The Sin of the Revolutionary Mind

11 April 2010

We worship in heaven, and we are unified with those who join us there in worship—including those believers in other nations, and those who died long before us. This unity surpasses any earthly tie, including ties of where you were born—or when.

The saints of every age and place are Our People, and we should hear the voices of those who have gone before us. They are sinners, and they can be wrong. But so can we, and so we listen to their wise counsel, and—as always—measure everything by Scripture. We cannot be revolutionaries, because we belong to a long line of people from whom we cannot separate, even though we may want to.

“Behold, I make all things new” is not something that we are allowed to say—and it doesn’t work anyhow. If we cannot remake our church, or our society, or our world at a stroke, through revolution, then what are we to do?

In Eden, the river that flows from the sanctuary waters the world. In the New Jerusalem, the water of life flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb, and the leaves of the trees beside it are for the healing of the nations. In between, Jesus says “He who believes in Me, as the Scriptures have said, out of his belly will flow rivers of living water.”

The life of the world flows from God through the sanctuary, through our worship; this is our first and most powerful agent of cultural change. Worship is a weapon by which we may battle God’s enemies and serve the people of the World at the same time. When we resort to carnal weapons, there is always collateral damage, but worship harms no one except those who insist on remaining enemies of God.

The charge therefore is this: Every change in your life, every difficulty, every new situation, should come first into your worship. Praise God, thank Him, ask for what you need. Situate your life in God-honoring heavenly worship before the throne of Grace. Then, having done that, pray that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven—and watch as God answers your prayers.

5 Comments | Preaching | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Easter: What Did Christ Purchase?

5 April 2010

Christ will build His church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. He has done this in very visible ways over the last 2000 years, and we should be profoundly grateful not only for His faithfulness, but for the gift of many fine historians who have preserved the stories for us so that we could see God’s faithfulness work out over time.

The Father promises the Son the nations of the world in Psalm 2.  When Satan tempts Jesus by offering Him the nations of the world and all their glory, if only Jesus will worship him, Satan is offering Jesus the crown without the cross.  Jesus refuses, goes to the cross, and before ascending, tells His disciples, “Go, disciple all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”  Not, please note, “Make some disciples from the nations,” but “Disciple the nations.”  (Yeah, I know what your translation has.  But this is what the text really says.)  God drives that process: the mass conversions of Pentecost begin mission work as the converts return to their home countries; the thing intensifies as believers are driven from Jerusalem in the wave of persecutions that follow the stoning of Stephen.  It really begins to unfold when the Holy Spirit moves the elders of Antioch to send out Paul and Barnabas.

What happens after that?  Most Christians don’t know, because we believed the story our government-funded 5th-grade history textbook told us.  That story is a lie.  Even the terms are a lie.  According to this lie, the “Classical” world gave way as Rome fell to the barbarians: night descended for 1000 years as the Dark Ages (or Middle Ages) began.  Day dawned in the Rebirth (the literal meaning of “Renaissance”), and fully came in the Enlightenment.

Viewed through a theological lens, here’s what the terms tell us.  The “Classical” era was when Yahweh-worship was largely confined to Jewish folks off in a corner, and paganism ruled the day in the places that mattered: Greece and Rome.  Then Rome becomes Christian, Europe fills with Germans and Celts, who also become Christian, and the Dark Ages begin (aka the “Middle” ages — a historian’s term for ‘flyover territory’).  The  Rebirth (“Renaissance”) comes when people start looking again to the Romans for influence in art, architecture, philosophy, etc., instead of just approaching things as Christians.  The “Enlightenment” comes when the pagan influence takes root and the intelligentsia throw off Christianity altogether.

