Full Contact Christianity

Below is the text of a sermon I preached on April 11, 2010.  I posted the charge here that week, but I never put the whole thing up.  Since it touches on some of the ecclesiological concerns I’ve been talking about here recently, I thought I’d revisit it.  The sermon was  delivered in a formal liturgical setting, so you’ll see a note where we stopped to observe communion, followed by the closing charge.

Scripture Reading

Pr. 1:8-9, 19:26-27, 20:20, 23:22-26, 30:11-17

Sermon

I got an email a few weeks ago which informed me in panicky tones that Janet Reno was going to use the FCC to shut down all religious broadcasting.  This seemed suspicious to me for a number of reasons, not least that Janet Reno doesn’t seem to be in a position to use the FCC to do anything.  With a few minutes of research, I found that this particular rumor has been circulating in one form or another since the seventies.  There is actually a kernel of truth to it: in 1974 someone did actually petition the FCC to prevent religious organizations from gaining licenses to broadcast on channels reserved for education.  Despite the fact that the petition would never have affected commercial radio stations, and that the petition was denied in 1975 in any case, the rumor has persisted for three and a half decades, and an alarming number of Christians, hearing it for the first time, believe it.  It continues to circulate through email to this day.

Now, there are a number of points I could make here, having to do with gossip, lack of discernment, loving your neighbor enough to check your facts before passing on the story, and so forth, and I did send an email making those very points to the credulous Christian brother who had originally sent me this panicky message.  But you’re all good Christians, and since I’ve said this much, you know what I’m going to say about those things, and hopefully you’ll take them to heart.  Today, though, I’d like to make a much more interesting, and hopefully much more helpful, point.

I got another email around the same time as the Janet Reno rumor, this one promising me a free laptop if I answered a brief online survey.  This message was not forwarded to me by a credulous Christian brother, and you all know why: very few of us believe that message; we just assume it’s a scam and delete it.

Which raises a question: why are we so ready to believe the one message and not the other?

We believe that our faith is under siege, and many of our fellow conservatives also believe that the Democrats are the party of all evil.  So a tale of a prominent Democrat trying to suppress our faith fits in with that story very nicely…maybe even a little too nicely.  On the other hand, we do not believe that people just go around giving away valuable goods in exchange for a few minutes of unskilled labor, and so we just ignore the offer of a free laptop.  In other words, we believe one message and not the other because one message fits with the way we think the world works, and the other one flies in the face of our picture of the world.

Last week we went over two competing stories of Western history.  In one, Christianity is a force for good, and it continues to shape the world.  Christianity conquered Rome, Europe was Christian for a thousand years, and became the missionary base from which God launched the presently ongoing conversions of South America, China, and Africa.  In the other story, Christianity was a corrosive influence.  The glories of classical Rome fell into the Dark Ages when the Christians took over, Europe only began to recover in the Renaissance (literally, “Rebirth”), when artists, philosophers and architects looked again to pagan Greece and Rome for inspiration, and recovery only really took hold in the “Enlightenment,” when the intelligentsia threw off Christianity entirely.

The question is, why did we, as Bible-believing Protestants, believe the second story automatically, without ever thinking that something might be wrong with it?  Why didn’t it sound like “Free laptop if you just answer this online survey”?  The gospels and Acts certainly didn’t set us up to believe it—so what did?  I would suggest two reasons.

The first is pessimistic eschatology, the idea that the world will get irretrievably worse and worse until Jesus finally shows up and rescues us from the madness.  I don’t have time to go into all this today, but that’s a highly suspect reading of Scripture.  Let me touch one passage: 2 Timothy 3.  Notice that Paul instructs Timothy in what to do with these people in the last days.  That’s because from the NT writers’ perspective, the Last Days were the days after Christ’s resurrection.  The Resurrection of the dead happens in the last days, Christ is the firstfruits – the harvest has begun to come in.  It’s the last days. So our reading of 2 Timothy 3 as a justification of unmitigated pessimism is just not exegetically responsible.

