For all the hardships connected to inflation none of us, I suspect, have found ourselves giving thanks for having the head of a donkey or dove droppings to eat. That, however, was the situation in Samaria when the Syrians laid siege to their city. No one could come in and no one could come out and soon the city’s food supply dwindled. Elisha the prophet gave, however, a prophesy of blessing, promising that in only a day the cost of food would plummet. Everyone thought him out of his mind.
Outside the city gates several lepers did some hard reasoning over their situation. “If we go into the city,” they thought, “we’ll starve with the rest of them. If we stay here outside the gate, we’ll starve just like those inside the gate. If we go to the Syrian camp they might kill us. But they might not.” They made the obvious choice. The Syrians did not decide the spare the lepers. Neither did they kill them. Rather, they just weren’t there. They had already fled, leaving behind their tents, their horses, their weapons, and all their plenteous stores of food.
The lepers began to partake of these blessings, until their consciences accused them. They knew all too well that inside the city gates a whole city was in fear, and starving, when the cause of their fear had fled and the need for their want was ripe to be picked. They returned to the city and let the people know. Almost everyone came out to the feast. The one exception was the guard of the gate who, when Elisha had made his prophesy, insisted it could never happen. He didn’t go because he couldn’t go. He died, trampled by the people of the city on their way to the feast.
Who are we in the story? That depends. Though sin is central to what we were, and such would make us good candidates to be the Syrians, sin is not central to what we are. Though we are given to doubting, we are not the gatekeeper who was trampled to death. We may be the people of the city. Once starving, as good as dead, surrounded by the enemy, desperately hungry and then, invited to a feast we didn’t prepare, eating of that feast with joy and thanksgiving, now alive and secure, just as the prophet had foretold.
Yes, that is who we are. Rescued and redeemed. This, however, is not who we are called to be. It is one thing to be rescued, and we certainly needed that. Having been rescued, however, our Lord calls us to call others. He rescues us and calls us to be used by Him in the rescuing of others. We are supposed to be the lepers- no better than the people of Samaria. No better than the Syrians. But those who, by His grace, understood that their only chance was to throw themselves on the mercy of the ones who would likely kill them. Only to find the mercy of the One who gave them life.
We are beggars all. We are feasters all. Let us show forth our gratitude by telling other beggars where the Bread finds them.
We have three important updates we thought it important to share with you. First, next Sunday, September 8 we celebrate a grand re-opening of Sovereign Grace Fellowship as we move into our own building. We meet at 10:30 AM Sundays for worship at 11281 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN 46845. We’d love to have you join us on this special Sunday, and if God wills, moving forward from there. Below is the invitation I sent out to several friends in the area:
Dear Friend,
All of us have things we like and don’t like about our church. There’s a simple reason for that- the church is made up of people who, not matter how friendly, how gifted, how fun, are sinners. While we are to love, encourage, support, uplift, pray for, edify one another, we will inevitably sin against one another.
What defines a healthy church is less how well it does, more how well it deals with not doing well. Is it a church where everyone pretends everything is ok, or a church where it’s ok to not be ok? Is it a church that celebrates itself, or that celebrates the grace of God in Christ? Is it a church that approves the sins of the world, condemns the sinners of the world, or one that repents of its own sins?
At Sovereign Grace Fellowship we are a body that seeks to remain ever mindful of three vital truths:
We are all great sinners. This is neither an excuse, nor the end of the story. Rather it is the foundation of the rest of the story. When John the Baptist came preparing the way he began with “Repent…”. We are, by nature, children of wrath. Though we are redeemed, forgiven, indwelt, and growing in grace, we still struggle with sin.
Jesus is our great Redeemer. His grace will never come short of our need. He has saved us to the uttermost. Because of His perfect life, atoning death, vindicating resurrection we are indwelt, forgiven, adopted and made heirs. He will never leave us nor forsake us.
Our heavenly Father loves us as His children infinitely, immutably and by name. We who by His grace rest in the work of Christ are utterly secure in His love. He delights in us, walks with us, rejoices over us. Whatever else is going on in our lives, this immovable rock equips us with joy, peace, contentment.