In reality, the “darkness,” the “middle” era in that story, is Christendom.  Rome became Christian, but wasn’t all that much on missionary work until God called the Germans and Celts to come live next door.  Christian Rome woke from her slumber, launched a large and very effective missionary effort, and the barbarians came to Christ faster than Rome had, beginning 1000 years when Europe was Christian and really grappled with how to live as a Christian society.  It is 1000 years of nations being discipled — which is exactly what Jesus told us to go and do. The continent was filled with fallen people, and of course there were problems — just as you don’t live a life of perfect discipleship.  But they tried, and there was real growth and progress.

Today, the sun is setting on Christendom 1.0, but South Americans are throwing off Roman/animist syncretism in droves and flocking to the living Christ.  Africa is coming to Christ.  China has huge numbers of Christians, and the numbers are growing.  Korea is about 30% Christian, last I checked.  Christendom 2.0 is just getting started, and what a wonder it will be!    Parenthetically, a great number of  our dispensational and amillennial brethren think The End Is Near, because Christianity is dying out (among the white people).  Ahem.

We of European extraction come from a long line of disciple nations.  We must be grateful.  If it seems that our own nations are dying spiritually, we must remember that we serve a God who really loves the death and resurrection motif.  We must also be grateful that God has not confined His attentions to the places where white people live.  He is very much at work in the rest of the world.  The wealth that He has given to us, we must in turn give to others.  That spans everything from sharing comfort with a fellow believer to sharing Christ with an unbelieving coworker to sending a missionary halfway around the world.

The Father promised Christ the nations.  Christ purchased the world with His own blood.  He told us to go disciple the nations.  Let’s go get ’em.

Comments Off on Easter: What Did Christ Purchase? | Preaching | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Unity of the Sanctuary

28 March 2010

We worship in heaven, following after our High Priest who has entered the Holy of Holies first as our Forerunner.  We who worship in heaven are all of one, children of the same Father, and therefore we are eternally unified in a way no disagreement can sever.  Because this is true, we should give careful attention to making our worship fitting for the heavenly context in which we find ourselves.

This means that we should strive to learn about heavenly worship and imitate it.  We should devote ourselves to discovering what God wants to receive so that we can give it to Him, skillfully and unreservedly.  And we should go into His presence unified with our fellow believers.

We will achieve none of these aims perfectly.  This is sanctification, and sanctification is a process in which we grow day by day.   The charge before us is this:

  • Pursue fitting worship that God desires at whatever imperfect level of maturity your present growth allows
  • Be confident that our Father will accept your worship because He has accepted Christ your High Priest as your forerunner, and you come following Him
  • Pursue peace with all your fellow worshippers at whatever imperfect level you are able to achieve
  • Again, be confident that the Father will accept your efforts because He has accepted Christ

When we all raise our voices in praise in our respective churches on Sunday morning, we are also in heaven, worshipping together, led by our High Priest, who always lives to make intercession for us.  There, we are unified — one people of God worshipping before His one throne.  There, we are holy.  May our godly worship there overflow into our lives here, that our Father’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.  For His is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever and ever.  Amen.

Comments Off on The Unity of the Sanctuary | Preaching | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Reformation and Assurance

21 March 2010

No one can read New Testament Scripture honestly and conclude that salvation is earned by our works.  Nor can anyone honestly conclude that God wants us to torture our souls with wondering whether we are truly saved.

The saints of the Protestant Reformation understood this better than most; they were in awe of the grace of God; they were astounded that He would save anyone, let alone them.  They believed most heartily in assurance of salvation.  The whole point of their system of doctrine was that we must thank God, and God alone, for our salvation, and that thanks must arise from a joyful heart that is certain of its salvation.  How could you thank God for something if you didn’t know whether He had really given it to you?

The Reformation confessions and catechisms teach this quite clearly.  They also teach clearly the perseverance of the saints, and this created a hairline fracture in their system of doctrine.  That fracture  permits a squinty-eyed, untrusting person to begin to question whether, if he were really saved, he would commit the sins that he does.  Many Reformed people have widened this hairline fracture to an unbridgeable chasm, and as a result whole denominations have been led to abandon both the Bible’s clear teaching of assurance of salvation and the Reformers’ fine example in that area.

