistic, embracing the doctrines of grace, begin our confession of our distinctives with the doctrine of total depravity. We affirm that sin impacts all that we are. Our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts and our desires are depraved. We affirm that we are unable, unless God should change our nature first, to even want to be changed.In short, we have a profoundly low, albeit biblical, view of ourselves in our fallen state. (For a strong exploration of Reformed theology, see After Darkness Light, Essays in Honor of RC Sproul here.)

The irony is that if we were in the high school yearbook we embracers of the doctrines of grace would rightly be voted “Most likely to be arrogant.” We begin with a humbling doctrine, but we end as prideful jerks. What gives? It is because of our depravity that even an awareness of our depravity does little to diminish our foolish pride. To put it another way, what else would we expect from sinners such as us?

We grow our arrogance, I suspect, out of one truth, and one lie. We embrace the biblical truth that God chooses His own. We deny that we are chosen based on His foreknowledge of any choices we might have made. What we often feel, however, is that we were chosen precisely because we were so worthy. We’ve turned out so well, we reason in the dark corners of our hearts, it makes perfect sense that He chose us. Didn’t He choose well when He chose me?

The truth that leads us astray is that we are, when considering election, entering into some deep waters. Which, we are foolish enough to believe, makes us think we are rather accomplished swimmers. We are tempted to believe that, because we not only look into such deep doctrines, but have the courage to embrace them, that we’re a better class of believer. I thank you Lord that I am not like other men. I know the five points of Calvinism. I know the difference between an Arminian and an Armenian.

The doctrine of election is true; it is biblical. As such we have a duty not just to affirm it and to teach it, but to believe it. We need to believe it from our hearts, to believe it enough to put to death our pride. We need to believe in it enough to believe in His power to rescue and revive the dead. We need to believe it enough to know down to our core that the vilest criminal, the cruelest Muslim, the most heartless adulterer is just what we are by nature. What sets us apart isn’t anything good in us save His grace at work in us.

We need to believe it enough to cry out in gratitude at the amazing grace that saved such a wretch as me. We should not believe in election because we in our brilliant minds have managed to peek behind the curtain, to look into the secret things of God. We are to believe in it because it reveals the glorious truth that He has loved us, despite our being utterly unworthy. He’s done so from the foundations of the world. His grace isn’t a slight fix to a small problem. It is instead the victory of Jesus over death. We are to believe it because it, however slowly, puts to death our pride. Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.

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Live Study Tonight, I Thessalonians 4 – Pleasing God

Posted on November 11, 2024 by RC

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.

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One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One Church

Posted on November 11, 2024 by RC

The Bible is organic. The Bible is true, and as such is consistent, coherent, and comprehensible. And the consistent, coherent, and comprehensible truth is, it’s not ordered as a systematics text, far less as a book of church order. It is a consistent, coherent, comprehensible, organic book.

There are few places where this is more obvious than in the doctrine of ecclesiology. How swiftly we find ourselves, as soon as we start talking about the church, talking about government. And we find ourselves immediately face to face with the organic. There is, much to our chagrin, no Book of Church Order in our Bibles. We carefully scan the table of contents, and lo, it’s just not there. Not only is there no apostle called Robert, there is no copy of his Rules.

What we have instead is mostly history, with the rest of our information coming from what we virtually dismiss as the “pastoral epistles.” The only government we see in the church is authoritative pronouncements from the apostles, and, in one more less than organic presentation, the Jerusalem Council. I mean, there’s not even any mention of a gavel. How legitimate can that be? What we are shown is something that doesn’t exactly fit our circumstance.

Because the book was written to a people living in the apostolic age, we are not given an extensive exposition on how the church should be ruled in the post-apostolic age. Which may explain why we have rational, Bible-loving men who are Episcopalian, who are Congregational, and who are Presbyterians, who believe in rule by bishop, by elder and by congregation. Here is one more place where honesty requires a recognition of the organic. While we affirm the perspicuity of the Bible, we must confess that some parts of it are more perspicuous than others.

But the problem is older than this. The lack of a Book of Church Order is emblematic of a broader problem. For not only are we not given a handbook for governance, we are not given a birth certificate for the church. Never does the Holy Spirit blow His celestial trumpet and declare, “The church is being born.” Some say the church was born at Pentecost. Others argue that the resurrection birthed the church. Still others suggest that it was the calling of the apostles, while others go all the way back to the calling of Abraham.

