Sheep lie down when they are well fed (cf. Psalm 23:2); they are more likely to be restless when they are hungry. “Feed my sheep,” Jesus commanded Peter (John 21); and many sheep are unfed. If you wish to deepen the worship of the people of God, above all deepen their grasp of his ineffable majesty in his person and in all his works.
Read more of D A Carson’s thoughts on worship here
Albert Mohler has written an article discussing a recent study, which found that the predominant ‘religion’ of American teenagers is ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’. This view ‘consists of beliefs like these: 1. “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.” 2. “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.” 3. “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.” 4. “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.” 5. “Good people go to heaven when they die.”‘
While this study focused on the views of teeneagers, the researchers behind it suggested that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the most common ‘religious’ view of all Americans, and has infact been very influential in the Christian church. Consider this quote:
“Other more accomplished scholars in these areas will have to examine and evaluate these possibilities in greater depth. But we can say here that we have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually [only] tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but is rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”They argue that this distortion of Christianity has taken root not only in the minds of individuals, but also “within the structures of at least some Christian organizations and institutions.”
How can you tell? “The language, and therefore experience, of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, . . . and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United States at the very least, to be supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward.”
Does this mean that America is becoming more secularized? Not necessarily. These researchers assert that Christianity is either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.
Thanks to laura for the link.
I had meant to return to my predestination series today, but something else came up, so you’ll all just have to wait in eager anticipation :). I was talking with my Dad about my previous post on the Easter service at Saddleback Church. He asked if it was specifically checking a box that I find problematic, or would raising a hand, ‘going forward’, praying a prayer, etc, all fall into the same category. I think this is an important question, because it gets to the heart of an important question: ‘what do we do with people who profess faith?’
Let me first respond to the immediate question. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with any of these things–that is to say, one is not (necessarily) sinning by employing any of these methods. The problem is that such things are liable to cause the individual to put his or her confidence in the wrong place. I just read of a Christian who was talking with a coworker about Christianity. The coworker said he had ‘prayed a prayer’ at one point, and he figured he had his bases covered because of it. Who knows how many others there may be in the same situation? It is important that we don’t give people a false sense of security. One of the idiosyncracies of Scottish church circles I have experienced in our time here is the idea of questioning one’s salvation. There is a history going back several hundred years in Scotland of people seriously doubting their own salvation–often for very long periods of time. Occasionally it has gotten to the point that people have said you aren’t really saved unless you question your salvation. This is a strange concept to an American mind, yet I have to believe that Americans, for the most part, suffer from the opposite problem–we are far too assured of our own salvation. The reason for this, to a large extent, is that we are placing our assurance in the wrong place. If asked how we know we are Christians, many of us would answer that we remember praying the ’sinner’s prayer’. The Bible, however, is clear that we are saved by the grace of Christ, and so we need to look to this grace for our assurance of salvation, not to something we have done. The tendency to place our confidence in ourselves is deeply rooted within us; we have inherited it all the way back from Adam and Eve. The church must therefore be careful to guard against our natural inclination, and emphasise instead God’s grace in ever aspect of conversion. For this reason, though I don’t think it is necessarily sinful to ask people to check a box or ‘come forward’, I can’t imagine a situation in which I would (will) do it myself.
The question may then legitimately be asked, ‘what should we do with those who profess faith?’ Along with the tendancy to trust in our own effort comes the tendancy to think we know better than God, and to therefore invent methods when he has already established his own. On the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, when they became aware of their sin through Peter’s preaching, the crowd asked ‘”what shall we do???? And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized”‘. When Philip explains the gospel to the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8 and he believes, he is immediately baptised. In Acts 10, when Peter preaches to the household of Cornelius, they believe and the Holy Spirit came upon them, and Peter ‘commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ’. I could point out other examples, but the point is clear: the Bible says that those who profess faith are to be baptised. Not surprisingly, God’s ordained method is more effective than checking a box, or whatever. Anyone who is at all familiar with church life knows that following up with those who profess faith is difficult, to say the least. Yet baptism does so much more than checking a card, etc. Checking a box adds another tally to a database; baptism places the individual in the church. He or she is then under the spiritual care and discipline of the elders, who can look after the new convert to ensure that they are growing in their faith. This is, of course, more difficult than the ‘check the box’ method: it will take more time and people, and quite frankly, it won’t work in a church of several thousand people. But the command of Jesus to his church is to make disciples of all nations, not to increase our market share.