Nor is it historically sensible.   The things Paul talked about were, in some ways, more true of the Roman world than they are of our world today.  For example, Tiberias Caesar used to have prisoners tortured for his amusement while he ate dinner.  This was not an aberration in his society — the Coliseum provided similar spectacles for the masses to enjoy.  Compare this to the recent controversy over waterboarding.  Yes, the practice had its advocates, and there were some stupid, wicked things said and done in defense of what was clearly a method of torture — but even in defending it, no one said “We do it because it’s fun,” and nobody suggested that Saturday Night Live do a Waterboarding Marathon for everyone’s entertainment.  You know why?  Because as a society, we wouldn’t have found it entertaining, that’s why.  Which is to say that the gospel has changed our culture for the better since the days of Tiberias, and we are characterized by 2 Timothy 3 a little less than they were.

The second reason we bought the “Christianity as a corrosive influence” story is that we want to tell a similar story.  In this version, real Christianity was wonderful, but everything went to pot after the death of the apostles, darkness descended, and the Roman church reigned until the Reformers recovered the gospel.  At long last, after a millennium and a half of night, we again believe in the simple gospel and worship in spirit and in truth.  We locate the ‘good times’ in the first-century church instead of the glories of Greece and Rome, and instead of the Renaissance and Enlightenment being the new good times, it’s the Reformation and the modern evangelical church.  Or in other circles, the new good times don’t start until the Anabaptists.  Or Amy Semple MacPherson.  Or Chuck Smith.  Or…pick your poison.

This second issue is the one I want to go after today.  It is the manifestation of an ugly, wicked turn of mind that is at once as old as Lucifer and peculiarly modern.  For lack of better terms, I will call it the Revolutionary Mind.

The Revolutionary Mind wants to take a vision of how things could be and make that vision come true, right here, right now.  “Behold, I make all things new” is the motto of the revolutionary.  Because history and habit get in the way, the Revolutionary Mind despises history and habit—what Proverbs would call “The instruction of your father” and “the law of your mother.”  In America, the soul of the Revolutionary Mind is political, but it manifests itself in the church in liturgical ways.

Liturgical examples

To put this in more concrete terms, let me offer an example.  I read some time ago about a Baptist pastor who began his ministry in Arkansas in the early 1900s.  Being a practical man—a thing then fashionable—he set about to abolish all needless ceremonies and reduce the church service to the essentials only.  For example, the church had previously stood to hear the reading of Scripture; he abolished this practice on the grounds that the Bible never commanded it.

He gave no consideration to why the practice existed or whether it accorded with the whole picture of biblical worship; it was enough for him that the Bible never commanded it.  It was therefore impractical and unnecessary, and it had to go.  Of course, if he were consistent, he would have thrown out the church pews on the same grounds: the Bible never commands us to sit to hear teaching, either, and certainly not in pews.  But he didn’t, and this is because he was a creature of his age, and in his age, pews were considered practical.  This man was, in his time, a revolutionary, and a revolutionary of the sort that was fashionable in his time.

His revolution was displaced by another revolution in the seventies and early eighties, when Calvary Chapel-style music and informal worship practices began to crowd out the so-called ‘traditional’ worship (which was really nothing of the kind).  That revolution is now being replaced in turn by yet another, in which ritual is returning to the worship service because it’s retro.  I am not in favor of any of these revolutions, and I maintain that as Christians we are required to be at war with the revolutionary turn of mind that drove all of them.  We are called rather to a slow and steady obedience founded on Scripture, which turns out to be quite a different thing, even when it looks similar from outside, which it occasionally does.

As over against those examples, I would submit that we have done something different.  We have not forsaken our recent brothers and fathers – we look to Sons of Korah as well as to Martin Luther.  But we look further back as well.  We have not made all things new; we are in glorious communion with those who have gone before us.

