A newsletter came to our church mailbox, The Northwest Baptist (January-March, 2020), led by a front page by Bob Straughan with the title, “Hyper-repentance vs. Easy Prayerism Contrasted,” and its first lines:

I have written quite a lot over the years cheap shallow evangelism aka “easy prayerism.”  But I have said less about hyper-repentance aka “Lordship salvation.” . . . .  [I]t is fair to say that at least for some Independent Baptists, their way of making sure they are not practicing Hyles’ type shallow evangelism, (sic) is to overreact and embrace at least to some extent hyper-repentance.

Straughan describes this “hyper-repentance,” a term I’ve never heard, to be “Lordship salvation.”  I don’t comprehend the opposition to the inclusion of Lordship on the front end with the gospel.  Jesus is the Christ.  Someone must believe Jesus is the Christ to have eternal life.  Lordship is definitional to “the Christ.”  He is the Messiah, the King, the Lord.  People have to relinquish to that in order to be saved.  Not doing so is rebellion against Jesus Christ.  That isn’t salvation.  Straughan and all those like him do great damage and undermine the gospel with such writing.  Then Mike Haxton, who publishes the paper, uses it for such eternally harmful means.  It is conspiracy of the worst possible kind.  It distorts the gospel.

Straughan also says:

With the Hyper-repentance (sic) people there is this, “quest”, (sic) for true salvation.  Which is why you see so many people repeatedly going forward for salvation. (sic)

Is “quest” a technical term used by apparent “Hyper-repentance people”?  Remember, these are people who say belief in Lordship of Christ is part of believing in Christ.  I had not heard of these people or their favor for the word “quest.” Pack your bags, we’re going on a quest for true salvation, folks.  It’s as if men who support Jesus’ Lordship are inventing something.

What about “going forward” that Straughan mentions?   In his assessment, “going forward” is worth associating with true salvation, but Lordship is supposed to be excluded.  Someone doesn’t need to believe Jesus is his Lord, but he does “go forward.”  In the article, most times Straughan describes people being saved, he says they “go forward.”  Scripture says nothing about “going forward” as a part of biblical salvation.

I don’t know anyone I would call a “hyper-repentance” person.   I have not seen hyper-repentance.  It’s a term, maybe invented by Straughan as a pejorative.  It’s not helpful.  Who is hyper-repentance?He says pro-Lordship are hyper repentance.  There are many no repentance or false repentance people.  I estimate that might represent 90% of professing Baptists today.

There is only Lordship salvation.  No Lordship, no salvation.  That isn’t hyper anything.  That is salvation.  To call “Lordship” hyper is evil.  Lordship salvation is

• not hyper repentance.
• not a pendulum swing.
• biblical salvation.
• not a quest.
• not accomplished by going forward.
• not a way of making sure not to practice Hyles type shallow evangelism.
• actual repentance.
• not based on a concern to see more decisions made by people going forward.
• not related to being a Calvinist.

When I talk to other people here in the San Francisco Bay Area, I sometimes ask if they will explain what they believe.  For instance, if Buddhism is true and helpful, perhaps a Buddhist could explain it for my benefit.  I’d like to know why I should become one.  Along the same line, if being woke is the best thinking and behavior, could the woke people help me understand in order to become woke?

The awakening of wokeness relates to social consciousness.  Before you weren’t, but now you’re conscious of white privilege, racial inequality, and economic injustice.  Now you’re apparently no longer asleep to those.  Consciousness doesn’t need to offer any real solutions, just display consciousness of their existence.  Don’t deny it.  Admit it.  Does that help?  It doesn’t help anyone, but it appears to care.

The Pharisees became masters of what today would be a photo opportunity, to be seen of men.  Jesus described it in Matthew 6:5:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

Lady Justice stands blindfolded with scales in her outstretched right hand and a sword in her left.  She was introduced by the Roman emperor Augustus, but the concepts communicated in allegory through her imagery reflect teachings of scripture.  The blindfold portrays impartiality (Leviticus 19:15), the sword the judgment of evil doing (Romans 13:4), and the scales represent justice itself (Proverbs 11:1).

