The Gospel Coalition

“If we stress the love of God without the holiness of God, it turns out only to be compromise.  But if we stress the holiness of God without the love of God, we practice something that is hard and lacks beauty.  And it is important to show forth beauty before a lost world and a lost generation.  All too often young people have not been wrong in saying that the church is ugly.  In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ we are called upon to show to a watching world and to our own young people that the church is something beautiful.

Several years ago I wrestled with the question of what was wrong with much of the church that stood for purity.  I came to the conclusion that in the flesh we can stress purity without love or we can stress the love of God without purity, but that in the flesh we cannot stress both simultaneously.  In order to exhibit both simultaneously, we must look moment by moment to the work of Christ, to the work of the Holy Spirit.  Spirituality begins to have real meaning in our moment-by-moment lives as we begin to exhibit simultaneously the holiness of God and the love of God.”

Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church before the Watching World (Downers Grove, 1971), page 63.  Italics added.

By personality, each of us is predisposed to favor one or the other, either purity and rightness or compassion and softness.  In ourselves, we veer off one way or the other.  And we do not feel wrong about it, because our defaults reflect something real about God.  God is pure.  And God is compassionate.  But God is bigger than we are.  God is all that he is all the time, and he is the measure of all that we need all the time.  Ministering in his name, but within the limits of our natural distortions, defaces the loveliness of God in the world today.  It is unfair to him and harmful to others.  And having a faithful doctrinal statement does not by itself rescue us from our personal smallness and ugliness.  It is only as we lean hard on the Lord moment by moment that his power enters in to make us larger than ourselves.  Self-mistrust and an outward looking to the Lord moment by moment — it is how we can demonstrate the beauty of the gospel.

“Christ suffered in his own person whatsoever he calls us to suffer, that he might the better learn to relieve and pity us in our sufferings.  In his desertion in the garden and upon the cross, he was content to lack that unspeakable solace in the presence of his Father, both to bear the wrath of the Lord for a time for us, and likewise to know the better how to comfort us in our greatest extremities. . . . He was broken, that we should not be broken; he was troubled, that we should not be desperately troubled; he became a curse, that we should not be accursed.  Whatsoever may be wished for in an all-sufficient comforter is all to be found in Christ.”

Richard Sibbes, “The Bruised Reed,” in Works (Edinburgh, 1979), I:72-73. Style updated.

“These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.”  Acts 17:6

In the days of the apostles, outsiders disparaged the church, but they couldn’t ignore the church.  Today, here in the Bible Belt, our task is to re-create those conditions.  We want to be a force for wonderful gospel upheaval.  How?  By planting so many gospel-centered churches that the blessing of God cannot be ignored.  Being spoken against, as ones who turn the world upside down, is not a problem.  Being ignored is, because this isn’t about us.  It’s about Jesus.

In the corporate psychology of every city, there is a threshold of non-ignorability.  Here in Nashville, many things can be ignored.  But the Titans cannot be ignored, country music cannot be ignored, Vanderbilt University cannot be ignored.  But the gospel remains too ignorable.

An organic, from-below, non-big-event strategy of church-planting — some churches small, some medium, some large — but churches with a clear message of grace and a beautiful culture of grace, churches of gospel + safety + time where sinners can rethink their lives without pressure, churches where sinners can admit their problems without being humiliated, churches where there are more and more stories of divine renewal, and Nashville will wake up one morning in the not-too-distant future and sense that something has changed.  And it cannot be ignored, it cannot be dismissed, it cannot be written off as anomalous, because it is not just another big event down at the Ryman Auditorium that comes and goes but is embodied in a growing network of radiant churches that are here to stay.

May the Lamb receive the reward of his suffering in Nashville.

“A man who is to do much with men must love them and feel at home with them.  An individual who has no geniality about him had better be an undertaker and bury the dead, for he will never succeed in influencing the living. . . . A man must have a great heart, if he would have a great congregation.  His heart should be as capacious as those noble harbors along our coast, which contain sea-room for a fleet.  When a man has a large, loving heart, men go to him as ships to a haven and feel at peace when they have anchored under the lee of his friendship.  Such a man is hearty in private as well as in public; his blood is not cold and fishy but he is warm as your own fireside.  No pride and selfishness chill you when you approach him; he has his doors all open to receive you, and you are home with him at once.  Such men I would persuade you to be, every one of you.”

C. H. Spurgeon, Lectures to my Students (Grand Rapids, 1970), page 169.

God is for us.  Romans 8:31

But I have this against you.  Revelation 2:4.  See also 2:14, 20; 3:3.

So, which is it?  Is God for us, or is God against us?  If we are in Christ, the answer is: maybe both.  God is certainly for us, and God might also be against us.

God is for us in an absolute sense, in Christ.  We have peace with God (Romans 5:1).  There is now no condemnation threatening us (Romans 8:1).  God foreknew us, predestined us, called us, justified us and promises to glorify us (Romans 8:29-30).  God is for us, and nothing can change that.

I can sin my way out of my marriage, I can sin my way out of the ministry, I can sin my way out of physical health, and a lot more.  But I cannot sin my way out of Christ, and neither can you, because God is for us.

God might also be against us at times.  Not that he de-justifies us, but he might discipline us (Hebrews 12:5-6).  He might oppose us (James 4:6).  He might send out wrath against us (2 Chronicles 19:2; 32:25).  Not condemning wrath, but purifying wrath, for a time.  How could it be otherwise?  The smile of God is not an all-approving grin.  What kind of Father would that be?

But even when he is against us, still, he is for us.  It is possible for God to be both for us and against us at the same time, his love burning away whatever keeps us from pressing more deeply into his mighty heart.

“Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3:19).

No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.  John 1:18

“John, in placing all his hopes on one person as the unique disclosure of a universal answer, sets the stage for an almost chilling anxiety of commitment.  If only the Son has made God known, then the hopes of humanity rest upon the Son.  This needs to be spoken in a hush, because it evokes a hope that if disappointed will mark the last stage of despair.  Hope in the Son is a last resort.  If the Son has not made God known, and if we agree with John that no one has ever seen God, then we shall remain in a place of tragic solitude.  There is nowhere else to go. . . .

Walker Percy, the novelist, has described humanity as ‘waiting for news.’  Christianity says that the news has come.  It brings to the human situation the news that what we most need has been supplied: perfect atonement for guilt.  It declares that what we know to be true about ourselves has been responded to decisively and eternally from outside ourselves.

This confidence that there is good news for humanity in the place of our solitude is summed up in the words ‘Christ died for our sins.’”

Paul F. M. Zahl, Who Will Deliver Us? (Eugene, 2008), pages 37-38.  Italics original.

“[W]hen classic justification, based on the propitiatory work of Christ, is absent, human beings will grasp for substitutes, often grotesque ones. . . . We have here [in the French Revolution], among much else, a case of secular atonement.  One of the central rituals within the drama of the French Revolution was meant to achieve expiation.  It was important to be cleansed from the past, while at the same time holding up revolutionary ideals. . . . Thus, the guillotine was a counterfeit for Calvary.”

William Edgar, “Justification and Violence,” in K. Scott Oliphant, editor, Justified in Christ (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2007), pages 131-134.

Moral fervor and violence go together quite compatibly.  We sinners know we cannot bear our own guilt, so we look for a substitute.  If we are not believing and revering and savoring Christ as our atoning substitute, we will find someone else to whom we may transfer our shame.  Only the gospel of justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, apart from all our works — and that doctrine not merely as a formal position, but as a moment-by-moment resource deep in the heart — can save us from our self-invented rituals of substitutionary atonement.

“Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”  Colossians 3:15