Gospel

The Mark of the Christian (part 2)

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

 by Francis Schaeffer

 

For True Christians Only

 

If we look again at the command in John 13, we will notice some important things. First of all, this is a command to have a special love to all true Christians, all born-again Christians. From the scriptural viewpoint, not all who call themselves Christians are Christians, and that is especially true in our generation. The meaning of the word Christian has been reduced to practically nothing. Surely, there is no word that has been so devalued unless it is the word of God itself. Central to semantics is the idea that a word as a symbol has no meaning until content is put into it. This is quite correct. Because the word Christian as a symbol has been made to mean so little, it has come to mean everything and nothing.

   

Jesus, however, is talking about loving all true Christians. And this is a command that has two cutting edges, for it means that we must both distinguish true Christians from all pretenders and be sure that we leave no true Christians outside of our consideration. In other words, mere humanists and liberal theologians who continue to use the Christian label or mere church members whose Christian designation is only a formality are not to be accounted true.

   

But we must be careful of the opposite error. We must include everyone who stands in the historic-biblical faith whether or not he is a member of our own party or our own group.

   

But even if a man is not among the true Christians, we still have the responsibility to love him as our neighbor. So we cannot say, “Now here’s somebody that, as far as I can tell, does not stand among the group of true Christians, and therefore I don’t have to think of him any more; I can just slough him off.” Not at all. He is covered by the second commandment.

 

The Standard of Quality

 

The second thing to notice in these verses in John 13 is the quality of the love that is to be our standard. We are to love all Christians “as I,” Jesus says, “have loved you.” Now think of both the quality and the quantity of Jesus’ love toward us. Of course, he is infinite and we are finite; he is God, we are men. Since he is infinite, our love can never be like his, it can never be an infinite love.

   

Nevertheless, the love he exhibited then and exhibits now is to be our standard. We dare have no lesser standard. We are to love all true Christians as Christ has loved us.

   

Now immediately, when we say this, either of two things can happen. We can just say, “I see! I see!” and we can make a little flag and write on it, “We Love All Christians!” You can see us trudging along with little flags — all rolled up — “We Love All Christians!” — and at the appropriate moment, we take off all the rubber bands, unzip the cover, and put it up. We wave it as we carry it along — “We Love All Christians!” How ugly!

   

It can be either this exceedingly ugly thing, as ugly as anything anyone could imagine, or it can be something as profound as anyone could imagine. And if it is to be the latter, it will take a great deal of time, a great deal of conscious talking and writing about it, a great deal of thinking and praying about it on the part of the Bible-believing Christians.

   

The church is to be a loving church in a dying culture. How, then, is the dying culture going to consider us? Jesus says, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.” In the midst of the world, in the midst of our present dying culture, Jesus is giving a right to the world. Upon his authority he gives the world the right to judge whether you and I are born-again Christians on the basis of our observable love toward all Christians.

   

That’s pretty frightening. Jesus turns to the world and says, “I’ve something to say to you. On the basis of my authority, I give you a right: you may judge whether or not an individual is a Christian on the basis of the love he shows to all Christians.” In other words, if people come up to us and cast in our teeth the judgment that we are not Christians because we have not shown love toward other Christians, we must understand that they are only exercising a prerogative which Jesus gave them.

   

And we must not get angry. If people say, “You don’t love other Christians,” we must go home, get down on our knees and ask God whether or not they are right. And if they are, then they have a right to have said what they said.

 

Failure in Love

 

We must be very careful at this point, however. We may be true Christians, really born-again Christians, and yet fail in our love toward other Christians. As a matter of fact, to be completely realistic, it is stronger than this. There will be times (and let us say it with tears), there will be times when we will fail in our love toward each other as Christians. In a fallen world, where there is no such thing as perfection until Jesus comes, we know this will be the case. And, of course, when we fail, we must ask God’s forgiveness. But, Jesus is not here saying that our failure to love all Christians proves that we are not Christians.

   

Let each of us see this individually for ourselves. If I fail in my love toward Christians, it does not prove I am not a Christian. What Jesus is saying, however, is that, if I do not have the love I should have toward all other Christians, the world has the right to make the judgment that I am not a Christian.

   

This distinction is imperative. If we fail in our love toward all Christians, we must not tear our heart out as though it were proof that we are lost. No one except Christ himself has ever lived and not failed. If success in love toward our brothers in Christ were to be the standard of whether or not a man is a Christian, then there would be no Christians, because all men have failed. But Jesus gives the world a piece of litmus paper, a reasonable thermometer: There is a mark which, if the world does not see, allows them to conclude, “This man is not a Christian.” Of course, the world may be making a wrong judgment because, if the man is truly a Christian, as far as the reality goes, they made a mistake.

   

It is true that a non-Christian often hides behind what he sees in Christians and then screams, “Hypocrites!” when in reality he is a sinner who will not face the claims of Christ. But that is not what Jesus is talking about here. Here Jesus is talking about our responsibility as individuals and as groups to so love all other true Christians that the world will have no valid reason for saying that we are not Christians.

 

The Final Apologetic

 

But there is something even more sober. And to understand it we must look at John 17:21, a verse out of the midst of Christ’s high priestly prayer. Jesus prays, “That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” In this, his high priestly prayer, Jesus is praying for the oneness of the church, the oneness that should be found specifically among true Christians. Jesus is not praying for a humanistic, romantic oneness among men in general. Verse 9 makes this clear: “I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me, for they are yours.” Jesus here makes a very careful distinction between those who have cast themselves upon him in faith and those who still stand in rebellion. Hence, in the 21st verse, when he prays for oneness, the “they” he is referring to are the true Christians.

   

Notice, however, that verse 21 says, “That they all may be one . . .” The emphasis, interestingly enough, is exactly the same as in John 13 — not on a part of true Christians, but on all Christians — not that those in certain parties in the church should be one, but that all born-again Christians should be one.

   

Now comes the sobering part. Jesus goes on in this 21st verse to say something that always causes me to cringe. If as Christians we do not cringe, it seems to me we are not very sensitive or very honest, because Jesus here gives us the final apologetic. What is the final apologetic? “That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” This is the final apologetic.

   

In John 13 the point was that, if an individual Christian does not show love toward other true Christians, the world has a right to judge that he is not a Christian. Here Jesus is stating something else which is much more cutting, much more profound: We cannot expect the world to believe that the Father sent the Son, that Jesus’ claims are true, and that Christianity is true, unless the world sees some reality of the oneness of true Christians.

   

Now that is frightening. Should we not feel some emotion at this point?

   

Look at it again. Jesus is not saying that Christians should judge each other (as to their being Christian or not) on this basis. Please notice this with tremendous care. The church is to judge whether a man is a Christian on the basis of his doctrine, the propositional content of his faith, and then his credible profession of faith. When a man comes before a local church that is doing its job, he will be quizzed on the content of what he believes. If, for example, a church is conducting a heresy trial (the New Testament indicates there are to be heresy trials in the church of Christ), the question of heresy will turn on the content of the man’s doctrine. The church has a right to judge, in fact it is commanded to judge, a man on the content of what he believes and teaches.

   

But we cannot expect the world to judge that way, because the world cares nothing about doctrine. And that is especially true in the second half of the 20th century when, on the basis of their epistemology, men no longer believe even in the possibility of absolute truth. And if we are surrounded by a world which no longer believes in the concept of truth, certainly we cannot expect people to have any interest in whether a man’s doctrine is correct or not.

   

But Jesus did give the mark that will arrest the attention of the world, even the attention of the modern man who says he is just a machine. Because every man is made in the image of God and has, therefore, aspirations for love, there is something that can be in every geographical climate — in every point of time — which cannot fail to arrest his attention.

   

What is it? The love that true Christians show for each other and not just for their own party.

 

The Cross Enforces Three Truths

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

The Cross enforces three truths:

  • about ourselves,
  • about God, and
  • about Jesus Christ.

1. Our Sin must be extremely horrible.

Nothing reveals the gravity of sin like the Cross.  For ultimately what sent Christ there was neither the greed of Judas, nor the envy of the priests, nor the vacillating cowardice of Pilate, but our own greed, envy, and cowardice and other sins, and Christ’s resolve in love and mercy to bear their judgment and so put them away.

2. God’s love must be wonderful beyond comprehension.

God could quite justly have abandoned us to our fate. He could have left us alone to reap the fruit of our wrongdoing… It is what we deserved. But he did not. Because he loved us, he came after us in Christ.

3. Christ’s salvation must be a free gift.

He ‘purchased’ it for us at the high price of his own life-blood. So what is there left for us to pay? Nothing!

– John Stott, The Cross of Christ 

Which Way?

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Your life hangs on how you relate these two statements: 

  1. “If anyone sins, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous” (1 John 2:1).
  2. “Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you” (John 5:14). 

Do you experience the first one weakening the second? 

Or do you experience the first one joyfully empowering the second? 

Your life hangs on your answer. 

– by John Piper , via Missio Dei Suburbia 

Are You Tired of Trying to Measure Up?

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

measure-up.jpg

Do you ever feel like you have to measure up?  Do you wonder sometimes how  you are grading out in God’s eyes?  I suspect that the answer for most people is “Yes”.    Our theologies may tell us otherwise, but I think most people struggle with this from time to time – especially when we feel emotionally tired and as if we are coasting in neutral gear spiritually.   

I’m not sure many people are even aware that we feel this way. We know our theology well enough, and so we remind ourselves of the truth of the Gospel: That we are declared righteous in Christ.  This is a wonderful truth.  But sometimes we don’t really live in the light of this truth.  This is the difference between our confessional theology and our functional theology.   