The charge is this:

First: relieve the agony of these squinty-eyed people by assuring them of their salvation through Christ’s promise—just as Paul and the early Protestants would have done;

Second:  attack as a hireling and a thief anyone who tortures Christ’s sheep by teaching them to doubt rather than to trust, to examine themselves in morbid introspection rather than to look to Christ’s promise for assurance.  The apostles attacked such teaching, as did the early Protestants, and so should you;

Finally:  read the early Protestants and their descendants charitably, as fellow heirs of the grace of God.  They are our people, whether we like them or not.  We will spend eternity with them; we might as well begin being charitable now.  Remember that in every age God has had His people, and they have had their errors.  As the early Protestants had theirs, we have ours.  We undoubtedly believe contradictory things, just as they did, and our flaws will come to light in due time, just as theirs have.  God promises us that “with the judgment you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you use, it will be measured back to you.”  Therefore, be kind in your judgment of them and humble in your assessment of yourself.

1 Comment | Preaching | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Life of St. Patrick

14 March 2010

In Patrick we find a man who recognizes God’s discipline on his own early disobedience, and accepts the hardship as his just deserts.  He repents and gives faithful service to his Lord and Master.  For his earthly reward, he receives the slights, insults, slanders and trials that accompany serving Christ.  He takes these things with Christian grace.  He does defend himself from the charges, but his heart is plainly not in vindicating himself, but in caring for his brothers and sisters in Christ.

In defending his downtrodden brethren, he is not afraid to speak the truth to anyone, and he annoys some powerful people, both inside and outside Christ’s church.  For protection against them all, he cries out to God.  He is doing God’s work, and he knows that this means that he is a fellow-laborer with God’s whole apparatus of righteousness: true history, doctrine, the saints of the past and the holy angels, the very forces of nature, and right on up to the direct intervention the Triune Creator.

We also find someone who does not speak in quite the way that we would, and this tempts us to simply dismiss him.  We have seen that a charitable reading gets us past those hurdles and shows us that St. Patrick has much to teach.  My charge to you is to practice this same charity with other believers, ancient and modern, and to emulate the virtues of this fragrant saint.  Make God’s priorities your own; subordinate your desires to His calling and accept the trials that come your way.  As with Patrick, some of those trials will be God’s judgment on your sins, and you must acknowledge the justice of God’s judgment and repent.  Other trials will be the result of the world hating you for the same reasons that it hated Jesus, and you should accept those trials in the same manner that Christ did.  As we align ourselves with God’s requirements in this way—that is, as we trust God in the way that Patrick did, we will be able to call upon God boldly for protection, and to say with the psalmist, “In God I have put my trust; what can man do to me?”

***

Read Patrick’s own writings at Irish Christian.

Comments Off on The Life of St. Patrick | Preaching | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Table: Is a Christian Allowed to Avoid Wine?

8 March 2010

(Given the discussion that’s occurred here over the last week, I feel a need to preface this post. The posts categorized “Preaching” are excerpted from my weekly Sunday sermons, generally a light edit of the charge at the close of the sermon.  I appreciate my brother Bobby and his online contributions, and I hope to continue discussion as we have opportunity to engage the deeper hermeneutical issues that underlie our disagreement.  Nothing here should be interpreted as a slam at Bobby; some of my thought has been shaped by interacting with him over the past week, but I’m not going after him here.  I am, however, expressing my convictions, with which he disagrees.)

The Scriptures are quite clear that the wine served at the Lord’s Table is wine—alcoholic, possible-to-get-drunk-on, wine. The Scriptures are equally clear that Jesus instructed us to eat and drink at His Table. It is highly inappropriate for us as Christians to start messing with the menu. I mean, imagine the scene: we come to church and hear the call to worship. The ceiling opens, the walls grow thin, and we are carried into the Holy of Holies in the heavenly tabernacle to worship our God as priests of the New Covenant. We offer our praises; we hear a word from God, and then Jesus, the priest after the order of Melchizedek, invites us, children of Abraham by faith, to come eat bread and wine at His Table. Can you imagine, in that setting, quibbling with the Lord about what He serves, and trying to make a substitution on Jesus’ menu?