We should probably note here that there are also many people who grow up in a Christian home and never remember a time that they didn’t believe in Jesus. As a paedobaptist, I believe that such people should properly have been baptised as infants (as opposed to ‘dedicated’, another method we have made up yet which lacks any biblical warrant), and are therefore non-communing memebers of the church–that is, they are a part of the people of God, but they do not receive the Lord’s Supper. When they are able to profess faith in Christ they then begin celebrating Communion with the rest of the family of which they have been a part from birth.
It would be interesting to do a study of conversions in the New Testament. I suspect that much of what has become standard in the evangelical church would be quite foreign to the early church. There is no doubt that the ’sinner’s prayer’, practically sacrosanct to us, is conspicuously absent from the Bible.
Soooo, I don’t really know what to say to sum this all up…Let’s look to the Bible to establish our church practice, and when the Bible is silent, let’s proceed on biblical principles, keeping in mind that our hearts are idol factories, always wanting to place our confidence in ourselves. Let’s avoid adopting the passing wisdom of this age, and avoid those churches which have become infatuated with it. Above all let’s strive to give our Lord the glory for what he has done, and stay away from this silly business of telling each other how many people were ’saved’ at our services.
This is so gross I don’t really know where to begin. Pastors.com, Rick Warren’s ministry site, is reporting that “4,000 [were] saved during Saddleback’s Easter services”.
Rick’s Easter sermon, according to this story (and also to my father-in-law, who was one of literally 45,000 who attended Saddleback on Easter), was based not on the enduring Word of God, but on his own best-selling self-help book. Rick told worshippers, “When there is no vision in your life, you drift…You just kind of drift through life, bouncing around. God didn’t mean for you to drift. He doesn’t want you to waste your life. You were made for a purpose. He wants you to have direction and meaning and significance.???
Hopefully you will have noticed that this message is entirely unChristian. Rick’s protrayal of God makes God exist for the benefit of human beings, rather than the other way around. But what is even more appalling in this report from Pastors.com is the declaration that the 4,000 people who checked a box are now saved. First off, there’s absolutely nothing in the Bible that would even point to the idea of having people check such a box (or raise their hand, stand up, whatever). Secondly, there is no indication in the Bible that anything we do can save us, or assure us that we are saved. Actually, the exact opposite is what is made clear in Scripture.
Now, some will surely say that no one believes that checking a box will save anyone. I would reply by saying, first of all, that (hopefully) no Christian would believe that, but there are likely many people who checked a box and, being completely ignorant of the Bible’s teaching (this is not to insult them; they are, after all, new Christians), are now assured that they are saved. Secondly, if you read the article on pastors.com, it is not all made clear that checking a box isn’t what saves someone.
In fact, the whole article is brazenly audacious. Why would any church decide it is a good idea to broadcast the “fact” that 4,000 people were “saved” at its services? Are we really so self-serving or insecure that we have to make that sort of thing public knowledge? And what is the deal with Rick’s quazi-blasmphemous statement comparing the Easter weekend services at Saddleback to the never-repeatable salvation of 3,000 people in Acts 2 on the day of Penetcost? If we are going by Rick’s standard, he actually superceeded the Holy Spirit by 1,000 people.
I’m beginning to think that there is exactly one good thing about the consummeristic, market driven trend that is overtaking the church, with Rick Warren and a few others at the helm. This movement is all about giving people what they want, marketing a product to them just like every retailer in the world. A church that is proclaiming what it believes to be the Good News because that is what they are called to do will continue to do so regardless of the response, because (they believe) they are called to do so by God. However, if a church that judges success on consumer surveys is not pulling in the desired numbers, they will change their methods, or declare bankruptcy. This gives us the power to say, “No, thank you”, and have it mean something. It may not mean very much, but over time, it may make a difference. I’m not saying that everything Rick Warren says and does and writes is blasphemy. I’m not even saying that nothing he writes is helpful. I am saying that the movement (as a whole) he is leading is contrary to the Bible’s standards, and should be avoided. If next Easter only 20,000 people come to Saddleback (how ludicrous does that sound, only 20,000, and yet it would be less than half of the number that attended this year!) Rick and friends will take notice, and they will make changes. They might try to put on a better show the following year, but they might also return to the Bible to see if they’ve gone wrong. Or so we can hope.