In other words there is sometimes (often?) a gap between what we know to be the facts and the way we allow those facts to impact our heart and emotions.  Put mathmatically, the difference between our confessional theology and our functional theology equals frustration.  (F – C = Frus)

A few months ago I posted an excellent article by Paula Rinehart, that had originally been written for The Navigators’ Discipleship Journal.  Because I know the tendency we have toward wandering onto what Jerry Bridges calls a Performance Treadmill, I wanted to post it again.   

If you ever find yourself tired of trying to measure up, or know others around you who seem to fall into that trap, you will appreciate: 

Good Enough!

The Beauty of Human Relationships

/ Dennis Griffith / 3 Comments

by Frances Schaeffer

This is the fourth of four posts in a series titled Two Contents, Two Realities.  These posts are slightly edited excerpts of a paper delivered by Dr. Francis Schaeffer  as part of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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The second reality is the beauty of human relationships. True Christianity produces beauty as well as’ truth, especially in the specific areas of human relationships. Read the New Testament carefully with this in mind; notice how often Jesus returns us to this theme, how often Paul speaks of it. We are to show something to the watching world on the basis of the human relationships we have with other people, not just other Christians.

Christians today are the people who understand who man is. Modern man is in a dilemma because he does not know that man is qualitatively different from non-man. We say man is different because he is made in the image of God. But we must not say man is made in the image of God unless we look to God and by God’s grace treat every man with dignity. We stand against B. F. Skinner in his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. But I dare not argue against Skinner’s determinism if I then treat the men I meet day by day as less than really made in the image of God.

I am talking first of all about non-Christians. The first commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind, and the second is to love our neighbor as ourselves. After Jesus commanded this, someone said, “Who is my neighbor?” And Jesus then told the story of the good Samaritan. He was not just talking about treating Christians well; he was talking about treating every man we meet well, every man whether he is in our social stratum or not, every man whether he speaks our language or not, every man whether he has the color of our skin or not. Every man is to be treated on the level of truly being made in the image of God, and thus there is to be a beauty of human relationships.

This attitude is to operate on all levels. I meet a man in a revolving door. How much time do I have with him? Maybe ten seconds. I am to treat him well. We look at him. We do not think consciously in every case that this man is made in the image of God, but, having ground into our bones and into our consciousness (as well as our doctrinal statement) that he is made in the image of God, we will treat him well in those ten seconds which we have.

We approach a red light. We have the same problem. Perhaps we will never see these other people at the intersection again, but we are to remember that they have dignity.

And when we come to the longer relationships–for example, the employer-employee relationship–we are to treat each person with dignity. The husband-and-wife relationship, the parent-and child relationship, the political relationship, the economic relationship 3 -in every single relationship of life, to the extent to which I am in contact with a man or woman, sometimes shorter and sometimes longer, he or she is to be treated in such a way that – man or woman – if he is thinking at all, he will say, “Didn’t he treat me well!”What about the liberal theologian? Yes, we are to stand against his theology. We are to practice truth, and we are not to compromise. We are to stand in antithesis to his theology. But even though we cannot cooperate with him in religious things, we are to treat the liberal theologian in such a way that we try from our side to bring our discussion into the circle of truly human relationships. Can we do these two things together in our own strength? No, but in the strength of the power of the Holy Spirit, it can be done. We can have the beauty of human relationships even when we must say no.

Now, if we are called upon to love our neighbor as ourselves when he is not a Christian, how much more – ten thousand times ten thousand times more – should there be beauty in the relationships between true Bible-believing Christians, something so beautiful that the world would be brought up short! We must hold our distinctives. Some of us are Baptists; some of us hold to infant baptism; some of us are Lutheran, and so on. But to true Bible believing Christians across all the lines, in all the camps, I emphasize: 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.

Every big company, if it is going to build a huge plant, first makes a pilot plant in order to show that their plan will work. Every church, every mission, every Christian school, every Christian group, regardless of what sphere it is in, should be a pilot plant that the world can look at and see there a beauty of human relationships which stands in exact contrast to the awful ugliness of what modern men paint in their art, what they make with their sculpture, what they show in their cinema, and how they treat each other. Men should see in the church a bold alternative to the way modern men treat people as animals and machines. There should be something so different that they will listen, something so different it will commend the gospel to them.

Every group ought to be like that, and our relationships between our groups ought to be like that. Have they been? The answer all too often is no. We have something to ask the Lord to forgive us for. Evangelicals, we who are true Bible-believing Christians, must ask God to forgive us for the ugliness with which we have often treated each other when we are in different camps.

I am talking now about beauty, and I have chosen this word with care. I could call it love, but we have so demoted the word that it is often meaningless. So I use the word beauty. There should be beauty, observable beauty, for the world to see in the way all true Christians treat each other.

We need two orthodoxies: first, an orthodoxy of doctrine and, second, an orthodoxy of community. Why was the early church able, within one century, to spread from the Indus River to Spain? Think of that: one century, India to Spain. When we read in Acts and in the epistles, we find a church that had and practiced both orthodoxies (doctrine and community), and this could be observed by the world. Thus, they commended the gospel to the world of that day and the Holy Spirit was not grieved.

There is a tradition (it is not in the Bible) that the world said about the Christians in the early church, “Behold, how they love each other.” As we read Acts and the epistles, we realize that these early Christians were really struggling for a practicing community. We realize that one of the marks of the early church was a real community, a community that reached down all the way to their care for each other in their material needs.

Have we exhibited this community in our evangelical churches? I have to say no – by and large, no. Our churches have often been two things – preaching points and activity generators. When a person really has desperate needs in the area of race, or economic matters, or psychological matters, does he naturally expect to find a supporting community in our evangelical churches? We must say with tears, many times no!

My favorite church in Acts and, I guess, in all of history is the church at Antioch. I love the church at Antioch. I commend to you to read again about it. It was a place where something new happened: the great, proud Jews who despised the Gentiles (there was an anti-Gentilism among the Jews, just as so often, unhappily, there has been anti-Semitism among Gentiles) came to a breakthrough. They could not be silent. They told their Gentile neighbors about the gospel, and suddenly, on the basis of the blood of Christ and the truth of the Word of God, the racial thing was solved. There were Jewish Christians and there were Gentile Christians, and they were one!

More than that, there was a total span of the social spectrum. We are not told specifically that there were slaves in the church of Antioch, but we know there were in other places and there is no reason to think they were not in Antioch. We know by the record in Acts that there was no less a person in that church than Herod’s foster brother. The man at the very peak of the social pyramid and the man at the bottom of the pile met together in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and they were one in a beauty of human relationships.

And I love it for another reason. There was a man called Niger in that church, and that means black. More than likely, he was a black man. The church at Antioch on the basis of the blood of Christ encompassed the whole. There was a beauty that the Greek and the Roman world did not know–and the world looked. And then there was the preaching of the gospel. In one generation the church spread from the Indus River to Spain. If we want to touch our generation, we must be no less than this.

I would emphasize again that community reached all the way down into the realm of material possessions. There is no communism, as we today know the word communism,  in the book of Acts. Peter made very plain to Ananias and Sapphira that their land was their own, and when they had sold their land they were masters of what they did with the money. No state or church law, no legalism, bound them. What existed in the early church was a love that was so overwhelming that they could not imagine in the church of the Lord Jesus having one man hungry and one man rich. When the Corinthian church fell into this, Paul was scathing in 1 Corinthians in writing against it.

Note, too, that deacons were appointed. Why? Because the church had found difficulty in caring for one another’s material needs. Read James 2. James asks, “What are you doing preaching the gospel to a man and trying to have a good relationship with him spiritually if he needs shoes and you do not give him shoes?” Here is another place where the awful Platonic element in the evangelical church has been so dominant and so deadly. It has been considered spiritual to give for missions, but not equally spiritual to give when my brother needs shoes. That is never found in the Word of God. Of course, the early church gave to missions; at times they gave money so Paul did not have to make tents. But Paul makes no distinction between collections for missions and collections for material needs, as if one were spiritual and the other not. For the most part when Paul spoke of financial matters, he did so because there was a group of Christians somewhere who had a material need, and Paul then called upon other churches to help.

Moreover, it was not only in the local church that the Christians cared for each other’s needs; they did so at great distances.  The church of Macedonia, which was made up of Gentile Christians, when they heard that the Jewish Christians, the Jews whom they would previously have despised, had material need, took an offering and sent it with care hundreds of miles in order that the Jewish Christians might eat.

So, there must be two orthodoxies: the orthodoxy of doctrine and the orthodoxy of community. And both orthodoxies must be practiced down into the warp and the woof of life where the Lordship of the Lord Jesus touches every area of our life.

True Spirituality

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

This is the third of four posts in a series titled Two Contents, Two Realities.  These posts are slightly edited excerpts of a paper delivered by Dr. Francis Schaeffer  as part of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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The first reality is spiritual reality.

Let us emphasize again as we have before: we believe with all our hearts that Christian truth can be presented in propositions, and that anybody who diminishes the concept of the propositionalness of the Word of God is playing into twentieth-century, non-Christian hands. But, and it is a great and strong but, the end of Christianity is not the repetition of mere propositions.

Without the proper propositions you cannot have that which should follow. But after having the correct propositions, the end of the matter is to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds. The end of the matter, after we know about God in the revelation He has given in verbalized, propositional terms in the Scripture, is to be in relationship to Him. A dead, ugly orthodoxy with no real spiritual reality must be rejected as sub-Christian.

