The Law – Part Three – Evangelism
December 24, 2008
In the last post in this series we discussed the issue of genuine repentance. At this point we must discuss a related topic which is the issue of evangelism, so let’s take a moment and examine evangelism in light of the New Testament law. Evangelism is always a critical indicator of what our practical theology is. I use the word practical because most of us would assent to correct doctrine if we were given a test on proper belief systems, however often there is a great gulf between our mental theology and our practical theology. Our practical theology is on display in the way that we live and interact with others. In our daily living we demonstrate what we truly believe rather than what we may simply assent to or think that we believe.
Beyond our theology, there are also three things that evangelism uniquely reveals. First, it reveals how we view man’s interaction with God. The way that we communicate the context and requirements of the gospel reveal how we practically believe that man and God relate. Secondly, it reveals how we view ourselves. In our interactions with others and the sharing of our “testimony,” we reveal in a great measure how we view ourselves in general, and in particular how we view ourselves before God. Thirdly, our evangelism reveals what we think about others. The way that we relate the gospel to others, or whether we relate it at all to others, shows how we view those who are presently dead in sin.
The Effects of the Law on our Gospel Presentation
As we have demonstrated, most believers have a decidedly Old Testament understanding to God’s law rather than the New Testament understanding that Jesus clearly laid out in the Sermon on the Mount. While many might dispute that point, the reality is that our methods of evangelism illustrate this disconnect perhaps better than any other place. Let’s examine a few characteristics of western evangelism that illustrate the great ignorance of the church with regard to the law.
To begin there is the issue that we have already covered which is that we know only how to apply the law to outward behavior, rather than to the inward motives of the heart. This brings several problems both to our gospel presentation and also to our own understanding of ourselves. For one, because we are so outwardly focused, we tend to be quite ignorant of our own inward depravity. The depravity, or wickedness, of man as it is inherited from Adam is one of those things that we might be able to check off on a theology quiz, but it is not a doctrine that we believe to the point that it affects the way we view ourselves and others.
Because we do not truly grasp our own inward depravity, we are at a loss to press the gospel upon another individual who appears to be relatively moral outwardly. We are at a loss for words when they fail to have an interest in a salvation that they do not see the need of. Why do they not see the need of salvation? Because we have largely presented them with an outward salvation over an inward one and this flows from the fact that we do not articulate the inner requirements of God’s law, only the outward requirements of a law that, once they are saved, we argue against lest we embrace “legalism” over grace.
Because we do not truly understand, or perhaps even believe, in the depravity of man, we are also tempted to justify wicked behavior in both ourselves and others. As we noted, the people we present the gospel to often have a level of moral conduct that is very similar to our own. When we try to present the need for Christ, we fail because we do not know how to properly convict the heart at the root of the issue. We struggle and stumble to present to an individual their great need of Christ because the reality is that we are not really convinced that the person is all that bad, mostly because we have not ever considered ourselves to be “that bad.”
In fact, from this lack of understanding of depravity has arisen various modes of comparison, such as “good person” compared with “bad person” and the idea that some sin is worse than others. True, some sin has more extensive effects in this age, but in the eternal age, all wickedness is evil. We fail to understand this because we fail to see unredeemed man, “good” or “bad” as essentially wicked. We fail to see them as essentially wicked, because we do not clearly see how the law of God cuts beyond behavior into the very essence of each thought and impulse of the heart. The proof of man’s wickedness lies not in what impulses he restrains and what impulses he allows, the proof of man’s wickedness is that fact that the evil impulse arises at all within his being. Continue Reading The Law – Part Three – Evangelism »
The Law – Part Two – Defining Repentance
December 22, 2008
In the first post in this series, we introduced the idea of the law in the New Testament by referring to Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount. Now that we are considering that the law was not discarded by Jesus but rather fulfilled so that God might accomplish through the law that which He desired to accomplish, we must address the issue of repentance. If you remember from the first post, the critical understanding that Jesus brought is that while the law given to Moses was primarily an external law, the law in the New Testament was to be an internal law. While this may appear to be a superficial point, it has deep implications for how we, as believers, live with regard to the law.
Defining Repentance
Repentance is a fundamental concept to the Christian faith. John Baptist and Jesus both began their ministries preaching repentance. With such a clear precedent, we can likewise expect that the church in our day should be preaching repentance as well. So, if the church has a requirement to preach repentance, and many churches do preach repentance, why is it that it seems to have so little effect? Well, a significant part of the problem could be whether or not we actually know how to define repentance.
When we define repentance in the church at large, what we generally have in mind is turning from sinful behavior to holy behavior. Different streams of theology would define exactly what that looks like in practice a little differently, but that is the essence of the understanding that commonly persists. The problem is that there is a fundamental error in this definition of repentance and that is that this is a distinctly Mosaic view of repentance and it is at odds with the New Testament directive regarding repentance.