I’m trying really hard not to be overly critical, but this type of thing really gets my blood boiling. It is a severe departure from the standards of the Bible, and yet it is not questioned by the church, but is rather the ideal many are striving to emulate. Thanks for reading my rant, please take a look at Tim Challies better written thoughts on the matter.
This is the third post in my series on predestination. Prerequisite reading can be found here.
Before continuing to defend the doctrine of predestination, I need to take a look at a couple background issues. The first issue has to do with the state of humankind after the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. This doctrine is commonly called ‘total depravity’, but I prefer the phrase ‘utter inability’. They both mean the same thing, so don’t let it throw you.
God created Adam and Eve in a state of perfection, and gave them authority and dominion over the rest of creation (Genesis 1:28-31). Everything they did was perfect, and they enjoyed perfect fellowship with God. After they ate of the fruit of the tree which God had prohibited, however, everything changed. Their relationship to the land, to each other, and to God was irretrievably corrupted. In Romans 5:12-21 (as elsewhere in the Bible), Paul teaches that through this sin, Adam plunged the entire human race into sin—he sinned on behalf of us all.
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Well, I seemed to get by with my first post on predestination without upsetting too many people. In that post I explained why Christians should attempt to understand what the Bible says about predestination (or, rather, why we shouldn’t avoid thinking about it). I’m now going to attempt to define predestination according to how it is used in the Bible. I really think that the meaning of the word is pretty obvious, and if you do too then I guess you can come back in a couple days. But just to make sure we’re all on the same page, I’m going to define it before moving on.
Before I do that though, I should make a qualification. It is possible to talk about predestination in three different senses. We could talk about cosmic predestination—God’s work in determining everything that comes to pass. I’m going to avoid this sense as much as possible. We could also talk about reprobation—God’s action in predestining some to death. Though I won’t be able to avoid this entirely, it will not be my primary focus. The third way the word predestination can be used is to describe God’s work in appointing some to eternal life. In this sense predestination and election are synonyms. This third sense will be what I have in mind in what follows.
Now that we have that under control, let’s take a look at what the Bible has to say about predestination. I’d like to first consider predestination as a general theme in the Bible. Out of all the people of earth, God selected the descendants of Abraham, the nation of Israel, to be a chosen people for himself. This he did for no other reason than because of his own freely given love (see, for instance, Deuteronomy 32:8-9 and Deuteronomy 4:37-39). Yet this general election of Israel did not save every individual Hebrew. The history of the Old Testament shows this in abundant clarity. Among the people of Abraham, whom God elected in a general way, he more specifically elected some individuals and rejected others.
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So I finished my essay on Calvin’s Doctrine of Predestination just in time to turn it in. I went considerably over the word limit, but what can you do when you’re up against the clock? Any who care to read it may do so here. It’s not a terribly inspiring essay, mostly because the assignment was to sketch Calvin’s view, not to set forth my own. Nevertheless, I am reasonably happy with how it turned out.
Ash has been after me to post something thought-provoking, and since this essay has been provoking many of my thoughts lately, I figured I’d post something on predestination. In fact, I think this will be the first in a series of posts on predestination.
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Ronald J. Sider has just published a book entitled Scandal Of The Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like The Rest Of The World?. An excerpt of his pook is available online. Here are some (staggering) quotes:
In 1968, the average church member gave 3.1 percent of their income—less than a third of a tithe. That figure dropped every year through 1990 and then recovered slightly to 2.66 percent—about one quarter of a tithe.
Even more interesting is what has happened to evangelical giving. The Ronsvalles compare the giving in seven typical mainline denominations (affiliated with the National Council of Churches) with the giving in eight evangelical denominations (with membership in the National Association of Evangelicals). In 1968 the eight evangelical denominations gave considerably more than the seven mainline denominations. While the mainline denominational members gave 3.3 percent of their income, evangelicals gave 6.15 percent. While this is significantly more, the evangelicals on average still gave less than two-thirds of a tithe. By 1985 mainline folk had dropped their giving to 2.85 percent of their income and evangelicals to 4.74 percent. By 2001, mainline members had recovered slightly to 3.17 percent, but evangelical giving kept dropping and was at a mere 4.27 percent.
As we got richer and richer, evangelicals chose to spend more and more on themselves and give a smaller and smaller percentage to the church. Today, on average, evangelicals in the U.S. give about two-fifths of a tithe.