Back in 1951 and 1952, I went through a very deep time in my own life. I had been a pastor for ten years and a missionary for another five, and I was connected with a group who stood very strongly for the truth of the Scriptures. But as I watched, it became clear to me that I saw very little spiritual reality. I had to ask why. I looked at myself as well and realized that my own spiritual reality was not as great as it had been immediately after my conversion. We were in Switzerland at that time, and I said to my wife, “I must really think this through.”

I took about two months, and I walked in the mountains whenever it was clear. And when it was rainy, I walked back and forth in the hayloft over our chalet. I thought and wrestled and prayed, and I went all the way back to my agnosticism. I asked myself whether I had been right to stop being an agnostic and to become a Christian. I told my wife, if it didn’t turn out right I was going to be honest and go back to America and put it all aside and do some other work.

I came to realize that indeed I had been right in becoming a Christian. But then I went on further and wrestled deeper and asked, “But then where is the spiritual reality, Lord, among most of that which calls itself orthodoxy?” And gradually I found something. I found something that I had not been taught, a simple thing but profound. I discovered the meaning of the work of Christ, the meaning of the blood of Christ, moment by moment in our lives after we are Christians–the moment-by-moment work of the whole Trinity in our lives because as Christians we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. That is true spirituality.

I went out to Dakota, and I spoke at a Bible conference. The Lord used it, and there was a real moving of God in that place. I preached it back in Switzerland. And gradually it became the book True Spirituality. And I want to tell you with all my heart that I think we could have had all the intellectual answers in the world at L’Abri, but if it had not been for those battles in which God gave me some knowledge of some spiritual reality in those days, not just theoretically but, poor as it was, knowledge of a relationship with God moment by moment on the basis of the blood of Jesus Christ, I don’t believe there ever would have been a L’Abri.

Do we minimize the intellectual? I have just pled for the intellectual. I have pled for the propositional. I have pled against doctrinal compromises, specifically at the point of the Word of God being less than propositional truth all the way back to the first verse of Genesis. But at the same time there must be spiritual reality.

Will it be perfect? No, I do not believe the Bible ever holds out to us that anybody is perfect in this life. But it can be real, and it must be shown in some poor way. I say poor because I am sure when we get to Heaven and look back, we will all see how poor it has been. And yet there must be some reality. There must be something real of the work of Christ in the moment-by-moment life, something real of the forgiveness of specific sin brought under the blood of Christ, something real in Christ’s bearing His fruit through me through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. These things must be there. There is nothing more ugly in all the world, nothing which more turns people aside, than a dead orthodoxy.

This, then, is the first reality, real spiritual reality.

Good Enough!

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Are You Tired of Trying to Measure Up? Paula Rinehart wrote the article below for Discipleship Journal.

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One fall evening, after months of recurring chest pain   and a rather hectic schedule, I found myself  thinking out loud with my husband as we watched the sun sink lower and lower in the Colorado sky.

We had been discussing the various pressures that clogged our lives–mostly good things, but too many and too much. It seemed the more we did, the more we had yet to do. I never felt I could get to the end of all the “doing.” Where was the off-button? What kept me pushing so hard, so long?

Finally, I posed a question I didn’t even know I was asking until it popped out. “Why do you suppose,” I asked my husband, Stacy, “that God makes it so hard to serve Him?”

That question was like a peek behind a wall for me. It plagued me for months, dogging my steps with the tenacity of an old hound. It hinted of a God who could not be pleased. After years of trafficking in the great truths of God, might there be a large gap between what I knew about Him, and what I personally believed, I wondered? Could the image I held of God be vastly different from who, in truth, He is?

Stuck on the Treadmill

My chest pain hinted that I should look further, especially after a battery of medical tests failed to reveal a physical reason for the pain. I decided to accept it as a talisman to help me see what I really believed, on an emotional level, about following Christ.

What I discovered in that quest was the utter shallowness of my understanding of grace.

As I read the Bible, I would ask myself what I knew in my mind to be true . . . and what I actually believed. The discrepancy, in many cases, was unnerving. I came upon old, familiar passages, one in particular that I had memorized as a young Christian.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest.Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart,and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.-Mt. 11:28-30

Here were wonderful words of Jesus about rest and a lightened load, but I had never been able to apply them to myself. They spoke of something so contrary to my experience that I had, in effect, deleted them from the text.

I slowly began to realize that I had been reading Scripture for years through the lens of personal effort and discipline, as though the great weight of following Christ rested squarely on my shoulders. And the crazy, destructive part of living out of personal effort and zeal is that you can never know when you’ve done enough. You are stuck on a treadmill with the off-button forever out of reach.

I had lived by “the tyranny of the oughts.” You ought to do more. You ought to do better. There might be 30 things wrong with you, but with God’s help, the list could be narrowed to 20 or with extra effort, even 10. Someday, you might even be “fixed.” Then you could relax . . . once you were a little closer to the ideal. Until then, like the Eveready Bunny, you just keep going and going and going. No wonder I felt tired all the time!

I began to see that while the grace of God had been the booster rocket that launched me into the faith, I knew more about explaining the message than the actual experience of living under grace. God’s grace had become just a familiar part of the backdrop to the real business–and busyness–of life. It did not describe an address where I actually lived.

As I went through this period where I felt I could never do enough, I became aware of a rather harsh, inner critic, a “voice” that provided a walking commentary on my life.

Hadn’t I had a pretty good devotional time this morning? “Well yes, Paula, but you know you aren’t doing much serious Bible study these days.”

Reading was a struggle for our son despite everyone’s efforts. “And you know, Paula, that a really good mother would tackle this problem with home schooling.”

A close friend was going through a rough time in her marriage. “But you let her walk out of your door yesterday with a rather weak word of comfort.”

In whatever direction I looked, I felt I was not measuring up. And the faint but relentless little voice inside rarely failed to point out that fact.

Turning Points

A major turning point in my quest to live under God’s grace came when I finally realized that my “inner critic” was not the voice of God. I was hearing an echo of myself and my longing to be loved and affirmed. Maybe I could finally do enough to feel loved. And doing enough to merit God’s approval would be, of course, the ultimate silencer of any thoughts of unworthiness. The emotional logic behind a lifestyle of personal effort is that someday, if I work hard enough, I will be received with open arms and a big smile.

One of God’s best gifts to me was chest pain and fatigue. They forced me to face the empty, scary vacuum that opens up when you are stopped in your tracks. And what I stumbled upon was an experiential understanding of God’s grace, one that comes when you are too empty-handed to do anything but humbly receive.

I came to realize that for years I had been relating to God as more of a “hired hand” than a daughter. David Seamands was the first to make this distinction, and it’s an important one. A hired hand is always in a rather tentative position. She may, by hard work and faithfulness, be promoted to a higher position–or she may be dismissed summarily and replaced by another. There’s no security, and hence, no rest.

But the relationship that God has invited us into is different altogether. By His grace, we are counted as His children. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” the Apostle John said (1 John. 3:1). My relationship, then, is that of a daughter. A daughter may grieve her Father, she may encounter His discipline–but she has the basic confidence of belonging and being loved. A daughter can work and serve and give–and a daughter can play and rest and receive. There is a world of difference between living as a hired hand (as though God had some “need” of our services) and living as a daughter or a son.

An Emotional Home

I began to see that the frustrated feeling that I might never “get there,” a feeling I carried beneath my chest pain, was accurate. No amount of “doing well and doing enough” would bring the sense of peace and acceptance I longed for. Rather, grace begins in a different place altogether. It grows out of believing that I am already there, already declared His daughter, pronounced His. He has been there waiting for the prodigal to return from the fields of her own self-effort, ready to speak the words He said to the elder son, “I have always loved you and all that I have is yours.”

Grace is our emotional home, the new place on the far side of the cross from which we begin, the very air we are meant to breathe. It can never be earned–only claimed. As Paul said, “Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God” (Ro. 5:1-2). Grace describes the ontological reality of our existence: We are already loved, already accepted, already made secure by the blood of Christ.

Living under grace is best described in terms of being, rather than doing. In fact, grace is the being that makes all the real doing possible. What does it mean to live from a place that the Scripture calls “this grace in which we stand”? The experience of grace is about living from a place where we know we are really loved. That may sound simple enough, but the truth is that any time we encounter the experience of being loved by God, it comes with an element of surprise.

A Welcome for the Unworthy

We are conditioned from childhood on to expect to encounter acceptance and love when we have been good boys and girls. That is the way life works. If we perform well, then we have a chance at winning the prize. Our talents, our strengths, our good attitudes provide our best hope of ever feeling wanted and valued. But the strangest thing happens in the gospel. If we read the text right, we realize that God looks at our “best” and claims that He is not terribly impressed. Yet He reaches past that, into the unseemly, weak, broken–and even sinful–aspects of who we are and loves us as we have never been loved before.

Frederick Buechner writes of a rather ordinary moment in his life when this kind of reality stung him. He was receiving communion one morning in a small village church where he knew the local priest well. As the priest moved nearer, Buechner could hear him intoning the familiar words, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.” Over and over he repeated the phrase.

But when the priest came to him, on an impulse he inserted another word. “The body of Christ, Freddy, the bread of heaven.” It was not unusual that the priest knew his name. But the effect on Buechner was extraordinary – it caught him off guard. He says,

For the first time in my life, maybe, it struck me that when Jesus picked up the bread at His last meal and said, “This is my body which is for you,” He was doing it not just in a ritual way . . . but in an unthinkably personal way for every particular man or woman or child who ever existed or someday would exist. Most unthinkable of all: maybe He was doing it for me.

