Gospel-Centered Resources from Midwestern Seminary
On this episode of the FTC Podcast, Jared Wilson and Ronni Kurtz offer some pastoral counsel for the Christian’s daily time in God’s word, reflections on their own Bible study practices past and present, and encouragement for those struggling with daily devotions.
The days were dark. Not because the sun wasn’t shining. In all honesty, those days were beautiful summer days in the Oklahoma heat. But I didn’t experience them. For me, the days were black.
It was the summer months of 2016. I had been the Lead Pastor of my church for just under six months. I had previously served as Youth Pastor before eventually becoming Lead Pastor. I loved this church and they loved me. But things were getting unexplainably bad. I remember the week that the “plane crashed.”
I had made it through the first Sunday in June with great difficulty. I put on a good show of confidence and well-being that Lord’s Day. A friend later remarked that I even preached a really helpful sermon. However, as I went to bed that night, I had a mixture of relief and fear. I was relieved that I had made it through another Lord’s Day, but I had a fear that I had to get up and go back to do it all over again.
That following Monday morning I tried to make things as normal as possible. But just an hour into work I was crushed. In a fit of weeping, anxiety, and confusion, I hit my office floor in desperate prayer. I ended up leaving the office that morning hoping that time would heal what I was feeling. Little did I know, I wouldn’t come back to my office for months.
For the next several months I would rarely leave my couch or bed. At first, I just thought I would take a few sick days and get over this melancholy feeling. By Wednesday, I saw no hope. That afternoon, unknown to my wife, I called some of the leaders of our church to meet me. I told them I wanted to resign.
By God’s providence, one of those men had been caring for his wife who had suffered from depression for decades. He immediately recognized what was going on. They refused my resignation and the church immediately gave me as much time as I needed to recover – with no lapse in pay or care. Talk about love!
That next week, some church members pulled some strings and got me to see a great Christian doctor. He diagnosed me with severe depression and anxiety. My wife would later describe that summer as watching me waste away.
Meeting Luther
At the time, I had only heard of Martin Luther. I had no knowledge of any of his works nor of the life he lived. I knew he was a major figure in the Protestant Reformation, but beyond that I knew little. Beyond my recollection, I somehow found myself holding a copy of a Luther biography written by Roland Bainton. Unbeknownst to me, this was the definitive work on the reformer.
As I meandered through the first few chapters I became enamored with this German friar. I read of his struggles, his fear, his anxiety, his failures, and more. His question, “How can a holy God forgive sin?” was my exact question. His feelings were my exact feelings. All of a sudden, I found my experience being described and articulated in the life of a man who had been dead for 500 years. In short, I identified with Luther.
Luther’s Life
Luther lived in a dark period during human history. Modern luxuries and human rights were no where on the radar. In the German country of Luther’s upbringing, most were relegated to hard and laborious work to earn a living. Additionally, children weren’t regarded as having much value and so the average childhood gained less than desirable memories.
But for all the external hardships, it was the internal turmoil that plagued Martin Luther. He was a man of extreme emotions. He knew the joys of life. He also knew the pains of depression. Bright in his mind, his soul often felt the pressures of hopeless imperfection. He can easily be defined as a man of inward torture.
Throughout his early adult years, he worked meticulously to reconcile the teaching of the Catholic Church and his inward turmoil. He sought the indulgences, did penance, sought good works, and appealed to the relics of past saints. But in no way could he find relief from his spiritual anguish.
As I read of Luther’s unrelenting struggle a connection developed. Here too was a man who was immersed in church life yet completely hopeless without the slightest alleviation of his despondence. In an out-of-body experience, it seemed like I was reading of my own feelings.
Luther’s Solutions
As I continued to read of him, I began to mimic his methods to try and find the same alleviation for my fears. Like Luther, I read the Psalms, I read Romans, and I wrestled with his deep internal questions. Little did I know, God was driving me to the same discovery of faith that He gave to Luther almost 500 years earlier.
As Martin began to have a break through, so did I. The same understanding of justification that led him to question his religious upbringing, nail his thesis to the church door, and lead the Protestant Reformation, also became my understanding of justification. In other words, Luther had led me to meditate upon and understand what it meant to be right with God through faith in Christ. He taught me that true faith in Christ was a balm for the broken soul. Consequently, as his struggles began to dissipate, so did mine.
