Asking the question, What is the Christian’s task in the world today?, Francis Schaeffer’s answer was not evangelism.  Evangelism too often seems canned and mechanical, Schaeffer said.  But when evangelism is pursued as part of a larger whole, it will be more convincing.  What is that larger whole, embodied in a healthy church?  Two contents and two realities, Schaeffer proposed.

Two contents

1.  Sound doctrine

“The first content is clear doctrinal content concerning the central elements of Christianity.”  This strong message stands in contrast to the content-weak philosophical and pragmatic rolls of the dice people are settling for all around us.

2.  Honest answers to honest questions

“The second content is . . . honest answers to honest questions. . . . Christianity demands that we have enough compassion to learn the questions of our generation.”  We must listen respectfully to all around us and try to satisfy their questions from the full biblical gospel.

Two realities

1.  True spirituality

“There must be something real of the work of Christ, something real in Christ’s bearing his fruit through me through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. . . . There is nothing more ugly in all the world, nothing which more turns people aside, than a dead orthodoxy.”

2.  The beauty of human relationships

“True Christianity produces beauty as well as truth. . . . If we do not show beauty in the way we treat each other, then in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of our own children, we are destroying the truth we proclaim.”

“When there are the two contents and the two realities, we will begin to see something profound happen in our generation.”

Francis A. Schaeffer, 2 Contents, 2 Realities (Downers Grove, 1975), pages 1-32.

Something profound in our generation

Ford

“God’s grace to His people is continuous and is never exhausted. Grace knows no interruption and no limit.  In contrast with the Law it stresses the dynamic character of the Christian life.  Law can be mastered.  A man may acquire merit by conforming to it.  He knows the precise requirements that are demanded of him.  But grace is always an adventure.  No man can say where grace will lead him.”

Leon Morris, The Gospel according to John (Grand Rapids, 1971), page 111.

Always an adventure

“My passion isn’t to build up my church.  My passion is for God’s Kingdom.”

Ever heard someone say that?  I have.  It sounds noble, but it’s unbiblical and wrong.  It can even be destructive.

Suppose I said, “My passion isn’t to build up my marriage.  My passion is for Marriage.  I want the institution of Marriage to be revered again.  I’ll work for that.  I’ll pray for that.  I’ll sacrifice for that.  But don’t expect me to hunker down in the humble daily realities of building a great marriage with my wife Jani.  I’m aiming at something grander.”

If I said that, would you think, “Wow, Ray is so committed”?  Or would you wonder if I had lost my mind?

If you care about the Kingdom, good.  Now be the kind of person who can be counted on in your own church.  Join your church, pray for your church, tithe to your church, throw yourself into the life of your church with wholehearted passion.

We build great churches the same way we build great marriages — real commitment that makes a positive difference in practical ways.  And thus we build the Kingdom.

My church or the Kingdom?

And you shall make response before the Lord your God, “A wandering Aramean was my father.  And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty and populous.  And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor.  Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression.  And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders.”  Deuteronomy 26:5-8

In his essay “On Stories,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “Dangers, of course, there must be; how else can you keep a story going?”

The harshness, humiliation, hard labor, affliction, toil and oppression – the biblical language is bluntly realistic – all these painful things in our stories are not to be suppressed.  We are not to “get over it and move on,” as some say.  That misses the point.  Remembering the past, including the hard parts, is part of our confession of faith.

Don’t be afraid to face how you have been sinned against.  God is redeeming those very parts of your story with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

God does not trivialize your sufferings.  He hallows them.  Remembered in this way, your past is lifted up and dignified.  In fact, it will take eternity to see and to share the wonderful stories of redemption God is telling through us all.

Danger there must be

Preview of coming attractions

1.  Human approval is divided.  Some like you, others dislike you.  A split vote.  Who can you believe?

2.  Human approval is shallow.  None of them know your deepest heart.  What if they did?

3.  Human approval is distorted.  Your friends overlook many failings.  Your enemies can’t see anything right with you.  How do you sort it all out?