The truth of the cross, the truth about grace, Buechner writes, is that “we are welcomed not as the solid citizens that our Sunday best suggests we are, but in all our tackiness and tatteredness that nobody in the world knows better than each of us knows about ourselves–the bitterness and the phoniness and the confusion and the irritability and the prurience and the half-heartedness. The bread of heaven, Freddy, of all people.”

Grace invites us to return, over and over and over, to the surprising reality of being loved in the midst of failure, weakness, and sin–in all the unworthy places of our lives where we would least expect ever to encounter such a response.

Grace and Obedience

The experience of grace is about letting our obedience grow out of our relationship with God.

David Seamands tells the story of a woman he helped, a woman who had known many disappointments in her bruised background. She was faced with a terribly attractive temptation. Amazingly, she was able to resist. Seamands asked her how she summoned the strength to turn away from an offer that symbolized so much of what she’d missed in her life.

“I’ve thought long and hard about it,” she said, “but it would be a real departure from Christ, and I just cannot bring myself to turn my back on that kind of love.”

I often ponder her response. The “ought-to’s” and the “have-to’s” and the “shoulds” were not what she was relying on to force her to make the right choice. Rather, she let the relationship she enjoyed with the Lord be what drew her to obedience. She could not turn her back on that kind of love, she said. What God asked of her was not viewed as a burden. It was the evidence of His care and protection, the proof of His unfailing pursuit of her.

Paul makes this point in his letter to the Romans. He says it is the kindness of God that is meant to lead us to repentance–not His severity, not the harshness of the judgment we deserve (Ro. 2:4). His kindness in the face of our sin is meant to melt the stubbornness in our hearts. We are responding to Someone who loves us and went to incredible lengths to demonstrate that love.

Grace and Rest

The experience of grace is also about letting ourselves relax in His embrace. There is something about experiencing grace that brings to mind the image of a weaned and satisfied child. For grace requires a willingness just to be with God in a way that we can receive, rather than perform. In his book Silence on Fire, William Shannon suggests that we often make the mistake of feeling we must do something in order to gain some entrance with the Lord, some hearing. He says, rather, that we need only pray to be made aware that we are already there, already at home with Him. His grace has brought Him near.

Sometimes when I pray and I am having a hard time settling into a sense of being with the Lord, a picture flashes before my eyes. I see myself standing behind a large bush, straightening my skirt and trying rather frantically to untangle something in my hand. I think it is my life I am trying to untangle! The idea is that if I could just get a little more presentable on the inside, then it might actually be possible to enter His presence.

That mental picture has helped me immensely because I realize more and more that grace is not like that. Grace means I can come out from behind the bush and be received by Him, once again, as the old hymn says, “just as I am.” My prayer is that I can become aware that I am already with Him, in this present moment. That is the practical reality of being received by grace. I am invited to experience the pleasure of a relationship that has been redeemed.

A few years ago a woman addicted to cocaine taught me something about what it means to let God love you this way. She was my client in a counseling internship, and one day she was terribly upset. Her roommate had tried to commit suicide, and Rachel had found her, barely alive. Rachel was unable to get the image of her friend out of her mind, an image that painfully reminded her of her brother’s death a few years before.

As I sat alone in a room with her, I felt at a loss for words. Indeed, there were no words to be said. What could I offer a woman who had experienced years of trauma, of which this last was a reminder of all the rest? Yet her tears were bordering hysteria. Finally, I made a move unusual at a county agency. I said, almost out of desperation, “Rachel, would you like for me to pray for you?”

“Oh, would you please,” she replied, to my surprise. “I would be so grateful to have someone pray for me.”

The prayer I prayed was very simple. I have no memory of the words I said, but I realized that the woman before me was becoming calm again–incredibly calm–almost childlike. When we finished praying, we began to talk once more. I asked her, “Rachel, you changed so visibly in the midst of praying, I wonder what you saw in your mind as we prayed?”

“I saw God on His throne,” she replied, matter of factly. “I saw God on His throne and He invited me to sit in His lap, and He said, ‘There now, Rachel, it will be okay. You will be all right.’”

I was speechless at the way that God met this woman. It struck a deep, deep chord in my life. I think each of us longs, at the very core of our being, for this kind of reassurance from God, for the sense that we are welcomed into His presence in a way that soothes the most tattered edges of our soul. It is His grace that invites us, always invites us. There in the silence and the solitude He waits to give the grace we need.

Dare to Be Free

I discovered in my journey that the compulsive pace of my life mirrored the true beliefs of my heart, however erroneous. Whatever I said I knew was true about God, what I really believed was that my effort could wrest from Him a love and acceptance based on my performance. I could not receive grace–the marvelous, utterly surprising grace of God–until I stepped off the treadmill and waited with empty, needy hands. I could not hear His voice–strong, inviting, and steady–until I could separate Him from the nagging critic I carried inside me. Until I disconnected my longing to be loved from my efforts to please.

I know a little more now, with my heart as well as my head, of what the Apostle John meant when he said at the end of his life, “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” (Rev. 1:5). John was the man who dared to describe himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved.

I think John was writing about grace–the grace in which we stand.

Honest Answers to Honest Questions

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

This is the second of four posts in a series titled Two Contents, Two Realities.  These posts are slightly edited excerpts of a paper delivered by Dr. Francis Schaeffer  as part of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland.

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The second content is that Christianity is truth, and we must give honest answers to honest questions. Christianity is truth, truth that God has told us; and if it is truth, it can answer questions.

There is no dichotomy in the Bible between the intellectual and cultural on the one hand and the spiritual on the other. But often there has been a strong Platonic emphasis in evangelicalism, a strong tendency to divide man into two parts -his spiritual nature and everything else. We must take that conception like a piece of baked clay, break it in our hands, and throw it away. We must consciously reject the Platonic element which has been added to Christianity. God made the whole man; the whole man is redeemed in Christ. And after we are Christians, the Lordship of Christ covers the whole man. That includes his so-called spiritual things and his intellectual, creative and cultural things; it includes his law, his sociology, and psychology; it includes every single part and portion of a man and his being.

The Bible does not suggest that there is something distinct in man which is spiritual and that the rest of man is unrelated to the commands and norms of God. There is nothing in the Bible which would say, “Never mind the intellectual, never mind the cultural. We will follow the Bible in the spiritual realm, but we will take the intellectual and the creative and put them aside. They are not important.”

If Christianity is truth as the Bible claims, it must touch every aspect of life. If I draw a pie and that pie comprises the whole of life, Christianity will touch every slice. In every sphere of our lives, Christ will be our Lord and the Bible will be our norm. We will stand under the Scripture. It is not that the “spiritual” is under Scripture while the intellectual and creative are free from it.

Consider the ministry of Paul. Paul went to the Jews, and what happened as he talked to them? They asked Paul questions, and he answered. He went to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, and they asked him questions, and he answered. He went into the marketplace, and there his ministry was a ministry of discussion, of giving honest answers to honest questions. He went to Mars Hill, and he gave honest answers to honest questions. There are three places in the Bible where Paul was speaking to the man without the Bible (that is, to the Gentiles) without the man with the Bible (the Jew) being present. The first was at Lystra, and his discussion there was cut short. Then we find him on Mars Hill where they asked questions, and Paul answered; this too was cut short. But one place, happily, where he was not cut short is in the first two chapters of the book of Romans. And there we find carried out exactly the same kind of “argumentation” that he began at Lystra and on Mars Hill.

Many Christians think that 1 Corinthians speaks against the use of the intellect. But it does not. What 1 Corinthians speaks against is a man’s pretending to be autonomous, drawing from his own wisdom and his own knowledge without recourse to the revelation of the Word of God. It is a humanistic, rationalistic intellectualism–a wisdom that is generated from man himself as opposed to the teaching of the Scripture–that we must stand against with all our hearts. Paul was against the early gnosticism, which said a man could be saved on the basis of such knowledge. Paul did answer questions. He answered questions wherever they arose.

Consider the ministry of our Lord Jesus Himself. What was His ministry like? He was constantly answering questions. Of course they were different kinds of questions from those which arose in the Greek and Roman world, and therefore His discussion was different. But as far as His practice was concerned, He was a man who answered questions, this Jesus Christ, this Son of God, this second person of the Trinity, our Savior and our Lord. But some one will say, “Didn’t He say that to be saved you have to be as a little child?” Of course He did. But did you ever see a little child who didn’t ask questions? People who use this argument must never have listened to a little child or been one! My four children gave me a harder time with their endless flow of questions than university people ever have. Jesus did not mean that coming as a little child simply meant making an upper-story leap. What Jesus was talking about is that the little child, when he has an adequate answer, accepts the answer. He has the simplicity of not having a built-in grid whereby, regardless of the validity of the answer, he rejects it. And that is what rationalistic man, humanistic man, does.

Christianity demands that we have enough compassion to learn the questions of our generation. The trouble with too many of us is that we want to be able to answer these questions instantly, as though we could take a funnel, put it in one ear and pour in the facts, and then go out and regurgitate them and win all the discussions. It cannot be. Answering questions is hard work. Can you answer all the questions? No, but you must try. Begin to listen with compassion. Ask what this man’s questions really are and try to answer. And if you don’t know the answer, try to go someplace or read and study to find the answer.