Scales are for weighing and Lady Justice holds an old style balance scale.  It’s a beam with a fulcrum in the center and identical pans on each end to hold the weight.  Justice meant the punishment fit the crime, the Latin lex talionis, equal retribution, which in the Old Testament was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Exodus 21:24).  Justice is represented by equal weights on each side of the fulcrum, what Solomon called a “just weight and balance” (Proverbs 16:11).  A common way to rip someone off was to tip the scale on one side, what became known as “putting your thumb on the scale.”  God asks His people (Micah 6:11):  “Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights?”

Weight still represents value.  Packaging and labeling includes weight.  The more pounds and ounces, the greater the value.  The Latin word, gravitas, means, “weight or heavy.”  The English “gravity” comes from it.  The Romans used the word to connote value and seriousness.  We still say we “weigh” the sides of an important decision.  Commodities still trade by weight:  corn, beans, oats, wheat, cotton, sugar, copper, lead, gold, silver, and platinum.

The two sides on the scale constitute a trade.  You give me this and I give you that.  Apples to apples.  Oranges to oranges.  All this thinking we got from God.  It comes from Him and it is in scripture.  It is foundational to everything right from the start.  Eat the tree, one side.  Death, the other side.  Before eating the tree, think about the punishment of death.  It is a trade.

Right now we have the coronavirus.  Quarantine to stop the disease is on one side and the destruction of the economy is on the other.  It is a trade.  It isn’t as important as this one spoken by Jesus in Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

In making that trade, Jesus brings other consistent language, such as ‘counting the cost’ (Luke 14:28).  When Jesus explains the gospel in His sermon in Matthew 5, He says, you are poor, but you inherit the earth.  You mourn, but you are comforted.  You hunger and thirst, but you are filled.  You are persecuted, reviled, and have all manner of evil said against you falsely, but yours is the kingdom of heaven.  In other teaching in Matthew 13, Jesus says, you give up everything to buy a field, because you know there is a treasure buried in it.  And you sell everything you have to buy one pearl.  The treasure and the pearl are salvation.

In many various ways, Jesus preached to trade this life for an eternal one.  If you hang on to this life, he said you will lose everything in the end.  It would be better to give up your sight in one eye than to end up with both eyes but in eternal hell fire, Jesus says someplace else.  Rather than offend one of these little ones, which is to cause one of them to never be eternally saved, it would be better to tie a giant millstone around your neck and throw yourself into deep water.

In describing the trade, the Apostle Paul said that he had to count as dung the best of everything he did, that he might win Christ (Philippians 3:8).  He had been putting his thumb on the scale of this life and giving himself a deceitful weight.  This trade was real.  It wasn’t Paul fooling himself into thinking his life before was dung.  It was right to count it as dung, especially for what he calls “the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).

The Apostle Paul writes one of the greatest expressions of trade for all time and eternity in 2 Corinthians 5:21:

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

We know sin and Jesus knows no sin.  The Lord Jesus is made sin so that we might be made righteousness.  We trade sin for righteousness by faith.  Without Jesus’ righteousness, we trade sin for death now and hell in the end.

All the Christian life is a trade.  Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:58 that your labor is not in vain in Christ.  Why?  “Vain” is empty.  Labor in Christ on the other hand is not vain.

Paul commanded the church at Ephesus, “Walk circumspectly. . . redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:15-16).  Redeeming means making a better trade.  Stop trading something valuable for something worthless.  Every aspect of life is trading and the following will explore adult children and their parents as a paradigm.

My parents live with me.  I am an adult child.  How much value do my parents bring to me?  In my father’s present state, I would estimate that he asks at least twenty times a day where my mom is.  That’s just one very small example.  There are many more of those, but when he does ask, every time I tell him one of the only two places she could be, her room or the bathroom.  It’s not his fault.  It’s a disease.  What’s the trade here?  What do I get?  I value my parents.  God values my honoring my parents.