4.  Human approval is unsatisfying.  The need of your heart for belovedness goes far beyond anything another sinner can say or do.

5.  Human approval is a blessing.  The loving favor of true friends is a gift from God.  Receive it cheerfully, with thanks to him.  And be sure to give it out to others in generous measure every day.  They need it too.

“I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.”  Philemon 7

Human approval

“About fifteen years ago I was sitting at the dining room table looking out the window and watching five boys fooling around with a BB-gun and wondering a little to myself how long it would be before one of them shot another in the eye. Finally one of them grabbed the gun to shoot at a little sparrow sitting on a tree just outside the dining room window through which I had been watching this whole performance. I could see the whole action unfolding before my eyes; it seemed almost slow-motion, uncanny, inevitable. The boy aimed deliberately at the bird, shot at the bird, missed the bird and put a hole in the window right in front of me, and away they all ran with me racing out of the house after them. I didn’t catch any of them!

In a few days I had found out that a boy named Dave White had pulled the trigger. Also in a few days I had the window fixed and paid for. Then I began to think about Dave. He was evading me at every turn. He would not face me and he had no notion of confessing. In the meantime the other boys had floated back to games in the vacant lot and in the street in front of the house, while Dave, the guilty one, was on the outside of all this, ‘weeping and gnashing his teeth.’ He would have none of us. So I went after him, not to punish him but to save him. He had to face me in judgment, then in grace; only thus could we renew our fellowship, only thus could I bring him back to the gang.

I caught him alone. Now we stood face to face to have it out. The boy was rebellious, tense, tight, ready to fight me, ready to run away again. He admitted he had wronged me but I gave him the surprising message that the window had been paid for, that I had no notion of collecting anything from him, that what really interested me was to know how we could get him to come back to be one of the gang again. . . . I told him over and over again the same old story: the price has been paid, it’s all over; let’s be friends. What a time I had getting that message through to him. Why? Because he didn’t believe me. There is always an unbelievable quality in the wonder of what we call grace. But I wish you could have seen him when he finally did believe me. What a wonderful look, what a release of tensions, what a rolling away of the burdens, what a newness of life. Now he could quit running. Now he could relax. Talk about peace of mind; you should have seen that boy. What total commitment he offered me henceforth, and by no request of mine! There was nothing he wouldn’t do for me.”

Addison H. Leitch, Interpreting Basic Theology (New York, 1961), pages 113-114.

Now he could relax

“For how many a soldier in a concentration camp, weak with hunger and smarting under the whip of the torturers; for how many a person huddling in the last extremity of ghastly dread in a bomb shelter; for how many on the endless gray road of a refugee trek was it not the great experience suddenly to know: I am not in the hands of men, despite everything to the contrary; another hand, a higher hand is governing in the midst of all man’s madness and canceling all the logic of my calculations and all the images of my anxious sick imagination?  I am being led to the undreamed-of shore, the harbor, the Father’s house.  And always when things grow dark, suddenly that marvelous helping hand is there.  If there is anything that is really bombproof, then it is this.”

Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father (New York, 1959), page 36.  Italics original.

The great experience

I tore this page out of the old hymnal we used at First Pres Augusta.  Sorry about that.  But the whole hymnal didn’t fit in between the pages of my Bible.  One page does.

This scrap of paper brings back happy memories of singing this great hymn in that church, with Paul Roberts cranking it on the organ, and the congregation belting it out with me:

Ask ye what great thing I know, that delights and stirs me so?
What the high reward I win? Whose the name I glory in?
Jesus Christ the crucified.

Who defeats my fiercest foes? Who consoles my saddest woes?
Who revives my fainting heart, healing all its hidden smart?
Jesus Christ the crucified.

Who is life in life to me? Who the death of death will be?
Who will place me on his right, with the countless hosts of light?
Jesus Christ the crucified.

This is that great thing I know, this delights and stirs me so
Faith in him who died to save, him who triumphed o’er the grave
Jesus Christ the crucified.

I love singing all-out, with passionate Christian friends, in praise to Jesus Christ the crucified!