My Relief
I made it through that summer by reading the Psalms and dwelling on faith. It wasn’t my perfection or my knowledge that would please God. It wasn’t my works or my contributions that would earn God’s approval. It was only my faith. Eventually, just like Luther, this turned in to my inward liberty.
Today, my church knows the depth of my depression and the importance of Luther for my life. He was a man that I could never agree with on every point. But he was a man that I could identify with. We struggled through the same things. And his previous experience and wisdom led me through the darkness of the night to the light of Christ and the warmth of God’s love. Seeing God liberate a fellow human being brought me hope that God could do the same for me. His example helped me to see Jesus as my only solution.
I missed those warm summer days in 2016. But by God’s grace, through the help of an old German reformer, I’ve enjoyed the warmth of Christ’s love ever since.
Many Christians today are familiar with the Apostles’ Creed. But from the perspective of the whole church, the Nicene Creed is even more significant. It originated earlier than the final version of the Apostles’ Creed; and unlike that one, the Nicene Creed is used by both western and eastern Christians. Where did the Nicene Creed come from—and what makes it so important that millions of Christians still recite it every Sunday?
To trace the history of the Nicene Creed, which centers on the relationship of Christ’s deity to God the Father’s, we must go back to the period of the ancient church. Yet in truth, that isn’t far enough back. The roots of the doctrine of the Trinity—that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct from one another, yet are one God—can be found in Israel’s understanding of how Yahweh interacts with his creation.
The early Israelites viewed God as enthroned in a heavenly temple. The heavens were located just above the solid blue dome called the “firmament” which we appear to see when we observe the sky. We know the Israelites understood God to be sitting in a temple resting upon the firmament because twice in Scripture, his people looked up and saw him there. In Exodus 24:9–10, we read that Moses and his assistants went up a mountain and “saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.” Similarly, Ezekiel 1:26 records that “above the firmament over [the living creatures’] heads was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like a sapphire stone; on the likeness of the throne was a likeness with the appearance of a man” (i.e., Yahweh, v. 28). For the Israelites, God was up there in the sapphire-blue heaven, resting his feet on the firmament. He certainly didn’t come down like other gods to wreak havoc, impregnate women, or do any of the other nonsense that the pagans believed.
So, then, how did God interact with his world? Scripture gives us numerous words and images to describe how God’s transcendent presence becomes immanent in our world (that is, becomes experiential or even tangible for us). These mediating influences include the Messenger of the Lord, the divine hand or finger, natural or weather-based phenomena, the breath (or wind, or Spirit) of God, fire, and perhaps most important of all—his word. Among other things, God’s word (Hebrew, dabar) is creative (Ps. 33:6; Gen. 1:3), impactful (Ps. 107:20, 147:18; Is. 9:8), and revelatory (Ps. 119:105; or any of the prophets). The Old Testament reveals that God’s word makes things happen in his creation.
Before we can turn to Christian reflection about these things, we need to make a stop with the ancient Greeks between the two testaments. The Greek philosophers talked a lot about the logos, which was their word for “word.” The logos can be divided into two kinds: the “indwelling word” and the “uttered word.” Imagine a family sitting around on a Friday night at dinnertime. The dad gets an idea in his head: pizza night! He’ll order a big pepperoni pizza and the family will be delighted. But it’s only when Dad shouts the word “Pizza!” to his family that cheers go up and stomachs start growling. The indwelling word in his mind can only make an impact on the world by being uttered. This is how the ancient Greeks thought about words.
Scholars debate whether the apostle John was thinking of the Hebrew concept of dabar or the Greek concept of the logos when he wrote, “In the beginning was the Word” (1:1). Maybe it was a combination of both. In any case, John said that the Word—the preincarnate Christ—was there “in the beginning with God” (v. 2). But then he went on to say something else: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (1:14). Now that God’s indwelling Word has been uttered into the world, he is able to make a physical impact with his tangible, human body. And of course, the Word’s greatest impact was to submit that body to crucifixion, then attain bodily resurrection for the salvation of the cosmos.