Not everybody is called to answer the questions of the intellectual, but when you go down to the shipyard worker you have a similar task. My second pastorate was with shipyard workers, and I tell you they have the same questions as the university man. They just do not articulate them the same way.

Answers are not salvation. Salvation is bowing and accepting God as Creator and Christ as Savior. I must bow twice to become a Christian. I must bow and acknowledge that I am not autonomous; I am a creature created by the Creator. And I must bow and acknowledge that I am a guilty sinner who needs the finished work of Christ for my salvation. And there must be the work of the Holy Spirit.

Nonetheless, what I am talking about is our responsibility to have enough compassion to pray and do the hard work which is necessary to answer the honest questions. Of course, we are not to study only cultural and intellectual issues. We ought to study them and the Bible and in both ask for the help of the Holy Spirit.

It is not true that every intellectual question is a moral dodge. There are honest intellectual questions, and somebody must be able to answer them. Maybe not everybody in your church or your young people’s society can answer them, but the church should be training men and women who can. Our theological seminaries should be committed to this too. It is part of what Christian education ought to be all about.

The Bible puts a tremendous emphasis on content with which the mind can deal. In 1 John we are told what we should do if a spirit or a prophet knocks on our door tonight. If a prophet or spirit knocks on your door, how do you know whether or not he is from God? I have a great respect for the occult, especially after the things we have seen and fought and wrestled against in L’Abri. If a spirit comes, how do you judge him? Or if a prophet comes, how do you judge him? John says, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world. By this know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God” (1 John 4:1-2).

Now that is a very profound answer; it has two halves. First, it means Jesus had an eternal preexistence as the second person of the Trinity, and then it means He came in the flesh. When a prophet or a spirit comes to you, the test of whether he should be accepted or rejected is not the experience that the spirit or prophet gives you. Nor is it the strength of the emotion which the spirit or the prophet gives you. Nor is it any special outward manifestations that the spirit or the prophet may give you. The basis of accepting the spirit or prophet – and the basis of Christian fellowship – is Christian doctrine. There is  no other final test. Satan can counterfeit and he will.

I am not speaking against emotion in itself. Of course there should be emotion. I am saying that you cannot trust your emotions or the strength of your emotions or the boost your emotions give you when you stand in the presence of the spirit or the prophet. This does not prove for one moment whether he is from God or the Devil, or whether your emotions are simply from within yourself. And the same is true with Christian fellowship. These are to be tested, says the Word of God, at the point at which the mind can work, and that is on the basis of Christian doctrine.

So there are two contents, the content of a clear doctrinal position and the content of honest answers to honest questions. Next I want to talk about two realities.

Rooted in Sound Doctrine

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

This is the first of four posts in a series titled Two Contents, Two Realities.  These posts are slightly edited excerpts of a paper delivered by Dr. Francis Schaeffer  as part of the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland.

As is often true for Schaeffer, his insights are timeless, and as pertinent today as they were a generation ago. 

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The first content, if we want to see somethng profound happen in this generation, is clear doctrinal content concerning the central elements of Christianity. There is no use talking about meeting the threat of the coming time or fulfilling our calling in the twenty-first century unless we consciously help each other to have a clear doctrinal position. We must have the Courage to make no compromise with liberal theology and especially neo-orthodox existential theology.

Christianity is a specific body of truth; it is a system, and we must not be ashamed of the word system. There is truth, and we must hold that truth. There will be borderline things in which we have differences among ourselves, but on the central issues there  must be no compromise.

Evangelicals can fall into something which really is not very far from existential theology without knowing it. One form of such “evangelical existentialism” is the attitude, if not the words, “Don’t ask questions, just believe.” This sort of attitude was always wrong, but it is doubly wrong today when we are surrounded with a monolithic consensus which divides reason from non-reason and always puts religious things in the area of non-reason. We must call each other away from this idea. It is not more spiritual to believe without asking questions. It is not more biblical. It is less biblical and eventually it will be less spiritual, because the whole man will not be involved. Consequently, in our evangelism, in our personal work, in our young people’s work, in our ministry wherever we are, those of us who are preachers and are preaching, those of us who are teachers and are teaching, and those of us who are evangelists must be absolutely determined not to fall into the trap of saying or implying, “Don’t ask questions, just believe.” It must be the whole man who comes to understand that the gospel is truth and believes because he is convinced on the basis of good and sufficient reason that it is truth.

Moreover, we must be very careful to emphasize content in our messages. How much content will depend upon the people with whom we are working. In a university setting, the content will be slightly different than in a situation where people are not as educated. Nevertheless, whether we work with a man or woman who is not as educated or whether we work with an intellectual, in all instances the gospel we preach must be rich in content. Certainly, we must be very careful not to fall into the cheap solution (which seems so fascinating at first) of just moving people to make decisions without their really knowing what they are making a decision about. We in L’Abri have had people come to us who have “accepted Christ as Savior” but are not even sure that God exists. They have never been confronted with the question of the existence of God. The acceptance of Christ as Savior was a thing abstracted. It had an insufficient content. In reality, it was just another kind of trip.

Likewise, in a Christian school or college we can try just to religiously move the students on the basis of something apart from the intellect, separated from the academic disciplines and the whole of study. We must say no to this.

What we need to do is to understand our age to be an age of very subtle religious and political manipulation, manipulation by cool communication, communication without content. And as we see all these things, we must lean against them. We have a message of content; there is a system to Christianity. It is not only a system, true enough; it is not a dead scholasticism, true enough; but it is a system in that the person who accepts Christ as his Savior must do so in the midst of the understanding that prior to the creation of the world a personal God on the high level of Trinity existed. And if they “accept Christ as their Savior” and do not understand that God exists as an infinite-personal God, and do not understand that man has been made in the image of God and has value, and do not understand that man’s dilemma is not metaphysical because he is small but moral because man revolted against God in a space-time Fall, in all probability they are not saved. If we “evangelize” by asking for such “acceptance of Christ as Savior,” all we have done is to guarantee they will soon drift away and become harder to reach than ever. Not everybody must know everything – nobody knows everything; if we waited to be saved until we knew everything, nobody would ever be saved – but that is a very different thing from deliberately or thoughtlessly diminishing the content.

Another way to fall into an “evangelical existentialism” is to treat the first half of Genesis the way the existential theologian treats the whole Bible. The first half of Genesis is history, space-time history, the Fall is a space-time Fall, or we have no knowledge of what Jesus came to die for, and we have no way to understand that God is really a good God. Our whole answer to evil rests upon the historic, space-time Fall. There was a time before man revolted against God. The internal evidence of Genesis and the external evidences (given in the New Testament by the way the New Testament speaks of the first half of Genesis) show that the first half of Genesis is really meant to  be space-time history-that is, space and time, the warp and woof of history.

In relationship to this is the danger of diminishing the content of the gospel in a reverse fashion. Bible-believing Christians who stand against the liberal theologian when he would say there are no absolutes in the Bible can make the opposite mistake by adding other elements as though they were equally absolute. In other words, the absolutes of the Word of God can be destroyed in both directions. That is, the liberal theologian can say, “After all, there is no such thing as an absolute, and specifically the Bible does not give absolutes,” or the evangelical can reach over into the middle, class standards and say, “These standards are equal to the absolutes of the Word of God.”

The obvious illustration is how the church treats the counterculture person or a person dressed in a different way. Young people come to us at L’Abri from the ends of the earth, become Christians, and go home and then try to find a Bible-believing church that will accept them without all the change of life-style. I do not mean they try to retain a drug life or a promiscuous sex life which would be against the Word of God. I mean, for example, the way they dress or talk. It is one of my greatest sorrows that the evangelical church often will not accept the person with his lifestyle unless it fits into the middle-class norm in that particular geographical location. And unhappily we often do not realize what we have done when we do this. It is not only a lack of love. We have destroyed the absolutes of the Word of God by making something else equal to God’s absolutes.

If you ask me why the evangelical church has so often been weak in the question of race in the past, I think it was the same. 1  We were surrounded by a culture that had racial prejudices and which did not look at all men as equal, and we allowed this to infiltrate the church. We made taboos apart from and even against the Word of God, and we held them to be equal with the absolutes of the Bible. But to exalt a cultural norm to an absolute is even more destructive today because we are surrounded by a totally relativistic society. As we make other things equal to the absolutes of the Word of God, it may not be more sinful in the sight of God than it was in the past, but it is more destructive. Consequently, when we talk about content, we are talking about something very practical indeed. We must have a strong, strong doctrinal content.

And as we have a strong doctrinal content, we must practice the content, practice the truth we say we believe. We must exhibit to our own children and to the watching world that we take truth seriously. It will not do in a relativistic age to say that we believe in truth and fail to practice that truth in places where it may be observed and where it is costly. We, as Christians, say we believe that truth exists. We say we have truth from the Bible. And we say we can give that truth to other men in propositional, verbalized form and they may have that truth. This is exactly what the gospel claims and this is what we claim. But then we are surrounded by a relativistic age. Do you think for a moment we will have credibility if we say we believe the truth and yet do not practice the truth in religious matters? If we do not do this, we cannot expect for a moment that the tough-minded, twenty-first century young person (including our own young people) will take us seriously when we say, “here is truth” when they are surrounded by a totally monolithic consensus that truth does not exist.