When was the church born? In Genesis 3. The church age began as soon as the age of innocence ended. The church, after all, is neither more nor less than the people of God. Where God has a people, there is the church.

In the patchwork that is the people of God, we find not merely a remnant, but a collection of remnants. Between the death of Noah and the calling of Abraham we are given a genealogy, followed by the tower of Babel, followed by more genealogy, followed by the call of Abraham. Nothing good happening there, in the interim between the heroes Noah and Abraham.

But no sooner does God call out a people for Himself, the Father of the Faithful, and his clan, that we meet Melchizadek, the priest of God Most High. Where did he come from? Perhaps the same place as the Wise Men, the land of Spiritual Lost and Then Found Socks. That the Spirit blows where He wills not only means that strange things, like the conversion of Alice Cooper, happen, but it means that the Spirit has blown where it will. He has flocks we know not of.

God was pleased, in the old covenant, to have His people be visible in the nation of Israel. He was pleased to commingle a national identity, and a spiritual one. Now, in these latter days, He is looking for those who worship in Spirit and in truth. But His grace does not spread like water without a tide. The leaven will indeed get through the whole lump, but it will do so organically, not uniformly. Which means that we ought not to be surprised that God has blessed the west, that He has blessed this nation, nor that He has, as yet, not shown the same grace toward the Chinese, or the Libyans, or the Rwandans.

He will have mercy on whom He will have mercy. And He will have mercy when He will have mercy. But the point of that affirmation goes back to the will of the Spirit blowing. It happens not by the will of those who run, but by the good pleasure of the Father. We show ourselves strangers to the grace of God when we think He gives it because of how wonderful we are.

Isn’t it telling that after Paul gives a verbal whipping to the proud Jews in the church, that they should not turn up their noses at the Gentiles God was grafting in, he takes the time to give a preemptive scolding to the Gentiles. “Hey, don’t get cocky. It happened to them; it could happen to you.” And yet we continue to fall into the same sin. We think the kingdom of God will look rather like our neighborhood, and then pride ourselves in avoiding the folly of political correctness.

The truth is that the only thing we know for certain about the ethnic make-up of the kingdom of God is this, there were will be some of everything. The people of God are those covered by the blood of Christ.

This is the twentieth 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 17 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.

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God in the Hands of Angry Sinners- A Misunderstanding

Posted on November 8, 2024 by RC

It was a strange time for me. I was attending a high school that was so nominal in its commitment to the Christian faith that the high school English teacher was an atheist. Still, his was among my favorite classes, both because of what we read and because of the things we talked about. While attending this school during the week, I also attended a decidedly Christian Sunday school. The late Dr. John H. Gerstner, my father’s mentor, was my Sunday school teacher.

During the week, and during the weekend, for a delightful several months, we were studying the work of the Puritans. Dr. Gerstner’s class was called “The Puritans: The Church at Its Best.” Dr. Kupersmith’s tenth-grade English class was called just that, but we read snippets from several Puritan authors as a part of our survey of American literature. We read a bit of Cotton Mather’s masterwork, Magnalia Christi Americana, and we read Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Although I was a convinced Calvinist at the time, I must confess that it seemed a little strange that we were reading Puritans in English class. It was a sort of a good news, bad news thing. We were reading the works of men who poured their lives into striving for change, to save souls, and to shape a culture. And we were reading them like curious old, cultural artifacts, as if the proclamation of the Word of God could be turned into sociological dinosaur bones.

It was true enough, though it was supposed to shock us, that people who thought this way once shaped the nation. It was true enough that it was true enough that strangest of all, one Sunday morning my atheist English teacher showed up to hear my hero and Sunday school teacher expound on the Puritans and how their thought shaped their culture. I prayed during the whole class that God would show Him the light. Indeed He did. But this man still preferred the darkness.

I think that Sunday morning at the feet of Dr. Gerstner at the least did this for my teacher, it helped him understand me a bit better. When the English class read through Edward’s sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” most of the students were repulsed. Well, to be more accurate, everyone in the room but me was repulsed. They couldn’t imagine that anyone could sit still to hear a sermon in which God was portrayed so harshly.