During the centuries after the apostle John penned his gospel, the early church fathers—especially those known at the Apologists—used these ideas to explain their faith to the pagans. The Johannine concept of the Word, understood in light of Greek philosophy, came in handy to show how the Christians, on the one hand, had no pantheon of gods but were monotheists like the Jews; yet on the other hand, worshiped Jesus as Lord alongside his heavenly Father. How can God be both singular and manifold?
The early Apologists compared God’s oneness to the unity between the speaker and the spoken word—just like, in the illustration above, there is unity between the dad who cries “pizza!” and the word that inseparably belongs to him. Yet the uttered word is impactful in ways that the word within his mind is not. This makes the spoken word distinct from the speaker. Do you see how unity and distinctness are kept in balance here? The Johannine way of thinking about Jesus—known as the Logos Theology—made sense to many ancient Christians. And they even had Old Testament precedent for it in the concept of God’s dabar.
Equal or Inferior?
Over time, some ancient church theologians began to consider whether the Logos was inferior to the God who speaks. Inferior in what way? For one thing, the Logos might not be eternal, just as the word “pizza” didn’t always exist in the dad’s mind. He thought of the word, then he uttered it—but he himself preexisted it. So the dad was already there at the moment he thought of pizza. His mental word started then. Words always have a shorter life than the thinkers who bring them forth.
The Logos also might be inferior to God because he is sent out. Words are like our messengers that we dispatch to do our will. We shoot them out when we want something done. “Scalpel!” cries the surgeon, and she receives it. “Pass the salt,” we say, and the shaker comes our way. The sending mind has more authority than the words sent out to do the mind’s bidding. So maybe Jesus the Logos is inferior because he’s the sent one? Didn’t he say that he came to obey his Father and do his will? In fact, Jesus even said, “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).
This theological subordinationism is reinforced by the fact that Jesus is God’s Son. In the ancient world, sons were dispatched by mighty men or patriarchs to bring the father’s message (as in the Parable of the Landowner, Matthew 21:33–46). So for these reasons, some ancient church theologians began to think of Jesus/the Son/the Logos as inferior to God—both in time (Jesus is not eternal) and in status (Jesus is not equal in divinity).
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared at the blog for Credo Magazine. You can read the remainder of Dr. Litfin’s article in the latest issue of Credo Magazine.
Why The Enemy Wants You To Think You’re Alone
We all struggle with feeling lonely and this feeling can cause us to despair in many ways. In this helpful post, we can consider the importance of community in warring against the devil’s schemes.
David Qauod writes about the need for Christians to pray for those in authority over them. He provides Biblical and succinct explanation for why this is such an important practice.
The God of Your Troubled Heart
“In your moments of greatest fear and doubt, you can trust that his mercy comes running to you.”
Relationships between believers should be marked by forgiveness and love. In this post, we can consider the importance of not being easily offended by those around us.
A message of grace may attract people, but a culture of grace will keep them. What our churches need, not in exchange for a gospel message but as a witness to it, is a gospeled climate. But how do you get that? How do you develop in your church community a safe space to confess, be broken, be “not okay”? What are some ways to cultivate a climate of grace in your church?
1. Ordain totally qualified elders
We often do well to make sure our elders are solid in doctrine and confident in leadership, but too often we let the just-as-important qualifications slide. Or we skimp over them in assessment. Many churches fail their communities when they ordain the smartest guys in the building because those smart guys lack in qualities like gentleness, long-temperedness, or in shepherding their families well. Consider candidates who live in open, transparent ways, who distinguish themselves in hospitality and generosity, who have reputations for patience and meekness as much as intelligence and confidence. Examine their families. Do they lead their families graciously? Do their kids seem happy? Are their wives flourishing? There is a reason Paul puts the quality of husbanding and fathering at the top of his list.
This is one reason I am particularly fond of older men as elders, particularly men with adult or young adult children. A man may have prodigal children in spite of him, of course, not because of him, and so I want to take that into consideration, but if a man’s children are no longer walking with the Lord I want to know if it was because they grew up in an undisciplined, ungodly home or an overly disciplined, rigid, authoritarian, graceless home. I am not opposed to younger elders with younger children, of course, or even single elders with none, but older men give you both the benefit of life experience and wisdom, and if they’ve been walking with Jesus for a while, they are often softer in heart than younger men. In short, what you want is not just elders who preach and teach well, but elders who love well, who shepherd well. You don’t want simply ruling elders, but gracious shepherds. Because whatever your elders are, your church will eventually be.