New Testament Repentance
Remember now, that the critical issue is that the law in the New Testament goes right into the heart of man whereas the Old Testament law focused on external behavior. New Testament repentance then is not focused on external behavior, but on the inward life of the heart. If you do not understand this, you will never understand the ministry of Jesus. This understanding is crucial to seeing how Jesus could minister to tax collectors and prostitutues with greater success than He could minister to moral, religious individuals. When you can see outward evil in your life, it makes it easier to accept inward depravity. Conversely, when you believe your outward morals to be sound, it makes it harder to receive the message of inward depravity.
In light of this, a true New Testament repentance preacher will bypass externals and pierce men directly in their heart. This sort of preaching may well expose the life long church-goer as a man more in need of repentance than the town drunk because the root of iniquity can exist in a religious man just as strongly as it can in an irreligious man. In fact, at times it can persist even more strongly in a religious heart as it provides fertile ground for the sins of pride and self-righteousness.
The New Testament message properly sees external behavior as a secondary issue that is at best a symptom of sickness of the heart. The call to repentance is not primarily a call towards behavior modification, but rather the call to repentance is to dig deep within. It is a call like unto Abraham’s whereby each individual is called to take their own personal Isaac, which is their own inner morality, up the dark mountain of sacrifice. Once on that mountain, you must bind him to the altar, and allow God to replace your treasured Isaac with Himself. Once would think that this is elementary. Who would not want God’s rule over him? Who would not think that God is the most perfect one to rule and reign in a man’s heart?
Saints, if nothing else illuminates for you the depravity of man, let this one example illustrate for you the sickness of the human heart. There is no battle known to man, even to Christian men, that is akin to the battle one faces when God comes into take over. The very One we should welcome with open arms we resist with all our strength. This is the issue of heart repentance. This battle shows our inner animosity towards God no matter how moral our outward behavior. Praise God that He alone can conquer such a heart and fill it with His own Spirit.
Genuine repentance bypasses everything external and requires this sort of turning within a man. The call for repentance goes deep into the essence of the man, confronts him with the supremacy of God and the right of God to rule the individual and then calls for that man to turn whole heartedly from his own life, religious or not, to a life consumed by God.
This turning from a life where man is obsessed with himself, which may or may not be moral and religious, to a life where man is wholly given over to God is repentance in the Biblical sense. Many of the problems in our churches arise because we are dealing with individuals that have never truly repented and part of the reason they have never repented is because they have never heard a proper message of repentance that has the power to cut through their soul and their behavior to the essence of what God is after. If we are to see men genuinely repent, we must begin to proclaim a message of genuine repentance to them. Continue Reading The Law – Part Two – Defining Repentance »
The Law – Part One – Introduction
December 22, 2008
Do not think that I have come to do away with or undo the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to do away with or undo but to complete and fulfill them. – Matthew 5:17 (AMP)
I was reading through a message by John G. Lake on the question of Sunday or Saturday worship and found in it some startling insights into the relationship between the law and the believer. As I considered what John was saying the implications of what he was saying hit me, and what hit me was far beyond the question of whether or not our primary worship gathering should be on a Saturday or a Sunday. As I continued to ponder this issue, I began to realize that what I was seeing was so simple and so clearly the gospel and yet at the same time, I believe there is something here of the relationship of the believer to the law that has been lost. I believe it is vital that we understand with a new clarity the appropriate relationship between the believer and the law because it vitally impacts many different areas. With that in mind, I’ll break out these thoughts across several posts so that each can be digested separately. Each part of the series will build up to the conclusion, so you’ll want to read through each one to participate in the complete conversation.
The Mosaic Law
The first thing we must consider is that the Mosaic Law, as a means to the sanctification and redemption of God’s people, utterly failed. There are obviously many purposes for which God gave the Mosaic Law, but for one He gave it that men might demonstrate whether they had the ability to adhere to even an outward display of righteousness. God dealt with men on the basis of outward behavior during this time and men fell woefully short. When the Israelites were given over to judgment, it was not just the judgment of a nation, but the judgment of systems of external morality. It was not just the failure of the Jewish nation; it was the failure of mankind to keep covenant with God by virtue of man’s own will.
What we find then is that outward requirements were incapable of dealing with inward corruption. While this may sound like an elementary principle, we will find a little later that most of the church has not yet fully grasped this issue. Seeing as the law could not produce a righteous man then, we must see that the law is powerless to do anything but demonstrate that man has a corruption that cannot be cured by himself. As an aside, the astute reader might notice that to fully grasp this statement is also to bring a question around much of our present evangelism. Our evangelism primarily revolves around telling “lost” people, whom the Bible actually calls dead not lost, that they need to make a decision of their will to choose Jesus. Without exploring this topic here, if the wills of the ancient Israelites did not have the capacity to choose good even in the face of the demonstrations on Mt. Sinai, what makes us think modern man’s will has the capacity to make a choice that brings salvation?