God commands, obey and honor your parents.  If I love God, I keep His commandments.  That is some of that labor that is not in vain in Him.  That is redeeming the time.  My parents themselves are more valuable to me than the alternative.

Maybe for some of you reading here, or you know someone who might read this, you would give up your parents for your rock/pop music.  You can’t give up the latter.  You can’t.  You won’t.  That’s how little you value them, care about or for them.  They want you to stop certain behavior, but you would rather keep those activities, none of which are needed to please God, rather than keep your parents.  You can’t give them up, but you are very willing to toss your parents.

Anything that you value more than God is an idol.  You can’t have the world and the Lord Jesus Christ.  That’s a trade.  Those are mutually exclusive.  But what about some temporal thing that you value more than your parents?   Paul said that he had to count his former life as dung.  He couldn’t keep both lives.  One of them he had to give up.  What you value is expressed by means of a trade.  What you keep or get in that trade is what you really value.

What is empathy?  For awhile I’ve understood empathy only in contrast with sympathy.  I’ve just assumed that empathy is an attempt to identify with or feel someone else’s experience or feelings that I haven’t had or don’t have.  With sympathy, I’ve had the same experience or feeling.  I could say, I know what you feel.  I’ve talked about that with the Lord Jesus Christ as our high priest, “touched with the feeling of our infirmities” and “tempted in all points as we are” (Hebrews 4:15).

It never occurred to me that empathy itself might be more of a social construct, a postmodern invention to justify feelings as an argument.  It’s not wrong to feel for someone.  This would be to obey Romans 12:15:  “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.”  However, scripture also says, “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying” (Proverbs 19:18).   “Let not thy soul spare for his crying” stands up against “weep with them that weep.”  Proverbs 19:18 could be called an ancient description of “emotional blackmail,” where a child uses feelings or emotions to manipulate his parents.

Kevin DeYoung writes:

One of the marks of the confusion of our age is that we have come to value feeling the right thing over doing the right thing. 

That actually may be giving the current mood too much credit. It would be nearer the truth to say we value professing to feel the right thing over doing the right thing. We live in an age of sentimentality where feeling the joys, or particularly the pains, of another (or at least expressing that we do) is considered virtuous in itself.

In a previous era, someone might get away with saying and was right to say to another person, “I don’t care how you feel,” when that person was not doing the right thing.  Someone also would have been credited with love for a loving deed for a person rather than the expression that made a person “feel better.”

Empathy itself only recently arose in vocabulary.  Susan Lanzoni writes in The Atlantic:

The English word “empathy” came into being only about a century ago as a translation for the German psychological term Einfühlung, literally meaning “feeling-in.” English-speaking psychologists suggested a handful of other translations for the word, including “animation,” “play,” “aesthetic sympathy,” and “semblance.” But in 1908 two psychologists from Cornell and the University of Cambridge suggested “empathy” for Einfühlung, drawing on the Greek “em” for “in” and “pathos” for “feeling,” and it stuck.   At the time the term was coined, empathy was not primarily a means to feel another person’s emotion, but the very opposite: To have empathy, in the early 1900s, was to enliven an object, or to project one’s own imagined feelings onto the world.

If empathy was scriptural, then it shouldn’t be new.  Since it is new, believers should ask, “Why is it new?”  And then, “if empathy is new, should it be treated as a kind of Christian virtue or necessary component of the Christian life?”

I assert that empathy, a modern understanding of feelings and emotions, has been forced on scripture.  Truth can be found in empathy as a concept, but as a whole it is false.  Whatever is true in empathy does not justify empathy as a whole.  What the Bible says about all related issues of feelings and emotions, of course, is true.  Feelings can be found in scripture, but the priority and emphasis is on thinking and then deeds.  In his description of love, Jesus said (John 14:15), “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”  The Apostle John confirms that in 1 John 5:2, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments.”