2. Go hard after doctrinal arrogance.
Most everyone who thinks they are right about a particular theological issue believes they came to it through growing in the Lord, not just reading information. Both the Calvinists and the Arminians in your church think that. Both the premillennialists and the postmillennialists think that. Most every one of us believes that we came to our particular view in the midst of our spiritual growth. (And we’re all right about that, sort of.) Thinking this way is only natural. But the danger in this thinking is equating our particular view with progressive sanctification. Doing so means believing that because I believe ______, I am more sanctified than you. The reason you don’t yet subscribe to my view on this matter is because you are more immature in your faith. Suddenly we are creating first and second class Christians in the community. And that’s gross.
Gently but firmly rebuke doctrinal arrogance and root it out wherever you find it. Factions develop over devotion to secondary matters quite easily if left unchecked. Be careful in preaching against sin that you don’t have “favorite” sins, pet sins to rail against. People guilty of such sins may be convicted and repent, but more often they do not hear the message of grace when their sin is repeatedly singled out but that your church is a safe place to have any sin but theirs. And there is an inverse danger in having favorite sins to preach against: it implicitly tells people who don’t struggle with that sin that they must be holy because they don’t struggle with it. By singling out certain sins for special treatment, you are helping everybody else embrace the arrogance of the Pharisee in the temple who was proud he wasn’t the tax collector.
Remind your people often that the demons have impeccable theology, that demons can be Calvinists and Arminians, millenniarians and amillenniarians.
3. Preach a whole gospel aimed at hearts, as well as minds
Preaching that takes the form more of lectures is great for creating information-glutted minds. Sometimes. But while every sermon should convey information—it should definitely teach—the purpose of a sermon is not primarily mind-informing but heart-transforming. Aim at the heart in two primary ways: 1) proclaim good news, not simply good advice, and 2) exult in your preaching. In other words, don’t just preach the text, as much as you are able, feel it. More often than not, churches don’t become passionate about what their pastors tell them to be passionate about but about what their pastors are evidently passionate about themselves. So if it’s clear from your preaching that what really fires you up is the imperatives of the Scriptures, and not the gospel indicatives, guess what? No matter how many times you tell your church to center on the gospel, they’re going to see that your zeal is reserved for the law.
And as you preach the gospel, preach to both prodigals and older brothers. Explain how the gospel is opposed to self-righteous religiosity. Entreat both “brothers” to embrace Christ, the legalist as well as the hedonist. Don’t give the impression that the gospel is just for those obvious sinners, the “lost” people, but for all people, including those in the pews every Sunday.
4. Establish limping leaders
From elders on down, don’t establish any leader who has no record of or reputation for humility. You will want to know if the leader has ever been broken, ever had his legs knocked out from under him. Don’t establish leaders who don’t walk with limps, because they often have no empathy for the broken, the hurting, the abused, or the penitent. Don’t empower any leader who has not confronted and wrestled with his own sin, who doesn’t demonstrate an ongoing humility about his sin and a grief over it. Leaders who do not personally know the scandal of grace set a climate in a church of gracelessness.
5. Promote hospitality, service, and generosity
What values, programs, initiatives do I most want to promote? The ones that are most conducive to closeness with each other and outwardness with the community. Church people don’t learn to be gracious with unchurched people if they are never in proximity with them. And often being in the same work environment doesn’t cut it. We want to facilitate and promote opportunities for growth that involve the opening of homes, the active service of people inside the church and out, and the giving away of money and stuff. Lots of things fit these bills, so you can get creative. But when church people spend a lot of time with each other in these sorts of settings—as opposed to simply classroom type settings or the worship service—they get to know each other in ways that build familiarity, empathy, intimacy, etc. And the same is true of spending time in these settings with unchurched folks, as well. A closed-off, insular, cloistered church is not conducive to a gracious climate. It runs out of air too quickly; people can’t breathe.
6. Take it personally
Most importantly, you I must be what you I want to see. So often as you are I am checking your my church’s pulse—which Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together wisely counsels against doing—we are I am thinking of all the people who need to get their act together, who need a big dose of humility. We may be right about them. But applying to others first is not the humble impulse of grace taken seriously. I need to keep a close watch on my life and doctrine. I need to outdo others in showing honor. I need to practice confession and repentance. I need to humble myself. As I am growing intellectually, I need to hold the fruit of the Spirit up to my heart and be fearless and honest about asking, “How am I doing in these areas?”