The Sermon on the Mount
The Sermon on the Mount, the height of the gospel declaration, gives us insight into the operation and direction of the law in the New Testament. As quoted at the top, in Matthew 5:17, Jesus makes the bold claim that He has come to fulfill the law. Most of us read that merely in the sense that Jesus is ending the Mosaic law, but if you look at the Greek word for fulfill, which is “pleroo” you will notice the meaning includes the following: “to make something full, or fill it up, or render it full or complete.”
Jesus follows this in verse 18 to say that nothing will pass away until the law has been accomplished. In other words, the law was given for a purpose that has not yet been accomplished. What is that purpose? The purpose is to have a people set apart, or sanctified, unto God. The law was given towards that purpose, but it failed to accomplish it and thus God injected Himself into the process in the person of His Son in order that God’s law might be extended and come to its marvelous conclusion. Do we consider that God is looking for an accomplishment to His law, or are we so eager to loose ourselves from the Mosaic requirements that we fail to consider the great accomplishment of God’s law that Jesus desires? Saints, God has in mind something more grand and glorious than our liberation from a ceremonial law. His law is going to accomplish something of eternal significance.
Jesus continues from this statement to declare that the righteousness of the people must exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees (vs. 20). In other words, God is about to require a righteousness greater than those that best understood, best kept, and publicly contended for the Mosaic law. Now this created a very real problem for the people of God listening to Jesus. Not only was there no one who could obtain righteousness under the law, but now they find that God is going to require an even greater righteousness of the people.
Jesus then explains that statement by giving examples of the righteousness that God requires (vs. 21-32). He begins each shocking new example with the phrase, “you have heard that it was said,” clearly referencing the law, in which He makes examples of what we would consider to be “major sins.” In order to be perfectly clear, Jesus does not use the example of “small sins,” (as if there were such a thing) but rather he uses the blatant sins like murder and adultery so that no one will misunderstand the gravity of His message.
Jesus then continues to destroy every man’s hope for righteousness by looking at the most holy among then and declaring, “You have looked at a woman and become sexually aroused and that is the same as the adultery for which you would convict a brother.” He looks then to a religious leader and declares, “Your anger with a fellow Jew is the same act before God as the one who murders another.” The audience is now spell bound. What will Jesus say next? Their very hope of standing with God, the law, now that it has been expounded by Jesus has been found to be their greatest enemy.
Furthermore, Jesus is filling up and completing this law that it might come to God’s glorious conclusion, but in that filling up the requirement of the law is enlarged. Who will be able to stand before this new law? Understand though that this was entirely within the expectation of the people because of John Baptists’s ministry. John’s ministry had been, “repent for the ruler of God’s kingdom (the Messiah) is coming.” People responded to John and repented precisely because they wanted to cleanse their hearts before His appearing so that they would be numbered among the righteous and not the wicked when Messiah executed judgment. Now the people, already having trembling hearts, are sitting before Messiah Himself and He is enlarging the concept of righteousness beyond what they had already failed to keep.
What we miss is that Jesus is introducing the basis here for the New Testament law. We sometimes are so pre-occupied with the desire to be free of modes of worship and kosher foods that we fail to see that while Jesus did liberate us from the Mosaic Law, He also brought it to fullness and brought into place a complete law which we fail to examine or consider.
What is Apostolic?
December 18, 2008
I realize that title of this post is a little misleading as it is a question that cannot be answered in a single post. In fact, books have been written on this subject and I would propose that there are still books that need to be written on this subject. Up front I have to say that, as always, I highly recommend Art Katz’s classic Apostolic Foundations when seeking illumination on the apostolic church. So, while I cannot examine the subject in one post, I want to add a few thoughts to the discussion and perhaps even re-direct our common considerations of the apostolic and the prophetic.
I have to admit that recently I have become a little weary of the phrase “Apostolic and Prophetic.” It is probably because the phrase seems to have become yet another buzzword. At the moment it seems like everyone is posturing their ministries to make sure they are “Apostolic” or “Apostolically aligned,” and, while I am not criticizing for that, I have to wonder if we have lost something in the mix.
Most definitions of what is “apostolic” seem to revolve around leadership structures or functions and I believe this is where we go astray. For example, if someone leads a large enough group then they are apostolic or if they can plant another fellowship and send out individuals then they are considered apostolic. I believe it is fair to say that if we examined most of our present teaching and our actions around the words “apostolic and prophetic” it would revolve around authority structures or functions. The question I think we need to ask is what if that is not the essence of the apostolic and the prophetic? What if they are defined by something entirely difficult than a leadership role or a function? What if there is something entirely different to be demonstrated in these gifts that we are missing but is very necessary? Could it be that the very progress of the church is impaired for want of a correct understanding of these terms?
