As the kingdom of Christ is established and rooted in any given place, the only way this can happen is by displacing what was there before. Sometimes that previous regime is old and decrepit, and is ready to relinquish its hold. These are tribes, nations and kingdoms ready for conversion, eager for something different. Other times the older way of doing things still has a lot of kick. They don’t want to go quietly. This is the source of long and savage persecutions. An example of the latter would be the Roman Empire under the reign of Domitian. An example of the former would be that same empire under the reign of Constantine. There will be resistance in both cases, but the situations are entirely different. Another factor can be found in the attitude of the Christians. If Christians have come to believe that their only role is to figure out how to “fit in,” then they will always try to negotiate and “settle” whenever it looks like trouble. Sometimes we think the regime is … [Read more...]
True Glue
Throughout Scripture, one of the central bonding agents in true community is a foundational commitment to truth-telling. Lies are corrosive, and the truth is a great adhesive. The ninth commandment says not to bear false witness against your neighbor (Ex. 20:16). The Colossians are told not to lie to one another, seeing that they have put off the old man with its evil practices (Col. 3:9). The Israelites are told not to be false with one another (Lev. 19:11). And in Scripture, whenever deception is honored it is honored as an act of war—lying to the enemies of God who have forfeited their right to the truth. The midwives to Pharaoh would be one example, and Rahab protecting the spies is another. In time of war, you are not trying to develop unity with the enemy. But when unity is the assigned goal, when it is desired as God requires us to desire it, a commitment to the truth at all times is essential. There are three aspects to this. First, remember at all times that the Truth is … [Read more...]
The Duty of Like-mindedness
Cultures and subcultures both can be tight or loose. At the extreme end of the tight scale we have small communities in lockstep, agreeing on virtually everything. At the extreme end of loose, we have cosmopolitan cultures with the only thing in common being the fact that everyone is in the same place at the same time, having very little in common. Tight cultures are not interested in proselytizing really, because converts just track things in. Loose cultures develop a radical live-and-let-live mentality, which devolves into an individualist autonomy. When a Christian church is functioning as it ought to function—declaring the whole counsel of God, worshiping together, sharing community, and so on—the end result is going to look a lot like a tight community. The trick is to develop the bonds of koinonia community, such that it rivals the Amish or Hasidic Jews, but while at the same time maintaining a radical openness to newcomers. The temptation, once you have the good thing … [Read more...]
Odd Gifts
Love makes a Christian community grow, but gifts give that growth focus and direction. When the Lord ascended into Heaven, He gave gifts to men, and He did this for the edification of the church. “Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men . . . And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4: 8, 11–13). The fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit must always be distinguished. At the same time, they must not ever be separated. God intends for them to function together. Now of course, if you had to choose between a church of godly people and a church full of gifted people, you should choose the … [Read more...]
Tend the Weeds
As I mentioned before, love is what makes a Christian community grow. Community is like a garden, and gardens contain many growing, beautiful things. But community is also the garden in which grumbles grow. Since the fall of Adam, there has never been a garden without weeds, and this is because our hearts are in such a condition that a garden without weeds would be terrible for us. If sinful men were given weedless gardens, this would simply prove that the garden had been entirely abandoned, and that they were the weeds. So when a Christian community is a growing and thriving place, grumbles will grow, depend upon it. Everything depends on how the grumbles are handled. In ancient Israel, the problem with grumbling ran much deeper, and it was sometimes met with severe judgments from God. But in the New Testament, as the new Israel was growing, complaints sprang up as to how some of the widows were being neglected in the distribution of food (Acts 6:1). They handled it properly, … [Read more...]
A Cabin by a Pristine Lake
Love is what makes a Christian community grow—people are attracted to it. They gravitate to the fellowship, to the teaching of the Word, to the worship of God, and to the community that all this necessarily engenders. But precisely because love makes a community grow, so also a community growing makes love harder. It is much easier to maintain tight communion in a church of 100 people than in a church of 800 people. And then if you go to two services, it is harder to do what used to be so easy to do. People are attracted to a good thing, which makes it harder to keep it a good thing. A cabin by a pristine lake is a good thing, and it would remain a good thing if there were a second cabin. The only trouble is, 150 people want to build the second cabin. As a church community grows, and loving one another gets more challenging, it is easy to assume the worst. Things aren’t what they used to be. But these challenges are not necessarily signs of love fading, but are rather signs that … [Read more...]
Loving the Truth in Person
Either you love God and His people, or you don’t love God and His people. There really is no third way. The two great commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor. Loving your neighbor includes those who come to the Table with you here every week; it means loving your fellow church member. Now when bitterness or resentment creep in, or sometimes just simple dislike, very few people tell themselves that they are now “not loving their neighbor.” What we tend to do instead is give ourselves a pass because we are still committed to the principle or idea of loving our neighbor, or we consider ourselves compassionate toward people generally. We think we are compassionate generally because we tear up in the right parts of the movie. But there is a difference between being sentimental and being tenderhearted. Sentimentalism is disobedient, and full of resentments, and tenderheartedness is obedient, and filled with compassion. Drifting away from a congregation therefore … [Read more...]