For each of us, a gracious climate begins with us.
Remember the old school-yard debate? “My dad could beat up your dad.” In a boy’s eyes, no one is stronger or mightier than their dad. It should be this way. Dads are strong and mighty. But though our earthly fathers wither and fade, God never can and never will. In fact, as time goes on, God grows mightier. The prophet Isaiah said of the coming Messiah, “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end.” In other words, the reign of Jesus, the Son of God, will, under the fatherhood of God, only increase forever. Time will not weaken him. As more people enter the world, as more governments create their kingdoms, as more tribes form their cultures, the ruler-ship of God only grows ever wider. In other words, God’s fatherhood capacity has no limit. The number of children he can take in has no end. He is boundless in fatherhood. He is almighty.
But we tend to think at some point, God will overlook us. Something will come into our lives—maybe some great sin—and he will be done with us. God knows that fear of separation remains in our hearts. What is his response? In Romans 8:31-39, we hear these comforting words from our Almighty Father.
What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
If God turned the cross from an instrument of torture and death to an instrument of redemption and new life, can he not deal with your problems? You have no weak father. You have One sovereign over all, ruling and reigning on behalf of his children, and he’s bringing you to glory. He is, as the prophet Zephaniah says, “a mighty one who will save.” But not only that, “He will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17). The Father Almighty loves his children with all his almighty heart.
Editor’s Note: This originally published at Things Of The Sort
In her lifetime-achievement-award acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey said, “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.”
Your truth. Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of “your truth” destroys families when a dad suddenly decides “his truth” is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It’s a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person’s truth will go to battle with another person’s truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor.
Our post-truth age pitches the individual self as the primary source of truth: “follow your heart,” “live your truth,” and so forth. Authenticity and expressive individualism are ultimate values. Authorities of every kind outside the self are now being questioned, their value seen only insofar as they serve and validate us. Institutions now exist to merely affirm us, not to form us.
And yet we follow our heart—which is “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick” (Jer. 17:9)—at our peril, becoming subject to the whims and contradictions of our fickle emotions. It sounds freeing to just “live your truth,” without the restrictive boundaries of moral police and stodgy institutions. But in reality it’s a burden.
Depressing, Lonely Path
“Your truth” also puts an incredible, self-justifying burden on the individual. If we are all self-made projects whose destinies are wholly ours to discover and implement, life becomes a rat race of performative individuality. “Live your truth” autonomy is thus as exhausting as it is incoherent. As French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg points out in The Weariness of the Self, the self-creating person turns out to be fragile and “weary of her sovereignty.” Depression is the inevitable result and “the inexorable counterpart of the human being who is her/his own sovereign.”
“Your truth” autonomy invariably leads to loneliness. It erroneously suggests we can live unencumbered and uninfluenced by the various structures that surround us (families, churches, cultures, biology, etc.). But it becomes impossible to form community when everyone is their own island, with no necessary reliance upon larger truths or embeddedness within a bigger story.
‘Your truth’ autonomy invariably leads to loneliness . . . It becomes impossible to form community when everyone is their own island.
These ideas were unfathomable in former eras, when to “go it alone” in life was seriously dangerous. In agrarian cultures the power of the communal is essential. Everyone plays a vital, interdependent role on the farm. You need each other to survive. Each person’s identity is naturally understood in terms of how it relates to the whole. The idea of total autonomy is not only foolish and foreign; it’s deadly.
Formed By Others
In his excellent book, The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew B. Crawford challenges the idea that everything outside one’s head is a potential threat to the self. His thesis is that the environments we exist within constitute rather than compromise the self. Humans are not just brains in vats. We are situated in real worlds we didn’t make up, and we know ourselves not through abstract projections or self conceptions, but in our “situatedness”: “We live in a world that has already been named by our predecessors, and was saturated with meaning before we arrived.”