In 2002, Barna discovered that only 6 percent of born-again adults tithed—a 50 percent decline from 2000, when 12 percent did. And in 2002, just 9 percent of Barna’s narrow class of evangelicals tithed.
I’ve been thinking for a while about suffering and how it relates to the Christian life. It is intriguing to me that Christ’s whole life on earth was one of suffering. I imagine the incarnation itself was a type of suffering - a self-emptying as Philippians 2 puts it. It’s something we can’t even begin to get our heads around. The second person of the Trinity humbled himself by becoming a man, a conglomeration of cells that grew into a wee baby in Mary’s womb. He was born, learned to walk, talk, read, play, and use human language to express the language of the Kingdom. That degree of accommodation to our human state is nearly unimaginable and we can only begin to understand it on this side of grace. But he was born to suffer and die, to provide a substitution, to make atonement for our sin - for something so big, so much a part of each of one of us, that we could never get beyond it, never make sin ‘right’. And so Christmas becomes more than just nativity sets and a baby in a manger ‘who no crying he makes’, but becomes the first sign of hope, the first step of the God-Man into human flesh and into the human situation and, into a life of suffering.
And so I wonder what our response to the incarnation is this Christmas. Is it just another year where we read the story from Luke? Is it full of images of cherub-looking Jesus with Mary and Joseph surrounding him, serene and in awe and completely aware (by the expressions on their nativity set faces) of whom this baby really is? Is your image of Jesus’ birth static or do you begin to see the awe of God emptying himself to utterly accommodate himself to a depraved human race?
And what is our practical response? There’s been some talk around the blogosphere about suffering. People are afraid to suffer. People don’t want to suffer. People avoid suffering. People figure suffering is what old people do when they lose their lifetime mate, their hearing or their health. And yet, the gospel of this Christ - who humbled himself to be born and then killed, and resurrected to redeem his people - is one of suffering. Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Suffering is a given; it’s part of the package of being a Christian; it isn’t optional. The Christian life is a continual denial of self - of pride, ambition, relationships, status, reputation, and even the good things that aren’t centred on Christ. And it’s a daily thing. It is a living self-sacrificially to our mate, our family, our friends, co-workers, and colleagues. Sure they don’t *deserve* our sacrificial treatment we might say, but how much more do we not deserve Christ’s substitionary death and his perfect righteousness imputed to our account? And remember, it’s not suffering for the sake of suffering, but a mark of belonging to Christ. In our world where everything is tainted by sin, those who seek to live a holy life will inevitably suffer.
Suffering brings us closer to Christ. Paul says that he counts everything a loss except for knowing Christ and desires “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death” (Philippians 3:10) and Peter says, “But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). Suffering helps transform us into looking more like Christ than when we live in comfort and ease. Paul writes in Romans 5:1-5: “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” We not only praise God because of the fact that we now (amazingly!) have access to God through his grace, but Paul notes we are to rejoice (and that he did rejoice) in the present suffering because it produces in us more of the character of Christ; moreover, it gives us hope and comfort through the work of the Holy Spirit.
I think we need to examine our lives and add suffering as a criteria to our introspective list. Do we suffer? Frankly, being teased that you’re a Christian is hardly suffering. Most of us in the West have become lazy Christians and have ignored the prominence of suffering in the Bible. So what do we do about it? How can we live our lives sacrificially, where we take up our cross daily? The answer’s going to be different for different people and it may be countless little things rather than one huge decision. For some it may mean sacrificially giving more money than is ‘necessary’ or ‘comfortable’ to the worldwide Church in parts of the world where people are ill-equipped due to their poverty. For some it may mean selling their house and moving to the inner city to be by people who suffer from an utter loss of hope. For others, it may mean researching where one buys their products and ensuring their money is not going to support child labour or deforestation. But whatever form the outworking of living sacrificially takes, it must take some practical form, for the command to ‘take up your cross’ is not a suggestion but a command. And as Christ, the Word who was present and active in creation was made flesh and dwelt among us and who was born to suffer and die, as Christians (”little Christs”) should not our lives too reflect a tiny smidgeon of a life lived for others, of a life seeking to come alongside those who suffer, of a life that seeks to always be vulnerable and teachable rather than simply comfortable?
This afternoon, after my normal full day of lectures I was required to attend a biannual lecture on evangelism. The lecture was to focus on youth evangelism, and was delivered by ‘Iver’, who, as everyone who’s anyone knows, is the minister of the Free Church in Stornoway. His lecture was entitled…
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