Death as a Way of Life
When a person drifts in the context of a sound and healthy church—a church in which very many people are not drifting, but are being nourished and fed—the reason that person is drifting is the direct result of not dealing with sin. And in the Scriptures, dealing with sin is not the same thing as managing or controlling it, or keeping it somewhat subdued and out of sight. No, the scriptural response to sin is always death—mortification. You can live in the middle of a crowd of people who are mortifying their sins, and this unfortunately has no impact on your sins. If ten people sitting around you confess their sins heartily, and you do not, then you get no benefit from what they have done. There is no benefit unless and until you imitate them. And if you do this for any length of time, then outside pressures will ensure that you start to drift. When you start to drift, you will then start making excuses to cover for your drift. So guarding yourself begins with understanding … [Read more...]
When Sin Signs a Lease
Drifting away from soundness in the faith is always the result of a peace treaty of some sort. The Bible teaches us that in this world we must always deal with sin outside us in the world and sin within us. In that familiar triad that we call the world, the flesh, and the devil, the first and the third are external to us. The flesh is closer to home. We are tempted to drift in response to suggestions from the world and the devil when we have made some sort of peace treaty, some kind of accommodation with the remnants of sin that we find within us. Our fundamental orientation toward impulses, temptations, urges, or suggestions from within must be adversarial. If it is not adversarial, if you have let a particular sin sign a three-year lease in your heart, then that accommodation within will betray you, and you will find yourself drifting in response to external pressure from the world or the devil. No true Christian has to “deal with” reigning sin within him. To be a slave to sin, … [Read more...]
Faith as Screen
When Christians drift away from a sound understanding of the faith, it usually begins first with them drifting away from what counts as understanding anything at all. If you believed the earth was flat, that wouldn’t make it flat. More surprisingly perhaps, if you believe it to be round, that doesn’t make it round. If you believe that two and two make five, that doesn’t make it five. And if you believe the correct sum to be four, it is not four because you believed it. True belief is responsive to truth as it is without the belief. Belief does not create the object of its belief. Now in ordinary affairs, like math, normal people understand this. But for a very long time, in religious matters, people have believed that what they believe makes it so. This is the central religious frame of mind, the frame of mind that allows every man his own gods, his own truth, his own views. The Christian gospel always drives out this way of thinking, and the receding influence of the gospel in … [Read more...]
Coolshame
Archimedes famously once said “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.” If the devil were to go in for such practical mechanics, where would he stand, what lever would he use, if he wanted to move a Christian? We are talking what it means to not pay close attention to what we have learned, and what it therefore means to moved slowly away from Christ. With many believers today that place to stand is the world and its ways, and the lever is the bar of coolshaming. The world offers us sweets, sure enough—the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes—but it also establishes and maintains a value system. That value system is called the pride of life. “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (1 John 2:15–16). This is the … [Read more...]
Lest We Drift
The church is a wooded island, and it produces three kinds of wood. The first would be the living grove, what makes the island an inviting place, lush and green. The second would be the dead wood, that which is not growing itself but remains in place, hindering the growth of the rest. And the third category would be that of drift wood, wood that is from the island but is not long for the island. So I want to give a series of exhortations about the dangers of drifting. “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it” (Heb. 2:1, ESV). Just as growth in Christ is slow growth, so also the reverse sanctification of drifting is a slow process. No one lives a vibrant Christian life for years only to wake up one morning deciding to throw it all away in one go. No, this process happens by drifting, by means of a long series of miniscule choices that seem, each one in isolation, to be no big deal. But collectively these choices add up to a … [Read more...]
Slow Drift
As we have noted before, there is a distinct sociological difference between a sect and a church. Both a sect and a church can be orthodox and Christian, but they necessarily have different pastoral challenges. A sect has tighter discipline, and disciplines over more things, and is in the very nature of the case smaller and more defined. A church tends to take professing Christians as they come, and to work with them from there. It is important to note that I am not using either term in a pejorative way, and am assuming that both a church and a sect can be faithful Christian congregations. But neither one will be faithful unless they take note of their own particular temptations. Sects struggle with rigorism while the temptation faced by churches is that of a broadminded laxity. In case you were wondering, Christ Church has elements of both, but is more of a church than it is a sect. Because of how the Lord has blessed many of our ministries here on the Palouse, our reputation in … [Read more...]
A Mind To
We all know that character, and moods, and particular virtues and vices are characteristic of individuals. But they are also characteristic of groups of people—generations, tribes, nations, churches. You know what it is like to travel around our nation, finding that one part of the country is particularly friendly, while another is particularly industrious, and so on. People collectively have a personality. Different generations can have different personalities. There is therefore a possibility of change from one generation to the next. There can be decline or there can be improvement—if there is change. One generation might just duplicate what went before. Our desire should be to stay the course, remaining faithful where our fathers were faithful (2 Tim. 2:2). When our fathers were not faithful, it is our responsibility to turn away from their example, refusing to follow them in it (Ps. 78:8). In other cases, we are to build on the preparatory work done by those who went before. … [Read more...]
The Rock of Catastrophe
When Peter describes the church, he describes us as living stones, built up into a spiritual house (1 Pet. 2:5). This house is a holy priesthood, set apart to offer up spiritual sacrifices, sacrifices that are made acceptable to God through the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ. He goes on to say that there is a basic distinction between people, between those who are living stones, built up upon the cornerstone of Jesus Christ, and those who treat the cornerstone as a stone of stumbling and rock of offense. So Jesus is either the living rock upon all other living rock derives its life, or Jesus is the rock of catastrophe for those who were appointed to their epic disobedience. When they stumble, the text says that they stumble at the Word. This Word is what we build upon, and this Word is what they stumble over. It is the same Word, with two different responses entirely. Now everything we do as a Christian church should be done in such a way as to testify to this glorious truth, … [Read more...]
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