Scraps – 4

Years ago I heard my dad preach on his favorite verse of the Bible, Romans 15:13.  “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”  I took these notes on a real estate agent’s stationery.

Dad started out referring to “hopelessness killing the spirits and the witness of Christians.  Long faces, sober.  But Christianity is incurably optimistic.”  Then dad proposed three points from the verse:

1.  Who God is – “the God of hope”

2.  What God does – “fills us with all joy and peace,” so that we “abound in hope”

3.  How God does it – “in believing” (our part), “by the power of the Holy Spirit” (his part)

Dad’s sermon pressed Romans 15:13 into my consciousness permanently.  This simple scrap of paper, with my jottings from a sermon long ago at an event I can’t recall, represents a landmark in my soul.  From that day on, I no longer had to face life without Romans 15:13.  I am grateful.

P.S.  The green background has no significance, by the way.  It’s the sofa I’m sitting on.

Scraps – 3

I was ordained into the ministry of the gospel by Lake Avenue Congregational Church, Pasadena, California, on September 14, 1975.  Three days before, Wilbur Smith wrote me this letter.  To some, it might be just a scrap.  To me, it is a treasure.

Wilbur Smith was one of the major Bible teachers in my grandparents’ generation, when liberalism had Bible-believers on the ropes.  Smith taught at Fuller in the early years.  Through Lake Avenue Church he took a liking to me and encouraged me along the way.  He was gruff in manner – famously so – but tender at heart.

I will not disclose the personally precious comments he makes on page two of the letter.  But in the second paragraph above he writes:

“I trust that in all the years that are ahead for you, it will be true for your audiences, as Paul said his ministry was true among the Thessalonians, how ‘they turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivered us from the wrath to come.’”

Oh, that people might walk out of Immanuel Church every Sunday stirred in heart to say, “I want to live for God now!”

Scraps – 2

In my Bible, and in a file folder I have in my brief case, I keep some scraps of paper.  They have no value in themselves.  Bob Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” after seeing a piece of discarded paper being driven by the wind down a New York street.  It seemed to him a metaphor for truth in this world.  I’m not at Dylan’s level, but there are some scraps that mean a lot me.

Like this one.  I wrote this as a college student, though I don’t remember the occasion.  It says,

“I’m so full of myself, so full of frustration, so defeated, so discouraged, so sad – BUT – Christ is SUFFICIENT, Christ is VICTORIOUS, Christ is SOVEREIGN, Christ is CAPABLE, Christ is LOVING – AND – I’m FORGIVEN.  So PRESS ON!  AND DON’T LOOK BACK!!”

At this time in my life, I didn’t know the Bible in a formal way.  But, within a general biblical framework, I was being taught by the Spirit.

This little scrap of paper reminds me of God’s loving care for me earlier in my life.  I am grateful.

Scraps – 1

Jani and I are off to Orlando for an Acts 29 conference.  Looking forward to it.

Lighter blogging this week.  Thanks for checking in.

Off to Orlando

“In Kiev, where I found myself on a Sunday morning, on an impulse I turned into a church where a service was in progress.  It was packed tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar whence I could survey the congregation and look up at the altar.  Young and old, peasants and townsmen, parents and children, even a few in uniform – it was a variegated assembly. . . . Never before or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of turning to God in great affliction was overpowering.  Though I could not, of course, follow the service, I knew from Klavdia Lvovna little bits of it; for instance, where the congregation say there is no help for them save from God.  What intense feeling they put into these words!  In their minds, I knew, as in mine, was a picture of those desolate abandoned villages, the hunger and the hopelessness, the cattle trucks being loaded with humans in the dawn light.  Where were they to turn for help?  Not to the Kremlin . . ., nor to the forces of progress and democracy in the West. . . . Every possible human agency found wanting.  So, only God remained, and to God they turned with a passion, a dedication, a humility, impossible to convey.  They took me with them; I felt closer to God then than I ever had before, or am likely to again.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time: The Green Stick (New York, 1982), pages 258-259.

Only God remained, and to God they turned

“If your religion doesn’t help you, it is no religion for you; you had better be without it.”