If you are unfamiliar with the sermon, the imagery that shapes it is simple enough. Edwards encourages those in his audience to understand their situation, that they are like a spider, dangling on a single strand of web, precariously hanging above a raging fire.

God holds the upper end of that strand, such that all that separates you and that burning cauldron is that gossamer thread. We didn’t, as a class, talk about God per se, but Edward’s perception of Him. They knew for sure that God wasn’t at all like that. They were just shocked that anyone could think He was. But of course, they figured, this was a long time ago, practically all the way back to the dark ages.

After all the bellowing from my classmates finished, I gingerly raised my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I think you all have completely missed the point of this sermon. Edwards wasn’t trying to paint God as an ogre. He wasn’t trying to impress upon his flock the harsh judgment of God. No, this is a sermon about the grace of God.” There was a brief and stunned silence as the class took in my hypothesis.

When they understood what I said, they saw Edwards in a new light. He wasn’t the world’s worst Calvinist — I was. They bellowed like so many spiders dangling over a fire. Grace?! Grace?! How in the world could I argue that this was about grace?

I went on to explain, though I doubt I persuaded anyone, that the grace was simple enough to see. It was found in that gossamer thread, and in the hand that held it. Edwards isn’t telling his audience how mean God is to hold them over the fire, but how gracious He is that He hadn’t yet dropped them in the fire.

The difference, then, between Puritan culture and our culture isn’t found, in one sense, in differing conceptions of God. Rather, it is found in different understandings of man. The culture’s wholesale rejection of the theology that served as its foundation isn’t of the predestinating God, but of the total depravity of man. The world, and that which is of the world in the church, hate the Reformed faith because of what it rightly tells us we deserve. We affirm we have earned the wrath of God, while they affirm God has earned our wrath.

Which is why our attempts at soft-selling the living God have failed so miserably. As we, in trying to call the lost to Christ cover over the wrath of God, we in turn cover over the one thing they need to grasp. Everyone’s already alright with God, because we aren’t spiders, but the pinnacle of creation. Indeed, we are so committed to our own goodness that we leave God dangling over the fire, finding Him guilty for not making all our dreams come true.

Perhaps by God’s grace, one day students will be shocked at how we in this century misunderstood the nature of God and the nature of man.

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God Knows My Heart; I, However, Clearly Do Not

Posted on November 7, 2024 by RC

Here we find an expression that is most strange- God knows my heart. Nine times out of ten the speaker using this expression is seeking comfort in the face of some sin. I do something wrong. Either my own conscience or someone else points out my wrongdoing. That sense of guilt stings, so I seek to salve it by affirming that I’m still good because God knows my heart. My behavior may look bad to the casual observer. The all-knowing God, however, looks beyond the surface, and finds in my heart a veritable bouquet of sugar and spice and everything nice.

It is true enough that God knows our hearts. There is nothing hidden from Him. He will never allow circumstances or other outward so called “evidences” to mislead Him in any way. He knows the innocent to be innocent and the guilty to be guilty. Which is precisely why this expression “God knows my heart” ought to terrify us rather than comfort us. While our hearts are adepts at deception, they never fool Him. They fool us daily, but never Him. That we think Him knowing our hearts is a comforting thought reveals that we have already been fooled by our own deceptive hearts.

Where this expression gets truly strange, however, is where it actually is a comforting thought. Yes, there is a way to understand this expression and to rejoice in it. It is not that God knowing my heart leads me to believe that He knows my innocence. Rather it is that God knowing my heart leads me to believe that He knows my guilt. Why would that be a comfort? Because He loves me anyway. I never have to fear that God will one day discover something worse about me that will change His perspective on me.

God knows, better than the devil himself, better than me, better than those I have sinned against, exactly how dirty, dark, deceitful my heart is, and yet He still has adopted me into His family, loves me with an immutable, eternal, infinite and personal love, by name. He knows my heart and finds there not something lovely and honorable but something He has already forgiven in Christ. There is no waiting for the other shoe to drop. There is nothing to hide.