We are a small congregation at present. There is no “hiding” at Sovereign Grace. We have been gathering for worship for over 4 years, switching locations, changing meeting times, dealing with COVID. We finally, however, have a more permanent time and location and are celebrating with a grand re-opening. We would love for you to join us Sunday, September 8, 10:30 AM at 11281 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN 46845. Our meetings take place on our beautiful farm/homestead.
What can you expect? You can expect to find a body committed to worshipping the living God, lifting up our Lord and Savior, seeking the Spirit’s will, and loving one another. We sing. We pray. We give heed to the Word preached. We celebrate the Lord’s Supper. You can expect a warm welcome from saints still battling with sin. This Re-Opening Sunday we will also enjoy a fellowship meal after worship. What should you not expect? Programs, distractions and facades. We worship all together, by His grace, in Spirit and in truth.
Will you please prayerfully consider joining us? Would you also, whether you plan to join us or not, spread the word to others? If you have questions, please feel free to contact me at hellorcjr@gmail.com or call or text to (407) 242-3627. Please also be in prayer for us as we pray God will bless you.
In the King’s Service,
RC Sproul Jr.
Second, it’s time once again for our regular Monday night Bible study at our home. We finished our long and fruitful journey through the book of Romans. We begin September 9 a new study on the book of Philippians. I can’t wait to dig in. As per usual, all are welcome to tune on Facebook Live, under RC-Lisa Sproul. All are welcome at our home as well. We serve dinner to our guests starting at 6:15, the study itself starting at 7:00. We will post these a day or two later right here at rcsprouljr.com. We hope you’ll join us.
Third, we are offering a course on personal finances on Tuesday evenings, live and in person. As with Sunday morning worship we’ll be meeting out at our beautiful farm at 11281 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Come learn biblical principles for being stewards of God’s good gifts. If you’ve enjoyed either my book on biblical economics or my curriculum, Economics for Everyone, you’ll likely enjoy these practical, hands on lessons designed to improve your bottom line and help you live within your means, and in peace. If you’d like to attend, please let us know. The course is free.
As you can see, we continue to offer opportunities for learning the things of God. Such is what Dunamis Fellowship is all about. If you’d like to support all the above, our blog, our podcast and so much more please click on the Donate Button on our homepage.
God bless you and we hope to see you in the coming days.
Yes, Virginia, there is. The true church is made up of all those churches that confess the true faith. We can divide the true church into the visible church and the invisible. The former contains all those who have a credible profession of faith. The latter includes only those who have actual possession of faith. The visible church, until the end, will always be a corpus per mixtum, a mixed body consisting of wheat and tares.
That is true of the individuals therein but also the doctrine confessed. That is, when we say the true church confesses the true faith we do not mean she does so perfectly. We all have errors in our thinking, and they, like tares in our hearts and minds, will be there until the end.
Typically those looking for the one, true church are looking for a visible institution, an entity with an address. The problem is there have been competing institutions making this claim for thousands of years. Do you suppose when the Jerusalem Council made their declaration against the Judaizers that the Judaizers all repented? Do you think those who didn’t repent converted to some other religion? No, they continued on, claiming that they would faithfully pray for that schismatic group in Jerusalem. They promised to welcome them back with open arms if they would simply repent and be circumcised.
That wasn’t the last split either. There were many more long before the Reformation, and have been more since then. The one-true-church buffet offered a long and heavy laden table filled to the brim with options. Eastern or Western rite? Pre or post Vatican II? Pope Snap or Pope Crackle or Pope Pop? The Reformation may have expanded the menu but it was already quite a tome.
Which ironically is what so often makes people go off in search of the “one true church.” It’s confusing, disheartening and more than a little scary to not know which group has it all together. The defining quality, however, of the one true church, is that it is made up of all those who know they have nothing together and know their only hope isn’t the one true church but the one true Savior.