Political outworkings

In America, we manifest the same revolutionary mind in a number of ways.  Our immigration philosophy, for example: If any man be in America, he is a new creation; old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new.  Because this is the case, in America we worship the state as the source of real, concrete salvation, and identification with America becomes our primary cultural identification, rather than identification with Christ.

American Christians also tend to think of the State as the source of salvation, and therefore work very hard to try to get control of it.  As a result, we keep making compromises because we are trying to get, and keep, the reins of political power.  This has been a problem for a very long time.  Speaking of American political conservatives, R. L. Dabney wrote:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be seasoned? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy [fat] and lazy from having nothing to whip.

That was in the mid-1800s, and how much has changed since then?

At the turn of the century, American liberalism was revolutionary; American fundamentalism recoiled into sola-doctrinal-correctness and moralizing.  Evangelicalism woke up from that sarcophagus and got politically involved—on the same principles as the liberals of 70 years earlier.  The political action of the Christian Right today is on these principles, and it will fail because the weapons of its warfare are carnal, the very same weapons used by Big Tobacco, Greenpeace and the NRA.  These are weapons that its enemies can also wield, and against which there are many defenses.

A Christian king should govern as God commands him; a Christian congressman should do the same; a Christian voter likewise.  But if we think getting out the vote will be enough to win the culture, we are sadly mistaken.  The history of Israel shows us repeatedly that you can’t reform the culture from the top down; several kings tried and failed.

But we have another weapon which is not carnal.  Worship is warfare; it is the weapon against which our enemies have no defense.  All they can do is get us to stop doing it, and in the American church, they have enjoyed remarkable success doing just that.  In order to win a culture war, it is necessary to first have a culture.  At the very center of a culture is a cultus: the sanctuary is the center of the world, and the culture is the overflow and externalization of the worship.  We begin by reforming our worship because that is the root of the matter.

In Eden, the river that flows from the sanctuary waters the world.

In the New Jerusalem, the river flows from under the throne of God, 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.”

Loyalty needs to flow appropriately, and that means, among other things, that loyalty to Christ and His people supersedes loyalty to America and her people.  This is not exactly a new idea: “Do good to all, but especially to those of the household of faith.”  As Christian Americans, we owe more to an Iraqi or Japanese or Palestinian Christian than we do to an American unbeliever, and this ought to be expressed in our attitudes about foreign policy.

For example, at 11:02 in the morning, August 9, 1945, the US dropped a bomb on Nagasaki.  It was aimed at the business and industrial district, but the wind blew it off course, and it actually exploded above the Urakami Catholic district of Nagasaki, where 12,000 Christians lived—the largest single population of Christians in the Orient.   The blast destroyed the largest Christian church in East Asia, killing the 32 people who were inside it at the time.  In all, 9600 Christians — well over three quarters of the city’s Christian population — were killed by the bomb.

For right now, let’s sidestep the whole debate over whether the bombing was morally justified, and just ask this question: how many of you even knew this part of the story? And if not, why not?  These are Our People; how could we just not know?  Do we believe in the unity of Christ’s body, or don’t we?

No, the story we tell is how many American lives were saved by dropping those two bombs.  Many of those American lives would also have been Christians, it’s true.  But let’s be honest: we’re not thinking about how many brother Christians we saved; we’re thinking about how many Americans we saved.  Telling, isn’t it?

Of course, where would we have heard this part of the story?  Who would have told us?  We can’t expect government-funded American schools to tell the story of Our People honestly.  But what about the churches? 

When the events of 1945 are discussed in the town square of the New Jerusalem, do you really think they’ll still tell the story the way we do?  Which will be more important: that America won the war with that bomb and saved countless American lives, or that America killed almost 10,000 Christians, blew up the biggest church in East Asia, and utterly destroyed the largest Christian community in the whole Orient?

MacArthur’s call for Christian missionaries after the war certainly takes on a peculiar irony, doesn’t it?