God’s infinite knowledge of all things, including each one of our hearts, is never going to change. It is an inescapable given. When we, fools that we are, seek to hide our hearts from Him, we can be assured they will be exposed. When we, by the power of His Spirit, confess and expose all that is in our hearts to Him, He covers them with the blood of His Son, He of the perfect, sinless heart.

Yes, He knows my heart. By His grace He is revealing more of its darkness to me, even as He is at work washing it. And He has declared me to be just, a saint, His own beloved son.

Oh what a gospel.

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Election Reds; Jesus Reigns; Practically Sovereign and More

Posted on November 6, 2024 by RC

This week’s Jesus Changes Everything Podcast

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He Will Never Let Us Go- Believing His Promises

Posted on November 5, 2024 by RC

Fear can be a potent motivator, or conversely, a great de-motivator. Many of us have a deep fear of change. However disappointed we may be in ourselves, in our circumstances, in our walk with the Lord, in our church, we can always imagine it getting worse. We end up paralyzed, set in our ways, stuck.

When I find myself challenged in terms of my biblical understanding of something I do this. I remember to distinguish between changing my mind about what the Bible teaches and changing my mind about the Bible. We all ought to be open to the reality that we might misunderstand the Bible. We all ought to be confident, on the other hand, that the Bible is right in all that it teaches. A disagreement about the meaning of a text between two people sharing a commitment to the authority of the text means no one is slipping away from the Bible.

In the same way, when we seek Reformation, in our own lives, in the lives of our family, in the church itself, we aren’t letting go of our lives, our families or the church itself. How much less are we letting go of the living God? “We’ve been doing this wrong” doesn’t mean, “so God has rejected us.” It may well mean, “And our loving Father is gently correcting us, because He loves us.”

When Luther stood on the Word of God, when he could do no other, he understood this point. He was defying the power and authority of the whole of the western church. He was securely resting in the power and authority of the God of heaven and earth, and His Word. He not only, however, was securely resting there, he knew he was securely resting there. The first Reformation came because of a courage resting on a faith in the absolute trustworthiness of God.

Like the rest of us, Luther was prone to feeling God’s distance, if not absence. It happens to all of us. That we feel His absence, however, is no evidence whatever that we are experiencing His absence. In fact, we have His Word that such can never be. He has told us He will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13: 5). He has promised that He is with us, even unto the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). He has assured us that nothing can take us from His hand (John 10:28).

It is not the bold who go forth and do great things for the kingdom, for they depend upon their own strength. Rather it is those who embrace the gospel truth we learned as little children, “We are weak but He is strong.” It is not just those who come as little children who see the kingdom, who enter the kingdom, but who make manifest the invisible kingdom to the watching world. We are used for Reformation as we remember that He has you and me brother, in His hands.

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Live Study Tonight, I Thessalonians 3 – Love for the Church

Posted on November 4, 2024 by RC

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.

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The Blessing of Blessings- Why We Hunger for the Benediction

Posted on November 4, 2024 by RC

I, along with many others, hopped on the liturgy bandwagon back in the day. I haven’t, in fact, hopped off. I have, however, come to a more modest understanding of the relative merits of high liturgy. Having spent the better part of the past four years with the option of either millennial shaped contemporary worship or liturgical services so scripted that even I couldn’t take it, I’m now left trying to lead the way at Sovereign Grace Fellowship.

I’m not at all surprised that the first thing I held tenaciously to, not that anyone has raised any objections mind you, is weekly communion. We celebrate it at Sovereign Grace. It does not cure all that ails us, but it faithfully points us to the One that does. I’m grateful to have the opportunity each week to preach from the text to the table.

What has surprised me was the next most important thing to my own spirit. I’m used to singing the Apostles’ Creed, chanting the Agnus Dei, coming forward and kneeling to receive the bread and the wine. What I have missed the most, however, is perhaps the most common bit of liturgy, that part of the liturgy that has survived the longest even in low-church services, the pronouncement at the end of the service of the benediction. In all the churches that the Sproul family has visited or joined in the years we’ve been in Fort Wayne, this was the one thing I asked every pastor for- can we have a benediction?

