It’s what everyone needs.  Everyone.  Gospel + safety + time.  A lot of gospel + a lot of safety + a lot of time.

Gospel: good news for bad people through the finished work of Christ on the cross and the present power of the Holy Spirit.  Multiple exposures.  Constant immersion.  Wave upon wave of grace and truth, according to the Bible.

Safety: a non-accusing environment.  No finger-pointing.  No embarrassing anyone.  No manipulation.  No oppression.  No condescension.  But respect and sympathy and understanding, where sinners can confess and unburden their souls.

Time: no pressure.  Not even self-imposed pressure.  No deadlines on growth.  No rush.  No hurry.  But a lot of space for complicated people to rethink their lives at a deep level.  If we relax, trusting in God’s patience, we actually get going.

This is what our churches must be: gentle environments of gospel + safety + time.  It’s the only way anyone can ever change.

Who doesn’t need that?

Gospel + safety + time

“The Beatles’ musical ideas progressed in a most tangible way with each album they recorded.  Geoff Emerick, the recording engineer who with George Martin formed the imaginative team which translated the Beatles’ requirements onto tape, once totted up the number of hours put into the making of Sgt. Pepper and came up with 700.  Please Please Me, the Beatles’ first album, was recorded in 585 minutes.”

Liner notes to Sgt. Pepper, CD version, Apple Records, 1987.

Excellence and effort

“The LXX was still close to the mark when it used eleos (mercy) as its preferred translation of hesed.  The modern preference for words like ‘duty,’ ‘obligation,’ ‘loyalty,’ ‘solidarity,’ has the picture completely out of focus.  Its worst effect has been to obscure the primal perpetual revelation of the Bible that God in his ultimate and eternal being is ‘gracious and sensitive, abundant in hesed‘ — ‘lovingkindness.’  The Old Testament is thus in perfect agreement with its New Testament consummation: ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16).”

Francis I. Anderson, “Yahweh, The Kind and Sensitive God,” in God Who Is Rich In Mercy, edited by P. T. O’Brien and D. G. Peterson (Grand Rapids, 1986), page 82.

Lovingkindness

In a world of secrets, outward success is everyone’s goal.  If we can just succeed, we won’t have to face ourselves.  No wonder that doesn’t work.  It can’t work.  The reality of what we are will always topple this house-of-cards persona we so earnestly wish were true.

The gospel is not God’s way of giving us an even better self-improvement goal.  The gospel is God’s judgment on our better selves and his replacement of it all with Jesus.

Every one of us thinks, “If only I could do __________ or be __________, then I would arrive.”  So, what does “arrival” look like to you?  If it isn’t Jesus, the risen Lord himself, every arrival you achieve is only another set-back.

If you make financial security your arrival, you are already trapped in anxiety.  If you make a thin body your identity, you will hate yourself more.  If you make a porn-free life your okayness, you are doomed to compulsion.  God’s remedy for you is not more money or better looks or perfect control.  God’s gift to you is Jesus.  With Jesus, we are saved.  Everything is going to be okay.  Without Jesus, we are damned.  Nothing will go right.

Forsake all fraudulent success.  Make Jesus your goal, your arrival, your identity, your comfort, your okayness, and he’ll gladly give himself to you — and on terms of grace.  But reach for anything else, and it will turn into its opposite and betray you.

To paraphrase the apostle Paul, “I’ve lost everything, and I don’t even care, because now I get Jesus” (Philippians 3:8).

Success and Jesus

“If we stress the love of God without the holiness of God, it turns out only to be compromise.  But if we stress the holiness of God without the love of God, we practice something that is hard and lacks beauty.  And it is important to show forth beauty before a lost world and a lost generation.  All too often young people have not been wrong in saying that the church is ugly.  In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ we are called upon to show to a watching world and to our own young people that the church is something beautiful.

Several years ago I wrestled with the question of what was wrong with much of the church that stood for purity.  I came to the conclusion that in the flesh we can stress purity without love or we can stress the love of God without purity, but that in the flesh we cannot stress both simultaneously.  In order to exhibit both simultaneously, we must look moment by moment to the work of Christ, to the work of the Holy Spirit.  Spirituality begins to have real meaning in our moment-by-moment lives as we begin to exhibit simultaneously the holiness of God and the love of God.”

Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church before the Watching World (Downers Grove, 1971), page 63.  Italics added.

By personality, each of us is predisposed to favor one or the other, either purity and rightness or compassion and softness.  In ourselves, we veer off one way or the other.  And we do not feel wrong about it, because our defaults reflect something real about God.  God is pure.  And God is compassionate.  But God is bigger than we are.  God is all that he is all the time, and he is the measure of all that we need all the time.  Ministering in his name, but within the limits of our natural distortions, defaces the loveliness of God in the world today.  It is unfair to him and harmful to others.  And having a faithful doctrinal statement does not by itself rescue us from our personal smallness and ugliness.  It is only as we lean hard on the Lord moment by moment that his power enters in to make us larger than ourselves.  Self-mistrust and an outward looking to the Lord moment by moment — it is how we can demonstrate the beauty of the gospel.