While the Nagasaki example is difficult for us to hear, there isn’t really anything we can do about it.  So let’s also look at another, more current, example.  However you might feel about the war in Iraq, one of the unintended consequences of the disorder has been a wave of violence against Iraqi Christians.  American officials have been largely unwilling to do anything about this, for fear of alienating the Muslim majority—one of the rare continuities in policy between the Bush and Obama administrations — and both these men consider themselves Christians.

Again, this is the sort of thing we ought to know about—and we don’t.  Why not?

If your instinctive response to this news is to think that you should call your congressman: isn’t there something else you want to do first?  Isn’t there another, more powerful Ruler to whom you should address your first appeal?  Let’s do that now:

Prayer

Lord God, we pray every week for our persecuted brothers around the world, but right now we would like to specifically lift up our Iraqi brothers and sisters before you.  They are suffering from persecution by Arabs and Kurds, Shi’ites and Sunnis alike.  They are suffering from neglect by America.  Many of them are actually worse off now than they were under Saddam Hussein.  We ask you to intervene on their behalf.  Give them shelter from their enemies; give them the hearts of their neighbors; give them wise government so that they might live a quiet and peaceable life; and above all, give them Iraq as a discipled Christian nation.  Finally Lord, we ask that for as long as America remains a presence in their country, our actions would work for these things rather than against them.

Communion

As we go into communion, remember that this is a celebration of our union with Christ and with all His people.  Those who eat and drink Christ at His table are Our People—wherever they may be in the world.

[Communion Observance]

Charge

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 river flows from under the throne of God, 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.

I again had the privilege of standing in for Bob Pickering as a Sunday School teacher this week. My thanks to Bob for the opportunity; I had a very good time preparing and delivering these two lessons in Leviticus. The outline for this week’s lesson follows, and you can also download the audio recording here.

Leviticus 11: Clean and Unclean Animals

Introduction

• Last week, we saw how paying attention to the weird parts in the chapter could pay off, and it’s possible to find answers to the questions that we have. This week, there will be some questions that we don’t have answers to, but we hunger and thirst for righteousness, so we need to continue to pay attention to the details.
• Last week, we saw how important it is for a priest to present the pictures and symbols that God gives him to present. This applies particularly to the sons of Aaron as the priests of Israel, but it applies at a lesser level to the entire nation as a whole, because Israel is a priestly nation, called to represent God to the Gentiles.

Observe the Chapter
Note the following details

• Among ‘animals’, cloven hoof and cud-chewing are ‘clean;’ others are ‘unclean.’
• In the water, fins and scales ‘you may eat’; others are ‘abomination.’
• Of the birds, specified birds are ‘an abomination.’
• Of the bugs, all those that fly/creep are an abomination; ‘yet you may eat those that creep but also hop’

Explanations that don’t work

• Health – there may be health ramifications here, but (for example) carp is as much a scavenger as eagle or lobster.  Also, if it’s about health, why does God dislike later refuse to give the Gentile nations the same guidance?  Does God just dislike the Gentiles?
• Something inherently disgusting about these particular animals — no. God will tell us in the NT that this can’t be (see Act 10-11), but also note that the eagle is an abomination and the lion is unclean, for example. Yet God uses the eagle favorably (Isa. 40:31, Ezek. 10:14), and Jesus is the Lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev. 5:5)

So what is it?

• As with the incense and other obligations of the preceding chapter, the issue is symbolic; the priestly nation is set apart to God and eats only the food that is set apart for it.
• Note the parallels between the language of 10:3 and 11:44-45.  God takes this matter very seriously.
• Note that ‘holy’ does not mean ‘morally righteous.’  It means ‘separate, set apart.’  (We equate holiness with moral righteousness because in order to be set apart to God’s service, a person must be morally righteous.  But there’s more to being set apart than just morality.)  Israel is set apart as a nation of priests to the world; part of her separateness has to do with the ritual pictures that she enacts for the world — including what she eats and doesn’t eat.