What today is called “empathy,” C. S. Lewis called “the passion of pity,” especially since empathy wasn’t used by Christians as a scriptural virtue.  In The Great Divorce, Lewis writes:

Ye must distinguish. The action of Pity will live for ever: but the passion of Pity will not. The passion of pity, the pity we merely suffer, the ache that draws men to concede what should not be conceded and to flatter when they should speak truth, the pity that has cheated many a woman out of her virginity and many a statesman out of his honesty-that will die. It was used as a weapon by bad men against good ones: their weapon will be broken.

He continues later:

Using pity, other people’s pity, in the wrong way. We have all done it on earth, you know. Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity. You see, I know now. Even as a child you did it. Instead of saying you were sorry, you went and sulked in the attic . . . because you knew that sooner or later one of your sisters would say, ‘I can’t bear to think of him sitting up there alone, crying.’ You used their pity to blackmail them, and they gave in in the end.

Lewis says that this passion of pity, what we call empathy today, “can be used for a kind of blackmailing.”  People weren’t using the term “emotional blackmail” at that point, but that’s what he was describing in 1945.

John 11 presents a case of potential emotional blackmail rejected by the Lord Jesus Christ.  John 11:5-6 say:  “Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.  When he heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was.”  John says that Jesus’ purposeful delay was love.  Later in v. 32 John writes:  “Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.”  Weeping (v. 33), Mary blamed Jesus for her distressful situation.  It’s true.  John says that the love of Jesus caused it.  Despite emotional blackmail Jesus would have anticipated, Jesus distressed Mary and Martha anyway.

Scripture provides multiple other examples of attempts at emotional blackmail as a means of manipulation.  Jonah sulked under the shade of a little tree that God had actually given him out of true pity, and said to God (Jonah 4:9):  ” It is better for me to die than to live.”  God didn’t accede to Jonah’s feelings then.  He destroyed the tree, leaving Jonah in the heat without the shade, and rebuked Jonah for his actions.  Today someone would call this abuse by God, who didn’t care about Jonah’s feelings, that God lacked empathy with Jonah.

In 2 Samuel 6, Michal despised David’s celebration of the return of the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, and she says (v. 20), “How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!”  David didn’t apologize for hurting her feelings.  He did more of what bothered her, despite her offense, and the last verse of the chapter connects her wrong emotions to why from then on she never had a child.  God concurred.

In 2008 Lyle Dorsett wrote a biography of A. W. Tozer and he provides an account by Tozer’s wife of their marriage.  After Tozer died, his wife remarried and she testifies of the superior love of her new husband, that Tozer was devoted to God, but not her.  She was happier with her new husband.  Does that mean her new husband was more loving or a better lover of her than Tozer?  John Piper came to the defense of Tozer with the following:

Sean Lucas (in his review of the book) seems to say that Tozer’s wife’s greater happiness with her second husband implies Tozer’s “failure to love passionately his wife.” When she remarried after his death she said, “”I have never been happier in my life. . . “Aiden [A. W. Tozer] loved Jesus Christ, but Leonard Odam loves me.” Lucas may be right to infer from this sentence that Tozer loved his wife poorly. But Tozer’s wife’s statement does not prove it. 

We would need to be as penetrating in our analysis of her spiritual condition as we are of A. W. Tozer’s. Not feeling loved and not being loved are not the same. Jesus loved all people well. And many did not like the way he loved them. Was David’s zeal for the Lord imbalanced because his wife Michal despised him for it? Was Job’s devotion to the Lord inordinate because his wife urged him to curse God and die? Would Gomer be a reliable witness to Hosea’s devotion? I know nothing about Tozer’s wife. She may have been far more godly than he. Or maybe not. It would be helpful to know. 