The one true church, like every pretender to the title, has within its walls areas of disagreement. Those who baptize babies and those who don’t can’t both be right. Those who say the cup is literally the blood of the Lord and those who say it is not cannot both be right. They can, however, be a part of the same body. For the body is the body of Christ.
The one true church is that place where there is liberty on secondary matters and immovability on the primary, where we confess that we are sinners whose only hope is in the God-Man, Jesus Christ who died for our sins, was raised again and is seated at the right hand of the Father. Where we confess that He will come again to judge the quick and the dead. Where we confess our belief in one, holy and catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting..
This is the tenth installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we are having a grand re-opening of Sovereign Grace Fellowship Sunday September 8 at 10:30 AM at our new location, 12811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
“And to forsake all others, till death do us part.” One would think, that with the decades-old trend in the broader culture of “personal marriage vows,” wherein husband and wife fill in the blanks and speak their own words, that the above would be the first to be ditched. It’s not so much the language as the sentiment that is archaic.
Competing mathematical theories, combined with actual divorces tell us that between one third and one half of all marriages end in divorce. Strangely enough, most couples still triumphantly march away from the altar having vowed life-long fidelity. It seems even the most coarsened consciences still so long for happily ever after that, while they can actually live without the fidelity, they can’t live without the illusion. No one dresses up and hires a photographer when they decide to move in together.
That illusion is so powerful, however, that in the face of the statistics, it might better be called a delusion. The sad truth is that whatever is the true number, the divorce rate among professing evangelical Christians is not much better than the world around us. We pledge our undying love, only to have the pledge die. Which may explain why we have such a hard time understanding the perseverance of the saints.
I’ve heard it said that the proclamation of the glory of the Father won’t carry a great deal of evangelistic freight in the inner-city. When we present God as our father, too many assume this means He is irresponsible, that He is absent, that He cannot be counted on. While I think avoiding biblical truths because of cultural sins is folly, I understand the sentiment. How are we to understand Christ as our Bridegroom, in a world where nearly half of all bridegrooms, just like inner-city fathers, skip town when convenient?
The answer within the church is simple enough. Our culture has changed. We are now those of whom Peter wrote, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession… Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2: 9–10). Our standards for the relationship between a man and a wife come not from the world around us, but from the Word beneath us, the very Word that upholds and sustains us.
We are the bride of Christ. And rather than having our vision of our Bridegroom besmirched by adulterous brigands, we ought instead to have our own vision of our calling as husbands be transformed by the image of the faithfulness of Christ. We don’t change Him; we don’t change our language. No, we change our behavior.
Once we grasp that we are His bride and that He will never let us go, we begin to loosen our grip on that cultural picture of perseverance, a white knuckled grip. The perseverance of the saints isn’t about our tenacious clinging to the Gospel as much as the sovereign clinging of the Gospel to us. I will persevere not because of me, but Him, not because I’m a faithful bride, but because He is a faithful Husband. Perseverance isn’t about bootstrap effort but cross-bearing effort, not about our effort now, but His effort then.
We do not have merely a handsome groom dressed up for the crowd. His tears shed are not simply for the moment of the ceremony, but for all our lives. When I struggle with the ugliness of my sin, when I grow impatient with the slow process of my sanctification, I remind myself God loves me today as much as He ever will. I’m not part way in, laboring to get all the way in. I am in. Not only does God love me now as He will forever, but He’ll love me forever as He does now.
Let us never forget either that it is love. When we translate biblical truth into formulae, something is always lost in the translation. It is good and proper that we should affirm with all conviction the doctrine of perseverance of the saints. It is good likewise to suggest in turn that preservation might be the better term, as it is what God does for us, not what we do for Him. But such can make the whole process sound, well, like a process.
We tend to turn the ordo salutis, the order of salvation, into a kind of production line. We who are Reformed rightly defend this doctrine in terms of His sovereignty. Nothing, the Bible tells us, can take us from His hand. But what drives God isn’t simply the hope of a perfect record. It isn’t merely a display of power. The promise is that He will sanctify His bride, that He will remove every blot and blemish.