So what is it a symbol of? (Acts 10-11)
No formal explanation of the vision is given, but notice…

• the vision’s effect on Peter — he goes
• how Peter speaks with Cornelius (10:28-29) and how he begins his sermon (10:34)
• how Peter recounts the vision in detail in his defense to his fellow Jews (11:4-10)
• Note the effect of his defense on the brethren in Jerusalem (11:18)

Why did the vision have these effects?

• Biblical symbolism draws a parallel between people and animals (the whole sacrificial system is based on this; it’s why a sheep can be killed to atone for the sins of a man)
• The clean animals symbolize the clean nation, Israel
• the unclean animals symbolize the unclean Gentile nations
• When God tells Peter to eat unclean animals, and rebukes him for calling them unclean or common, God is abolishing the division between clean and unclean food, which also abolishes the division between Israel (which ate only clean food) and Gentiles (which ate unclean food).

How does the symbolism work?

That is, what is it about cloven hooves and chewing cud that makes an animal symbolize Israel, and what is it about a solid hoof (or no hoof), and not chewing the cud, that symbolizes the Gentile nations?  What is it about having fins and scales that symbolizes Israel, and what is it about lacking those things that symbolizes Gentile nations?  And so on.

Short answer is we don’t know.  If you want to read some ideas on this, James Jordan’s Through New Eyes has some provocative suggestions (see pp.101-102).  These are things that would be difficult to prove for certain, and we may never know.  Or God may grant us wisdom, so we can understand.

Applications
Hermenteutical: Attend to the details.  Understanding the weird things in the Bible requires wisdom from God, an dif He doesn’t give it, we won’t have it.  Sometimes He blesses us with an answer right away; other times He rewards diligent study; and of course there are some things we may never know.  “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled.”  We aren’t required to have all the answers right now, and it’s okay if we don’t.  We are required to study the Word diligently, and to trust God to reward our efforts with what we need to know right now.

Daily living: Israel was required to do certain things as a priestly nation in order to maintain her separateness and to show the world the picture God prescribed.  We are not Israel, and are not under the same requirements.  However, we are the Church, and as members of the Church we are priests also (Rev. 5:9-10).  We have our own requirements, and we must take ours as seriously as Israel was supposed to take hers.

The below is an outline of the Sunday School lesson I had the privilege of teaching yesterday.  Fully written out, it would make a decent article.  I hope to have time in the near future.  In the meantime, though, here’s the skeleton:

Leviticus 10: How Priests Must Behave

Introduction

There’s some strange stuff in this chapter.  We need to pay very careful attention to the details, or we will miss what’s happening here – and there’s a point here that’s vital to us in the church.

The key to dealing with strange stuff in the Bible is to remember that if we had the mind of Christ, it wouldn’t be strange.  So when we read something and think “That’s weird…” that means we have an opportunity to be conformed to the mind of Christ in that area.  Rather than overlooking or ignoring the weirdness, we need to pay particular attention to it.  “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled.”

Narrate the chapter

Highlights:

1. “strange fire”
2. no mourning, no leaving the tabernacle
3. instructions to Aaron
4. burning the goat without eating

What’s happening?

Key: God communicates to His people in symbols, in pictures as well as words.  The Priest is responsible for making the pictures, and God takes it seriously if he messes up the picture, because that’s attributing to God an image that He didn’t design.   The priest getting the ritual wrong is like the prophet saying “Thus says the Lord…” when God hasn’t said any such thing – it’s that serious.