Consider an example in the academic world. One girl who was teaching in one of the major universities of Britain was a real Christian and very bright. She was teaching in a sociology department whose head was a behaviorist, and he told her she had to teach in the framework of behaviorism or lose her post. Suddenly she was confronted with the question of the practice of truth. She said no, she could not teach behaviorism, and she lost her post. This is what I mean by practicing truth when it is costly. And this will come in many, many places and in many, many ways. It will come in the area of sexual life forms, being surrounded by permissive sexualists and asexuality. We must be careful by the grace of God to practice what we say the Bible teaches–the one-man, one-woman relationship–or we are destroying the truth that we say we believe. And this practicing will include church discipline where it is necessary.

But nowhere is practicing the truth more important than in the area of religious cooperation. If I say that Christianity is really eternal truth, and the liberal theologian is wrong–so wrong that he is teaching that which is contrary to the Word of God–and then on any basis (including for the sake of evangelism) I am willing publicly to act as though that man’s religious position is the same as my own, I have destroyed the practice of truth which my generation can expect from me and which it will demand of me if I am to have credibility. How will we have a credibility in a relativistic age if we practice religious cooperation with men who in their books and lectures make very plain that they believe nothing (or practically nothing) of the content set forth in Scripture?

Incidentally, almost certainly if we have a latitudinarianism in religious cooperation, the next generation will have a latitudinarianism in doctrine, and specifically a weakness toward the Bible. We are seeing this happen in parts of evangelicalism as well. We must have the courage to take a clear position.2

But let us beware. We certainly must not take every one of our small secondary distinctives and elevate them to be the point where we refuse to have fellowship on any level with those who do not hold them. It is the central things of the Word of God which make Christianity Christianity. These we must hold tenaciously, and, even when it is costly for us and even when we must cry, we must maintain that there is not only an antithesis of truth, but an antithesis that is observable in practice. Out of a loyalty to the infinite-personal God who is there and who has spoken in Scripture, and out of compassion for our own young people and others, we who are evangelicals dare not take a halfway position concerning truth or the practice of truth.

Thus, with regard to the first content there are three things to recognize: first, there must be a strong emphasis on content; second, there must be a strong emphasis on the propositional nature of the Bible, especially the early chapters of Genesis; and third, there must be a strong emphasis on the practice of truth. We can talk about methods, we can stir each other up, we can call each other to all kinds of action, but unless it is rooted in a strong Christian base in the area of content and the practice of truth, we build on sand and add to the confusion of our day.

What is the Gospel?

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

Gospel means “good news.” The good news is: you (and I) are more sinful and flawed than you (or I) ever dared believe, yet you (and I) can be more accepted and loved than you (or I) ever dared hope at the same time, because Jesus Christ lived and died in our place. As the apostle Paul said, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5.21)

That paradoxical statement is a simple formulation of the gospel.

More thoroughly we could say that the whole Bible is the gospel. It is a book about the God who rescues people from their moral and spiritual rebellion against him. The teaching of the Bible can be summarized under four headings: God, Man, Jesus Christ, and Our Response. 

Firstly, the gospel teaches that God is our creator. Thus he has the right to rule and command us as he does in his law. God is also holy, that is, he is absolutely pure morally, and he hates and punishes rebellion on the part of his creatures. He is more holy than anyone would ever imagine. 

Secondly, the gospel teaches us about human beings. We are creatures made by God and for God. We were originally created to live in relationship with God and we were morally pure. But because our first parents rebelled against God (just as we also all have done), human beings are now cut off from relationship with God and are subject to his condemnation. We are more sinful than we ever dared believe.  

Thirdly, the gospel teaches us what Jesus Christ has done for sinners like you and me. Jesus became a man and lived a life of perfect obedience to God’s law, and then died as a sacrifice in our place under the judgment of God. He was raised from the dead and now reigns in heaven. The condemnation that he suffered takes away the necessity that we suffer judgment for our own sins- “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us.” The righteous life he lived is credited to us, not because we are actually righteous, but because of God’s mercy and grace- “in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 

Fourthly, the gospel teaches us how to respond to the good news. We turn away from our rebellion and put our trust in Jesus Christ. Despairing of our own worthiness to stand before God, we believe the promise that those who trust in Jesus Christ will be forgiven and declared righteous. Those who put their faith in Jesus Christ are accepted as loved sons and daughters of God, and God sends his Spirit to live in them. 

Counterfeit Gospels

 Martin Luther said that “a sinner trying to believe the gospel was like a drunk man trying to ride a horse; he will always be falling off on one side or the other”. The two errors that the sides of the horse represent are

  • legalism or moralism, and
  • pragmatism or relativism or antinomianism.  

Moralism is the view that a person is made acceptable to God through his own attainments. Moralists are usually very religious, and often very conservative in their religion. Legalism tends to stress truth without grace. Moralists are usually very rules oriented, and depending on their success in keeping the rules they will be either arrogantly self-righteous or depressed and morose. If they go to Jesus for forgiveness, it is just to ask him to fill in the gaps they have left in their own religious performance. For the moralist, the cross is not the only basis for acceptance by God, but is an adjunct to our performance. 

Pragmatists are often irreligious, or prefer more liberal religion. They tend to stress grace over truth, assuming everyone is accepted by God and that we each have to decide what we think is true for us. Often relativists will talk about God’s love, but since they do not see them selves as deeply sinful people, God’s love for them costs him nothing. For them the cross is not the necessary condition of our acceptance by God. 

The gospel holds out to us a whole new system of approach to God. It rejects our attempts to justify ourselves before God, to be our own saviors and lords. It rejects both our pragmatic presumption and our religious attempts to earn our way into God’s favor. It destroys the perception that Christianity is just an invitation to become more religious. The gospel will not let us think Jesus is just a coach to help us get stronger where we are weak. To be a Christian is to turn from self-justification of all sorts and to rely exclusively on Jesus’ record for a relationship with God. 

Christians and non-Christians both stumble over the two counterfeits of the gospel. Many Churches are deeply moralistic or deeply relativistic. Christians who understand the gospel very clearly still look like the drunk man on the horse, as the desire to justify ourselves and trust in our own performance continually reappears. 

The gospel tells the pragmatist that he is more flawed and sinful than he ever dared believe. The gospel tells the moralist that he is more loved and accepted than he ever dared hope.  

20 Reasons We Need Revival

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Reformation is the labor of God’s people to conform our lives, our churches, our institutions, and our whole society to the standards God has established in his Word. Revival, however, is no less than an act of God to change hearts and lives; bringing life – or a quality of life – into being, where no evidence of it previously existed. 

Both are necessary. 

As a vision statement of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) illustrates: 

Without an emphasis on revival, “reformation” may become either a mimicking of political ideologies or sterile doctrinalism. Without an emphasis on reformation, “revival” may become a shallow pietism or mysticism. Only reformation and revival together can accomplish the Great Commission of our Lord. 

Which comes first?  In one sense that question may be about as easy to answer as which came first, the chicken or the egg?  But in another sense it seems to me that revival is far more necessary.    

While the goal of Reformation, in part, is to allow the free demonstration and proclamation of the Gospel, it does not always work out that way. Theoretically a Reformation can take place without any real effect on the heart.  We can establish order according to God’s standards, without necessarily being reconciled to God, or being drawn closer to him.  

A Revival however – a REAL Revival – changes the heart; revealing our sin, and opening our hearts to the love & grace of God, demonstrated in Christ’s death to pay the debt of our sin; leading to living in humble joy to the Glory of God. (I distinguish between a REAL Revival, and the revivalism that is prevalent in some parts of the USA.  In some places signs are posted, and newspaper ads taken out, saying: “Revival this Week…” The old cliché is correct: Posting a sign does not guarantee a revival; and if a REAL Revival is taking place, you don’t need a sign.) 

Again, both Reformation and Revival are needed. I’ll let God work out the logistics. But since God alone can create a revival, it seems worthy of our efforts to pray for God to send one.   

While unpacking my files recently, I stumbled upon the following observations and reasons we need revival.  I have slightly edited them from the original work of John Murray in the Banner of Truth.

  1.  We have gone on so long without seeing a revival. There has been no major revival in more than a century. (Habakkuk 3:2)
  2. There has been a great spiritual and moral decline in the land, and some areas are dark and almost pagan.
  3. The prevailing Christianity is powerless, and the church has lost her credibility.
  4. Deadness, formality and worldliness have taken hold of many congregations. (Revelation 3:1)
  5. True conviction of sin is lacking. The first work of the Spirit is to convict of sin. (John 16:8)
  6. The broken spirit and the contrite heart are rare. We do not mourn over our sins. (Zechariah 12:10)
  7. Many of us have “left our first love” to the Lord Jesus Christ and lack warmth and fervency. (Revelation 2:4)
  8. Zeal for the glory of God is lacking, and we are not grieved by the dishonor done to His name in church and nation.
  9. We are not deeply moved by the Sight of multitudes passing into eternity without Christ.
  10. In many pulpits, the true Gospel is buried out of sight, and sinners are flattered and encouraged in nominal Christianity. 
  11. Trust in the infallibility and inerrancy of the Bible has been undermined, and the distinction between truth and error lost.
  12. Preaching is in decline, and there is a famine of hearing the Word of God. There is no great hunger for the Word. (Amos 8:11)
  13. There is widespread ignorance of the basic truths of the Gospel and of the nature of Christian conversion. The doctrine of the new birth is watered down. 
  14. Evangelism has become centered on man and his need instead of on God and His glory.
  15. The decay of family religion and family worship. The subversion of the family threatens the very fabric of society .
  16. The decline in church attendance and the failure to retain the youth. 
  17. The neglect and desecration of the Lord’s Day.
  18. The lack of any fear of God in our communities. There is open defiance of God and of His ways.
  19. Ignorance of what God has done for us in the past. (Judges 2:10) 
  20. We are sinning against great light because God has so blessed this nation in the past.  

