If you’ve preached and pastored for any length of time you’ll know the truth of MacArthur’s words when he said, “Soft preaching makes for hard people” (“The Sinner Neither Able Nor Willing”). Even if you haven’t preached, think about how that has been true for your own soul. Gospel preaching is not soft preaching. The gospel is divisive, which is another reason why we have to be cautious not to be culturally or personally insulting when preaching the gospel. The gospel will be offensive. It splits humanity into two groups - those who believe and receive eternal life and those who don’t. Jesus himself knew that his teaching did exactly that. Some people received the kingdom of heaven and some didn’t when Jesus “told them many things in parables” (Matt. 13:3, 10-17, 34-35).
It’s been nearly a week since T4G and I’m still thinking about alot of what was said. Let me give you the one from R.C. Sproul. I’ll be listing more notable quotes in the days to come.
When Jesus was forsaken by God, when He bore the curse, it was as if Jesus heard the words “God damn you.” This is what it means to be under the anathema of the curse. It is far worse, far more powerful, far more profound than we can know. We cannot understand this, but we know it is true. Everyone who has not been covered by the righteousness of Christ draws every breath under the curse of God. If you believe that, you will stop adding to the gospel and start preaching it with clarity and with boldness because it is the only hope we have. And it is hope enough. (”The Curse Motif of the Atonement”)
Then he closed in prayer. “And it is hope enough.” To which Dr. Mohler responded, “That made me what to tell someone about Jesus.” Think about that this week.
What is your first thought when asked how you’re spiritually doing? Where does your mind race to find it’s first line of reasoning? Maybe you recall your quite times - the fervor, energy, enlightenment, closeness, and renewal you felt. Maybe you take inventory of your life’s circumstances. I would like to suggest that your spiritual well-being, i.e., your sanctification, should be assessed primarily by your Christian obedience. When asked, “How are you doing?” Your first thought should be “Where am I or am I not being obedient?”
Now lest you think I’m going to quickly digress to a form of obedience that amounts to legalism, void of emotion, and/or vapid, let me recommend Eric Costa’s seven aspects of “Christian Obedience” to frame my understanding. (This is a single-page document that I highly recommend keeping folded up in your Bible for future reference.)
This is late coming because I forgot how to log on. It has been that long since I blogged (and the worlds wonders why I have returned). Thanks to BAT this dinosaur of a blog keeps rollin for some reason, so why not finish my lesson on it. Since Bruce so graciously cut me off Sunday morning I wanted to leave the XM class with some concluding thoughts from our study.
First, a brief summary. One must judge any new Christian movement based upon what they do with Scripture. It is helpful if they tell you what they think about Scripture, but how they actually use it tells the real story. Conservatives (good, healthy evangelicals) allow Scripture to be the true, absolute, inerrant, UNIVERSAL source for truth. The sliding scale of healthy theology moves from there in terms of how you modify what Scripture says in relation to what science, culture, tradition, or whatever says. Key question: What is denied or modified by the pastor/theologian using some other source? Ex: Evolution is a fun test case. What you do with gluttony or homosexuality may be more telling because effects are evident.