1. “Strange Fire”
   1. Tabernacle is a portable mountain of God
   2. God’s fire on the mountain
   3. They introduced strange fire to the mountain, probably through using common incense instead of the holy incense (cf. Ex. 30:34-38)
2. No mourning, no leaving
   1. High Priest can’t tear his clothes; he can’t mourn for what God did
   2. Aaron can’t leave because he’s being consecrated (i.e., spending time on the mountain with God) (cf. ch. 9)
3. Instructions to Aaron
   1. Why does God say these things at this time?
4. The sin offering goat
   1. Priest is to eat from the sin offering (Lev. 6:24-30)
   2. In this specific case, it’s the day of Atonement sin offering (Lev. 16)
   3. Aaron doesn’t eat it, because he can’t do it with a right heart; he sends the meat he would have eaten to be burned.
   4. Moses accepts this reason.

Application

We tend to read this kind of thing and think, “Yikes!  Getting killed for messing up some ritual requirement!  Well, thank God we’re not under the Law and we don’t have to worry about that.”  Not so fast…

What did God do to the Corinthians when they profaned the Lord’s Table? (1 Cor. 11:17-34, especially vv. 29-30)

Is that the only place we act as priests?  No – Baptism is another ritual required of us, for starters.  We also act as priests in the church meeting, as Hebrews teaches.  So we need to make a serious investigation of what God requires of us, lest we wind up playing the part of Uzza (1Chron. 13:10).

As many of you know, I have been pastoring a church in Hemet, CA for six years.  In April of this year, the Lord called Kimberly and me to Denver.  We completed the move this last week, and today I preach my final sermon as pastor of Fellowship Community Chapel.  Below is an excerpt.

The author of Hebrews makes a fairly involved argument through the book, and the major point is that the Hebrew Christians ought not to abandon their position as priestly worshippers in God’s heavenly sanctuary and return to the inferior service of the earthly sanctuary.  In his closing instructions, he focuses this admonition still further by turning their attention to the elders who rule over them in the church.  They must remember and obey these people, who have taught them in the past, who watch out for their souls in the present, and who must yet give account to God for them in the future.

You must also obey this principle today, because human nature hasn’t changed in the last 2000 years, and you need someone to watch out for your souls just as much as the Hebrew Christians did then.  So you also need to obey the rulers God has set over you.

In order to have rulers to obey, you have to have rulers.  In order for them to give account to God for your souls, they must know that you’re there.  So you don’t just get to float anonymously from church to church, sitting in the back row and never speaking to anyone who matters.  You can’t say, “My ruler is Pastor X,” if Pastor X doesn’t even know you’re there.

That is a serious temptation, because it’s very convenient.  If the rulers don’t know you’re there, they will never give you commands to obey.  You can claim that you’re in submission to them, but in reality, you’re in submission to no one at all.  And don’t tell yourself, “I’m in submission to God.”  He’s telling you to be in submission to church leadership, and if you’re disobeying that command, you’re not in submission to Him either.

So the first part of the charge is to go and find yourself some rulers—faithful, qualified shepherds who will teach you the Word of God and watch out for your souls.  Having found those rulers, you will need to submit to the requirements necessary to come under their authority.

I have watched out for your souls for six years, and God is now moving me to a place where I can’t continue to do that in the same way.  You will always be my friends, and I will always help you as best I can.  But I’m not a regular, weekly presence in your lives anymore, and to shepherd you well, I would need to be.

We never drew up formal membership papers or anything like that, but there was never any doubt in your mind or mine that we were part of this church together.  I always knew which people I would have to give account to God for, and you always knew who your pastor was.

Now, you need to make that arrangement with a new set of elders, and this means that you will need to join a church.  In a church larger than ours, there probably will be formal membership arrangements—new members’ classes to go to, agreements to sign, all that.  This kind of thing is necessary in a larger group, so the elders of that church know who they’re responsible for, and so that you know who you must obey.

So the second part of the charge is this: Do not mutter to yourself, “We never had to do this with Tim.”  God is taking you to a different set of rulers, and the requirements will be different.  Submit to the requirements, and do it gracefully and willingly, so that they may give account for you with joy and not with grief, because that would be unprofitable for you.

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.