For those of you, like me, that get confused or wearisome of some of the apostolic and prophetic rhetoric, for a moment let’s lay aside all that we have previously known and examine this for a moment and see if God does not open up something entirely different. Continue Reading What is Apostolic? »
The Issue of Dispensational Thinking
December 2, 2008
My heart has been stirred lately on the issue of dispensationalism. Proponents of dispensationalism would argue that it has been taught in the Scriptures since the New Testament. For the sake of clarification, what we need to examine is more what we might call the effects of the dispensational theology that was initially formalized in the 19th century. Now many might wonder why it is significant to examine this issue. Others might point out that more recent dispensationalists seem to have moderated their position and perhaps corrected the errors of earlier dispensationalists. While that may be true, that is not the fundamental issue.
One of the crisises that may well be brewing in the church in America is that the average churchgoer has little appetite for theology. Now, lest you think I am promoting intellectually driven seminaries (some would call them “cemeteries”) or large, dusty books written by well educated men debating nuances of doctrine let me explain myself. Theology is simply the study of God. It is what we believe about God. Now, the core essence of God is perceived by the Spirit and transcends human understanding. It is important that we understand that, or we will be given to boxing God into human models of understanding. With that being said, God gave us a capacity to think and to know. This capacity is modeled after His capacity because we are made in His image and yet it is far beneath His capacity.
While this capacity must necessarily operate below the revelation of God’s Spirit to man’s spirit, it is still a vital part of our makeup. Because of this it is vitally important how and what we think about God. When we do not think rightly about God, it causes great loss to the believer and ultimately the church. We must become very jealous for the issue of theology. We must always be careful not to reduce God to diagrams and systems of theology that man can comprehend, and we must remain ever vigilant of a concept of God that is man derived and man comprehended. With those proper guardians watching over our heart, we must then make every effort to allow God to reveal Himself to us that we might think great thoughts about Him. We must also be ruthless in discerning and rejecting thoughts and ideas about God that are untrue. These ideas can taint the lens through which we view the world causing us to miss God’s revelation and fall into error.
Now with that being said, let me set a few caveats in place. Dispensationalism, like any other movement or doctrine, does exist across a wide spectrum. An examination of every particular flavor of it is certainly beyond the scope of a blog post, so let it suffice to say that we will examine specific effects of the results of dispensationalism thinking rather than examining every individual dispensational tenet. I am not attempting to paint all dispensationalists as heretics with a single broad stroke, but rather want to examine specific ideas that have been associated with or have come as a result of various streams of dispensational thought.
I also acknowledge up front that I am not an expert in dispensational theology, so theologians of that persuasion may have addressed some of the issues that I raise; however my primary concern over specific tenets of doctrine is the effect of this way of thinking on believers at large. So, again, I am dealing with the effects of ideas and ways of thinking over specific beliefs and have no desire to paint a broad stroke of “heresy” on anyone. In that spirit, just because we see some dangerous ideas, let us not label everyone from here on that uses the word “dispensation” as a heretic. Let’s continue in Christian love and charity contending for proper ideas and thoughts about God, but not allowing ourselves to execute improper judgment on individuals simply because of the use of a single word or phrase. With these warnings and caveats out of the way, let’s now examine the effects of dispensational thinking. Continue Reading The Issue of Dispensational Thinking »
Two Powerful Quotes
December 1, 2008
While working on a new post, I came across two powerful quotes I wanted to pass along. Both are worth some time and consideration. Thanks to Becky over at IHOP for posting these.
First from John Piper, Hunger for God, p. 14 -
The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of the triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18-20). The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.
The Second from Allen Hood, The Excellencies of Christ -
Satan the adversary, the ‘bringer of light,’ opposes the advances of the Gospel primarily through the realm of ideas and deception. The object of his deception and the subject matter of his deception is who? It is Jesus.
That is why for the first four-hundred years the Church fought vigorously for the Person of Christ, to the shedding of blood to the laying down of their life. There is a reason why they could not worship at the emperor’s altar. Beloved, if Jesus is just a good teacher, if He just shows you the way to God, then they can easily worship at the altar of the emperor. Yet hundreds and hundreds of thousands of believers year after year after year were led to the lions, were filleted alive, were skinned alive, were run through, were crucified upside down, were hung on crosses, they were burned and set on fire. Why?
Because He is not optional. He is the unique, supreme, revelation of the Living God. When you have Him you have it all. When you do not, you do not. Satan will oppose that revelation over everything, and he will do it through the most popular polished people on the globe. He does not mind feeding the poor. He minds the testimony of Jesus who is the only King who will return and set the poor truly free… [The testimony of Jesus Christ] is the subject matter that will enflame our hearts and set us on fire and make us fearless before the most powerful men and women of the earth.