Perseverance is a love story beginning and ending in the marriage of power and beauty, as our strong groom finishes the work He has begun in us, beautifying us, precisely because He is faithful and true.
His obedience shows forth our wickedness. We in turn, turn from our wickedness, to embrace His obedience. And then He holds on to us into eternity. This is not just good news now, but good news forever. For this is the one story that rightly ends … “and they lived happily ever after.” Cue music.
We all know we are called to walk by faith and not by sight (II Cor. 5:7). What we often don’t know is how terrible we are at it. We tend to think of it as the ability to believe the future promises of God. That’s surely a part of it. But so is our calling to believe the present promises of God. The Bible doesn’t tell us that we will be seated with Christ in the heavenly places but that we are so seated (Eph 6:2). It doesn’t teach us that we will be beloved of the Father but that we are beloved of the Father (I John 3:1).
That said, we are called to now have the faith to recognize that the life we see now is a drop in the bucket compared to the life we will have forever. C.S. Lewis, at least twice, unpacked this glorious truth. First, at the end of the seven Chronicles of Narnia, as the Pevensie children enter into eternity Lewis describes all that they have experienced as merely the first paragraph of a story that has no end. Second, Lewis described not the unseen world, but this world as the “Shadowlands.”
While our lives are real now, they will be both more alive and more real then. As Lewis illustrates in The Great Divorce, it is as if eternity has a greater density than the merely temporal. We are living in the wispy world of shadows, on our way to the true and eternal Mount Zion.
To grasp this isn’t to succumb to the folly of Gnosticism. It doesn’t undo His declaration that His creation is good (Gen. 1:31). We don’t despise these days of small beginnings (Zech. 4:10) but give thanks. Indeed we invest our lives here knowing that right now counts forever, that all that we do by His grace and for His glory will prove not to be wood, hay and stubble. Rather it will last into eternity. It is to remember that forever counts right now.
This is just the beginning. He who has begun a good work in us will carry it through to the day of Christ Jesus (Phil. 1:6). The whole creation groans, and it will when the labor comes to an end, be just as incorruptible as we will be. It too will take on immortality. Heaven and earth will embrace as time and eternity kiss.
Walking by faith means, in part, living today in light of eternity. It means walking, plowing in hope. It means suffering with endurance. It means joy in the mourning. It means being anchored, now and forever, in the never-ending glorious truth that He is able and He is for us. Rejoice, for even should He tarry for a thousand generations, the end is near.
I’m still working on putting together new podcasts. In the meantime here’s one from last year that I think many of you may have missed. Gardening, Reformed turf wars and more. Give a listen and hear what you’ve been missing.
I suspect one of the reasons that the opposition to sodomy that was once the default position of all professing Christians is in such retreat says more than we suspect. We’re now being encouraged to be silent on the issue, for the sake of the gospel, to nuance the issue for the sake of our witness, to rethink Paul for the sake of our credibility. And all this is wrapped up on the one all consuming law of evangelicalism- you have to be nice. We have found that hating the sin and loving the sinner just doesn’t work anymore because sodomites define themselves by their sin.
Some have argued that we need to resurrect the ick factor. I not too long ago foolishly thought the ick factor would prove to be a stalwart ally to us, only to see it fleeing the battlefield before a shot was even fired. As Al Mohler once said, the trouble with the ick factor is that it can be changed. We have the capacity to change what makes us go “eww,” and so broadly speaking the culture has.
The ick factor wilted in large part because it was hidden. For years now we have seen a parade of homosexual characters, actors, pundits all putting their orientation on display but never their behavior. We have come to think that homosexuality is all about being clever, biting, witty and sophisticated. Instead homosexuality is all about sexual confusion. I would argue that we ought to force ourselves to consider the sexual acts of these broken not to up our ick, but to, ironically, up our compassion.
The problem with sodomy isn’t that it’s a delightful, pleasurable thing that is bad because God is uptight and is opposed to it. Nor is the problem that it still makes some of us go “ick.” While it is true that God opposes sexual perversion the immediate problem is that it is a repugnant, destructive thing for those engaged in it.