So, let’s commit to praying for Revival, while laboring together for a heart-felt Reformation.

Tough Questions from a Pre-Teen Girl

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

The following are answers to questions asked by a then-12 year old girl.  This young lady had had a very, very difficult life, but was very bright and determined.   At the time she wrote the note to me asking these questions, she had only recently come to live with her father – a godly man.  Now a teenager, she has grown into a beautiful and sharp young woman.

She has given her permission to use our correspondence for this post.       

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

1.      Why do people look so depressing, sad, and miserable when we pray? 

This is a good question.  There is no good reason to be sad & miserable when we pray, but I think you are right that sometimes we look that way.   

I guess the reason is that people want to be reverent, or to be serious, when they approach our Holy God.  This is a good thing, since the Bible calls us to “Fear the Lord”.  (Deuteronomy 6:13; Proverbs 9:10)   BUT, if Christians do not have joy as they pray, then they are forgetting that God loves us; that He is our Father, and wants us to come to him with joy & thanksgiving.  We are unbalanced between Fearing God & Loving God.  

 2.      Why does God choose some people, but not all, to spread His Word? 

I am guessing that you have two questions combined here.   

First, Why does God not call everyone to be a Christian?  The answer is that everyone is to hear the call to follow Christ, but only those God chooses are able to become Christians.  Why does he choose some but not others? We don’t know. 

Second, Why are not all Christians called to spread his Word?  The answer: All are called to spread his Word, by teaching and by our actions.  Some are called to spread his Word to other countries. Some are called to spread his Word by preaching in the church. Some to spread it by teaching Sunday school. Others are called to spread it to their friends, neighbors, and family.  Not everyone does it, but all are called to spread the Word somewhere & somehow.  

3.      Why did God flood the earth when not everybody was being bad? 

Romans 3:10 and 3:23 tell us that there is no one who is good.  This is difficult to hear, but it is true. It is also important to understand my answer to your question.  

If you read Genesis 6:5 it says “The Lord saw …man’s wickedness…” There was no one good on the earth, everyone was being bad. Romans 6:23 says: “The wages of sin is death.”  This means that anyone & everyone who sins deserves death – in this case by drowning in a flood.   

In Genesis 6:8-9 it says “Noah found favor in God’s eyes…” and “…he walked with God”.  This does not mean that Noah was perfect, and that he was not doing bad – though he was better than most men. (Remember Romans 3:23 “All sinned… fall short of the glory of God.”) That he “found favor in the eyes of the Lord” means that God chose to love him even though he was a sinner.  Genesis 6:9 says: “Noah was a righteous man”… this means that he believed in God, and trusted God for his salvation. Noah did not believe he was good enough, and knew he needed God’s grace.  (Romans 1:17 tells us that righteousness comes by faith. Hebrews 11:6 says: “Without faith it is impossible to please God…”)   

Now the great thing about this is that God does the same thing with us.  You & I, and everyone else, are sinners.  We may be better than many people, but we are still not perfect like God wants us to be. 

But read Romans 5:6-8… Is that great or what?!! 

The important thing, though, is to believe what God has provided for our salvation from his punishment.  For Noah it was the Ark, but really it was a Savior.  For us (and for Noah, too, really) it is Jesus – a person not a boat! 

Read 1 John 5, and it shows the importance of believing & trusting in Jesus for our salvation and forgiveness of our sin.   

(A guy named Fritz Ridenhour has written a cool book for teenagers, How to Be a Christian Without Being Religious. It is about all this Romans stuff.  I have a copy if you want to borrow it from me.) 

4.      Why does God make some peoples’ lives worse than others? 

This is a difficult question, and I am so sorry that you have had some very hard things happen in your life.  But the best way I can answer this is in two ways.  

First, sin is in this world and hurts people –both those who sin and those they sin against.  It will continue to hurt people until Jesus returns to take us with Him.  This does not mean that God does not love us or care for us, or that he will not protect us.  He does, and He shows it all the time.  But what he also does is remind us that someday soon he will take us where there is no sin.   

Look at it this way, before your Dad had you with him, he loved you, and cared for you. He gave you some good times, even though some bad things were happening around you. But he also told you that he wanted you to live with him.  Even before you got to live with him you had both good & bad times. You looked forward to when you could be with him, and this gave you hope.  Now that you have moved in with him many of the bad things are away from you.  God continues to give us this same type hope when he reminds us of heaven – except all bad things will be away from us in Heaven. Until then our lives will be mixed with good and bad.   

Why are some worse than others? That I do not know. The book of Job is a good example of your question, but God does not totally answer it.  God simply says we should trust him, because we know He is good.   

Second, some of our hardships come from decisions we make. There are consequences to our actions. If you commit a crime, you may go to jail. If unmarried teenagers are sexually active a pregnancy may result. 

But even the consequences to our own actions are not all bad.  Hebrews 12:6 says: “The Lord disciplines those He loves.”  And please read 1 Peter 1:3-9 for encouragement. 

5.      How does God choose when He wants your life to be over? 

That is a mystery, but we know He is good and works out everything for His glory and the good of those who trust him.  (Read Romans 8:28) 

6.      How is God with every church in America at one time? (In the whole world?) 

This is another mystery. But God is a Spirit, and is not limited as we are to space.   

7.      If Jesus knew that he was gonna die why didn’t he run or hide? 

This is one of the amazing things about the love Jesus has for us!  Jesus indeed did feel the very things that we might suppose he would.  Matthew 26:36-39 records that in anticipation of his crucifixion he said, “My soul overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death…” and praying, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me.” What he meant by cup is “take away the wrath I will have to feel”.  But amazingly Jesus said, “Yet not my will, but your will be done.” In other words, “Whatever you want, and whatever it takes, Father, I will do it!”   

So why did he do it?  Romans 5:8 says, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  1 John 3:16 says, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”  So the answer to your question is that Jesus felt like running away, but he loved us so much he would rather do what God wanted him to do than to save his own life.  I am always amazed that I am loved that much – and so are you! 

8.      Why does God make some people bad and some people good? 

Romans 3:12 says, “…there is no one who does good, not even one.”  So it is important to realize that any goodness we think we see in ourselves or others needs to be compared to the holiness and perfection of Jesus. None of us measures up. 

However, it is true that God allows some to act worse than others.  Why does he keep some from certain sin, and allow others to hurt people?  I don’t know. I only know that he is good, and that apart from his salvation & grace I would do more evil, and be condemned for it. But, in his grace, I do some good, and by faith all of the things Jesus did are counted as if I did them.  

9.      Why does God make some people cute and some people ugly? 

Proverbs 31:30 says: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting…”  So before answering about God’s reasons, it is important to realize that standards of beauty are different from culture to culture, and from generation to generation.  Proverbs tells us both that those who have physical beauty (or cute-ness) may eventually no longer be considered beautiful or cute, and that even if beauty were maintained there is no guarantee others would think so as perceptions change.  So to answer your question with a question: What is cute? 

However, the more direct answer is that God makes all people as he sees fit.  It is the real beauty, what a person is, that God is most concerned with. And that is what he wants us to be more concerned with.   

 10. If we are not supposed to re-write the Bible, then why do people make new copies? 

God commands us not to add anything to what he has told us, nor to take anything away from what he tells us.  That is what is meant by not re-writing the Bible.  However, since the Bible is to go to many different people, and in many different languages, it is appropriate that his Word be translated into different languages. 

As for the many English versions, they all say essentially the same thing, but just have a different way of saying it.  This is because they were translated by different people, in different generations.   

It is true that some people make different emphasis because of the way they read the different words. But people do the same thing even using the same translations.  People are limited in knowledge, and tend to filter everything through their own experience.  The Scripture does not say different things to different people. God always has one meaning. Our responsibility is to be faithful to determine what that is.  One day, however, all our disagreements will be settled, and we will know without question what the Scriptures mean.  (Read about the Bereans in Acts 17:10-12) 

11.      If God knew that Adam & Eve were gonna’ sin why did he put that Tree of Good & Evil in the middle of the Garden? 

Some think God was being mean, to put that tree there but telling Adam not to eat from it. But if you read the story, God told him he could eat from any of the many other trees. So it is important to see first that God is good and generous. He is not mean and selfish.   

But why did God put that tree there?  My short answer is this: To show us how much he really loved us.

While many people may disagree with me, let me try to simply explain.  

Good and evil both existed, though Adam did not know anything about evil, and evil did not hurt him.  God, in love, warned Adam not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. Why would he need to know more?  But evil still existed, as the opposite of Good.   

It also was a way to test man’s love for God. Was God enough for Adam? Or would Adam want to “know” stuff apart from God?  It was not intended to tempt Adam, though that possibility existed. It was a way for Adam to know his own heart. 

Now, here is how God’s love is shown… It is easy to love someone who is good.  It is difficult to love someone who is not good; someone who hates you.  By eating from that Tree, Adam & Eve rebelled against God. In essence they said: “I hate you… you are not enough for me.”  But they had no excuse.  They had everything they needed in and from God. But they wanted more.   

But God still loved them. So instead of killing them and starting over, he revealed a plan how he would win them back… A plan that so clearly shows God’s love, and wisdom, and grace, that it is glorious!  He would redeem them back by sending his own Son to pay the price of their sin – and all the sin that would come from that first sin! (Genesis 3:15 is the first promise of Jesus.)   