Again I admit Lucas may be totally right. Tozer may have blown it at home. Lucas’ lessons from this possibility are wise. But I have seen so much emotional blackmail in my ministry I am jealous to raise a warning against it. Emotional blackmail happens when a person equates his or her emotional pain with another person’s failure to love. They aren’t the same. A person may love well and the beloved still feel hurt, and use the hurt to blackmail the lover into admitting guilt he or she does not have. Emotional blackmail says, “If I feel hurt by you, you are guilty.” There is no defense. The hurt person has become God. His emotion has become judge and jury. Truth does not matter. All that matters is the sovereign suffering of the aggrieved. It is above question. This emotional device is a great evil. I have seen it often in my three decades of ministry and I am eager to defend people who are being wrongly indicted by it. 

I am not saying Tozer’s wife did this. I am saying that the assumption that her feeling unloved equals her being unloved creates the atmosphere where emotional blackmail flourishes. 

Maybe Tozer loved his wife poorly. But his wife’s superior happiness with another man does not show it. Perhaps Lyle Dorsett’s new biography of Tozer, A Passion for God, penetrates to the bottom of this relationship.

Recent articles on empathy and emotional blackmail online and in print have revisited Piper’s statement.  Much attention is given to the third paragraph.  I wondered about the opinions of secular psychiatrists.  The most rudimentary form of emotional blackmail is performed by small children when they throw a tantrum when they don’t get their way with a parent.  A parent doesn’t love his child by acceding to the tantrum.  This is Proverbs 19:18 quoted above.  Easily someone could point to the fall of man in the garden to say that Adam abdicated to the emotions of Eve.  He didn’t  acquiesce to an intellectual argument, that we know (1 Tim 2:14).  I believe that part of the curse of sin is the attempt of the woman to rule her husband related to emotional blackmail, what Genesis 3:16 calls ‘her desire to her husband.’

Adult children often relitigate their upbringing to blackmail their parents.  Their parents loved them like Jesus loved, but their parents didn’t make them feel like they think they should have felt.  They didn’t feel love, because of parental expectation.  They aren’t talking about biblical love — in other words, all that their parents have done for them.  Feelings are the main basis of their complaint.  Parents used physical discipline for bad behavior. Their feelings are the main evidence now for emotional blackmail as they blame their new unsciptural behavior on those feelings.  Susan Reimer writes in 2007:

Somewhere along the parenting timeline, we stopped raising our children and started wooing them. Sometime over the past 30 years, we stopped demanding obedience from our children and started seeking their love and companionship. 

It was a serious tactical error because it shifted many of the powers in the parent-child relationship to the child. And one of those is the power to hurt.

Emotional blackmail is old, but instead of being rejected, it’s now growing in acceptance among evangelicals.  Evangelicalism itself is being blackmailed, very often afraid to invalidate the feelings of a growing number of millennials, who won’t endure criticism of their worldly and ungodly lives.  This has extended in many cases to toleration, for instance, of even homosexuality.  The fear of hurting someone’s feelings results in not loving them.

God judges love by action, not feelings.  God loves by what He does.  He gives and gives and gives.  The same God out of love rejects and judges sin.

Out of sentiment and often because of emotional blackmail. church leaders may not love.  They accept worldly and ungodly behavior and their blackmailers call this love.  Leaders who do love are said to be unloving, because of how their blackmailers feel.  The blackmailers don’t feel love when their behavior is not accepted.  Instead of looking at all that was done and comparing that to God’s love in scripture, they judge based on perceived empathy with their feelings.  If they don’t feel that empathy, they judge that as not loving.  They can find many others who will approve of their assessment, who feel the same way they do.

What has happened?  Professing Christians who emotionally blackmail are not relying on scripture for their belief and practice, perhaps from listening to false teaching by Christians and secular psychologists.  The world itself has also turned to empathy as a crucial practice and emotional blackmail as a valid argument.  Love can be almost whatever someone says that it is.  Feelings are the most deceptive replacement for actual love.  This has brought cataclysmic results to individuals and institutions, such as the family and the church.  The United States itself has been greatly damaged by this false means of judgment.

I understand how painful it is for leaders to be accused of not loving people.  They are loving according to scripture, but being accused by emotional blackmailers for not loving.  The blackmail itself is not love, as a reaction to what actually is love.  This is difficult to endure.  Remember the encouragement of Jesus, who said true believers will be reviled and falsely accused as a regular feature of the Christian life.

I join many others right now calling on professing believers to consider the place of empathy in Christianity and the reality of emotional blackmail.  Much bad practice arises from the influence of the perversion of love I’ve described.  Let us return to biblical love and repent of the fraudulent replacement of empathy.

Part One


Flow charts can be helpful for the proper comprehension of authority and responsibility.  They cannot replace what scripture says nor even completely picture what the Bible says about authority and responsibility.  There is always overlap that can’t be represented by a flow chart without contradiction.  This relates to the separation of church and state.

The state isn’t over the church and the church isn’t over the state, so in that way they are separate entities.  On the flow chart, they are distinct squares on an equal plane.  In certain ways, however, the church is over the state and the state is over the church.  This happens and it contradicts the flow chart.

Christ is the Head of the church.  He isn’t the Head of the state.  The state gets authority from God, but it doesn’t have Christ as its Head.  In that way the church is superior to the state.  God gives the church the keys of the kingdom, so that the church is dealing with eternal matters the state can’t even touch.  The church can tell a man to do things the state cannot.  The church can tell the governor of the state that he’s out of the church.  The governor is under church authority.  The church can bind him or loose him on earth and he can’t stop it.

The state can charge the church fees.  It can inspect a church building for a fire permit.  It can stop its church members on the highway and give them a ticket.  It can send its men to war, where for years they are never in church.  It can stop the church from meeting in the middle of the road or perform an outdoor meeting in which the congregation disturbs the neighbors.  It can order the church people from entering a condo development to evangelize.

The government has told our church not meet, because meeting will help spread the coronavirus and kill people.  I could argue that we can die of the disease if we want to.  How far does this go?  We could take up the hospital bed of someone who needs it and he dies instead.  Because of meeting, maybe our church sends ten people to the hospital, and that doesn’t hurt anyone else, but if every church sends ten people, that does hurt the state, so the state requires every church not to meet.  This is the very reason why government is needed and ordained by God.  It’s not just the church not meeting, but theaters, restaurants, stadiums, gymnasiums, funeral homes, and classrooms.  Churches are not singled out for not meeting.

As a pastor, I understanding being in a position where I know things that other people do not know.  I am in a position to know more things many times than other people.  I make decisions very often based on way more information than what other people could possibly have.  When the state said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I couldn’t tell them they were wrong.  I’m still not sure there weren’t.

Sabbath was sacrosanct in Israel.  It could not be missed.  Numbers 15:32-36 read:

And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day.  And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.  And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him.  And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.  And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the Lord commanded Moses.

This followed Exodus 31:15:

Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death.

Yet, Jesus said this in Matthew 12:11-12:

What man shall there be among you, that shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day, will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?  How much then is a man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days.

Similarly in Luke 14:5 He said:

Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?

An exception was made for an animal falling into a pit.  That didn’t mean that Israel stopped observing the Sabbath, but there were exceptions.  Hebrews 10:25 says, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together.”  That is God’s will for the church.  I believe it isn’t a command, because of situations just like we’re in.  Our manner is not forsaking ourselves together, but like with the animal in the hole on Sabbath, the pandemic could be an exception.

God has not ordained the church to overturn other human institutions.  Paul expounds on this in 1 Corinthians 7.  Peter writes in 1 Peter 2:13-16:

Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme; Or unto governors, as unto them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well.  For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men:  As free, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God.

Churches and Christians should not as a practice be revolutionaries, tend toward mutiny.  This isn’t compromising.  We aren’t about this world, but the next; not about this kingdom, but about the kingdom of Jesus Christ.  We don’t belong that much here.  There’s relatively little to fight for here.  Mostly we’ve already won.  We’re working for what’s coming in the next world and we don’t want people to be confused about that.  That’s how Jesus operated and His apostles.

Jesus said they’ll still hate you.  They will still persecute you, revile you, and say all manner of evil against you.  This complements the actual good citizenship of church members.  They aren’t bringing on this treatment through insubordination.  It comes through actual light shining, the preaching of the gospel, the confrontation of sin.  Our church does this a lot (read what Harvard says about our church and me).

As an American citizen, I believe in religious liberty.  As an American citizen, I would fight for religious liberty.  Americans did at the Alamo.  That is part of what it means to be a citizen of the United States.  Attorney General Barr has stood and spoken in that tradition.  His signal to churches in the United States gives an opportunity with wisdom to move faster than a state governor to come together in some fashion again.  However, the Apostle Paul didn’t have religious liberty, he didn’t fight for that.  Neither did Jesus.  That is a characteristic of the United States, which opens up into another longer discussion.  We should obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).  Is meeting during this pandemic obeying God rather than men?  We’re saying, No.  Others are saying, Yes.

An assembly is visible only.  You walk into a room and no one is in there, and you would be right to conclude there is no assembly.   An assembly is people and people are visible.  Let’s say that you had a group that met in the hotel banquet hall.  You saw someone at the park and he asked, “Are you in that group in the hotel banquet hall?”  You say, “No, I’m in the park.  I’m only  in that group when that group meets.”  Somehow he thinks you’re in the group, even when it isn’t meeting.  That’s a legitimate thought.  It’s also a scriptural thought.  Furthermore, the people who are the members of the assembly become so by means of, first, true conversion and, second, baptism by immersion into the assembly.  The ekklesia of the New Testament is more than just a gathering.  There are other dimensions to it beyond people in close proximity to one another, potentially not practicing social distancing.

I said this a few posts back:

A church must meet or gather.  Right now our church is not gathering, but there is the assumption that it will, just like there is the assumption that it will when it’s not meeting on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  Even when it isn’t meeting, the church, however, is still the church.  The church is the church when sermons are livestreamed on youtube.  That’s still our Assembly out there, the Congregacion of Tyndale’s New Testament.  Some might ask, is this church?  Yes, it is church, because it is still church even when it isn’t meeting.  This assumes still that the church will meet, and our church will meet.

Perhaps my former seminary professor, Thomas Strouse, directed the following to me in his newsletter, dated April 30:

Saucy states, “Ekklesia also designates the universal church. In this usage the concept of a physical assembly gives way to the spiritual unity of all believers in Christ. Ekklesia in this sense is not the assembly itself but rather those constituting it; they are the church whether actually assembled or not. This is clearly evident in the early persecution of the church at Jerusalem. Even when believers are scattered abroad and in their homes, they are ‘the church’ (Acts 8:1-3).” Robert L. Saucy, The Church in God’s Program (Chicago: Moody Press, 1972), pp. 16-17. He failed to recognize that they were baptized church members and became the assembly only when they assembled. In this verse, the term “church” is the figure of speech (“synecdoche”) wherein the whole represents the part (“church” = church member). . . . Shades of Ignatius!

Alright, so was I right in the post a week or so ago about that being the church out there listening in a livestream, even though they aren’t visibly assembled?  Does this justify universal church teaching?  Strouse is writing that it does.  Am I even saying anything different than Strouse himself is arguing against Saucy in that paragraph?  Maybe Strouse could use a better argument against Saucy’s point.

I don’t really want a conflict with Strouse.  I love Dr. Strouse.  We’re both local only in our ecclesiology.  We don’t see eye to eye in every aspect of it, but we both believe that the church is local only.  No one would think I’m less Baptist than he is, probably more than he. Strouse writes: “they were baptized church members and became the assembly only when they assembled.”  This is a case of reading something into the text.  There isn’t a single verse that says that the assembly is only the assembly when it is assembled.  I’d like to start with the passage to which he refers, starting in Acts 8:1.  It doesn’t help his point.

And Saul was consenting unto his death. And at that time there was a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles.

The church, all of its members except for the apostles, were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.  A church member was still the church, even when he was scattered.  He wasn’t invisible.  He was in Judea and in Samaria.  He wasn’t assembled in Jerusalem.  According to scripture, the church scattered is still the church.  Acts 8:3 then reads:

As for Saul, he made havock of the church, entering into every house, and haling men and women committed them to prison.

