Shepherd the Flock

The picture above has been in the news this week, as this heart-breaking image of two slave children just recently surfaced. In God’s providence, I have been reading a very good book this week, Surprised by Grace, and the book closes with an illustration of our freedom in Christ that brought this picture to mind.

There’s a story told, from Civil War days before America’s slaves were freed, about a northerner who went to a slave auction and purchased a young slave girl. As they walked away from the auction, the man turned to the girl and told her, “You’re free.”

With amazement she responded, “You mean, I’m free to do whatever I want?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And to say whatever I want to say?”

“Yes, anything.”

“And to be whatever I want to be?”

“Yep.”

“And even go wherever I want to go?”

“Yes,” he answered with a smile. “You’re free to go wherever you’d like.”

She looked at him intently and replied, “Then I will go with you.”

Jesus has come to the slave market. He came to us there because we would not go to Him. He came and purchased us with His blood so we would no longer be a slave to sin but a slave to Christ, which is the essence of freedom.

The gospel of Jesus Christ not only saves sinners in eternity, but it rehabilitates them here on earth as well. Radical things happen when God saves a sinner. Thieves stop their stealing and instead begin giving. Liars stop their lying and become advocates for the truth. Even the rich stop their hoarding, instead turning their focus on spreading what God has given them.

And when sinners with a great reputation for sinning come to Jesus in repentance and faith, no doubt they are eager to share the story of their rehabilitation. Though testimony sharing is a good, biblical, and edifying practice, even the best of personal testimonies do not carry with them the power of the gospel. The gospel is His-story, something that culminated 2000 years ago in the tiny nation of Israel. And this story concern the testimony of only one Man: the God-Man, Jesus Christ, and what He accomplished in His life, death, and resurrection.

But in considering personal testimonies, I find it easy to become weary of hearing these stories of radical conversions to Christ. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that these testimonies aren’t often very glorious and uplifting to Christians (and to me as well). But I can’t help but recognize that the world and many false religions bear witness these radical ‘conversions’ as well.

I’ve heard of adulterers embracing Mormonism and becoming radically faithful. I’ve heard of drunkards saved from their drunkenness by Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ve heard of selfish, hedonistic rich people turning their lives around to become loving, giving, serving people as a result of some spiritual experience.

And since these conversions are not unique to Christianity, many unbelievers also get fed up with us Christians acting like we hold a patent on radical transformations. As someone who has a pretty radical testimony myself, I’ve been cut off (by sighs, rolling eyes, scoffs) more than a few times with the plea “Not another ‘I Found Jesus!’ story!”

The fact remains: though the gospel rehabilitates sinners in outward areas of morality, this is in no way unique to the gospel, and so we shouldn’t treat these radical testimonies as if they are the gospel.

But is there no place for sharing our testimony? Yes- I do believe there is an appropriate place for them, but with a few qualifiers:

1) Focus more on the inward than on the outward

In other words, what religion can expose the hypocrisy of a moralistic, unselfish, upright and loving man? What religion can cause a goody-two-shoes to fall on their face crying ‘woe is me’ when enlightened by the holiness of God? What religion can convince a man who has all the money, power, comforts, and family he’d ever need that he stands condemned as a rotten sinner before God?

The most amazing power of the gospel is not that it rehabilitates the outwardly wicked, but that it rehabilitates the outwardly good but inwardly wicked! Emphasizing how God saved you despite your inward corruptions hits far closer to home than emphasizing your outward corruptions. Outward corruptions are recognized by all religions as undesirable; only Christianity and the gospel expose our true, inward self-righteousness.

2) So as not to sensationalize, get a firm understanding of the fact that radical testimonies are actually less astonishing -in God’s eyes- than ‘boring’ testimonies

Matthew 21:31 “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.”

Jesus, in speaking to the religious elite, the moral majority of His day, proclaims that it is actually more common for an outwardly wicked person to enter heaven, than it is for a person of moral and religious uprightness.

How is it, Christian, that you think that the worse you were before coming to Christ actually makes your testimony that much more astounding? If you let scripture be your guide, the better of a person you were before coming to Christ is what would make your testimony that much more improbable!

So friends- the word of God makes it plain that the gospel is a foolish message to those who are perishing. Let’s stop acting like it isn’t foolish, dressing it up in self-improvement as if it will somehow impress the world. Trust me. It doesn’t.

Instead, let’s place our trust in the power of the message itself: the testimony of Christ and what He accomplished. And should a time or place lend itself to sharing a personal testimony, do not neglect the inward over the outward. Proclaim the depths of sin and how it has permeated every fiber of your being, and demonstrate the power of the gospel to even save the successful, moral, and satisfied sinner.