If we love the sinner we cannot simply look past the sin. Indeed it is because we love the sinner that we call them to turn from their destructive behavior. It is compassion for those who destroy their bodies through misuse that calls us to call them to cease from doing so. It is compassion that proclaims forgiveness in Christ for those who repent and rest in Him.
The permissive “love” that the world offers is no more loving than if we “loved” those who cut themselves and others by looking the other way. We love those who starve themselves and others by calling them to repent. It is no more loving to “accept” this confusion than it would be to accept the confusion of those who think themselves an animal trapped in a human’s body. We are to expose such deeds (Eph. 5:11).
Love calls those caught up in destructive sin (which is, of course, every last one of us) to repent, to turn from that sin and turn to Christ. But if the sexually confused will not turn to Christ, we still call them to turn from that sin, to cease from destroying themselves. Love means understanding that homo-sex isn’t just an odd adaptation of the normal, but a manifestation of the love of death (Prov. 8:36).
Love calls we who love Christ to be willing to be hated by both those caught up in the sin of homo-sex and those caught up in its apologetical propaganda. Loving the sinner means taking on the “sin” of what they call, in defense of their perversion, hate. Let us love the sexually confused, even as they hate us as haters.
It was likely the most surreal thing I’ve ever witnessed at a worship service. Not surprisingly it happened on a Sunday morning at the Orlando Convention Center. My esteemed father was scheduled to preach at this service in conjunction with the annual Christian Booksellers Association convention. Back in those days CBA was a huge deal, with more than 5,000 souls in attendance representing book and music publishers, authors and artists and Christian bookstore owners.
I don’t remember what big name sang the offertory, but it was a big name. Just before my father got up to speak, however, a gentleman in a nice suit went up the microphone to let us all know, “This worship service is being brought to you by the W@#R Music Group.” (I honestly don’t remember which music company it was and if I did I’d likely leave it out to protect the guilty.) A corporate sponsor for a worship service? What?
My concern, however, is less with what happened 30 years ago and more with the perspective I fear may be behind it. Too often we look at the presentation of our tithes and offerings as some sort of commercial time out- that portion of the service where we tend to the necessary business of financing the work of the church. It’s sort of like a smoking break- necessary for some, a bit of an intrusion, and not a little unseemly.
I have these suspicions in part because of how I hear some churches explain their reasoning for removing the giving of tithes and offerings from their liturgy. We’re told they don’t want the unbelievers in the meeting to feel uncomfortable or pressured, and they don’t want them believing we care too much about money. But, they reason, the necessary chore of meeting the financial needs of the church can be met by a collection box near the narthex, or via texting or this app or that.
I honestly have no strong quarrel with differing views of how tithes and offerings are collected. Nor am I particularly concerned with the practical side, wanting to make sure the church has the money it needs. Instead I fear what we lose when we remove this aspect of worship from our liturgies.
That is, the giving of tithes and offerings isn’t a business transaction, but an act of worship. We are responding, in God’s presence, to God. We are handing these tokens back to Him as a way of acknowledging not that the bills must be paid, but that all that we are and all that we have are His.
In the same way that we set aside the Lord’s Day not to say to God, “We love you so much we’re willing to give you a whole day” but instead to say, “We give you this day to remember that all our days are Yours” so we do not say, “One tenth of our income is Yours, but instead, “I have been bought with a price. All that I have received is from Your hand, and You have made me but Your steward. I, and all I have, belong to You alone.”
Might this make unbelievers uncomfortable? Perhaps. So ought the preaching of the gospel. Might it make them feel pressured to give? Perhaps. So ought the preaching of the gospel make them feel pressured to repent. Might it make them not want to come back? Perhaps. So might the preaching of the gospel make them not want to come back. We are there, remember, not for W@#R Music Group, not for the lost, not for ourselves, but for Him. Our liturgies ought to reflect such.