Mark Rutherford, The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (New York, 1929), page 266.

Yes, there are times when nothing seems to work. We feel forsaken by God himself, and we don’t know how we got there or what it means or how to get back. There are such times. But they are meant to be seasons or episodes only. They are not meant to provide the narrative. Christ is better than that.

If we have been reaching out for his hand and not finding it, we might be reaching in the wrong direction. Reaching back toward the past, however desirable, is often wrong. Reaching forward into the future, however much we must let go of, is commonly where his strength awaits us.

He is our true help, and his hand will not fail.

Help for the helpless

It’s what everyone needs.  Everyone.  Gospel + safety + time.  A lot of gospel + a lot of safety + a lot of time.

Gospel: good news for bad people through the finished work of Christ on the cross and the present power of the Holy Spirit.  Multiple exposures.  Constant immersion.  Wave upon wave of grace and truth, according to the Bible.

Safety: a non-accusing environment.  No finger-pointing.  No embarrassing anyone.  No manipulation.  No oppression.  No condescension.  But respect and sympathy and understanding, where sinners can confess and unburden their souls.

Time: no pressure.  Not even self-imposed pressure.  No deadlines on growth.  No rush.  No hurry.  But a lot of space for complicated people to rethink their lives at a deep level.  If we relax, trusting in God’s patience, we actually get going.

This is what our churches must be: gentle environments of gospel + safety + time.  It’s the only way anyone can ever change.

Who doesn’t need that?

Gospel + safety + time

“The Beatles’ musical ideas progressed in a most tangible way with each album they recorded.  Geoff Emerick, the recording engineer who with George Martin formed the imaginative team which translated the Beatles’ requirements onto tape, once totted up the number of hours put into the making of Sgt. Pepper and came up with 700.  Please Please Me, the Beatles’ first album, was recorded in 585 minutes.”

Liner notes to Sgt. Pepper, CD version, Apple Records, 1987.

Excellence and effort

“The LXX was still close to the mark when it used eleos (mercy) as its preferred translation of hesed.  The modern preference for words like ‘duty,’ ‘obligation,’ ‘loyalty,’ ‘solidarity,’ has the picture completely out of focus.  Its worst effect has been to obscure the primal perpetual revelation of the Bible that God in his ultimate and eternal being is ‘gracious and sensitive, abundant in hesed‘ — ‘lovingkindness.’  The Old Testament is thus in perfect agreement with its New Testament consummation: ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16).”

Francis I. Anderson, “Yahweh, The Kind and Sensitive God,” in God Who Is Rich In Mercy, edited by P. T. O’Brien and D. G. Peterson (Grand Rapids, 1986), page 82.

Lovingkindness

In a world of secrets, outward success is everyone’s goal.  If we can just succeed, we won’t have to face ourselves.  No wonder that doesn’t work.  It can’t work.  The reality of what we are will always topple this house-of-cards persona we so earnestly wish were true.

The gospel is not God’s way of giving us an even better self-improvement goal.  The gospel is God’s judgment on our better selves and his replacement of it all with Jesus.

Every one of us thinks, “If only I could do __________ or be __________, then I would arrive.”  So, what does “arrival” look like to you?  If it isn’t Jesus, the risen Lord himself, every arrival you achieve is only another set-back.

If you make financial security your arrival, you are already trapped in anxiety.  If you make a thin body your identity, you will hate yourself more.  If you make a porn-free life your okayness, you are doomed to compulsion.  God’s remedy for you is not more money or better looks or perfect control.  God’s gift to you is Jesus.  With Jesus, we are saved.  Everything is going to be okay.  Without Jesus, we are damned.  Nothing will go right.

Forsake all fraudulent success.  Make Jesus your goal, your arrival, your identity, your comfort, your okayness, and he’ll gladly give himself to you — and on terms of grace.  But reach for anything else, and it will turn into its opposite and betray you.

To paraphrase the apostle Paul, “I’ve lost everything, and I don’t even care, because now I get Jesus” (Philippians 3:8).

Success and Jesus