Below you will find an excerpt from Tim Keller’s excellent book, The Prodigal God. The emphasis is all mine, which is the specific statement that concerns this post:

“Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of His day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on the people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.“

At first glance, I found this to be a very compelling and convicting statement. Jesus did tend to offend the self-righteous religious people of His day, while in our day these people are seen as valuable tithers. The majority of churches in my community do tend to attract and even seek after white, middle class (again, tithers are seen as vital for church growth), outwardly moralistic people, rather than inner city runaways, drug addicts, and homosexuals.

However, I part ways with Keller at one point: his presuppositions seems to be that the preaching of God’s word in the context of corporate worship is entirely evangelistic, and that the ministry of the church is to create an atmosphere/message that make unbelievers feel comfortable. Furthermore, I’d also disagree with his inference that Jesus’ preaching (which was obviously evangelistic) should be exactly modeled in the corporate gathering of His church.

Instead, the corporate gathering of the church should be to feed and equip God’s people to then go out and evangelize to the ends of the earth, even to the licentious, liberated, and broken. Sure, our preaching in church should offend the outwardly religious, but it should make the licentious squirm as well. God’s people are holy, sanctified, and have gathered with hopeful expectation of being fed with Christ’s gifts. That is not an atmosphere that should make an unbeliever of any sort feel very comfortable.

Thus, I’d like to propose a slight adjustment to Keller’s words: Instead of saying that if we do not attract the outcasts then the ministers are not declaring the same message as Jesus did, I think it would be more accurate to say that if we are not consistently around, friends with, or ministering to the licentious, liberated, broken, and outcasts, then we are not living the same gospel the Jesus preached.

Certainly, the church is not to be a place with high walls and cultural or spiritual pre-qualifications necessary for entry, but neither should it look like the mission work of evangelism. We are to be in the midst of God’s people on His Day, feeding of Christ’s gifts, while the rest of the week we are to instead look outward, to the spiritual needs of others, and seek to be around the wicked (in order to bear witness to the gospel) as much as possible. That’s the ministry of Jesus: going outside the camp to make friends with sinners.

Some Christians place a high priority on knowing the exact date they were converted to Christ. Recalling the date is not only important for assurance of salvation, but is also helpful in sharing personal testimony when witnessing to other, it is argued, at least implicitly.

The scriptures, however, do not base assurance of salvation on any one-time event or decision in a person’s life (indeed, assurance is never to be found in one’s own experience or decision-making). And the use of an exact date in testimony is really just empty sentimentalism and/or an attempt to draw attention to oneself (our experiences/decisions rather than His work).

Recently, I read Michael Horton comment that when people would ask him the question, ‘When were you saved?’, he’d sometimes answers straight-faced, ‘2000 years ago at Calvary’.

Biblically speaking, Horton is right on. If you are in Christ, you were ’saved’ when Christ finished the work His father sent Him to accomplish, even though this salvation wasn’t applied until a specific point in your lifetime.

But recognizing that it is often important to point to a specific time in your life where you were ‘born again’, wouldn’t it make the most sense to point to your baptism? Without denying that there were ‘labor pains’ of tears, prayers, and pleas, which were the Spirit’s work of regeneration in your heart, it is at Baptism that you are publicly presented to the world as a disciple of Jesus Christ. It is at your baptism that a believer is baptized into Christ, into His death, and raised with Him in His resurrection.

We must be careful, my friends, of subtly removing Christ and His work in favor of our own experiences, thus drawing the attention to us rather than pointing to Him. What happened at Calvary and the grave 2000 years ago is the gospel which carries with it the power of salvation; what happened to you at some certain date in your life is really not that important at all –it is a footnote in the greater drama of HIS-story of redemption. Even the baptism, at which point you are united to Christ, is a baptism chiefly into HIS death, not just a newer and better ‘you’.

So strive to speak of His work, not your own, and you will decrease, and He will increase. Don’t worry about specific dates and experiences. Instead, shun the idea of talking about them, making it clear that HE is the real story worth discussing, and that you are actually just a pretty boring (and sinful) character caught up in the midst of a much greater redemptive drama.

Yesterday we celebrated my son Rylee’s 1st birthday. Rylee is named after the 19th century Anglican bishop, J.C. Ryle (along with my dad, Chandler, which is Rylee’s middle name).

Before we lit the cake and sang to little Rylee, I briefly explained to our friends and family what made J.C. Ryle so special, and why I’d name my son after an Anglican.

Broadening those thoughts just a bit, here is a good summary of what I admire most in Ryle, taken from Ryle himself in Knots Untied:

Ryle was an Evangelical

What is Evangelical Religion?