Only by a power from beyond ourselves

After your abortion, what?

This is good

This is evil

“Christ suffered in his own person whatsoever he calls us to suffer, that he might the better learn to relieve and pity us in our sufferings.  In his desertion in the garden and upon the cross, he was content to lack that unspeakable solace in the presence of his Father, both to bear the wrath of the Lord for a time for us, and likewise to know the better how to comfort us in our greatest extremities. . . . He was broken, that we should not be broken; he was troubled, that we should not be desperately troubled; he became a curse, that we should not be accursed.  Whatsoever may be wished for in an all-sufficient comforter is all to be found in Christ.”

Richard Sibbes, “The Bruised Reed,” in Works (Edinburgh, 1979), I:72-73. Style updated.

In his desertion

“These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.”  Acts 17:6

In the days of the apostles, outsiders disparaged the church, but they couldn’t ignore the church.  Today, here in the Bible Belt, our task is to re-create those conditions.  We want to be a force for wonderful gospel upheaval.  How?  By planting so many gospel-centered churches that the blessing of God cannot be ignored.  Being spoken against, as ones who turn the world upside down, is not a problem.  Being ignored is, because this isn’t about us.  It’s about Jesus.

In the corporate psychology of every city, there is a threshold of non-ignorability.  Here in Nashville, many things can be ignored.  But the Titans cannot be ignored, country music cannot be ignored, Vanderbilt University cannot be ignored.  But the gospel remains too ignorable.

An organic, from-below, non-big-event strategy of church-planting — some churches small, some medium, some large — but churches with a clear message of grace and a beautiful culture of grace, churches of gospel + safety + time where sinners can rethink their lives without pressure, churches where sinners can admit their problems without being humiliated, churches where there are more and more stories of divine renewal, and Nashville will wake up one morning in the not-too-distant future and sense that something has changed.  And it cannot be ignored, it cannot be dismissed, it cannot be written off as anomalous, because it is not just another big event down at the Ryman Auditorium that comes and goes but is embodied in a growing network of radiant churches that are here to stay.

May the Lamb receive the reward of his suffering in Nashville.

The threshold of non-ignorability

C. H. Spurgeon, Lectures to my Students (Grand Rapids, 1970), page 169.

A great heart

God is for us.  Romans 8:31

But I have this against you.  Revelation 2:4.  See also 2:14, 20; 3:3.

So, which is it?  Is God for us, or is God against us?  If we are in Christ, the answer is: maybe both.  God is certainly for us, and God might also be against us.

God is for us in an absolute sense, in Christ.  We have peace with God (Romans 5:1).  There is now no condemnation threatening us (Romans 8:1).  God foreknew us, predestined us, called us, justified us and promises to glorify us (Romans 8:29-30).  God is for us, and nothing can change that.

I can sin my way out of my marriage, I can sin my way out of the ministry, I can sin my way out of physical health, and a lot more.  But I cannot sin my way out of Christ, and neither can you, because God is for us.

God might also be against us at times.  Not that he de-justifies us, but he might discipline us (Hebrews 12:5-6).  He might oppose us (James 4:6).  He might send out wrath against us (2 Chronicles 19:2; 32:25).  Not condemning wrath, but purifying wrath, for a time.  How could it be otherwise?  The smile of God is not an all-approving grin.  What kind of Father would that be?

But even when he is against us, still, he is for us.  It is possible for God to be both for us and against us at the same time, his love burning away whatever keeps us from pressing more deeply into his mighty heart.

“Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3:19).

God for us, or God against us?

No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.  John 1:18

“John, in placing all his hopes on one person as the unique disclosure of a universal answer, sets the stage for an almost chilling anxiety of commitment.  If only the Son has made God known, then the hopes of humanity rest upon the Son.  This needs to be spoken in a hush, because it evokes a hope that if disappointed will mark the last stage of despair.  Hope in the Son is a last resort.  If the Son has not made God known, and if we agree with John that no one has ever seen God, then we shall remain in a place of tragic solitude.  There is nowhere else to go. . . .

Walker Percy, the novelist, has described humanity as ‘waiting for news.’  Christianity says that the news has come.  It brings to the human situation the news that what we most need has been supplied: perfect atonement for guilt.  It declares that what we know to be true about ourselves has been responded to decisively and eternally from outside ourselves.

This confidence that there is good news for humanity in the place of our solitude is summed up in the words ‘Christ died for our sins.’”

Paul F. M. Zahl, Who Will Deliver Us? (Eugene, 2008), pages 37-38.  Italics original.

All our hopes here

“[W]hen classic justification, based on the propitiatory work of Christ, is absent, human beings will grasp for substitutes, often grotesque ones. . . . We have here [in the French Revolution], among much else, a case of secular atonement.  One of the central rituals within the drama of the French Revolution was meant to achieve expiation.  It was important to be cleansed from the past, while at the same time holding up revolutionary ideals. . . . Thus, the guillotine was a counterfeit for Calvary.”