This is the ninth installment of an ongoing series of pieces here on the nature and calling of the church. Stay tuned for more. Remember also that we are having a grand re-opening of Sovereign Grace Fellowship Sunday at 10:30 AM at our new location, 12811 Garman Road, Spencerville, IN. Please come join us.
Perhaps the most subtle verbal sleights of hand are acts of equivocation. We commit equivocation when we use one word, but with two different meanings. We make the change so quickly we miss the palmed meaning, and are made fools. Consider this classic illustration— God is love. Love is blind. Ray Charles is blind. Therefore Ray Charles is God. Something isn’t right there, and what it is, is shifting meanings.
When dealing with pronouns we face the toughest temptation. Antecedents get lost in a sea of pronouns, and soon enough we not only don’t know what he said but don’t know who he is. And where confusion abounds, there you will find the devil. It is one of his favorite weapons.
Consider for a moment the wisdom in the Bible about loving one another. Love is indeed a dominant theme in the Bible. The Bible is so full of injunctions to love that we in turn have great difficulty reconciling that teaching with this: “Oh Lord, dash their heads against the rocks.” The Bible contains sundry summons to love. It includes also what we call imprecatory psalms, wherein the psalmist calls down God’s judgment on His enemies.
Read through Moses’ celebration of the deliverance of the people and the destruction of Pharaoh’s army, and you probably won’t feel the love. How do these things cohere? Lest you think the solution is a division between the old and new covenants, give a read to Paul in thundering against the Judaizers in Galatians.
God commands of us a love toward those outside the kingdom, (that is, we are called to love our enemy). That matches a kind of love God Himself has for His enemies (the love of benevolence). By the same token, we are called to love discriminatingly. We have different kinds of loves for different kinds of people. I love my wife one way, and I love my neighbor an entirely different way. We miss this, because our enemy has confused us on the pronouns. The Bible’s call that “we” love “one another” isn’t ultimately about man’s call to love man. The “we” isn’t human beings, but the redeemed.
Wolves in the church began this sleight of hand when they first spoke of the “universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man.” The evangelical church, as with so many from this particular pit of hell, eventually accepted this “wisdom.”
It operates under the assumption that God has a duty to treat all people exactly the same way, an assumption that the Bible explicitly denies: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy” (Rom. 9:15). There is no getting around the fact that God did not treat Esau as He treated Jacob, and this before either had been born. And He does not treat the seed of the serpent the same way He treats us, the seed of the woman.
Why not? What accounts for the difference? The answer is simple enough — our union with Christ. Pardon the confusing pronouns, but while we love Him because He first loved us, He first loved us because He first loved Him. We are in ourselves, just like the seed of the serpent, merely dust and rebellion. But in Christ we are altogether lovely. It is not for mere pity that He loves us, but for His Son.
But what of His love for the lost? If they are not in union with Christ, why would they be loved at all? How do we account for what the theologians call this “love of benevolence”? Why He brings the rains upon the fields of the unjust isn’t union with Christ, but the image of God. There is, in short, something lovely about the lost, the very remnants of the image of pure loveliness. What God loves in the reprobate isn’t the reprobate, isn’t the Son, but is Himself, something indeed worthy of His love.
And we who are in union with Christ not only bear that same image, but are called to polish it, to improve upon it, to labor with the Holy Spirit that we might more and more reflect His glory. Which in turn means that we too ought to love the lost, for the very same reason.
We love one another with a holy love, because we are together in union with Christ. But we love outside the circle of the kingdom because they yet maintain the fragments of the image of God. In their depravity, they do everything they can to smash that mirror to ever tinier pieces. Their degeneration is nothing more than leaving that image behind. At their death, they reach the opposite of glorification, utter horror. They become nothing but dust and rebellion, enveloped in eternal flame.
But not here and not now. Ironically, He shows them kindness due to His love for us. If He released the restraints, we would find ourselves living in a living hell. But by His grace toward us, He restrains them, and He kindly showers them with His beneficent love. In His grace toward us, He teaches us our pronouns. Like Him we too must love His sheep as His sheep, and love the goats for the image of the Shepherd.