1) The first leading feature in Evangelical Religion is the absolute supremacy it assigns to Holy Scripture, as the only rule of faith and practice…

2) The second leading feature in Evangelical Religion is the depth and prominence it assigns to the doctrine of human sinfulness and corruption…

All men…are not only in a miserable, pitiable, and bankrupt condition, but in a state of guilt, imminent danger, and condemnation before God…

Hence we protest with all our heart against formalism, sacramentalism, and every species of mere external or vicarious Christianity. We maintain that all such religion is founded on an inadequate view of man’s spiritual need.

3) The third leading feature in Evangelical Religion is the paramount importance it attaches to the work and office of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the nature of the salvation which He has wrought out for man…

4) The fourth leading feature in Evangelical Religion is the high place which it assigns to the inward work of the Holy Spirit in the heart of man…

We maintain that the things which need most to be pressed on men’s attention are those mighty works of the Holy Spirit, inward repentance, inward faith, inward hope, inward hatred of sin, and inward love to God’s law…

5) The fifth and last leading feature in Evangelical Religion is the importance which it attaches to the outward and visible work of the Holy Ghost in the life of man…

The true grace of God is a thing that will always make itself manifest in the conduct, behaviour, tastes, ways, choices and habits of him who has it. It is not a dormant thing…

To tell a man he is “born of God”, or regenerated, while he is living in carelessness or sin, is a dangerous delusion…

Where there is the grace of the Spirit there will always be more or less fruit of the Spirit.

I am thankful for Ryle and his legacy of Gospel faithfulness. And I encourage you to get to know him better if you’re not familiar with his writings.

Sadly, in a recent article, Christian music artist Jennifer Knapp has openly admitting to living in a homosexual relationship with another woman. If you are not familiar with Jennifer Knapp, she was a extremely popular CCM musician in the late 90’s, until walking away from music (temporarily it seems) in 2002.

Reading the interview, a few things that she said about her relationship stuck out to me:

“…deciding to invest in a same-sex relationship”

“…because of who I’ve chosen to spend my life with”

“…we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love”

“…feeling like I have to justify my faith or the decisions that I’ve made to choose to love who I choose to love.”

“…this is not an option for me, to invest in this other person”

“…the conservative evangelical who uses what most people refer to as the “clobber verses” to refer to this loving relationship…”

“…I’ve found no law that commands me in any way other than to love my neighbor as myself”

I find it interesting how she paints this homosexual relationship. Who would ever think that investing in, loving, and holding onto another person is a bad thing?  Certainly those are good things; anyone reading the article –especially Christians– would agree.

But unfortunately, we’re talking about a sexual relationship here, between two people of the same sex. If she is sexually involved with this woman, which she admits, then she isn’t investing in, loving, or holding onto anyone but herself. She is actually destroying the other person, along with herself, and actively shaking her fist at God’s definition of sin, as well as His definition of ‘loving neighbor as yourself’. But notice that this very carefully –and intentionally– avoided by painting the relationship in these glowing  terms.

On a personal note, I recently transferred from a secular State University to Covenant College, a Reformed/PCA school. In one of my classes, ’sexuality and religion’, homosexuality in the church was the main topic. Sadly, I was very surprised at how many people (professing Christians) within the class were on the fence regarding this issue, and even some who after the class seemed convinced that homosexuality is not to be condemned by the church (but rather to be accepted).

If you don’t think this isn’t a real issue within the church right now, and I’m talking about conservative circles, then you’re not paying attention. That’s one thing that Knapp got right in this interview, when she said:

“The heartbreaking thing to me is that we’re all hopelessly deceived if we don’t think that there are people within our churches, within our communities, who want to hold on to the person they love, whatever sex that may be, and hold on to their faith.”

Yes, they are all around us, and if they’re not, then we need to “GO into all the world” a whole lot more so that they are around us. Because they –and us all– need the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Instead of defining ‘love’ to fit your personal preferences –which we all tend to do and which will most often lead us directly into conscience-soothing selfishness at some level– look to Christ. In Him we see loving, compassionate, missional, patient, and yet firm, demanding, objective, and stubborn when it came to truth, sin, righteousness, hell, and the judgment. He is the embodiment of love, to depths unfathomable by the human mind.

What He accomplished at the cross and the grave 2000 years ago is loving. Take that event and hold it up against all other claims of ‘love’, and by God’s grace our sin will be exposed, and the fullness of righteousness and forgiveness found in Him will shine like the noonday sun.