William Edgar, “Justification and Violence,” in K. Scott Oliphant, editor, Justified in Christ (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2007), pages 131-134.

Moral fervor and violence go together quite compatibly.  We sinners know we cannot bear our own guilt, so we look for a substitute.  If we are not believing and revering and savoring Christ as our atoning substitute, we will find someone else to whom we may transfer our shame.  Only the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, apart from all our works — and that doctrine not merely as a formal position, but as a moment-by-moment resource deep in the heart — can save us from our self-invented rituals of substitutionary atonement.

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”  Colossians 3:15

Justification and violence

A broken man can be killed, but not stopped

“In the name of God, brethren, labor to awaken your own hearts, before you go to the pulpit, that you may be fit to awaken the hearts of sinners.  Remember they must be awakened or damned, and . . . a sleepy preacher will hardly awaken drowsy sinners.  Though you give the holy things of God the highest praise in words, yet, if you do it coldly, you will seem by your manner to unsay what you said in the matter. . . . Speak to your people as to men that must be awakened, either here or in hell.  Look around upon them with the eye of faith, and with compassion, and think in what a state of joy or torment they must all be for ever; and then, methinks, it will make you earnest, and melt your heart to a sense of their condition.”

Richard Baxter, quoted in J. I. Packer, A Quest for Godliness (Wheaton, 1990), 279.

HT: Dane Ortlund.

Before we preach tomorrow

The Cross: no failure

As soon as Zion was in labor
she brought forth her children.  Isaiah 66:8

“If any minister can be satisfied without conversions, he shall have no conversions.  God will not force usefulness on any man.  It is only when our heart breaks to see men saved, that we shall be likely to see sinners’ hearts broken.  The secret of success lies in all-consuming zeal, all-subduing travail for souls.  Read the sermons of Wesley and of Whitfield, and what is there in them?  It is no severe criticism to say that they are scarcely worthy to have survived.  And yet those sermons wrought marvels. . . .

In order to understand such preaching, you need to see and hear the man, you want his tearful eye, his glowing countenance, his pleading tone, his bursting heart.  I have heard of a great preacher who objected to having his sermons printed, ‘Because,’ said he, ‘you cannot print me.’  That observation is very much to the point.  A soul-winner throws himself into what he says.  As I have sometimes said, we must ram ourselves into our cannons, we must fire ourselves at our hearers, and when we do this, then, by God’s grace, their hearts are often carried by storm.”

C. H. Spurgeon, “Travailing for Souls,” 3 September 1871.  Italics original.

Travailing for souls

Bullinger (1504-1575) left an account of how the Reformation ministers in Zurich studied the Old Testament together in Zwingli’s time:

They began with prayer, asking God for clarity and transformation, that in no way would they displease him.

Then one of the young ministers, who had prepared in advance, read and commented on the passage for that day from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate version.

Next, a Hebrew scholar went back over the passage in the Hebrew text, commenting, explaining, citing commentaries along the way.

Then, a Greek reader led them through the passage in the Septuagint and other Greek versions.

Finally, Zwingli himself pulled it all together, surveying the Patristic commentators, the medieval rabbis and the Catholic scholars. He connected the text with the whole of the Bible. He funneled it all down to the force and message of the passage, its uplifting power, the real meaning and profit and use of it.

God was powerfully at work, to produce such an intelligent and sincere passion for his Word.

Cited in G. H. Box, “Hebrew Studies in the Reformation Period and After: their place and influence,” in The Legacy of Israel (Oxford, 1927), edited by E. R. Bevan and C. Singer, pages 345-346.

How they studied the Bible

“Our self-abnegation is thus not for our own sake but for the sake of others.  And thus it is not to mere self-denial that Christ calls us but specifically to self-sacrifice, not to unselfing ourselves but to unselfishing ourselves.  Self-denial for its own sake is in its very nature ascetic, monkish.   It concentrates our whole attention on self—self-knowledge, self-control—and can therefore eventuate in nothing other than the very apotheosis of selfishness.  At best it succeeds only in subjecting the outer self to the inner self or the lower self to the higher self, and only the more surely falls into the slough of self-seeking, that it partially conceals the selfishness of its goal by refining its ideal of self and excluding its grosser and more outward elements.  Self-denial, then, drives to the cloister, narrows and contracts the soul, murders within us all innocent desires, dries up all the springs of sympathy, and nurses and coddles our self-importance until we grow so great in our own esteem as to be careless of the trials and sufferings, the joys and aspirations, the strivings and failures and successes of our fellow-men.  Self-denial, thus understood, will make us cold, hard, unsympathetic—proud, arrogant, self-esteeming—fanatical, overbearing, cruel.  It may make monks and Stoics, it cannot make Christians.”

B. B. Warfield, “Imitating the Incarnation,” in The Person and Work of Christ (Grand Rapids, 1970), page 574.

HT: David Powlison.

Not unselfing, but unselfishing