I criticized PM/emergent views of revelation and Scripture for thinking they have given a final correction to modern theology, when really I think all they have done is worked out the anthropocentric starting point to its most logical conclusion, i.e. they are hyper-moderns, not beyond-moderns. Second, they have overemphasized their critiques of Modernism so that all universal truth claims are abandoned. Since they buy into the beginning point without God (faith seeking understanding), they lose all ability to make claims on reality. This effects the heart of the gospel and everything the church is and should be doing. Third, they tend to separate the works of the Triune God. The early church fathers recognized the deity of the Spirit and the Son because they were working with the Father and about his and one another’s business. The person work INSEPARABLY. The Spirit is blowing with the Word, not through other religions, but at and against them. Fourth, the theologians I chose are outside of Reformed/Protestant/post-1517 theology because they deny sola Scriptura. It is one source among many. Fifth, God is muted and impotent in their theology because he is not able to speak a clear, universal Word of truth in the church. (Not one of these critiques is original to me I simply repeated what I learned from others). That was a summary of the class, now what I need to add…
1. Be aware of how you use Scripture. It is God’s revelation, and therefore, a source of truth to be used to know more about him, how we relate to him, and how we should live. Know that your heart is deceitful above all things and cannot be trusted. You will try to argue away from hard truths. Ex: While at LU, Falwell had a conference with many homosexuals confessing to be Christians to promote honest communication. The leader of the group was quite honest and said apart from a few scriptures they were actually doing okay. He then pointed out that many Christians appear to do the same thing with the gluttony passages of Scripture. He has a point, not a means of defending his lifestyle. We all have a bias we bring to the text–we all must strive to have the text judge us with our bias being made clear. One of the hardest things to do is allowing Scripture to interpret your experience and not vice versa. Learning to do this is an ongoing process and in order for it to happen you have to trust that the Spirit will bring clarity and conviction as you read Scripture. You also have fellow believers, especially a sermon, to bring the Word in a penetrating manner that confronts you. You must also be able to correct, transform, criticize your culture using Scripture and not allow this to be a two-way road of influence. Scripture is the corrective, not culture. Cultures change so Scripture will need to be reapplied, but the truth of God’s revelation remains the same.
2. Be aware of the many influences you have in your life. You have the Bible (I hope) and then tradition, church, culture, etc. You must be aware that this is a “round-robin” of influences competing with or complementing one another. You are a product of many influences and the goal is to ultimately be a product of the gospel alone. This means throwing off as much of the other stuff as possible and strive for ultimate Christ-likeness. How does your fellowship with others effect you, how are you effecting others? Christ stands at the center of the church unifying the community and Scripture must be the source for our knowledge of Him and the means by which we unify. This is how Christ and Scripture remain the correctives for all other influences.
3. Cling to the one, clear, certain source of goodness and truth–God. His entire story (revelation) points to the fact that he has called out a people and desires to be known by them. He has spoken authoritatively to them so they can know him personally and truly, even if not fully. He is able and willing, and has spoken his Word in human form (Christ) and in human words (Scripture). If God wants to be known, he is more able than you and I to make himself known. As one healthy PM theologian says, “God too must be a communicating member of the community.”
We are going to start a new Christianity Matters course in a couple of weeks on contemporary issues in theology. (Check back in a few days for more information.) One class will be on “The New Perspective.” There is alot of talk about it, but distilling it to a few finer points isn’t too easy. If you want a helpful start then here is a good essay by Simon Gathercole. If you want the essay in an interview format then go here. The book to read is Justification and the New Perspective on Paul by Guy P. Waters.
(Bruce, I haven’t forgot about your question on Severe Mercy.)
It would not be right to let this sentence languish in the middle of Keith’s post without being plucked out and put on display. It’s one of those questions that cuts to one’s heart and deserves to be meditated on at length:
“Are you more concerned about how committed people are to you, than about how committed you are to them?”
There’s a sermon for you to preach to yourself. I recognize that being and feeling loved are important needs for any human being. That’s how we’re made. But it’s worth noticing that the Bible’s command is to “love one another,” not “to be loved by one another.” The language is active, not passive.
That ought to set our priorities, and our expectations. It seems to me that the default position of too many Christians, when it comes to love, is passive rather than active. The switch is set on “intake” rather than “output,” meaning that people spend alot more time analyzing whether they feel cared for, than they do strategizing about how they can care for others. You can see the problem with that: If every switch in the church is set on “intake,” most everyone starts to feel like they’re “not being cared for.” But flip all those switches to “output”—change the priority from “being cared for” to “caring”—and see what happens: Love abounds.
I hope and pray that kind of active love is, or perhaps increasingly becomes, one of Third Avenue’s distinctives.