It was Augustine who famously said:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

This concept of an ‘empty void’ in our hearts is often preached upon in our churches, but sometimes with the wrong emphasis. Growing up, I remember a song we used to sing:

“There is an empty place/inside of you/there is a hollow space/don’t you know it’s true?
There is a reason why/nothing else can satisfy.
The empty place is the shape of God.“

Unfortunately, however, stating ‘nothing else can satisfy’ is not entirely true. For sinners in bondage to their sin, they are in love with the things of this world. Sex, greed, power, entertainment, and pleasure are things that temporarily satisfy them. Sure- sinners are seeking to fill some void, but often times they succeed in doing so without ever submitting to God.

Appealing to their (already) selfish desires to fill this ‘void’ is not a wise approach. For the void is ultimately their conscience. And there are many things besides the gospel that effectively deaden the conscience. We cannot expect someone outside of Christ to understand the ‘fulfillment’, as it were, and freedom of conscience, that one experiences once in Christ. It’s like appealing to the unbeliever in a foreign language; beckoning them to experience something that they cannot experience, or even understand.

The scripture says that “no one seeks after God…not even one.” (Rom 3:11-12). So whatever the lost man is ’seeking’, he isn’t seeking the God of scripture as  revealed in Jesus Christ. Instead of the one seeking, he is actually the one who must be sought.

It through the proclamation of God’s word, the good news of what God has accomplished through Christ, that seeks out, exposes as naked, and grants life to the unbelieving through the gift of faith. Instead of focusing on man’s emptiness and inability to find satisfaction for his own selfish comfort, let us point out that man’s greatest need is the record of his sin before a holy God, and that the only remedy is found in the sacrificial atonement of the God-Man, Jesus Christ, on behalf of desperate sinners like you and me.

Preach Christ and what He has done, not man and his personal crisis, and the lost-unbelieving-searching man will be properly exposed, and by God’s grace, properly clothed in the righteousness of God that comes by faith. 

(Taken from the PuritanBoard)

Tabletalk, March issue, Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson

[speaking of what sabbath meant from the beginning, Old Testament]

….Externally, that meant ceasing from his ordinary tasks in order to meet with God. Internally, it involved ceasing from all self-sufficiency in order to rest in God’s grace.

….And whatever was temporary about the Mosic Sabath must be left behind as the reality of the intimate communion of the Adamic Sabbath is again experienced in our worship of the risen Savior on the first day of the week — the Lord’s Day.
But we have not reached the goal. We still struggle to rest from our labors; we still must “strive to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:11). Consequently the weekly nature of the Sabbath continues as a reminder that we are not yet home with the Father.

[speaking of when our focus is on what we can and cannot do on the Lord's Day]

….”Is it ok to do….on Sunday?– because I don’t have any time to do it in the rest of the week?” If this is our question, the problem is not how we use Sunday, it is how we are misusing the rest of the week. This view of the Lord’s Day helps us see the day as a foretaste of heaven.

[speaking of the end effect of trying to keep the sabbath/fourth commandment/Lord's Day]

….Hebrews teaches us that eternal glory is a Sabbath rest. Every day, all day, will be “Father’s Day”! Thus here and now we learn the pleasures of a God given weekly rhythm, it will no longer seem strange to us that the eternal glory can be described as a prolonged Sabbath!

John Owen’s Commentary on the Old and New Covenants (Outline) « Contrast.

“We must have a righteousness in which Jehovah Himself cannot find a flaw, a righteousness which Jehovah cannot mend, a righteousness which neither sin nor Satan can mar; and unless we have on a righteousness of this nature, we can never enter into the blessedness of the world to come. Where, then, are we to find it? Eternal praises to the matchless mercy of a covenant God, we have it in the blessed Person, glorious work, and spotless obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ! And, therefore, as it was essential for Him to fulfill all righteousness for His people, He loved the Lord His God with all His heart, with all His mind, and with all His strength. He began at the beginning, and went through holily, righteously, and steadily every step of the law of God and all in justice and righteousness. He fulfilled every iota of it, and gave it immortal glory and honor. The law could only require the perfect obedience of a perfect man, but He gave it the perfect obedience of the God-Man, and stamped forever a holy dignity and majesty on it, in order to manifest that this glorious righteousness is suited to every sinner’s case, to all their needs, and to honor and glorify all the perfections of God; and thus He has “forever perfected them that were sanctified,” all those who were set apart for Himself. They are perfected forever in His own blessed obedience and spotless righteousness; and this righteousness which God gives shall endure forever…”My soul shall be joyful in my God; I will glory in the God of my salvation; for He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness; He hath adorned me with the garments of salvation.” –William Gadsby