From cradle to grave, we are formed by others. Contrary to what a “look within” world would suggest, the world outside our heads defines our existence in ways we are foolish to ignore. Rather than seeing this as oppressive, or simply pretending (foolishly) this isn’t the case, we should accept this situation as a gift: truth comes, in large part, from outside ourselves.
We can choose the sources of where we look for truth. We can choose how we synthesize truth and apply it as wisdom in everyday circumstances. But we don’t get to choose whether or not something is true. We don’t invent truth. We don’t determine it. We search it out and accept it with gratitude, even when it’s at odds with our feelings or preferences.
Thanks be to God.
Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition blog.
“You never really know when God accepts you. You just keep working until you die.” This was my pastor’s response to a question that I asked in a Bible study. The question was, “How do I know when God accepts me?” I was coming off concurrent nights where I lost sleep over a recurring fear – that I would die, and God would reject me, leaving me to suffer in Hell for eternity. Emotionally frayed and physically tired, I went to the Bible study looking for comfort.
What I got was, “You just keep working until you die.”
My pastor went on to give an analogy of a dirty rag, one used to clean a greasy kitchen. He went on to explain, “We’re all dirty rags. We try hard to be clean, but we know that we will never be clean. However, when you die, even though you will be dirty, God will accept you.”
The clarity with which I can recall his response directly correlates to how this interaction shaped me for the coming years. If I was never going to be clean, I had to keep working. In my legalistic church, this meant volunteering at the church for over 20+ hours a week, making sure that you avoided watching R-rated movies, not drinking, making sure your hair was in an acceptable style, and scrubbing your vocabulary free of all vulgar words.
After toiling under this burden for years, I finally heard and believed the Gospel. God saw fit to pluck a poor sinner who lost sleep while constantly questioning his salvation, and allowed that feeble man access by faith into His grace. I fought hard to shed the persistently clinging shackles of legalism. I read books about soteriology. I became a Calvinist. I stood in awe at the Gospel. All of this made me…prideful and arrogant.
You would think that it would have the opposite effect. In fact, the Apostle Paul thought it would have the opposite effect. “What becomes of our boasting? It is excluded.” (Romans 3:27) However, knowing the Gospel did not make me humble. In fact, knowing the Gospel made me want to prove everyone at my church wrong.
Every theological conversation became an attempt to prove the other person wrong. I memorized Bible verses – not to feed my soul, but to make sure my weapons were sharp should theological conflict arise. I am a lover of confrontation and can direct most conversations toward that end. Once they came, I would unleash my arsenal of arguments and verses. I made quick work of some. Others would put up a fight. It is my shame to say that verbal debate, not Gospel zeal, motivated me.
I failed to see the person as another soul caught in the snare of legalism. I failed to wonder about their sleepless nights. Did they face the same persistent fear in the early hours of the night? Did they lie awake, wondering if their day’s work was ever enough? Did they have a strong and perfect plea before the Throne? None of those things mattered to me at the time, theological debate was invigorating. Their inability to answer my questions and to counter my position was all the satisfaction I needed.
I heard a story about an elderly woman who spent many years at that church. She was a dedicated servant, and known as a woman of godly character. As her health declined, she was admitted to the local hospital. I remember hearing a story about her final days before her death. Those who visited and knew her said that she went to the grave, with a dreadful fear of Hell. Such is the plight of those who do not rest in the Gospel, and I saw them as verbal sparring partners?
“What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7) It is strange that the people who have the strongest intellectual grasp of a biblical soteriology boast as if they climbed to those dizzying heights without aid. Legalism is a scourge. It is to be repudiated. With more resources available online, there are more Christians young and old emerging from behind Sisyphus’s rock, and seeing that their efforts to reach the mountaintop through their works is a fool’s errand. There are more Christians who are recovering legalists. If that is you, allow me to ask two questions: Do you still bear the marks that legalism left? If so, do you have compassion and love for those who are still under that lash?
This is not an argument to endure legalism or a legalistic church. If God has opened your eyes, leaving is a legitimate and often only option. However, even as you think of those who are still there, who are still trying to self-justify, do you weep that there are those who will never know the Gospel? Only eternity will reveal God’s judgment or mercy on them. As you grow in delighting in the Gospel, as you consider how you slip into old legalistic tendencies, consider that the freedom you experience is not known by those who are still serving that false god. There are those who will go to the grave fearing Hell, while you know that you have a Great High Priest who ever lives and intercedes for you. When you draw near to the throne room, there are those who you know that shrink back since they know that they cannot stand on their inadequate works.