Yet this is exactly what we do when we insist on something other than bread and wine. The proper course of action here is obvious: submit to Christ and eat and drink what He serves.   Simple.

Unfortunately, we come from a culture where there are long-standing bad connotations attached to alcohol—so much so that drinking grape juice is assumed to be the default position. There couldn’t be anything wrong with that, people think, and anyone who wants to see wine in a communion cup has a long, hard uphill battle to justify their position—as biblical as it plainly is. However cloaked in explanations, it is idolatry to elevate our tradition above what God actually says in His Word. The only thing we can offer in defense of our well-meaning brethren is that most of them have never given it a second thought, and those that have are often mired in a few centuries’ worth of very bright folks muddying the waters–which is to say that the idolatry is rooted very deeply in American church culture.  We won’t get free of it overnight. [EDIT: Actually, far less than “a few centuries.” Thomas Welch pioneered using pasteurization to preserve fresh grape juice in a non-alcoholic state in 1869, and began lobbying churches to adopt Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine thereafter. As with many other things in American evangelical church practice, the “default option” is well under 200 years old.]

That said, there is always a tension between where we ought to be—perfect holiness—and where we actually are, and we have certainly not attained perfection either. As Christians, we are called to love one another and stir one another up to love and good deeds. As we seek to grow the Church to maturity, we must do it without losing anyone, and without provoking them to rebel against the truth. So we change incrementally. The fruit of the Spirit is patience.

In practice, this means that if insisting on wine in the communion cup will have the practical effect of dividing the Body, then we can’t do it. The Table both celebrates and sustains our unity; to divide the Body over the way we observe the Table is to partake in an unworthy manner — and this we must not do. As necessary for medical or conscience reasons, we will serve Welch’s with joy and thanksgiving, rightly discerning the corporate Body of Christ that eats and drinks at the table. If we are convicted that it should be wine, we will look at the grape juice in our cup and pray, “Lord, this is wrong. It’s wicked. Please bless it; the alternatives are far worse. Please hasten the day when we can stop committing this sin without doing something worse in the process.” And confident in God’s mercy, we will eat our bread and drink our ersatz wine with gladness and simplicity of heart.

Of course, the brother whose convictions run toward Welch’s ought to be as willing to drink wine for our sake as we are to drink Welch’s for his; no one should be willing to breach the unity of the Table over what’s in the communion cup. Paul says not to let anybody judge you in such matters (Col. 2:6).  In our case, we will seek to serve both wine and Welch’s at communion, so that each person can choose as he will, and no one’s conscience need be troubled by what he drinks.  This is not a perfect solution, by anybody’s lights.  But perfection is reserved for glory, and in the meantime we trust in God’s mercy.

4 Comments | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Wine

28 February 2010

As with bread, we are tempted to impose our own personal meaning on wine. Wine means excess and wild parties and losing control; wine means your drunk father who beat you; wine means scandal and appearing like a sinner; whatever. But no.

Wine means what God says it means. Lack of wine is either a form of fasting or a curse from God. God says wine is our labor blessed by His hand—which is to say it is the result of man having dominion over the earth, which is fulfilling his role as the image of God. It is God’s blessing. It is the gift with which Jesus blesses a wedding, the drink served by Wisdom, part of the Ascension offering lifted to God in the morning and evening sacrifices, the drink that Melchizedek the royal priest brings to Abraham and the drink that Christ serves to Abraham’s children by faith at His Table. Wine is rejoicing and fellowship.  Good lovemaking is better than wine—but not much else is.

As with any blessing, wine can be abused, and Scripture is filled with warnings about that; it is a wicked mind that turns God’s blessing into an occasion for sin. It’s an equally wicked, pinched, joyless mind that thinks rejecting God’s good gift is a holy thing to do. Both of these sins stem from a lack of gratitude.