The purpose of worship is to glorify God, to bless and magnify His name. That’s why we sing, why we preach. It’s why we break into doxology, speaking words of praise to Him. Benediction, on the other hand, is God speaking to us, pronouncing His blessing on us. It is not something we give, but something we receive. And, it is important to note, that even though the pastor may be speaking it, he is not the one giving it. He is speaking it for the Lord, in submission to the Lord’s command in Numbers 6.

We depart from the worship of the living God having had Him pronounce His blessing over us. I want all those under my care to receive that blessing every Lord’s Day. Yesterday, at the end of the service of Sovereign Grace Fellowship I pronounced that benediction. It is such a delight, such a soul feeding thing that I get to do. It is here, however, that I miss being on the other side. Which is why I always remember one particular night of blessing.

Our family drove through the snow to attend a night of worship at another church. It looked nothing like what I was used to. There was dance going on, both formal and informal. Banners were being waved by small children throughout the service. There was no preaching and no sacrament. This was just about as low-church as a local body could be.

Until the end. Then the pastor raised his hand and spoke for God, “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.” And so the Lord did.

This is the nineteenth 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 10 at 10:30 AM at our new location, at our beautiful farm at 112811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.

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Cults ‘R’ Us- The Gross Error of Assertion

Posted on November 1, 2024 by RC

There are any number of ways that cultural confusion always walks down the aisle with relativism. Divorce, in this instance, isn’t an option. If, for instance, we all agree that there is no such thing as right and wrong, then what do we do with, say, people who like to torture animals? Or, better yet, what do you do with people who like to hijack airplanes and kill thousands? After all, jihad is “right to them.” How can we object, when all we object against is objecting?

The same is true theologically. Time was that even those outside the church were interested if not worried about the proliferation of various cults. We’re a nation that holds this truth as self-evident, that no religion is more or less true than another. How then can we distinguish between a religion and a cult?

The broader culture won’t draw the line at the doctrine of the incarnation or the Trinity. (Indeed, many inside the church won’t make that their line in the sand either. Several of the most influential “evangelicals” of the past fifteen years have denied the doctrine of the Trinity.) So where will they draw the line?

The mark of a cult, in the minds of the West in the twenty-first century, isn’t the assertion of gross error, but the gross error of assertion. Respectable religion is that religion that is held loosely, that may, if it must, assert this belief or that, so long as it does not deny any other assertion or belief. Rome gets a pass because John Paul II, Benedictus and Francis affirm that there are many pathways to heaven, that what counts is sincerity.

The sad truth, however, is this same thinking has found a home in the church. We don’t determine something is a cult by the doctrines it affirms, but the way in which it affirms its doctrines. The distinguishing mark of the cult is authority.

How far we have come. Once cults were defined by a failure to submit to an objective standard. Now a cult is that place that affirms the existence of an objective standard. Which ought to help us understand the true nature of our culture’s embrace of relativism.

Relativism isn’t merely an errant philosophical understanding of epistemology and ethics. It isn’t a mere wrong turn in someone’s sincere journey looking for the truth. It isn’t a silly, yet benign, embracing of folly. It is instead a false religion.

Irony of ironies, it comes with a confession of faith, and law written in stone. The confession is this, “All confessions are not true.” The law is this, “Thou shalt not affirm anything.” Failure to keep the law will bring forth at least social ostracism, and at worst, jail time. And no religion has proponents with greater evangelistic zeal. They will not stop until everyone affirms in unison that each of us constructs our own reality. They will tolerate no intolerance, except of course their own.

They are winning. Already, according to George Barna’s polls, more than 50 percent of people who describe themselves as evangelical Christians, affirm as true the claim that there is no objective truth. That number will surely climb, as the rest of us more and more get marginalized first as fundamentalists, then as extremists, and finally, as cultists.

God has not called us, however, to paint ourselves as reasonable. We don’t whip out our relativist credentials, and insist that we are no danger to the reigning religion. We confront the false religion. We tear down the stronghold. We take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. We do this, because we fear no man; we fear God.

He calls us to believe this objective truth, that those who are persecuted for His name’s sake, are blessed. He commands that we confess that name before men, not as an option, not as God-to-me, not as something true in my heart. No, we must confess that Christ is Lord over all, that He speaks all truth, and that we must obey — right away. To put it another way, we must confess before men that He is the way, not a way, the truth, not a truth, and the life.

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