Christian, if you have been freed from legalism, is your posture one of a prince or pauper? The next time you think of that fundamental church you used to attend, may your heart break for the darkness and bondage legalism brings, and may you pray that the Lord sets them free.
When wars have ceased, international leaders have become dust and the poverty of their souls is revealed; when enterprises crumble and the last dream has evaporated; when death has claimed the final person, and those alive are changed for their eternal future; when everything earthly and mundane is over, and each person resides in heaven or hell—what will be important? And what among all that is important will be the most important?
This is a question worth thinking about, because finding out what is important in the end will, or at least should, tell you what is important now. That which is important for eternity, that is, for billions of years and more, is surely the most important thing to God for this brief wisp of time called human history. And it should be even more important for you, since you live here for only a small fraction of that wisp.
What if, in your hurry and your worry about so many little things, you actually missed the most important thing?
That which is most important for all time, as is well known only to some, is Jesus Christ. I mean, not just Jesus Christ as a being, but Jesus Christ in the light of what he has done—his life, death, and resurrection. It is a huge gamble to dismiss the one who is the center of everything. There is, in fact, no hope for such a person.
You know what it means to forget the most important element of some concoction—like the sugar in sugar cookies, or the coffee in your coffee and cream, or the lens in your glasses, or the warhead on your nuclear weapon. But some of you have forgotten Christ, and his death and resurrection, as if he were not essential to life and eternity. He is, rather, everything related to life and eternity. This is why I say there is no hope for such an omission.
Christ’s perfect life, his sacrificial and substitutionary death, and his victorious authenticating resurrection provide the foundation of all hope. As Dr. J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937) stated, “Christianity begins with a triumphant indicative.” God declares that something is done on behalf of those who will come to him—Jesus lived without sin as the perfect lamb, took on their sin and died in their place as the adequate sacrifice, and was raised bodily over the power of sin and death for them.
To think little or not at all about the centerpiece of history, is to guarantee that you will have no place in heaven. It is not enough to merely be religious by going to church on holidays or even every Sunday, or doing a few other well-meaning duties. It is not religion that makes you acceptable to God. You must be “accepted in the Beloved,” that is, in Christ’s merits alone. (Eph. 1: 6) Only trusting in Christ, resting your confidence in the one who lived, died, and was raised again, can assure you of heaven.
To believe otherwise, to add your little bit of religious activity to Christ as if you could impress God, is actually insulting to God. Either Christ is sufficient or he stands in need of you to satisfy God’s wrath and to provide your acceptance before the Father. The declaration of Scripture is that he does not need you; rather, you need him, for without a living relationship with him through faith, you could not possible be received by the Father. Christ cried out on the cross, “It is finished,” meaning, it is paid in full. But “If righteousness comes by the law, then Christ died needlessly.” (Gal. 2: 21)
You may say, “Anyone can begin a religion like Christianity.” But you give away the fact that you think of Christianity as only a system of duties. You are wrong. It is about Christ and what he has done that could not be done by any other. If you are merely a moralist, using some Christian terminology at times, don’t think you have become a true Christian. Moralism damns, in and of itself. Christianity is not based on what you do, but on Christ, his death, and his resurrection. If this is too much to swallow now, you will avow it later, but sadly, when it is too late.
It does not have to be this way. You may put your trust in Christ, terminating your confidence in yourself as sufficient to please God. You may enjoy now, before the end of time and throughout the rest of time, an authentic relationship with him. There is a world, an eternal world, of difference between trusting him and dismissing him as will one day be completely understood.
It is Christ who will one day be seen by all, rightly, to be the center of everything, the apex of history, the hope of mankind, the reference point of the universe, the conversation and exaltation of heaven, the eternal joy of millions, and the eternal bane of even more. And it is now that you should trust him.
Editor’s Note: This originally published at Christian Communicators Worldwide
On this episode of the FTC Podcast, Jared Wilson visits with Scott Thomas, Executive Pastor of Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tennessee, about gospel-shaped leadership, the importance of emotional intelligence and self-awareness among ministers, and Scott’s own time pastoring at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington and what he learned from its implosion.