So God allowed the Tree to be there so that if – when – they disobeyed for no reason, he could prove His  justice, wisdom, kindness, and how much he loved us.

12.    Why does God let some people be poor and some rich? 

I don’t know why he chooses some to be rich, and others to be poor.  But I do know that he says that it is hard for rich people to become Christians.  (Matthew 19:24)  Because, I suppose, rich people trust in themselves and their money for everything, and not on Jesus Christ.  But God also blesses the poor in a very important way. James 2:5 says: 

Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the worldto be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? 

(Read: Luke 4:18; Luke 6:20; Luke 14:13) 

It is important to remember that almost everyone in the USA is rich compared to most people in the world. You may not feel as rich as other people you know, but compared to people in other countries, you are.  And it is also important to remember that Jesus was born poor.  But 2 Corinthians 8:9 says:  

For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. 

13.  Why did God let Saddam attack America? 

Why does God let there be war? War is a result of sin in the hearts of man.

James 4:1-2 says: 

What causes fights and quarrels among you?Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet,but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. 

War is just bigger; when groups or countries fight against each other.  Saddam is just one man who in this age has chosen to go to war in a big way.  In the past there have been other men, like Hitler, who started wars. 

Why did it happen to America?  I can only ask: Why not?  Because of Sin we all experience trials & hardships in this life.  (1 Peter 1:6)  Our country has largely been spared, but God never promises that no hardship will come; only that He will see us through.  And, while we don’t like to admit it, Americans have sin that offends people.  That does not justify the killing of the people on the planes or in New York, but we must remember it is a part of living in a fallen world.   

However, when Jesus returns, all will be well for those who trust Him.

14. Why doesn’t God come to earth right now?  What is God waiting for? 

The Disciples asked this very question in Acts 1.  Jesus’ answer was that “only God knows.” 

I don’t know why He has not yet returned.  But I do know He will return when He is ready; when the time is just right.

15. Why do people make up lies about how the universe was made? 

Lying or not, people are wrong when they deny that God created the world from nothing, in six days, and all very good.  Some are not “lying” because they have been deceived.  But they are no less wrong. 

On the other hand, sin leads to hard hearts; hard hearts lead to hating God. Hating God leads to pretending he does not exist.  And some people, because they are still in sin, are trying to pretend God does not exist. And to them if God doesn’t exist, then he cannot have created the universe.   

The problem for them is, that God is there, and He did create all things; and he continues to sustain all things.

16. Why doesn’t everybody believe in Christ?  Why doesn’t God make everybody believe in Him? 

Sin prevents people from believing. The Bible calls people “Dead in sin.”  Dead people can do nothing to help themselves do or believe anything.  The amazing thing is that some of us do believe. And that is because God chose us, and has made us alive. He has given us faith to believe; it is a gift. (Ephesians 2:8)  (Read Ezekiel 37 – Ezekiel preached in a grave yard, and the dead bones came to life!!) 

Why doesn’t God make everyone believe? I cannot answer that.  I only know that all deserve death (Romans 6:23); that those who are condemned get what they deserve (and what we deserve); and that we who are saved do not deserve it (we are no better, smarter, cuter, etc.), but have been given a gift that glorifies God’s justice & grace.  This is known as the Doctrine of Election.    

17. Why does God give more talent to some people than others? 

While all people are equally created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and thus are equal in value, not everybody is the same.  Like wealth and beauty, God chooses who he gives certain talents to. It is not because they are deserved, but just because he chooses.  We don’t know “why” he does what he does. We only know that he is good, and does what is good.  Because he is good, it is right; it is not “unfair”.   

But it is also important to know that God gives to each person talent; and to each Christian Spiritual gifts. Everyone has them, uniquely given by God.  We are told to learn what our gifts & talents are, to use them wisely for the benefit of others and the glory of God.  We are also told that those who use them wisely may be given more, while those who do not use them wisely may loose them.     

18. Do you have to go to school in Heaven? 

In heaven you will have all knowledge.  You will not know everything God knows, but you will know everything you need to know. So… I don’t see any reason to go to school in heaven…except to have fun! 

19. Why did God make some teachers meaner than others? (Like Mrs. Quigley?!) 

While I can’t comment about Mrs. Quigley, I can comment in general. Some teachers are mean because they have hard hearts, caused by sin.  They express meanness instead of expressing love.  They need to be prayed for, just as Jesus said to “pray for your enemies”.  (Matthew 5:44) 

On the other hand, sometimes we just think people are mean when, because they really love us, they are firm & demanding.  Good parents are the best example. When they “punish” or discipline us, it is because they love us and want for us to know right from wrong.  Likewise, a good teacher wants you to learn all you can learn, and will push you to do so. We pray for these people too – thanking God for putting them in our lives.   

The hard part is being able to tell the difference.   

No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful.Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peacefor those who have been trained by it.    –Hebrews 12:11

He who ignores discipline despises himself, but whoever heeds correction gains understanding.              –Proverbs 15:32 

*NOTE: Read Proverbs 10:17; 12:1; 13:24; and Hebrews 12 

20.   How does God let parents know what to name their baby? 

There are some cases in the Bible where God specifically told parents what to name their babies.  In many cultures names have some significance about the person, but not always.  But the Bible does not command anything about names, so parents are free to choose whatever name they like for their children.   

21. Does God not let you into Heaven if you didn’t get baptized?  If he doesn’t, why doesn’t he let me get baptized? 

While God does command us to be baptized, the baptism is not what saves us.  The baptism is required to be part of the church on earth – of which God wants all Christians to be members.  But it is possible to go to heaven without having been baptized.  This should be unusual, but it is very possible.  (If you want to talk more about baptism, I’d be happy to answer any questions you have.  Hopefully we can have you get baptized very soon.) 

22. What does Satan look like? Does anybody know? 

Satan is deceitful, but nobody knows what he looks like.  While because of his evil he is the epitome of ugly, Ezekiel 28:12 says Satan was created “…perfect in beauty.”  How he has fallen! 

23. What does Jesus look like? 

There are no records as to what Jesus actually looked like.  Interestingly, especially in light of the description that Satan was created in beauty, Isaiah 53:2 records of Jesus: “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”  This does not mean that Jesus was necessarily an ugly-looking man, but many believe he was physically unattractive, but nevertheless a beautiful man. (Read Isaiah 52:14, and it suggests that the absence of beauty was after his beating and torture… “disfigured”) 

24.    How will we know when Jesus comes to Earth if we don’t know what he looks like? 

The best answer I can give is that when Jesus comes “riding in the clouds” (Psalm 104:3) all who believe in him will recognize him.  Revelation 19:11-16 is a picture (probably symbolic) that is unforgettable & recognizable.  But the best answer, I believe, comes simply from Jesus: “My sheep listen to my voice.”  (John 10:27)   Like a sheep recognizes the voice of the shepherd, so will those belonging to Jesus somehow recognize his voice.  

25. What if somebody was not from a family that didn’t believe in Jesus but wanted to be a Christian? How do they become one? 

While God has established a Covenant with his people, and blesses the households of believers who are faithful to that Covenant, God must save each person.  One is not a Christian because he or she grows up in a Christian home. Each child must learn & understand that he/she is a sinner in need of a savior, and that Jesus is that Savior.  He died on the Cross to take our sin; and he was Resurrected to give us Faith to believe.  It is by repenting of our sin & Faith in what Jesus did for us that we become Christians.   

For a person from outside a Christian home to become a Christian, he/she must learn & understand the same thing.  However, it will not come from their parents. They will hear about Jesus through a friend (or a Missionary).  But when they believe they will be every bit as much a Christian as the believing person who comes from a Christian home.   

NOTE: You can be that “friend” to those at your school. (Matthew 28:18-20) 

26. Why does everybody look so sad during Communion? 

This is another good question, similar to the one you asked about prayer.  However, in communion there may be more reason to look sad, though it should also bring joy.   

When we come to the table we are reminded that we are sinners, and that Jesus had to die to pay the price for our sin. (Romans 3:23; Romans 6:23) That should make us sad, because someone else “got in trouble” because of something we did.  Jesus took our punishment, although he was good. He is the only one who is.  But even after we become Christians, and are forgiven our sin, we still sin. (1 John 1:8)  And so being reminded of this, we may feel sad. 

On the other hand, God the Father demonstrated his love for us by sending his Son; and Jesus demonstrated his love for us by coming (Romans 5:6-8; Philippians 2:5-11).  He died on the Cross to pay what we were powerless to pay. We have been set free. He loves us! So for that, we should feel good.   

Each time we come to the table we declare that. (1 Corinthians 11:26)  And so we may feel both sad & happy at the same time.  But in the end, we should be happy, because the truth of God’s Grace is Amazing & Great! 

27. Why are only men allowed to be Elders, Deacons, and Pastors? 

First, it is important for you to know that a Pastor is an Elder – no more, no less.  A Deacon is different, but he is important. But this is another good question.  Many people do not believe this, though the Bible teaches about this.   

In 1 Timothy 3 & Titus 1 God, through Apostle Paul, gives us the requirements for these two offices.  In each the requirement is that the person be a godly man.  It is not because women are not good enough, or smart enough, or not important. It is just the way God created things. However, some people have used this to believe that women are not supposed to do important things in the church. That is wrong.  And as you grow up, you should use all your gifts & talents in the church, for God’s glory and the good of others.   

So, the short answer is, for whatever his reasons, that’s the way God set it up.  (We can talk more about this if you want more info.)

I hope these answers to your questions helped.