Full Contact Christianity

We are in the midst of a transition and are doing some traveling at the moment. This entry is excerpted/summarized from a sermon I preached yesterday at McCarroll Bible Church in Denver, Colorado.

But there is forgiveness with You;
That You may be feared.

This is not what we would expect, or how we would describe God.  We would say, “There is forgiveness with You, that You may be loved,” or perhaps “There is perfect justice with You, that You may be feared.” But that’s not what it says.

So now the question: why?  Why does he say it like this?  How does forgiveness lead us to fearing God?  It’s a riddle worth pondering.

Go ahead, ponder it a little.  I’ll wait.

If you’ve got some thoughts on this, post ’em in the comments — I’d love to hear from you, and it’s surprising how often different parts of the body come up with different parts of the answer to biblical riddles like this one.  Below, you’ll find my part of the answer.

Imagine if you served a god that was truly and completely impossible to please.  Imagine if nothing you did was ever good enough for this god.  You could do absolutely everything as perfect as you could possibly make it, and still he would find some petty thing wrong with your efforts and rain down judgment on you.

Why bother to try pleasing such a god?  In the end, why even be afraid of him?  Of course he can judge you and cause you problems, but he’s going to do that no matter what, so why change your behavior trying to avoid it?  You’re going to hell already; surely one more brick on the load won’t make any practical difference.  You might as well ignore him and live any way you want.

Yahweh is nothing like that imaginary god.  Yahweh forgives.  Yahweh accepts our efforts and and our worship because He has accepted Christ.  And because He forgives, we can and should fear Him.  Suffering His wrath is optional; we actually have a choice.  Hell will be populated with people who will not receive forgiveness, who do not want it if it comes from Him.

The hellish life of unrepentant sin is likewise optional.  There is no sin for which Christ did not die; there is no act after which you cannot cast ourselves on the mercy of heaven’s court, and receive forgiveness.  If you confess your sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive you your sins, and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness.  And having been cleansed, you are righteous.  God says so.  On that basis David says to you in the thirty-second psalm,

Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you righteous;
And shout for joy, all you upright in heart!

You will soon be fully joining with a new congregation.  At one level, this changes nothing: you will be responsible to encourage your fellow church members there as it has always been your responsibility to encourage your fellow church members here.

At another level, this dramatically changes the shape of your ministry.  You will encounter a different church culture, a culture which is blind to some problems that you will see clearly, and also a culture that sees clearly some problems to which you are blind.

Your task is to be an approved worker, to pass on to them the things you have learned from me.  The thing you must recognize is that they will have the exact same task with you: to pass on to you the things they have learned from their leaders.  It is your job to make sure that both they and you succeed.

In both cases, this means you must be humble.  Hear what they have to offer to you, consider it carefully, and understand in advance that God will bring correction to you through them.  Esteem others better than yourself.  When you have something to say to them, be wise.  Choose your words and tone carefully.  Stir up your brothers to love and good deeds; don’t provoke them to rebellion, and again, esteem others better than yourself.

This means that you need to remember how painful some of these lessons have been.  They will be no less painful for others.  Have some sympathy, and don’t rush them, which leads me to another point.  You must remember that it took you a long time to get to where you are.  You have no right to expect someone to absorb in five minutes a lesson that God taught you over five years.  Trust God, and trust His timing.  You are fellow servants of God; He will grow them just as He grows you, and as you well know, that often means slowly.

The world wants leaders that are smart, good-looking, dominant, and loud.  This is because apart from Christ, human beings are slaves of sin, and it is an easy step from being a slave of sin to being a slave of another sort as well—and a slave needs a master.  It is also because having refused to worship the Lord of heaven and earth, unbelievers fall inevitably into some form of idolatry, and they will willingly worship a human leader if he distracts them from having to deal with God.

It should be obvious to us that having this kind of leader is not a good choice among the people of God.  In Christ’s church, we do it differently.

Christ came and offered a broken, sin-sick world the possibility of an entirely different way of being human.  He was, and He is, the most fully realized human being ever to live.  He is what God always meant for man to be—and because of this, God has highly exalted Him and given Him the name that is above every name.  He is our King, and every knee will one day bow to Him.

Not surprisingly, then, Christ is our model for leadership.  The people that God wants for leaders are the people who serve willingly, faithfully, and humbly, and this is because these people strongly resemble Christ.

I have worked hard these last six years to be that sort of person among you.  As you go out into the broader Christian world, be that sort of person among them.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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Read Patrick’s own writings at Irish Christian.