My charge to you is to think of wine in this way, and to behave as Moses and Solomon instructed: Go and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has accepted your labor. Do this that you may learn to fear God and keep His commandments, because that is your whole duty.

(Further reflections here.)

17 Comments | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Bread

21 February 2010

When we consider the question of what bread means, we face constant temptation to sidetrack the question into areas that are more comfortable:

  • “What does bread mean to me?” – a question of individual emotional association, or
  • “What does bread symbolize in the Bible?” – part of our question, an important part – but to ask the question this way is to stop with the academics, which is missing the whole point.

We live in a meaningful world.  Everything means something; everything is a message from a loving, majestic Triune God.  Only when we begin to ask what each thing means do we begin to understand the world and our place in it.  So what we’re asking is what bread means in the world itself.  When you see a loaf of bread sitting on the counter in your own kitchen, what does it mean?  The Bible does speak about the meaning of bread, not just because bread symbolizes something in God’s Word, but because bread symbolizes something in God’s world—the only world there is.

Bread is provision, it is blessing, it is strength.  It is the product of dominion, a cooperation between God’s blessing of the crops and man’s labor in the fields, the mill and the bakery.  Every loaf of bread is God’s kindness, a demonstration of the image of God, of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, and when we eat this blessing, we receive strength.  And so, of necessity, every loaf of bread is also a call to thank God.

Knowing this about bread, begin to ask yourself what the other things in your life mean.  Don’t be afraid to find that you don’t know.  God wants you to know; He will teach you if you will trust Him.

2 Comments | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Table: Passover and the Last Supper

14 February 2010

Christ is our Passover, and in the supper we eat and drink the ultimate Passover feast. Or maybe not quite the ultimate. One of the lessons of Passover, and of the Supper, is that we are pilgrims in this world. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to be a pilgrim.

If we think of ourselves as pilgrims in space—now we’re here on earth, but we’re on our way to our home in heaven—then we will behave like rats on a sinking ship. That is, we won’t care at all about the ship. But this is exactly the wrong lesson.

You see, we are pilgrims in time. Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.*  We wait for the coming of Christ’s kingdom, and then what a feast we will have—the Lord’s Table, with Christ himself drinking the cup with us in His Father’s kingdom. That kingdom will not be in a far-off heaven, but right here on earth—the very same earth we are commanded to cultivate and protect.

Therefore, we live not as pilgrims who are going away, but as pilgrims who are waiting for this world to be turned into our home. And this is the good news that we carry out to our neighbors: this world is passing away, and its lusts. Stand apart from it, and seek the Kingdom of God. Christ died for us so that we need not fall in love with the temporary; He has freed us to seek a home in His eternal Kingdom.

____

*I am indebted to N. T. Wright for this lovely turn of phrase.

Comments Off on The Lord’s Table: Passover and the Last Supper | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Supper: “Do this unto My remembrance”

7 February 2010

This week draws together several threads we have been considering recently. The need to pray without ceasing; the need to think of things as the Bible thinks of them, and not in the sterile terms so common in theology; the significance of the Lord’s Table to us.

Jesus tells us it is His memorial, and in biblical terms this means not just that it is for us to remember Him, but also that it is a reminder to God of what Jesus did for us, a reminder to God that we partake of Christ’s body and blood, and that we are what we eat. Theology tells us that God needs no reminders, and as far as it goes, this is true. Jesus tells us to remind God regularly. “Why?” we want to know. Perhaps for the same reasons that we pray without ceasing even though God knows our requests before we ask. Perhaps for other reasons. The most pressing thing, however, is not to know why, but to obey God’s command.

This is one of the necessary lessons of worship that must spill over into the world: the mysteries are many, our understanding is weak, and we obey in spite of it all. Not because we understand, but because we trust the God who guides us. In that trust God answers our prayer: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

2 Comments | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »