Home » Search results for 'worship' (Page 33)

Search Results for: worship

INDEX FOR WHAT IS TRUTH

Entire Index (Click for Whole Index)

Topical — Alphabetical

TOPICAL INDEX, A to E
TOPICAL INDEX, F to J
TOPICAL INDEX, K to O
TOPICAL INDEX, P to T
TOPICAL INDEX, U to Z

Topical  — Specific

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: BAPTISTS AND CHURCH

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: BEAUTY, MUSIC, WORLDLINESS, AND WORSHIP

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: CERTAINTY, CULTURE, EPISTEMOLOGY, MEANING, TRUTH, WORLDVIEW

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: CONTINUATIONISM AND CESSATIONISM, HOLY SPIRIT, AND SPIRITUALITY

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: DIVORCE, GENDER OR SEX, MARRIAGE, COMPLEMENTARIANISM

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: DRESS OR APPEARANCE

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: EVANGELICALISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: EVANGELISM AND PREACHING

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: OBTAINING A LIFE’S PARTNER

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: PRAYER

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: PRESERVATION OF SCRIPTURE AND VERSIONS

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: SALVATION

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: SANCTIFICATION

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: SCRIPTURE

INDEX BY SPECIFIC TOPIC: SEPARATION OR UNITY

Scriptural

GENESIS to REVELATION (In Order)

Please Stop

April 22, 2014 / 9 Comments on Please Stop

“Please Stop” is going to be a periodic series of posts in which I talk about things that I wish would stop.  I’ll get back to my series about second blessing theology later.  My family and I are on vacation.

“Please Stop” could apply to a lot of different areas, but I’m mainly going to deal with cultural, ecclesiological, theological, and spiritual issues.  The beauty of “Please Stop” is that I can write about whatever it is that I want, as much or as little.  I won’t come back unless something has motivated me to do that.

Obviously, I could say, “Christian” boys wearing skinny jeans, please stop, and maybe I will, but that’s not primarily where I’m heading with this series.  Once some of you start to read, you might be saying, “Please stop ‘Please Stop.'”

Churches that put superficial, very shallow lyrics to either carnival music or Texas honky tonk, Please Stop.  I spent 45 minutes deciding where we would stop for church on the road.  What makes it tough?  You want a scriptural sermon, actual Bible preaching.  There is more than a 50% chance that you won’t get that an independent Baptist church today.  The doctrine and practice of the church is important to me.  So we did all we could do to stop for worship on a Sunday night.  The pastor is sick.  He couldn’t preach so he invited a friend to entertain his congregation.  I could describe to you what I saw, but it was the epitome of disrespect to God.  It centered right on men, what would please them.  The body language is all about “look at me.”  Please Stop.

The word “celebrate” with church.  Please Stop.  I drive by a church with a banner for Easter.  It says to the world “celebrate the resurrection with us.”  I saw this for a reformed Baptist church.  Who in the community, that isn’t already going to church, is actually going to celebrate the resurrection?  Is this something you do on the spur of the moment?  And what is “celebrating”?  Where is “celebrate” in the Bible.  We celebrate our birthdays and anniversaries, but this word “celebrate” makes church sound like a party.  A party is what people in the world want church to be.  Everyone wants a party.  But celebrate?  Please Stop.

One more.  Ironic t-shirts.  I dream of a world without the t-shirts with the ironic statements.  Let’s get serious before we get ironic.  The epitome of cleverness purchased by someone who isn’t clever. Don’t make baklava your first course when you can’t boil a potato.  Please Stop.

A Major Part of What’s Wrong with Fundamentalism (and Evangelicalism)

April 1, 2014 / 9 Comments on A Major Part of What’s Wrong with Fundamentalism (and Evangelicalism)

I want to allow this post to stand, but my heart felt apologies to the man whose name I thought was Paul J., because I was told that the quote below was his.  I was wrong not to have made sure.  He may not even know his name was up for 2-3 hours.  I’ve removed his name and inserted the rightful owner of the comment, whom I actually don’t know, but the message stands.


*******************

What is valuable?  To start, eternal value far outweighs temporal value.  Paul wrote that bodily exercise profited little, but godliness was great gain.  Jesus said seek first the kingdom of God and all these other things, temporal things, would be added.  What is of eternal value?  This is simple, but stay with me.  Only God, the Bible, and the souls of men are eternal.  Of those three, we’ve got the Bible to judge whether something is eternal.

With that being said, for awhile the Bible hasn’t been of chief value to fundamentalists.  What is more important, and you reading know it, is whether something is bigger or not.  Second to that is what kind of degrees or credentials someone has.  As you read those two and you start thinking about who in the Bible was similar to that, you might think the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin or apostate Israel.  You would be right.  Whenever something is great in the Bible, it is someone keeping the commandments of God.  When it is bad, it is someone doing what he wants, no matter how successful it might seem.
For instance, among the Old Testament kings, you had those who were great at building up the defenses in the further regions, but did little to sustain the worship of Israel.  They aren’t said to be any good.  You’ve got the ones who did that which was right in the sight of the Lord and they’re great.   Disobeying God brought kings down.  Obeying Him resulted in blessing.
A friend of mine, Bobby Mitchell, pastor of Mid-Coast Baptist Church in Brunswick, Maine, has started writing at apurechurch.com.   Some of his articles have been linked at moderately leaning fundamentalist blog forum SharperIron (SI).  SI linked to an article he wrote on why independent Baptist churches might be losing their children.   It was a good article.   An SI member, Paul J., wrote the following, entitled “Why Are You Giving Him a Voice?”:

I’ve seen several posts from this individual over the past few weeks and am wondering why SI feels what he has to say is important? Out of the hundreds of blogs why is this one that gets represented?  It doesn’t seem like he has and credentials to merit that.  Small church in the backwoods of Maine, no educational credentials listed for jr or sr. 

There is the extent of evaluation of the article.   Why is anything that anyone says important?  According to Paul J., it is obvious — why?
  1. Feelings
  2. Meritorious credentials
  3. Big Church
  4. Urban
  5. Educational credentials
If you are a fundamentalist (and probably an evangelical), then you feel something is important because it comes from the pen, the word processor, or the mouth of someone with meritorious credentials, which happens to be someone with educational credentials, who pastors a big church in an urban area.  Correct me if I misunderstood what Paul J. said.
Question:  Is that why God knows that anything is important?  First, in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul says that the one who sows and waters is nothing, in essence irrelevant.  Paul J., of course, is saying that Bobby Mitchell is irrelevant.  We can surmise that Paul J. would say that Mitchell would be relevant, important, worth listening to, if he had advanced degrees and a big church in an urban area.  Where is that in the Bible?
I’ve preached through 2 Corinthians almost twice now (I’m into chapter 13 next week).  Paul J’s criticism sounds identical to the false teachers at Corinth who Paul defends himself against for many chapters, and especially the last two.  They said Paul wasn’t worth listening to because he lacked in credentials.  I’m not going to get into the details, but the false teachers would have accredited the same credentials that Greek philosophers would have touted, bereft of any eternal truth.
Second, what did Paul take as his credentials?  The beginning of 1 Corinthians 4 would be a good basic look at it.  Paul was a galley slave who was faithful with the mysteries of God.  Would that characterize Bobby Mitchell?  Does Paul J. know?  No.  He doesn’t care.
Paul J was looking for advanced degrees.  I was a double major at Maranatha.  I majored in pastoral studies and biblical languages.   Maranatha told me I was Mr. Maranatha my senior year.  I was honored as top Greek student, Who’s Who, winner of the preaching contest, and the students voted me student body president.  I was president of my Freshman and Sophomore classes, VP of student body my junior year.  I was given high honors, wore the gold cords.  I was appointed student activity director and sat on the administrative cabinet next to Dr. Cedarholm while I was still in graduate school.  I could keep going, but I saw how the sausage was made at college and graduate school and it often wasn’t very pretty.  It was a lotta, lotta, lotta politics, jockeying for positions by trying to please people.  You continued on that path at your own peril.
But I was credentialed!!!  I is maybe worth listening to.  I coulda been a contender.
Make a scriptural argument.  Crickets.  Tell people the size of your church and your credentials.  Big time listening.  It’s true.  You see it in evangelicalism as well.  My son graduated from West Point.  That should make him a bit of a celebrity as a Christian.  That’s where Eisenhower and Grant and Patton and Douglas MacArthur graduated from, people who made history.  And I’m his dad!  Listen to me, folks.  I’ve got credentials!  I wonder if Paul J. could have made it into West Point.  Harrumph!  Nose looking down.  Oh my.
Here’s the thing.  Robert and his son Bobby Mitchell went to very, very difficult Brunswick, Maine, and both were faithful to preach a true gospel.  People were evangelized, discipled, trained.  They continue moving out from there preaching the gospel faithfully in the other communities, like who?  Like Jesus did.   Judea.  Samaria.  All the towns in Galilee.  Caesaria Philippi.  Tyre and Sidon.  Perea.  For the Mitchells it’s up in Portland, in Lisbon, Bath, Freeport, and Lewiston.  They’ve built the most beautiful church building you can imagine.  They have a great church.  They’ve been faithful.  He preaches the Word of God. He’s worth listening to.  Listen to Bobby Mitchell!
Bobby Mitchell has been faithful to the mysteries of God.  He’s been a galley slave.  He’s been a servant of Christ.

Do you know who has credentials?  Clarence Sexton.  So he preaches at BJU and at the FBFI.  Is he the model for church that we want men to follow?  Really?   Jack Trieber there at Sextons, Jack Schaap.  That level of discernment?  This is what bigness gets you.  The Charismatics have 500 million.  Mark Driscoll could buy his way on to the New York Times best seller list.  How do you get into the office of the president?  Be a Billy Graham, who agreed on universalism and a metaphorical hell.

Paul J. is pushing pragmatism.  When size and degrees become preeminent, you get pragmatism.  You’ll also get discouraged preachers.   Then they start looking for a way to succeed.  You can find it.  And finally you’ll get to where the local evangelical pastor is, a five week series on the Walking Dead, where you find out if you are a biter or a walker.  His church is biiiig.  It’s growing faster than anyone around here, so he has a voice.  He’s worth listening to.  Thanks Paul J., because that’s what those ideas get you.

Paul J. should be thanking God for Bobby Mitchell, but no.  Looking down his nose at him.  Shame on you Paul J.  Flush your credentials.  Shame on fundamentalism.  Shame on evangelicalism.  Turn from this type of activity.   Turn against it!

The Two Book Approach and English Separatism

March 25, 2014 / 7 Comments on The Two Book Approach and English Separatism

Some most trumpeting sola scriptura batter it with the greatest zeal.  They pervert doctrine with the ram of a two book approach.  They accommodate the academy with integration of the historico-critical, scientific method with the Bible.  The two book approach says that God reveals truth in two ways, the first, non-propositional truth injected by God in the natural order, which must be unearthed by human discovery, and, the second, scripture.  In this, the former is just as valid as the latter, even as God discloses all truth.   Of the many, one field where this two book approach has been applied is church history.   Pre-enlightenment, God’s Word was good enough as an interpreter of church history, but no longer.  In so doing, the gates of biblical authority have been splintered.  Let me explain.

Baptists of the nineteenth century, the populace, rank-and-file members of the churches, believed in the perpetuity of the church.  They believed there were always New Testament churches from the time of Christ up until their day.  That was based on biblical presuppositions and taught in their assemblies by their pastors.  They read their own Bibles and saw the same.   The Southern Baptist Convention was started in 1845 and that’s what people in those churches believed.  Then the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) was started in Greenville, SC in 1859, closed almost immediately because of the Civil War, and then reopened in 1865.
For the 1869-1870 school year at SBTS, Crawford Howell Toy, a graduate of the University of Berlin in 1868, became a professor.  Toy brought liberalism into the SBTS and the Southern Baptist Convention, influenced by European higher criticism of the Bible and scientific advancement and shaped by the historical-critical method of studying scripture popularized in Europe by Julius Wellhausen.  Toy left SBTS for Harvard in 1879, ending as a Unitarian.
In 1872, another recent graduate of the University of Berlin, William Heth Whitsitt joined the faculty as a professor in ecclesiastical history.   His first year, he was roommate with Toy, and there was almost no one for whom Whitsitt held more admiration.  Whitsitt had taken the theological method of Germany, which was to apply the scientific method to the interpretation of history.  In 1880, Whitsitt took a trip to Great Britain in which he formulated the view that today is called English Separatism.  In his time there, he met with C. H. Spurgeon and writes about the conversation in a letter:

He was very charming and very interesting, but does not think much of my notions about Baptist history.  We locked horns pretty much.  I am not afraid of him anymore.

The Whitsitt view was not the rank and file view of Baptist history.   It wasn’t the C. H. Spurgeon view of Baptist history.   In my opinion, Whitsitt suffered what I’ve noticed from a lot of men through the years who are in places of academia — they think they must make their mark in the world with some new discovery.  By doing so, they show themselves to be deep and scholarly and independent in thought.   Through his “scientific research,” Whitsitt determined that baptism by immersion had been lost among the Anabaptists until 1641, introducing this as the valid teaching on the subject.  In essence, according to Whitsitt, there had been a total apostasy in the matter of scriptural baptism to the extent that no authoritative baptism any longer existed.
New Testament churches didn’t accept Whitsitt’s findings.  When Whitsitt became the president of the SBTS in 1895, there was an uproar from the grassroots and in order to preserve the seminary, Whitsitt resigned in 1899.   Today revisionist historians chalk up his resignation to the forces of Landmark ecclesiology in the Southern Baptist Convention.  This didn’t occur in a corner.  Almost every Bible-believing Baptist rejected Whitsitt’s view at the time.  Many works were written in refutation and they weren’t written by just the typical names quoted — Pendleton, Graves, and Dayton.  Whitsitt’s was a two book approach.  Baptists, based primarily on biblical presuppositions, believed that baptism by immersion for believers had been handed down from generation to generations of believers.  Whitsitt’s position was that this could not be accepted without the unequivocal proof of extra-scriptural documentation.  This undermined the faith of Christians in their New Testament assemblies.
Whitsitt himself was a strong supporter of ecumenism.  It wasn’t unusual for him to speak in the congregations of other denominations.  He liked it.  He wanted this unity.  He had motive for looking for something to dump the apple cart of Baptist baptism for the acceptance of alien baptism.  When Toy went to Harvard, that didn’t hinder his relationship with Whitsitt.  These two were of similar mindsets.
It is not untypical today for men on the one hand to trumpet sola scriptura, but on the other hand expect extra-scriptural evidence to back up what the Bible prophesies will occur.  In 2 Chronicles 13, we read an unexpected defense of Abijah, the king of Judah, for a war against Jeroboam in the northern kingdom.  Despite his own personal ungodliness, Abijah depends on the biblical teaching of worship in the law for his victory over Jeroboam.  And that was a winning argument.  God did in fact deliver victory to the massively outnumbered and surrounded army of the south over her northern adversary.  Abijah’s expectations for the future were presuppositional, and, therefore, true.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.  God didn’t promise to preserve history. Whatever Whitsitt could find was not the final word on the perpetuity and authority of New Testament churches and baptism.  In the many answers to Whitsitt’s progressive declaration found in preserved and archived letters, papers, pamphlets, and books, again most not written by those labeled “Landmarkers,” we read other “evidence,” but most of all a dependence on the promises of God, the contents of the one book.
You can’t be sola scriptura and two book in your approach, but this is so conveniently characteristic of so many even in fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism.  I’m pointing it out here in church history.  Baptist perpetuity was the position, the only position.  If these were true churches and true Christians, how could they all be wrong only to be corrected by a man who had an axe to grind?   This doesn’t ring of the Holy Spirit’s work.  This clashes with a rejection of total apostasy.
Men have taken off on Whitsitt’s work, revising almost an entire century of Baptist history in American and church history in general, by depending on the second book.  They mock their opponents as fideists.   This has supported an agenda.  It supports a larger evangelicalism and fundamentalism.  It sets aside differences for a bigger tent with an idea that there is even greater influence.  And then it’s pro-intellectual.  It is operating like the big boys in academics.  Actually, it’s elitist and even more, it’s not true.  God is not pleased, because without faith it is impossible to please Him.

Free Grace and Lordship Salvation: Rival Hermeneutics for a Biblical Soteriology

March 19, 2014 / 18 Comments on Free Grace and Lordship Salvation: Rival Hermeneutics for a Biblical Soteriology

For awhile, I’ve known that even within what some will call independent, fundamental Baptists, there have been several views of salvation and for sure sanctification as well.  Many just want to leave it alone, not make a big deal about it, sort of treat the views as welcome inhabitants of a bigger tent as a part of a view on unity.  The idea, I think, is that we be generous, sort of accepting of several views in a general way, and sort them out at a lower level.  One question that some might be asking is, “At what point has the plan of salvation been altered to be a false gospel?”  Or perhaps another, “When is the difference great enough that it means separation?”

I know some don’t know on which side of this debate they fall.  Both sides make points that sound good to them.  They might not want to offend either side.  If they do come down on a side, they do it by inviting only one of the sides to preach for them or for a conference.  They will promote only one of the sides of which they prefer.  They might think that one of the sides just has a few quirks or some over emphases of certain aspects of salvation, but besides that is OK.

Does the Bible give latitude on the plan of salvation?  Is there any hint that some variety is acceptable within permissible boundaries?  There is only one Bible and one plan of salvation.  God is clear.  How did we get to where there is the present degree of difference between those who might generally identify with one another?

For the sake of this one post, and since this is what I’ve written about the last three posts, I want to keep it to these two points of view that have disagreement coming from each side, those two being what some call Lordship salvation (LS) and another that some label free grace (FG).  We’ll leave “works salvation” or legalism and universalism, those types of extremes, out of it.  Relating to what I’ve recently written about, I take the side called “Lordship salvation.”  Someone here is wrong– both FG and LS cannot both be right.  Where we get the difference is an approach to scripture, the interpretation of the Bible, what is called “hermeneutics.”

My credentials for writing this and reporting my conclusions are that I have studied the entire New Testament verse-by-verse in the original languages and I’m very proven independent.  I’ve studied exegetically and preached expositionally for decades.  I’m more of a biblical theologian than systematic.  I’m widely read on both sides of the salvation issue.  I am less biased than most.  I don’t think I’m biased at all, but at the same time I think everyone is biased at least some.

With all that being said, I read the “free grace” (FG) position as a proof text position, influenced greatly by the outside and by pragmatism, and the “Lordship salvation” (LS) view as contextual, grammatical, and historical.  That evaluation is my being as straightforward as possible, not holding back.  To put it the most simply, the FG side “proof texts” and the other doesn’t.

How I am reading this is that FG has a particular perspective of free, freedom, or grace, coming as it has out of a position of pragmatism that likely arose out of a wrong view of man’s nature, and then everything else has to fit into that.  All the passages have to fit into that, even if they have to be forced to do so.  True interpretation doesn’t work like that.  Everything in the Bible fits naturally.  There is one God, who doesn’t deny Himself, and so the harmony of scripture is not forced.

Rather than finding the message of the whole New Testament, FG finds verses that might teach what it wants the Bible to teach, then adjusts the rest of the New Testament to it.  It is a method similar to Campbellism, which finds a few verses that Campbellism purports the teaching of baptismal regeneration and then makes the rest of the New Testament conform to them.   Alexander Campbell has a big influence on those who say they’re just trying to teach what the Bible teaches.  The Church of Christ says that it speaks where the Bible speaks and is silent where the Bible is silent, but actually they’re just morphing Campbell.  Their views are part of a Campbellist tradition, that fit the Campbell hermeneutic.  They are easily exposed, but there is still a lot of emotion and angst that can turn into hours of argument.

FG saturates evangelicalism and fundamentalism, arising out of a tradition of Keswick, Finney, Moody, Torrey, Chafer, and then Campus Crusade, among others.   Its plan of salvation was reduced to a kind of pragmatic presentation, like a sales pitch, everything fitting on something that you could carry in a shirt pocket.  It was repeated again and again and again.  There were professions and results, all of which were an assumed validation of its truth.  A few verses took on major importance in the tradition.   That message, however, over a period of time also eroded and began to disintegrate to something easier and simpler.  When it is challenged, it is as if the Bible is being disputed, but it really is a tradition propped up on years of repetition.

The latest iteration of FG is less a biblical theology of salvation as it is an attack on LS.  FG has to defend itself after years of a free pass.  It doesn’t look pretty.  Rather than prove its point, it essentially just attempts to debunk LS.  I read it as sending LS into one rabbit trail or wild goose chase after another without providing actual proof itself, beside pulling out its typical proof texts and red herrings.  One of the red herrings is:  salvation and discipleship ARE NOT THE SAME.  I write that in all caps, because either yelling that or reciting it again and again is what gives it authority.  Some of the other red herrings are “make Jesus Lord” or “frontload works” or “commit to changing every aspect of your life ahead of time.”  LS must stop itself from dealing with the red herrings, which is difficult.

LS is a read of the New Testament within the arch of the entire biblical narrative.  Lordship is the story.  You take that out and you don’t have the same story.  In a sense, you don’t have the Bible or the New Testament.  You have in the beginning “God.”  Lordship starts there.  Nothing is here without him.  Everything is about worshiping Him.  LS isn’t a lense.  It is the entire landscape.  Revelation ends with Lordship.

Chronicles is the last of the Hebrew OT, which has a long genealogy.  Matthew is the first of the NT, Greek and English, and it starts with a genealogy.  You make the connection and it is Jesus is Lord.   Luke starts with saying that it is proving something and what it proves is Lordship.  I can pick out any of the New Testament books and see the same.  Almost every Pauline epistle starts with Paul speaking about Lordship.  I think of 2 Peter.  What do the false teachers have a problem with?  The second coming.  Why?  Jesus is Lord and they want to be.  I think of why people are not saved in Romans 1 — they hold fast (suppress) the truth in unrighteousness.  They like doing what they want to do and so they suppress the truth.  They like things their way, so they suppress the truth.

If the entire New Testament is the gospel, the message is the Lordship of Christ.  Sure, we can be saved, but we’re saved to worship.  We’re saved as a love gift to the Son to worship Him forever.  Jesus is exalted, why?  That every knee would confess that He is Lord.  Even Jesus as Savior is tied into Lordship.  How?  Man is in rebellion against God and He can’t do what the Lord wants Him to do without being saved.  He can’t get into the Kingdom where Jesus is King without being saved.  Unless He is born again, He can’t be in the kingdom.

Tell-tale in the whole discussion is the FG taking of “commitment” out of belief.  When you take commitment out of belief, you leave belief as merely intellectual.  You are left with intellectual salvation.  This smacks against the very idea of belief, which might be why they often prefer “accept” instead of “believe,” even though “accept” isn’t in the Bible.  You can’t believe in Jesus and not be committed to Him.  Moses asked, “Who is on the Lord’s side?”  Answer of FG, “I am, but I’m not committed to His side, just acknowledging that His side is right.”  Moses:  “Fine!”  No, not fine.  Hebrews 11, faith chapter, it’s obvious commitment is part of believing.  Commitment is the message of faith there.  If you believe in Jesus, and He is Lord, what is the commitment?  If He is Lord, how could there not be commitment?  Of course there is commitment, but taking commitment out is indicative of a strategy here.

FG was allowed, it seems for many years, to operate with little to no criticism, probably in part because there was a particular view of unity that allowance would support.  They were orthodox on the Trinity, the Deity of Christ, bodily resurrection, inerrancy — those types of so-called fundamental doctrines.  On those, FG and LS are identical.  Now that there is criticism, probably because salvation has been so watered down to become almost a form of universalism, there is little to nothing to defend FG.  Of the few attempts, the faulty hermeneutic of FG has been exposed.

Lordship Salvation for “Dummies”

March 17, 2014 / 10 Comments on Lordship Salvation for “Dummies”

As a pejorative, inventors of a new doctrine of salvation have titled what is the historical and biblical plan of salvation, “Lordship salvation.”  The terminology doesn’t sound bad to me, so I own it.  However, all sorts of garbage have been dumped on it to where it must be defined.  One risk is cherry-picked quotes taken out of context.  Lordship salvation isn’t hard to defend, just avoiding tortured sound bytes.  The pejorative nature of “Lordship salvation” is that “Lordship” is added to salvation.  I still like the label because it distinguishes from a deficient doctrine of salvation most common today in professing evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

When I evangelize the lost, I often make four points:  (1)  we are all sinners [none of us are good], (2)  we deserve a penalty for sin, (3)  Jesus died for us, and (4) we must believe in Jesus Christ.  That fourth point is most difficult for folks.  In order, the degree of difficulty has been 4, 2, and 1, with 3 being no problem at all —  people accept Jesus died for them.  Almost every religion and every person I ever talk to agrees with number 3.  From the non-Lordship position, that means that almost everyone in America is already saved, because 80 plus (probably 85 plus) percent of the people I talk to agree that Jesus is Savior.  They accept Jesus as Savior.  That would also make me one of the most successful evangelists in the history of mankind, because I’ve talked to thousands and thousands of people with them agreeing with #3.
We’ll park on point 4:  we must believe in Jesus Christ.  And I elaborate that it is faith alone, separate from works.  Wow, that sounds like salvation by faith.  It does, because it is salvation by faith, and, therefore, by grace.  Whatever doctrine someone believes will agree with everything else in the Bible if it is true.  If it’s by works, it’s not by grace.  If it’s by faith, it’s by grace.  Faith is not a work.  An interesting aspect to opponents of “Lordship salvation” is their sometimes teaching that faith is a work.  They target “Lorship salvation” for frontloading works — which it doesn’t — but they themselves then teach salvation by works, because they teach faith itself is a work.  I wag my head over that.
The two major parts to “believe in Jesus Christ” are, first, “believe,” and, second, “Jesus Christ.”  If “believe” isn’t biblical believe and “Jesus Christ” isn’t biblical Jesus Christ, then you don’t have salvation.  I can believe in Jesus, but if Jesus is a jar of peanut butter, he won’t save me.  If Jesus is the spirit brother to Satan or just the archangel Michael, he won’t save me.  So I spend time when I’m evangelizing talking about “what believing means” and “who Jesus is.”  I say that “a lot of people are confused about what it means to believe in Jesus Christ, so I’m going to explain to you what that means.”  Even non-Christians believe this.  They know many professing Christians are not Christian.

It seems that non-Lordship people aren’t so concerned about the identity of the Jesus people believe in.  He only needs to be Savior for the proper outcome to their conversation.  Many also exclude “repentance” and if they don’t, they often define “repentance” as merely a change of mind.  It’s very, very important, they say, that people understand that salvation is free.  Language of “Lord” and “change of direction” or “turning from sin” would make salvation then become by works, according to them.  As a result, the non-Lordship people return from “evangelism” regaling of dozens and dozens saved, very few baptized, and even fewer to none joining.  I don’t know if “conversion” is proper language, because it might hint of a different kind of life, which might smack of works.

Is it true that a lot of people say they believe in Jesus Christ, but don’t believe in Jesus Christ?  Of course so.  And people are more messed up about that than ever.  The Bible reveals a faith that cannot and will not save (Acts 8, 1 John 2, James 2) as well as “another Jesus” (2 Corinthians 11).   The doctrine of “faith” and the doctrine of “Jesus” can both be perverted and often are today.  So both those, “believe” and “Jesus Christ,” must be explained from scripture.
The two biggest ways that both “believe” and “Jesus Christ” are perverted or corrupted today are related to one other.   The gospel is corrupted when “believe” does not include repentance and “Jesus Christ” does not include Him as Lord.  Jesus is the way to the Father (John 14:6).  You can’t get there going your way, and your way happens to be idolatrous until then (see Rom 1).  Jesus said that if you did not repent, you would perish (Luke 13:3,5).  He said if you believe, you won’t perish (John 3:16), so part of what it means to believe is to repent.
Why don’t people turn to Jesus’ way?  Because they don’t believe in Him.  When you believe He is Lord, you start to follow Him.  You come after Him, as Jesus put it (Luke 9:23).  You seek Him, as Isaiah 55:6-7 puts it.  Before someone repents, he’s going down the broad road that leads to destruction, but when He repents (and believes), he’s now going down the narrow road that leads to life eternal.  Jesus’ call to go down the narrow road was to “enter ye in at the strait gate” (Matthew 7:13-14).   All of this is defining repentant faith, which is not a work (Philip 1:29).
We are saved by God through the Lord Jesus Christ.  We are saved by believing in Jesus Christ.  2 John 1:9-11 (cf. 1 John 2:22-24) teach that you cannot be wrong on the identity of Jesus Christ and be saved.  It’s a doctrinal test of faith.  The identity of Jesus Christ more than any one point in the New Testament is His Lordship.  I have mentioned in some of my comments that this is a major part of the New Testament.  The New Testament starts with a genealogy to show that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant, the King who will sit on the throne forever (2 Sam 7:16ff).  Some were looking for that King, even as you see the testimonies of Zacharias, Elizabeth, Simon, Anna, Joseph, Mary, and the magi.  Of course, they too needed to believe He was a suffering Messiah (Luke 24, Isaiah 52-53), but to start, He was the Messiah.  He was the King, which means that they needed to give in to His demands.
Paul talks about Jesus being confessed as Lord (Romans 10:9-10).   He includes before that a quote of Deuteronomy 30:11-14, which is part of the covenant of Deuteronomy 30.  Israel could be blessed through obedience and cursed through disobedience.  The blessing of the covenant is found through the seed — this is the new covenant.  We couldn’t keep the law without Jesus Christ.  Our faith in Jesus Christ is relinquishing our life to Jesus as Lord, which is believing that He is the Messiah, that is, the King.  Or as Peter put in Acts 5 in His sermon there, both Prince and Savior.   In Acts 2, he was warning them that day that the resurrected one would come back as Lord, which was a warning to them to turn to Him, to repent.

God’s people are a covenant people.  They became this people, His people, by entering into a covenant.  The ground for the New Covenant is faith.  The covenant is made between someone and someone else.  One side is the LORD, and the other side is a vassal.  The faith inextricably intertwines with Who Jesus is.   According to the covenant, Jesus is God and Lord and Savior and the vassal, provided for by the death and shed blood of Christ, recognizes His authority and acquiesces to Him.  Paul said he was an able minister of the New Covenant (2 Cor 3:6).  Of course, God does all the saving. Deuteronomy 30, a covenant passage, is quoted in the context of Romans 10.  This agreement is akin to that agreement made between the mount of blessing and the mount of cursing.  It is not a work that saves, but there is an agreement that involves the whole person, his intellect, emotion, and will, in belief in Jesus Christ.

These non-Lordship say that turning to the Lord is a work, making salvation not by grace.  Repentance is not a work.  God grants repentance unto life (Acts 11:18).  That is “unto life,” not “after life.”  Sinners don’t get eternal life and then repent.  They repent unto eternal life.  That repentance is granted unto them — it is not a work (the usual fare here in comments is to ignore this).

The true plan, Lordship salvation, is not complicated, except explained by those who oppose it.  When I talk to unbelievers, they can understand it in 30-60 minutes from start to finish if they are apt to listen.  They also know that Lordship is the truth.  Many times, these are people who in the past have had the kind of experience that non-Lordship advocates are urging people to have.

To maintain their position, anti-Lordship advocates must make a passage such as Luke 9:23-25 into a “discipleship” passage and not a salvation passage.  According to them, Jesus is instructing already saved people how to be better Christians, rather than teaching what salvation is.  That idea just doesn’t work — here’s the text:

23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. 24 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it. 25 For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?

This is so obviously salvation that anti-Lordships force into some “decision” subsequent to salvation.  To “come after” Jesus, a man must deny himself.  This is an aorist imperative, which calls for a specific, definite choice — do this now, at once, once for all and in one quick action (in contrast to present imperative which commands a habitual action).  It is akin to the “poor in spirit” in Matthew 5:3 and Paul counting all things as loss and as dung in Philippians 3:8-9.  Jesus elaborates in v. 24.  To save your life (psuche, soul), you must lose it.  It’s obvious from v. 25 that Jesus is talking about salvation.  It wouldn’t be worth it if you gained the whole world, but lost yourself, your soul that v. 24 talks about.  Being cast away is akin to going to Hell forever.

The anti-Lordship teachers turn this Luke 9 text into a discipleship passage to preserve the idea that no one gives up anything to be saved, since it doesn’t cost anything to be saved.  [Hint:  You’re giving up nothing to be saved, because your life is altogether vanity until you’re saved.  Are Lordship advocates saying there is something more to you than either nothing or loss before your salvation?]  To them, a potential convert doesn’t need to lose his life, deny himself, or any of that to be saved.  He only denies himself and loses his life to be dedicated, to reach a higher plane of spiritual existence after his salvation.  How does he get “dedicated”?  This is where revivalist second-blessing teaching comes in.  He’s got to sacrifice, really mean it, suffer for it, fast for it, or let go and let God.

The anti-Lordship proponents must turn the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46) into dedication, greater dedication, or discipleship.  Since the man is trading something in, all that he had, for the pearl, the pearl can’t be salvation.  Trading everything in would mean that salvation isn’t free, that it costs us something.  When Paul traded everything in, according to Philippians 3, he said it was dung and loss that he traded for gain.  He traded in his false religion for knowing Jesus and the power of His resurrection.

In the parables of Jesus in Matthew 13, a man trades in everything to buy a field, which is the kingdom.  He trades everything for the kingdom.  Then a man trades in everything for a pearl of great price, which again is the kingdom.  This is the same teaching as “no man can serve two Masters.”  You have to choose your Master.  When you know the value of the kingdom, you would trade whatever is necessary to get it.  In Luke 9, that is to trade your self, your soul.

I’ve talked to several Hindus in my evangelism.  I’ve found that they almost always are willing to accept Jesus.  They will gladly add Jesus to the shelf with all their other idols.  According to the anti-Lordship men, does the Hindu have to give up His idols to turn to Jesus Christ alone?  No, because that would be works.  For it to be a free gift, the Hindu just accepts Jesus as Savior.  These Keswick men have wreaked havoc all over India with that plan, proclaiming all their salvation decisions.  At some point in the future, the Hindu man will perhaps become dedicated and then Jesus will be Lord.  At that time, Jesus might be alone in the man’s worship.

In Lordship salvation, belief includes repentance.  Repentance includes self-denial.  Repentance means turning from idols to serve the living and true God.  Belief is more than just intellectual and emotional, but also volitional.  In Lordship salvation, someone believes in Jesus Christ, and sacrosanct to a belief in Jesus Christ is that Jesus is God, Lord, and Savior.  All sin is against Lordship.  If someone turns from sin, that means he wants to do what the Lord says.  That means that He wants the righteousness, which is in Christ alone.

The problem is sin. Sin sends to Hell.  Sin is against Lordship.  The Lord says something and man doesn’t do it or He says not to do something and man does do it.  As far as I can gather, the anti-Lordship say that a man accepts Jesus as Savior and no thoughts about sin need to be a part of that.  God is saving him from hell, where he’s going because he isn’t saved.  Why does he need to be saved?  Because he isn’t.   He doesn’t even have to know that sin is what is sending Him to Hell.  He just has to want to be saved and believe that Jesus is Savior.  If he thinks that sin is sending him to Hell, he might think about wanting not to sin later and frontload works and ruin the plan of salvation.  That mixes works with grace for all that I can gather.  I’m just going to say it:  it’s crazy.

Some at times have asked me, “If I didn’t receive Jesus as Lord when I got saved, am I saved?”  I don’t like just to answer, “Yes.”  I think someone could be saved because he wasn’t denying Jesus as Lord when he believed on or received Jesus Christ.  He believed in Jesus Christ.  He didn’t believe in Him as Lord, but the person knew He was Lord and he wasn’t denying that.  He didn’t want to be in rebellion any more against Jesus.

I’m sure I’ll still have to answer many other comments about what I’ve presented above.  What I wrote is just the tip of the iceberg.  To do Lordship salvation justice, I would like to go page by page through the New Testament to show how it teaches it all over.  There are proof texts for Lordship salvation, but the best proof is that this is the salvation of the entire New Testament.

Unbiblical Salvation Language, pt. 1

March 12, 2014 / 6 Comments on Unbiblical Salvation Language, pt. 1

Either Thomas Ross or myself have written “Lordship salvation” related posts in the past and if you want to get caught up on at least what we’ve already posted, then please do [his will be TR and mine KB, both with numbers to differentiate):  KB1, KB2, KB3, KB4, KB5, TR1, TR2, TR3.  Here are articles either he or I talk about Keswick theology:  TR1, KB1, KB2, TR2.  I haven’t written on Keswick perhaps as much as I should.  Thomas Ross is preparing a 1000 page doctoral dissertation on sanctification that will surely break down Keswick for someone.  Until then, but without further delay, read this post.

*************************
A lot of salvation language gave me trouble in both my early and middle childhood.  It was the normal salvation-speak in evangelical, fundamentalist, independent Baptist, and other groups of churches galore.   In the Nye-Ham debate, Nye mentioned the game of telephone.  Perhaps this lingo for churches developed like the game of telephone.  At one time the language used was biblical and, therefore, legitimate, but it degraded like something that has eroded over time.
This will not be the depth of historical study to explain to you exactly where this language came from.  I want to make an educated guess, i.e., say what makes the most sense to me.  The Bible presents only one way of salvation, and not everyone likes it.  You say it how a person would more like to hear it and it catches on — it works.  It sticks.  You want salvation to be easier for people because you want it to be that they’re saved, so you say it in a way that it will be easier and they accept that.  Because it works, you keep doing it.   A paraphrase is made of a paraphrase of a paraphrase and the last iteration becomes accepted as what the Bible actually says.  The talking points no longer reflect the Word of God, but they are treated as if God said them.  In some cases they’re slightly off, but key words or thoughts are either missing, added, or a combination of both.
Before I get into the ones I have heard the most, I want to clarify that someone can elaborate or expose the words of the text in a helpful way.  Just because different words are used, that mean the same thing, doesn’t mean that the doctrine has been twisted.  When you’re trying to get across a verse or phrase in the Bible, you might restate in a way to help people understand.  That’s all fine, and it’s not what I’m talking about with unbiblical salvation language.
Accept Jesus as Your Savior
Everyone should “accept Jesus as his Savior.”  I’m thrilled if someone does that.  Some who use those words in their gospel presentation might be using them in a biblical sense.  I say that, because I’ve read these words in the midst of a lot of others in a way that doesn’t leave it as the only or main point.  Let’s be honest and accurate here though.  These words should not stand alone as a saving response to the Lord Jesus Christ.  They shouldn’t stand as the crucial, most practical point in a salvation presentation.  They are not biblical salvation language.
“Savior” is found 24 times in the New Testament.  That might sound like a lot, but it isn’t compared to the value that is being placed upon it in these plans of salvation.  The terminology itself isn’t found in the Bible, but you’ll get 88,700 of those exact words on the worldwide web (334,000 of “accept Jesus Christ as your Savior” and 210,000 of “accept Jesus as Savior,” and those only with the Americanized spelling of Savior — the latter gets 187,000 more results with the Anglicized version).  This language is very popular.
The term “Savior” is found only 3 times in the gospels and twice in Acts.  It is used more times in Titus than those combined (6).  And that’s before we ever get to how the title “Savior” is being used.  In its second usage, one of the very earliest of the gospels, Luke 2:11 reads:  “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.”  You remember that verse?  City of David — think Davidic Covenant, then Savior, who is Christ the Lord.  He’s the Lord, which would hearken to all those Old Testament promises of the Lord, like Psalm 2:2, as one of many, many, many examples:  “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed.”  Lord is used three more times in Psalm 2, more times than Savior is used in all four gospels.
When you start looking through those 24 uses of “Savior” in the New Testament, you get to the first in Acts (one of only two), and that usage in Acts 5:31 reads:  “Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.”  If you were hearing that verse that day, you might think that you also should “accept” Jesus as “Prince,” since He had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, after hanging on a tree.  He’s going to come back as Judge, because he is “Prince,” and you might have some time to turn to Him, to follow Him, and get forgiveness of sins, since He’s Saviour.  Sure, that’s harder to say than “accept Jesus as Savior,” but it is much more complete, gives a fuller picture.
If “accepting Jesus as Savior” were such important language, then why doesn’t that occur once in the Bible?  If the concept of “Savior” were so important, or even the word, then why didn’t the apostles use it all the time in their preaching?  Now, believe me, I am for using the title “Savior,” but definitely not in exclusion of “Lord” in the presentation of Jesus, and not even as the main point, since it isn’t the main point.  Will He save?  Yes.  But He won’t save while your mind is still made up that you’re going to do what you want to do.
As you keep looking at the title “Savior” in the New Testament, you’ll see it used almost exclusively on behalf of and directed toward believers, because Jesus is being described as their Savior. But why is He their Savior?  Is it because they’ve accepted Him as Savior?  It doesn’t say that.   The tone of those passages is that He’s been so good to them, as their Savior, that they owe Him a lot.  Savior isn’ being used in a presentation of the plan of salvation there.
Four of the 24 times “Savior” is found, it is found in the following way, all in 2 Peter:  “Lord and Savior,” Lord always coming first.  Eight of the 24 times “Savior” is found, “Lord” is also found in the same verse.  If we count “Prince” in Acts 5:31, that goes for 9 of 24.  Even when “Savior” is used, it gets used with “Lord” over one-third of the time.

Romans is the great salvation book.  Do you agree?  45 times in 39 verses, “Lord.”  Zero times, “Savior.”  As Paul explains the great doctrine of salvation so much in that book, he doesn’t mention “Savior” at all.  Does this mean anything?  It does.  But you won’t find “accept Jesus as Saviour” in the book of Romans.  You can’t.  So how does it appear as the clinching point in so many plans of salvation for churches — in their tracts and on their websites?

We have something preached by an angel, who flies around the earth so everyone can see him, in Revelation 14:6 called the “everlasting gospel.”  It would be interesting, wouldn’t it, to know what the everlasting gospel is?  The next verse begins that everlasting gospel:  “Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.”  Does anyone wonder why the angel doesn’t just say, “Accept Jesus as your Savior!!!”?  Perhaps he’s talking to people who are already believers, since “fear God” and “worship him” are only sanctification concepts that can’t be done until after someone is saved.  Should we accuse the angel of preaching works salvation?  But, of course, I speak in jest.
If someone wants Jesus as his Savior, He’s not going to get that by merely “asking Jesus to be His Savior.”  If He doesn’t want Jesus as Lord, Jesus won’t be His Savior.  If He won’t fear God, repent of His sin, deny Himself, and turn to Jesus Christ for Who Jesus really is, He won’t be saved.  Is that so hard to add to the equation in the explanation?  But won’t people find “accept Jesus as your Savior,” much easier to accept?  Sure.  But is that what Jesus our Savior gave us as an example to do?
Romans 6:23 says that “the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”  Eternal life is a gift.  So how we get that gift is by simply accepting it, right?  It doesn’t say, but we could listen to Peter, on the day of Pentecost, who said, “Repent . . . and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38).  He said, “Repent and you get the gift,” not “accept the gift and you get the gift.”  Eternal life is through Jesus Christ our Lord.  “Through.  Our Lord.”  You get to that gift through Jesus Christ our Lord.
More to Come.

How Much Diversity Should a Christian Allow and What Is His Responsibility to Error?

February 24, 2014 / 1 Comment on How Much Diversity Should a Christian Allow and What Is His Responsibility to Error?

Before I get into this subject, I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten two series that I never finished.  If you are a regular reader, you know that I have forgotten many series through the years — it would be interesting to check out how many series stopped dead in their tracks, never to be begin again.  But the two that were rolling along to a sudden stop where these:

The Deceit and Tragedy of the Wrong Attribution of Success or a Wrong View of Success in Church Leadership (parts one, two, and three)

Proving the Music Issue in the Worship War: Is there Holy Hip Hop? (parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten)

I link to these for you and for me.  I want to be reminded that I want to continue them.  If I didn’t or I won’t, I’ll let you know.

*****************

A few days ago, Robert George from Princeton and Cornell West, former Harvard professor and now at Union Theological Seminary, held a discussion on the importance of hearing opposing viewpoints in a liberal arts education at Swarthmore College, George a 1977 graduate.  George is a professing Christian and political conservative, while West is a theological liberal.  Apparently, the two are friends.  As they ended their talks, the session went to a question and answer period, and the first two questions both attacked the concept of even considering George’s point of view.  The first student even confronted West for merely appearing with George.  Before the event, students organized in opposition against even hosting George on campus, and then afterwards, a student made this comment in a Swarthmore publication:

What really bothered me is, the whole idea is that at a liberal arts college, we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion. I don’t think we should be tolerating [George’s] conservative views because that dominant culture embeds these deep inequalities in our society. We should not be conceding to the dominant culture by saying that the so-called “progressive left” is marginalizing the conservative.

West and George argued for the allowance of a diversity of thought and belief in a liberal arts education.  “Diversity,” of course, is rhetoric of tolerance, which most may think is the predominant ethic of modern university campuses.  They’re wrong.  They are not quite Stalin’s Gulags, but close.

After the Swarthmore discussion, several different commentators, bloggers, and pundits reacted to the interaction (here, here, here, and here).  There were more, but the one that got my attention first was a post titled, A Fundamentalist vs. Robbie George & Cornell West, by Denny Burk, an associate professor of biblical studies and ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  Burk labeled the first questioner, who defended same-sex marriage and advocated the exclusion of George from any proceedings, a fundamentalist.  Interesting, huh?  Burk would get a lot of support from the comrades at SBTS for that backhanded slap at fundamentalists.  “You’re a, you’re a, you’re a fundamentalist!  So there!”  Burk might just say that he meant it as a rhetorical device, but is it true that the first questioner at Swarthmore was very much like a fundamentalist?

Burk’s comparison is absurd actually.  He tries to entertain his pals by throwing a wild pitch over the backstop, very similar to the questioner, and toward the reception of similar applause.  He doesn’t have to be concerned about fundamentalist criticism from his colleagues, and he’s got far more in common with the Swarthmore boy than do fundamentalists.  Now, I’m using Burk’s post or thought as a jumping off point, but before I go there, it’s worth pausing to consider the premise that this is what fundamentalism is like.  For his comparison to be true, fundamentalists (1) don’t engage actual arguments because they assume a priori that they have no merit, (2) are willing to discredit their critics as bigots in order to do whatever it takes, and then (3) ignore academic qualifications and background.  The irony here is that with his broadbrush, Burk himself is guilty of all three.

I had to say something about Burk’s post, but the subject itself is what interested me.  Liberal arts education has become understood as welcoming and tolerating many points of view, and these students of Swarthmore challenge the reigning educational dogma.  Do we really do well or better to settle for the status quo of toleration or do we leave Swarthmore to the end of their own intellectual inbreeding?  It seems that Robert George argues for the opportunity of a continued place at the table.  Maybe he thinks we can save the entity of the college or university.  Do we need it?  Should we fight for it?  Or should it be circumvented like Fox in modern television news or Hillsdale in colleges?

And then even further, how much diversity should a Christian allow?  Does the Bible teach some benefit to listening to error?  Isn’t relativism the basis of diversity?  If there is absolute truth, do we argue to get there?  It seems to me that we have already surrendered, like Burk, by advocating for diversity.  I’m gathering that diversity describes education at a Southern Baptist seminary, a veritable buffet table of approaches from which you can pick and choose, and never be rejected for what ends on your platter.   So you can go to SBTS and differ with your other graduates on dozens of doctrines and practices and methods.  You could be a star, the next Billy Graham, with Roman Catholic nuns at the front to help with the personal work.  It is within that perspective that Burk does his chest thumping.  Not only does scripture not teach diversity, but it commands against it.  The Apostle Paul started 1 Timothy (1:3) by writing:

As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine.

Towards the end of the same book of basis instruction to a pastor, he wrote (6:3-5):

If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness. . . . from such withdraw thyself.

Paul wrote that he was not ignorant of Satan’s devices (cf. 1 Cor 2:11).  He was not instructing ‘not to be ignorant of Satan’s devices’ — in other words, learn Satan’s devices.  When you learn the Bible, you’ll have all the Satanology you’ll need.  The Bible nowhere says, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” There are no published sources yet found which predate the use of that phrase by the fictional character “Michael Corleone” in The Godfather Part II (1974), written by Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola.

The concept of diversity in education is not only unscriptural, but was totally debunked intellectually in the 1987 bestseller by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.   The diversity that Burk advocates is in fact a bow to relativism, an intellectual and spiritual quagmire, the sinking sand like that to which Jesus referred in His Sermon on the Mount.  This destination at which modern higher education has arrived perhaps originated from a metaphor, the “marketplace of ideas,” representing a belief that holds that the truth will emerge from the competition of ideas in free, transparent public discourse.

In 1644, the English poet John Milton suggested in his Areopagitica that restricting speech was not necessary because “in a free and open encounter,” truth would prevail.  We could all wish.  The Bible teaches and experience tells us the opposite.  I’m afraid I’m going to have to agree with Mark Twain, the atheist, on this, who wrote:  “Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.”  There is a sense that truth will prevail.  In the end, God will have destroyed all error.  But in the meantime, truth will prevail when we do what it takes to protect it.  That doesn’t happen by giving equal standing to error.

George is very careful in his answer to the Swarthmore questioner by explaining that he has read Plato and Kinsey and Ghandi to come to his present position on homosexual marriage.  Perhaps we were to assume that he also read the Bible, but he didn’t say it.  Why not?  If he said, “Plato, Kinsey, Ghandi, and, oh, God’s Word,” that would have been the end of the discussion, end of argument.  In other words, we already know that “diversity” doesn’t exist at Swarthmore.  He couldn’t bring the Bible into the discussion without totally discrediting himself, and he knew it.

Christians shouldn’t expect diversity on state or even private college or university campuses that afford diversity.  It won’t be there.  As far as the truth is concerned, it will never be preserved by diversity and accommodation.  It really is only preserved by separation.  As Christians we have a responsibility to teach only the truth about everything and eradicate and eliminate error.  That kind of vigilance is the only way to preserve the truth and it is all that the Bible teaches.

I’m of the same mindset as Booker T. Washington.  Washington didn’t teach integration.  He taught, “Build a better brick.”  Let’s do a better job at training our own young people in the truth and stop worrying about whether they will find acceptance in the marketplace of ideas.  If they can build a better brick, people will buy it.

Incremental Conservatism?

February 4, 2014 / 6 Comments on Incremental Conservatism?

For those keeping track, I want to come back to part four of my series on success in church leadership, but there is something else first.  While I’m digressing, our Word of Truth Conference this year is November 5-9, Wednesday to Sunday.  We continue our subject of I-Magination, and the Reasons for Apostasy in this age.  We have past sessions linked on the right, top margin.

*******************

Jonathan Edwards wrote an important book just after the Great Awakening, Treatise on the Religious Affections, for which there is still a crying need today.  Scott Aniol named his blog after Edwards’ book, and I highly recommend most of what is written there.   Recently, Aniol, who is a professor at a Southern Baptist seminary, joined a few pastors in publishing A Conservative Christian Declaration.  You should read it.  I agree with and would subscribe to most of it.  It contains scriptural truths and applications with which everyone should interact and accept.  It’s so good that I don’t want to disagree with any of it for fear that someone will reject its main point.  However, it necessitates a challenge, since the first two articles portend its own ultimate demise, unsustainable in its present condition.

The first article offers a compromise the adherents or authors could have done without.  It fundamentally undermines their statement, and among other things provides a basis for rejecting their position.  Conservatism comes out of a coherent worldview:  one truth, one goodness, and then one beauty because there is one God.  One does not and cannot support one beauty by compromising one truth or one goodness.

The compromise seems a strategy of incrementalism.  It doesn’t hinder a coalition of conservatives and non-conservatives.  True conservatism is all or nothing  — people may not live up to that ideal, but it is the conservative position.  You can’t chop up truth and accept parts of it and not others.  It seems that this declaration is conservatism being offered to a liberal world with the hopes of nudging baby steps forward.  That’s not a conservative method to convince and it fails of a foundational theological and biblical error.   The conservative way is to present truth, goodness, and beauty, and the audience either wants it or not.

The first two articles communicate a certain representation of historic fundamentalism, but they do not reveal conservatism.  Here’s the statement:

Article 1: On the Gospel

We affirm that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the boundary of Christian faith (1 Cor 15). We also affirm that to ignore this boundary by granting Christian recognition to those who deny the gospel is to demean the gospel itself (2 John 1:10).

We deny that Christian fellowship is possible with those who deny the fundamentals of the gospel including the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, his sacrificial atonement, and justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.

Article 2: On the Whole Counsel of God

We affirm that the center and apex of Christian faith and fellowship is the whole counsel of God including right belief, right living, and right affections (Deut 6:1­9). We further affirm that the transmission of biblical Christianity necessarily involves the preservation and cultivation of the entire system of faith (Acts 20:27).

We deny that belief in the gospel alone is all that is necessary for healthy Christian worship, fellowship, and devotion.

One of the authors, Pastor Michael Riley, expanded on these first two articles at the links provided in the quotes above (if you click on each hypertext, you’ll get to each exposition, where you’ll find comments from me for each section).

When you read the language from article one above that “the gospel is the boundary of the Christian faith (1 Cor 15),” that might sound correct depending how you take it.  You might think they meant, “you have to believe the gospel to be a Christian,” but they are actually defining a basis of Christian fellowship, that is, they fellowship with someone who believes the gospel, whether he’s conservative or not.  So this assumes that someone can be a Christian his entire life without every becoming a conservative.  That’s not conservative.

God’s Word is plain.  It can be understood, even by a child.  God wants us to know it.  Truth, goodness, and beauty are objective.  That gives us confidence to judge, discern, and make the right decisions.  But the statement is relativistic.  Someone can slide around anywhere between the so-called center, the whole counsel, and the so-called boundary, the gospel, and still get Christian fellowship.

The authors cite 1 Corinthians 15 as basis for “gospel as boundary,” a reference to “first in importance,” a common contemporary explanation for the word “first” (protos) in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.  Even if “first” means “first in importance,” it is a gigantic stretch to extrapolate from that a boundary for fellowship merely the gospel.    Instead evidence shows that protos means “first in order.” The bodily resurrection of Christ was the first thing that the Corinthians had heard from Paul and that they believed in order to become a church at Corinth.  Evangelicals and now fundamentalists find “first in importance” in search for a proof text.

And then would conservatism have been part of the gospel response that Paul preached as well?  In other words, could those at Corinth have continued in love with themselves or the world or loved Christ like an idol and have believed the gospel?  The rest of 1 and 2 Corinthians belies that point.  Everyone is a conservative in position the moment he’s converted, and his sanctification will progress him practically to that end in his glorification.  We don’t help people along by allowing a kind of perpetual carnality.  And if we can’t judge heteropathy, then it isn’t objective, and we shouldn’t judge it anyway.  If conservatism can be judged — and it can be — then it should be judged.

I grant that Christian fellowship should not be bestowed to those who deny what the authors identify as “fundamentals of the gospel.”   Of course.   But they added “including” for purposeful ambiguity.   This is not an all-inclusive list.  Are they “first in importance”?  This is where orthopathy, true affections, should be moved to the front end.  There are many who would agree with the list of fundamentals, but have a different Jesus as seen in the nature of their worship, by their inordinate affections, by their disordered love.

The authors affirm more than the gospel as necessary for “healthy” Christianity.   If “healthy” tilts any direction, it’s toward self-help and therapy.   The possibly healthy are people recognized as Christians, because they get under the boundary, but they’re sick.  And even if they stay sick, they still get Christian recognition.  We want to and maybe can help them get better, healthier.  Someone reading that statement can see how it would be better to be healthy instead of sick.  He can stay sick, but that wouldn’t be good for him.  But this unhealthy person, because he is heteropathic, and maybe heterodox, is still fine with God.  How could he be?

This is not how the New Testament reads.   That sin isn’t just unhealthy.  Sure sin is unhealthy.   But primarily it’s a violation of God.  It’s against His holiness.  To keep a violator of God in the boundary isn’t how the Bible regards that person.  Shouldn’t we regard that person the same way God would have us in His Word?  This type of language appears symptomatic of a postmodern culture.  There is such a lack of certainty, and such an emphasis on nuance, that men find it difficult to exclude anyone:  “if we can’t really know, how can we be so harsh in our judgment?”  Yet we can know, and God wants us to act upon what He said.

Sanctification is a process.  But it isn’t one in which someone is allowed to know what he’s doing wrong and rebel against getting it right, remain in a place of rebellion, until he decides that it’s been unhealthy for him.  Healthiness is about him; he can be healthy.  He doesn’t take baby steps toward what is right until he finally gets to what he knows.  That person isn’t pure in heart.  Sanctification is a struggle, but giving in to what he knows, because he wants to, because He can, and because that’s how God’s grace works.  God doesn’t work in half measures.  Salvation is conversion, not a buffet for his own passion.

After converted men read this declaration, will they change?  It’s obviously true, right?  So if they don’t change, do we just keep giving them Christian recognition?  Are we saying that not everyone can really know?   This clashes with the professed objectivity that defines conservatism.

The Deceit and Tragedy of the Wrong Attribution of Success or a Wrong View of Success in Church Leadership, part three

January 27, 2014 / Leave a comment

Part One   Part Two

There were several factors that came together at once, that got my thinking about a view of success and attribution of success in church leadership.  Part of it is the experience of vicious, unmerited attack, wondering how this originates and where it comes from.  I expect harsh criticism, because Jesus prophesied it, but I find myself looking into the source, when it is wacky and grossly unsubstantiated, of the total cheap-shot variety, full of lies.

Another motivator was the reaction of major evangelicals to the “holy hip-hop” debate, especially Albert Mohler.  I was thinking about his relationship to the “conservative resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention and advocacy for “holy hip-hop.”  I am convinced now that the conservative resurgence in the big picture, in the long run, will serve to be worse than if the SBC had simply taken its course.  What I’m saying is that the cure will be worse than the disease.  That will likely be a whole other blog post in the near future.  I’m saying that Albert Mohler is doing more damage than good.

Another couple of factors came from a controversy related to conservative evangelicals, cessationists, and Charismatics.  It’s been around on simmer for awhile, but the heat turned up on the burner with John MacArthur’s Strange Fire conference.  MacArthur and his church savaged the Charismatic movement, in the midst of which he and several other participants said plainly that music was the means of entrance.  Again and again, they agreed that music was how someone started being deceived into the movement.  At the end of the conference, MacArthur said, and oddly, sort of out of the blue, seeming to answer some unknown critic, that the trajectory of Grace Community Church was the Protestant Reformation and not the Jesus Movement.  I mean, who had said anything about that?

Another aspect of the last one in the previous paragraph has been the after conference battle of the Strange Fire conference participants and defenders with the Charismatic apologist Michael Brown, and his rebuttal book, Authentic Fire.  I obviously side with MacArthur on this one, but it has been interesting, and even entertaining, nonetheless.  What was especially so was the Benny Hinn-Michael Brown get-together that was bombarded by the Strange Firers.  This was proof positive that the baby and the bathwater were just about one and the same.  You might not be able to find a baby in the bathwater, to articulate a metaphor (or cliche) that Brown used and that Phil Johnson pounced upon in a Strange Fire session.  The Brown allies came right back at the MacArthur confederation with a charge of hypocrisy, because of MacArthur’s one time appearance on Paul Crouch’s Trinity Broadcasting Network to promote one of his books — Hard to Believe.  The hypocrisy charge was that Brown appearing with Benny Hinn was like MacArthur appearing on TBN to promote a book.

The Strange Fire alliance has answered the Brown Charismatic crowd by saying that MacArthur’s appearance was way different — it just was, not to be compared with Brown and Hinn.  Hard to Believe was a stark repudiation supposedly of TBN, and so on.  Phil Johnson said Paul Crouch hated MacArthur’s appearance and they just wouldn’t even re-air it after that.  I don’t know.  I watched the appearance, and here it is.

MacArthur’s appearance with celebrity Christian Kirk Cameron appears like a television variety show.  They sit on those variety show stools with the studio audience clapping and clapping as if they were being entertained.  There is no doubt that there is some playing to the audience with things that are said.  Was that TBN audience being confronted for the travesty that is TBN?  Not at all.  Anything MacArthur was saying could be viewed through a TBN grid.  How could they be clapping so much if they really knew what he was talking about?  And there was no attempt to clarify.  But that wasn’t the worst of it.

In order to entertain the TBN crowd, then comes at the 20 minute mark MacArthur’s son-in-law Kory Welch, in front of this lavish television set, singing to entertain the audience.  I’m not going to give my take on his performance in any detail, but the whole thing comes off as a “Christian” version of a television variety show.  The style is worldly in so many aspects, music and appearance.   It wasn’t praise to God.  It was a performance that fit in perfectly with a TBN crowd.   Now remember, MacArthur “doesn’t have a trajectory” from the Jesus Movement, even though he benefited big numbers in Southern California from the Jesus Movement, when he was calling it a genuine revival.  Those kids fit in fine with John MacArthur because he didn’t do anything to stop them from these types of abuses that now he says are the entrance into the movement.  According to MacArthur, that music is the entrance into the Charismatic movement.  You’ve got this studio set, the worldly music, and an adoring TBN crowd.  There was definitely no repudiation of TBN with his appearance — sad really, but unfortunately not surprising.  The Charismatic style music is at his own church, and now at the Shepherd’s Conference with the addition of the rock band this last year, what was before featured at their youth conference.  People there can pick up that taste for an easy segue and acceptance of Charismatic styled worship that now MacArthur is calling Strange Fire.

Before I move on, when I talk like this, the way this is marginalized is by calling names, like flame-throwing fundamentalist.  This really is typical of evangelicalism, more than even fundamentalism, to go to name-calling in order to disrespect the critique.   Most people want any kind of music style they want.  It will be easy for them to go along with name-calling as a means of excusing themselves.  If not a flame-thrower, I’ll hear that I’m KJVO, which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.  I’d be glad to talk about that, but it is hardly related to this.  They know their crowd, however, will not respect anyone who still uses the King James Version of the Bible, and so that is code language.

Biblical Credentials for Success

What is success, according to the Bible?  In 2 Corinthians, Paul differentiated himself from the false apostles, the false teachers, that had subverted his teaching and ministry at Corinth.  What do you think would be the credentials of Paul that were different than those appearing as angels of light to deceive the Corinthians?  What he said they were, I don’t think are what people would think they would be.  I don’t think they would even cross someone’s mind.  How would someone know Paul was true and those fakes were false?  In 2 Corinthians 11:23, Paul was indicating how the Corinthians could determine who was a minister of Christ, a servant of the Lord, and who was not.  How would they know?

How you could tell someone was real and not fake was by the suffering they were enduring.  Paul lists from 2 Corinthians 11, verses 23 to 27, what was preeminent in a determination of authenticity.  Why would the real be suffering, when the false would not?  The real are confronting the darkness with light.  The real are contradicting the world, the culture, the zeitgeist.  The genuine are not conforming to the world, are denying worldly lust.  The false can do just fine and keep very comfortable because they are not pointing out those areas that will bring the unpopularity that will shrink their following.

The false are all about getting and keeping the bigger crowd and are not going to teach certain uncomfortable teachings of scripture.  With evangelicals, it is a matter of finding that sweet spot, where they hang on to enough true doctrine without offending too many, so that they would get too small to meet an understanding of success.

In this world, in this present climate, I don’t believe someone will get to the size of a MacArthur and many others who are even bigger than him, in order to keep their opportunities, without a compromise for the sake of a worldly standard of success.  Everyone getting very big in this country should be suspect.  What sinning, what fleshliness, what worldliness, what false worship are they failing to confront?  How are they dimming their light in the darkness?  That is what happens.  They are deemed successful, but in fact they are not.  They are avoiding the suffering of allowing their light to shine brightly.  They’ll say it’s something else, but that’s really what it is.

And I’ll talk more about that in the next post.

Poem by David Warner

January 8, 2014 / 2 Comments on Poem by David Warner

Here is a poem just recently written by David Warner from our church.  He regularly writes poems in honor and worship of God, according to the Word of God.  We are encouraging our students to write poetry and music for the Lord.  Tell me what you think.

+++++++++++++++++++++

Thus He speaks, the Maker of the earth,
“Produce your cause, strong reasons bring.
Can your idols flood a desert’s dearth
With blossoms sweet and water springs?

“Can they speak a million days before
And do as I have prophesied?
Nay, for they are empty lies and lore
Of men whose hearts are filled with pride.”

O the charge that clay will lay on God!
The Potter says, “Your idols rust.
Burn the residue upon the sod,
And let Me be your life-long trust.”

Shall He give His glory to a stock
Which man will carve with his own hand?
Should He share His workings with a rock
When He alone divided sea and land?

Thus the LORD has said, “I am the LORD,
Who bridles earth to rest My feet,
As I sit upon the heaven’s shore,
From which I guide the starry fleet.

“Who but I designs a seed to sprout
Into a dainty flower bloom,
Or subjects a storm that roams about
To play whatever role of gloom?”

Roam the earth.  There is none else but Him
The Holy One of Israel,
Who commands the brutes of darkness swim
Beneath the sea and schooner’s sail.

Scan the space.  The everlasting God,
Yea, only He, the LORD of hosts,
Built the sun and moon to course the flood
Of stars, mere advocates at most.

Search the gods, which cannot speak nor hear.
None else but God almighty saves
In the worst of tempest’s mad career
And from the deadest crypt of graves.

Can those gods forgive and then record
Repentant faith for righteousness?
Only God, the everlasting LORD,
Can blot out man’s unrighteousness.

Post navigation

← Older posts Newer posts →

AUTHORS OF THE BLOG

  • Kent Brandenburg
  • Thomas Ross

Archives