Here the apostle argues more explicitly than he had before done, for revering, and submitting to, magistracy, from this consideration, that such as really performed the duty of magistrates, would be enemies only to the vile actions of men, and would befriend and encourage the good; and so be a common blessing to society.

Every facet of God’s Word relates to authority and with God at the Top.  Even in the model prayer, the Lord Jesus Christ references the height of God the Father, “which art in heaven.”  The Lord Jesus sets Himself under the Father, which also doesn’t in any way diminish Him.  Just the opposite, He is elevated by His submission.  God the Father gave the Son a name above every name, because He had made Himself of no reputation (Philippians 2:5-8).

You know this verse?

But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right.

How can a person know how much to promise [to give in Faith Promise giving]?  By asking God what additional amount He wants to channel through you.  Then by means of His Word and a settled peace that comes with prayer, you will come to a conclusion with thanksgiving to Him [emphasis mine].

[T]he amount to be given is determined by God and revealed subjectively to the heart of the believer in response to faith and prayer. . . . Through prayer and inward impressions of the Holy Spirit, God is expected to reveal that specific amount to the believer.

[S]aying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush.

It must be understood, that the case here to be resolved is not, How an unhumbled, profane sinner, that never was convinced of sin and misery, should be brought to a settled peace of conscience. Their carnal peace must first be broken, and they must be so far humbled, as to find the want and worth of mercy, that Christ and his consolations may not seem contemptible in their eyes.

To help you to a settled peace, let me, first of all, urge upon you to obey the comprehensive command of our text—“Submit yourselves therefore to God.” And then, secondly, let me further press upon you to practice the other precepts which follow, such as, “Resist the devil.” “Draw near to God.” “Cleanse your hands.” “Purify your hearts.” “Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep.” And, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord.”

Submission is essential to salvation, therefore bow before the Lord at once! May the Lord bend that stubborn will and conquer that wayward heart. Yield yourselves to God and pray to be delivered from future rebellion. If you have submitted, do so yet more completely, for so shall you be known to be Christians when you submit yourselves to God. If you will not submit, your faith is a lie, your hope is a delusion, your prayer is an insult, your peace is presumption and your end will be despair!

If you are to have peace with God there must be war with Satan! You cannot rest in your spirit and know the peace which faith gives unless you wage war to the knife against every evil and against the patron and Prince of Evil, even Satan. Are you ready for this? You cannot have peace unless you are! . . . . Can you ask God to be at peace with you while your hands grasp your sins with loving embrace and are full of bribes, or are foul with lusts, or are smiting with the fist of anger and wrath? . . . . Then it is added, “Purify your hearts, you double-minded.” Can they do this? Assuredly not by themselves, but still, in order to have peace with God there must be so much purification of the heart that it shall no longer be double-minded.

The word “church” in the New Testament translates the Greek word ekklesia, which means “assembly” or “congregation,” how Tyndale translated it in his New Testament, which predates the King James Version.  He was right.  It means “congregation” or “assembly.”  “Congregate” and “assemble” are the same thing.

Now in this that I declare unto you I praise you not, that ye come together not for the better, but for the worse (v. 17).
For first of all, when ye come together in the church (Tyndale: “when ye come togedder in the cogregacion”), I hear that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it (v. 18).
When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper (v. 20).
Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another (v. 33).

True spirituality relates to the Holy Spirit.  Someone is spiritual when the Holy Spirit indwells him.  The Holy Spirit indwells believers, truly converted or saved people only.  He doesn’t indwell unbelievers, so unbelievers are not spiritual.  The Holy Spirit in His holy nature does not indwell the unrighteous.  Every believer is spiritual because every believer possesses the Holy Spirit.  The essence of a believer is spirituality.  He is spiritual.  A crucial verse for this is Romans 8:9:

But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. 

Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted.