Truth: The Third Mark of the Church

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

by James M. Boice 

It is a striking thing that nearly all that God does in the world today, he does by the Holy Spirit through the instrumentality of his written revelation. This is true of sanctification. Sanctification means to be set apart for God’s use. So our text tells us that the only way this will ever happen to us is by an appropriation of God’s truth as that is recorded for us in the Bible.  

If we are to receive the blessings God has for his church, we must receive them in the way God has planned to give them to us, and this means that there are many ways in which holiness will not come to us.

First, It will not come through preaching or listening to preaching, for instance. Most of us know people who have specialized in Bible conferences and conventions to such a degree that they are fully aware of what a speaker is going to say before he says it. But this alone does not produce holiness.

What is wrong? Quite simply, they are looking to men for their teaching, rather than to God.  

A second way in which we will not find holiness is through prayer or, still less, through prayer meetings. Prayer is most important in the Christian life, but it is not the God-ordained means for growth in holiness. Prayer is preparation for such growth. But at what point in prayer does God actually speak to us and direct us in the way we should go? Only when God the Holy Spirit brings the words of Scripture to our minds for the direction we need.  

Third, we must not expect to find holiness through a special experience.

Whenever you find yourself looking for an experience, you are on the wrong track and in spiritual danger. Sanctification comes rather from seeking always and increasingly to have the Lord Jesus Christ (a person, not an “it”) exalted in our lives. And the way to do that is by discovering what he desires of us and for us as that is revealed in his Word.  

This brings us back to the central point. Growth in holiness is through Bible study, that alone. And therefore, the third mark of the church must be God’s truth. David asked about it, saying, “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?” He answered, “By taking heed thereto according to thy Word. With my whole heart have I sought thee; oh, let me not wander from thy commandments” (Psalm 119:9-10).  

What does this mean practically?  

Let me suggest some areas. 

1) We must let it be known that we do what we do because the Bible says so. It is our authority. We must be men and women of “the Book.” We have to recover the biblical standard. We have to get to what the Word of God says. We have to study it, do our homework, and then we must ask: On the basis of this Word, what does God want for the church in this age?  

2) We need to be distinct in our theology. This pays off, because where it is done those who hunger for the truth of the Word of God will come to it.  We need to articulate the great biblical doctrines, not just adopt the theology of our culture. We need to speak of the depravity of man, of man in rebellion against God, so much so that there is no hope for him apart from God’s grace. We need to speak of God’s electing love, showing that God enters the life of the individual in grace by his Holy Spirit to quicken understanding and draw the rebellious will to himself. We must speak of perseverance, that God is able to keep and does keep those whom he so draws. All these doctrines and all the supporting doctrines that go with them need to be proclaimed.  

3) We have to be distinctly different in the area of our priorities. Our priorities are not going to be the world’s priorities but the priorities of the Word of God. This does not mean, let me say, that we will therefore neglect social concerns. That is part of the priority of the Christian life. But it does mean that we will not reject the gospel of salvation through faith in the vicarious atonement of Christ either. And we will make the proclamation of this gospel our number one priority.  

4) We need to be distinctly different in the area of our lifestyle.   

One of the priorities we must have concerns our time. Sport has almost become the religion of America. It is what many people do on weekends. And there are evangelicals who find their time so taken up with sports that Christian activities are crowded out. Is that right? Is this not an area in which we have to say that the drift of our day is not in the direction we want to go?  

The second area where I raise the question of proper priorities is the amount of time spent watching television. The average American watches television over four hours every day. These figures are true, I am convinced, of Christian people also. Is the tube worth that time? The Bible says, “Redeem… the time, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:16).  

How about the use of Sunday? I do not believe in proscribing what is proper and improper Sunday activity for anybody. But how do we use Sunday? Do we want to worship God? Is sixty minutes, seventy or eighty minutes, on Sunday morning really the whole of our Sunday commitment?  

Public schools are increasingly scheduling school events for Sunday, and this is having its effect on our children. We are going to see more of that, and Christian people are going to be confronted with it again and again. Are these activities more important than having our children in church? Even if it means that our children are not going to be as popular as we would like them to be – we must say, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:15). These are areas where Christians are going to have to show that they are distinct.  

Perhaps the most pressing area in which we have to be distinct is sexual ethics, particularly in our conception of marriage and the way we conduct our marriages. It is not easy to have a Christian marriage today. Everything in the world works against it. The great and overriding concern of our time is for personal satisfaction, and there is always that in marriage which does not seem personally satisfying. We wish things could be different. But the question is: What are we in the marriage for? Are we in it for personal satisfaction above all? Or are we there because we believe that God has brought us together with our spouse to establish a Christian home in which his truth can be raised high, Christian values demonstrated, and children raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?  

Finally, we must be distinct in our use of money and other resources. How do we use our money? All of us are hit by inflationary times. But if we compare our standard of living in the United States with the rest of the world, compared to most others we are all millionaires. All of us have money we could use in the Lord’s work. Do we thus use it? Are we faithful in that area? Some of us do not even give the Old Testament tithe, let alone our life and soul and all that we have to be used in the Lord’s own way.

I have given four areas in which we need to be distinctly different: the areas of our authority, theology, priorities, and life style. All these correspond to the areas of secularization delineated earlier. But there is a fifth point which we need to add.

5) We need to be distinctly different in our visible dependence upon God. I am convinced that nothing less than this will capture the attention of a secular world.  

How can Christians change the world? The Lord Jesus Christ gave the answer in the Sermon on the Mount. He did not say that we are to maneuver the world. He did not say, “Get elected to high positions in the Roman Empire. See if you can get an evangelical to be promoted to emperor.” Not at all! It could happen, of course. He did not forbid it. But that is not the option he gave. He said, “Ye are the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). Then he said, “Ye are the light of the world” (v. 14).  

Salt does a great deal of good, but it does no good at all if it has lost its saltiness. It is only when it is salty that it is effective. So, if we are those in whom the Spirit of God has worked to call us to faith in Jesus Christ, we must really be Christ’s people; and it must be evident that by his grace we are not what we were previously. Our values must not be the same values. Our commitments must not be the same commitments. Our theology must not be the same theology. Rather, there must be a new element in us and, because of us, in the world.  

We are also “light.” If salt speaks of what we are, light speaks of what we do. The purpose of light is to shine, to shine out. So the Lord said, “Look, nobody lights a candle and puts it under a bushel. It is to be set up on a candlestick where all will see it.”  

What are we to be? We are to be lighthouses in the midst of a dark world. Being a lighthouse will not change the rocky contours of the coast. The sin is still there. The perils of destruction still threaten men and women. But by God’s grace the light can be a beacon which will bring the ships into a safe harbor. That is what it means to be set apart unto God, to be sanctified. We are to be a beacon, knowing that as we are that, there will be cause for great rejoicing, and the evangelical church will be blessed by God and thanked by those who have found the Lord Jesus Christ through her witness. 

This is the third in a series of six posts by Dr James M. Boice concerning the characteristics of a healthy church.

Holiness: The Second Mark of the Church

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

 by  James M. Boice

 Holiness is the characteristic of God most mentioned in the pages of the Word of God and is therefore, quite rightly, that which should characterize God’s church. We are to be a “holy” people (1 Pet. 2:9). We are to “follow” after holiness. Indeed, without it “no man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). Jesus speaks of this characteristic of the church in our passage (John 17) by praying – it is his second petition combined with the third – that God would keep it from the evil one. 

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But what is holiness? Some people have identified holiness with a culturally determined behavioral pattern and so have identified as holy those who do not gamble or smoke or drink or play cards or go to movies or do any of a large number of such things. But this approach betrays a basic misconception. It may be the case that real holiness in a particular Christian may result in abstinence from one or more of these things, but the essence of holiness is not found there. Consequently, to insist on such things for the church is not to promote holiness, but rather to promote legalism and hypocrisy. In some extreme forms it may even promote a false Christianity according to which men and women are justified before God on the basis of some supposedly ethical behavior. 

The Apostle Paul had found this to be true of the Israel of his day, as Jesus had also found it before him. So he distinguished clearly between this kind of holiness (the term he used is “righteousness”) and true holiness which comes from God and is always God-oriented. He said of Israel, “For they, being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God” (Romans 10:3). 

This biblical idea of holiness is made somewhat clearer when we consider those words that are synonyms for it in the English language, namely “saint” or “sanctify.” Christ uses the second one in verse 17. What is a saint? A saint is not a person who has achieved a certain level of goodness but rather one who has been set apart to himself by God. 

But now we need to ask this question: If holiness has to do with separation (or, better yet, consecration) and if believers are already holy by virtue of their being set apart to himself by God, why does Christ pray for our sanctification? Why pray for that which we already have? The answer is obviously that although we have been set apart to himself by God we often clearly fail to live up to that calling. 

We are worldly in the sense that the world’s values often remain our values and the world’s priorities our priorities. 

First of all, there is the matter of the world’s wisdom. The old wisdom of the church, in every age and in every denomination, was the wisdom of the Scriptures. Christian people stood before the Word of God and confessed their own ignorance in spiritual things. They even confessed their inability to understand what is written in the Scriptures except for the grace of God through the ministry of the Holy Spirit who opens the Scriptures to us. Christian people confessed their resistance to spiritual things and the fact that, if left to ourselves, we always go our own way. But what has happened in our time is that this old wisdom, the strength of the church, has been set aside for other sources of wisdom with the result that the authoritative and reforming voice of God through the Scriptures is ignored. 

Second, it is not only in the area of the world’s wisdom that we are faced with secularism; we are also faced with it in the area of the world’s theology. The world’s theology is easy to define. It is the view that man is basically good, that no one is really lost, and that belief in the Lord Jesus Christ is not necessary for salvation. 

Finally, secularism in the church is seen in the world’s methods. God’s methods are prayer and the power of the gospel, through which the Holy Spirit moves to turn God’s people from their wicked ways and heal their land. That has always been the strength of the church of Jesus Christ. But today that power is despised. It is laughed at, because the methods that those laughing want to use are politics and money. 

Well, the secularism of the church is bad. I will be considering the cure for it in our study of the church’s next distinguishing characteristic: truth. But, of course, we must notice the cure even now.  Jesus makes it clear in his prayer by saying at the beginning of this section, “I have given them thy word” (v. 14), and then again at the end, “Sanctify them through thy truth; thy word is truth” (v. 17). It is by means of the Bible, then, by the Word of God, that we are to become increasingly separated unto God and grow in practical holiness. 

Without a regular, disciplined and practical study of the Bible the church will always be secular. It will fall into that state described by Paul for Timothy, when he warned that in the last day “perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God, having a form of godliness, but denying the power of it” (2 Tim. 3:1-5). That is the secular church: “having a form of godliness, but denying the power of it.” But on the other hand, by means of the Bible, God’s people will become the opposite. For if the secular church employs the world’s wisdom, the world’s theology, the world’s agenda, and the world’s methods, the true church will invert it. It will employ the wisdom of God, the theology of the Scriptures, the agenda of God’s written revelation, and the methods that have been given to us for our exercise in the church until the Lord Jesus Christ comes again. 

This is the second in a series of six posts by Dr James M. Boice concerning the characteristics of a healthy church.

Practical (& Humorous) Laws for Young Children

/ Dennis Griffith / 2 Comments

The following are Levitical-style Commandments for families with young children. These “Laws” are taken from an episode of A Prairie Home Companion.

 Our children are out of the life-stage where these are applicable, but to pass along “wisdom” for parenting – and to get a chuckle – I post these laws here. 

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Laws of Forbidden Places 

Of the beasts of the field, and of the fishes of the sea, and of all foods that are acceptable in my sight you may eat, but not in the living room.  

Of the hoofed animals, broiled or ground into burgers, you may eat, but not in the living room.  

Of the cereal grains, of the corn and of the wheat and of the oats, and of all the cereals that are of bright color and unknown provenance you may eat, but not in the living room.  

Of quiescently frozen dessert and of all frozen after-meal treats you may eat, but absolutely not in the living room.  

Of the juices and other beverages, yes, even of those in sippy-cups, you may drink, but not in the living room, neither may you carry such therein.  

Indeed, when you reach the place where the living room carpet begins, of any food or beverage there you may not eat, neither may you drink.  

But if you are sick, and are lying down and watching something, then may you eat in the living room.  

Laws When at Table 

And if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were.  

Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke.  

Drink your milk as it is given you, neither use on it any utensils, nor fork, nor knife, nor spoon, for that is not what they are for; if you will dip your blocks in the milk, and lick it off, you will be sent away from my presence.  

When you have drunk, let the empty cup then remain upon the table, and do not bite it upon its edge and by your teeth hold it to your face in order to make noises in it sounding like a duck: for you will be sent away from my presence.  

When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister has done the same to you.  

Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is.  

And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why.  

And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why.  

Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.  

Laws Pertaining to Dessert 

For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert.  

But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert.  

But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof.  

And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.  

On Screaming 

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault.  

Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming.  Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat it myself, yet do not die.  

Concerning Face and Hands 

Cast your countenance upward to the light, and lift your eyes to the hills, that I may more easily wash you off. For the stains are upon you; even to the very back of your head, there is rice thereon.  

And in the breast pocket of your garment, and upon the tie of your shoe, rice and other fragments are distributed in a manner beyond comprehension.  

Only hold yourself still; hold still, I say. Give each finger in its turn for my examination thereof, and also each thumb. Lo, how iniquitous they appear. What I do is as it must be; and you shall not go hence until I havedone.

Various Other Laws, Statutes, and Ordinances 

Bite not, lest you be cast into quiet time. Neither drink of your own bath water, nor of the bath water of any kind; nor rub your feet on bread, even if it be in the package; nor rub your feet against cars, not against any building; nor eat sand.  

Leave the cat alone, for what has the cat done, that you should so afflict it with tape? And hum not the humming in your nose as I read, nor stand between the light and the book. Indeed, you will drive me to madness. Nor forget what I said about the tape.  

Complaints and Lamentations 

O my children, you are disobedient. For when I tell you what you must do, you argue and dispute hotly even to the littlest detail; and when I do not accede, you cry out, and hit and kick. Yes, and even sometimes do you spit, and shout “stupid-head” and other blasphemies, and hit and kick the wall and the molding thereof when you are sent to the corner. And though the law teaches that no one shall be sent to the corner for more minutes than he has years of age, yet I would leave you there all day, so mighty am I inanger. But upon being sent to the corner you ask straightaway, “Can I come out?” and I reply, “No, you may not come out.” And again you ask, and again I give the same reply. But when you ask again a third time, then you may come out.  

Hear me, O my children, for the bills they kill me. I pay and pay again, even to the twelfth time in a year, and yet again they mount higher than before.  For our health, that we may be covered, I give six hundred and twenty talents twelve times in a year; but even this covers not the fifteen hundred deductible for each member of the family within a calendar year.  And yet for ordinary visits we still are not covered, nor for manymedicines, nor for the teeth within our mouths. Guess not at what rage is in my mind, for surely you cannot know.   

For I will come to you at the first of the month and at the fifteenth of the month with the bills and a great whining and moan. And when the month of taxes comes, I will decry the wrong and unfairness of it, and mourn with wine and ashtrays, and rend my receipts. And you shall remember that I am that I am: before, after, and until you are twenty-one. Hear me then, and avoid me in my wrath, O children of me.

Joy: The First Mark of the Church

/ Dennis Griffith / 1 Comment

by James M. Boice

That most of us do not think of joy as a primary characteristic of the Church probably indicates both how little we regard it and how far we have moved from the spirit of the early Church. For if anything characterizes the early Church it is that it was a joyous assembly. 

When the Jerusalem Church sent a letter to the churches of Antioch, Syria and Cilicia after the first Church council, they began their announcement of the momentous decision regarding Gentile liberty from law by the word chairein – “Joy be with you”  (Acts 15:23).  James begins his letter in the same manner – “Joy be with you” (James 1:2).  In Paul there are many such greetings. Thus, when in a letter literally flowing over with joy, the Apostle wishes to give final admonitions to his friends, the Philippians, he writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always; and again I say. Rejoice” (4:4). 

But is the Church today joyful?

Are Christians? 

No doubt we think of joy as something that should characterize the Church ideally and will doubtlessly characterize it in that day when we are gathered together around the throne of grace to sing God’s glory. But here? Here it is often the case that there are sour looks, griping, long faces and other manifestations of a fundamental inner misery. 

We should be joyful, but often we are not. We are depressed. Circumstances get us down. Instead of the victory we should experience, we know defeat and discouragement. 

Since none of us wants to remain gloomy, let us see what we can find as a remedy. 

The first remedy for a lack of joy is on the surface of the text. Jesus says quite clearly, “These things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy” (John 17:13). This means that in one sense the basis for joy is sound doctrine. Earlier in these final discourses Jesus declared, “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love, even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full” (John 15:10, 11). Joy is to be found in a knowledge of God’s character and commandments, and these are to be learned through his Word. When we are settled in our knowledge of God, his will and ways, we can trust him peacefully and joyfully whatever the circumstances. 

Does someone say, “Oh, but that is easy for you to say, but you don’t know my circumstances. I am thirty-two years old and unmarried. My parents are dead, and I am so lonely. I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to go on this way for thirty or forty more years…” Another says, “But I’m an invalid. I can’t get about. My circumstances are so hard…” If you are speaking this way, you are indicating your practical ignorance of the sovereignty of God and are confessing that your thoughts are not really settled in him. Instead of this, recognize that he has planned those circumstances and look for his purposes in them. 

Let me say something about circumstances, which we often think are so bad. Circumstances refer to things that are without. The word itself is based on two Latin words: circum, which means“around” (as in the word “circumference”), and stare, which means “to stand.” So circumstances are the things that are standing around us. They are external. But where is the Lord in this picture? Is he without? No, by contrast he is within. It is a case of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1 :27). So why worry about what is without, if Christ is within? To know that he is within and that he is directing us moment by moment, day by day, is the secret of that super-natural joy which is our rightful birthmark as God’s children. 

The second remedy for a lack of joy in the believer’s life is fellowship, and that in two dimensions. There is a vertical fellowship: fellowship with God. And there is a horizontal fellowship: fellowship with one another. Jesus is the pattern for us in both cases. 

One thing we are going to notice in these six marks of the Church is that Jesus is the pattern for each one. And that is certainly the case here. For Jesus was joyful, even though we call him (rightly, but perhaps one-sidedly) “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.” We know this from our text, because he speaks here, not just of “joy,” but of “my joy.” It is this that he holds out to us. What is his joy? It is the joy of moment by moment contact and fellowship with the Father. This is what sustains him in this prayer. It is what sustained him on the cross. 

It will sustain us as well, if we will only enter into the reality of that fellowship. Do not say, “But that is for Jesus; he was the Son of God, and I am just I.” Are we not also sons of God? Is it not Jesus himself who has taught this to us? He taught that we could be born into God’s family (John 3:3, 7). He taught that God could become our Father (John 20:17). Therefore, we can enter into the joy of Christ even as he entered into it – by constant fellowship with the Father. 

Moreover, we can enjoy it on the horizontal level also. In fact, we must enjoy it on the horizontal level, for fellowship with the Father and with one another always go together. So if you are not joyful, it may be that you have cut yourself off from other Christians, perhaps even with the thought of establishing your own private fellowship with God. It does not work that way. You need other believers, and they need you. Without them your fellowship with God will be diminished and your joy will not be full. 

There is one final part to God’s remedy for lack of joy. It is that we must live holy lives; for sin will keep us from God, and the fellowship with him that we need will be broken. In John 17 this thought is suggested by the sequence of the verses. For immediately after speaking of our need for joy, Jesus goes on to speak of our need for holiness, adding, “Sanctify them through thy truth” (v. 17). The same thing is suggested in Romans 14:17, where Paul says, “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” 

Many Christians do not have the joy that they ought rightly to have because they go their way, rather than God’s. They disobey his commandments. How much better to go God’s way in holiness, to rest in him, and thus allow him to “fill you with all joy and peace in believing” (Rom. 15:13). 

This is the first in a series of six posts by Dr James M. Boice concerning the characteristics of a healthy church.

Marks of a Healthy Church

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Over the next several weeks the leaders of Walnut Hill Church will engage in a number of discussions concerning the health and direction of our church.  These discussions will cover a wide range of considerations. 

Walnut Hill, though a smaller church is in many respects already a healthy congregation.  I believe that if we were to compare ourselves with the majority of churches around the country, we would find that we are doing quite well.  But such comparative health is not our aim. Instead we want to be faithful to all that our Lord calls us to be and to do. We want to be and do everything that we were designed for; we don’t want to just be (or seem) better than some others.

Toward that end…

  • Our Elders will be going to Birmingham, AL in a few weeks to participate in the Embers to Flame Conference, which I expect will provide some common ground for our discussions.  The key concepts emphasized by the Embers Conference will then serve as a sort of “scaffolding” as we labor to strengthen and build and our various ministries.  
  • We will continue our process of moving from a church that prays toward becoming a House of Prayer for all Nations.  Already Walnut Hill displays a priority of prayer that is very encouraging to me as the pastor.  But we want to explore how we can still grow in this area. (I’ll compose several posts that I hope will clarify some of the distinctions between a Praying Church and a House of Prayer.) 
  • We will explore the Gospel, and its various aspects. And we will consider how the Gospel applies to us each day as followers of Christ, and not just as a plan of salvation to be explained to those who do not (yet) believe. (See Colossians 2:6, Galatians 3:1-3, and 2 Peter 3:18)
  • We will reflect on the Core Values, or the DNA, of our church, so we can build on those things that make Walnut Hill unique. And we anticipate developing a clear and comprehensive philosophy of ministry – which we will put in writing. Much of this is already in place, but still needs to be clearly articulated so we can communicate it to those who will be – and already are -joining us. 

These are a few of the things that we will be undertaking, and obviously only a broad sketch. But I wanted to share it with you so you will know how to pray for us. And I also wanted to provide an open door for you to consider some of these same things along with us. 

As part of our discussion I will also post a series of articles by Dr. James M. Boice from his series: How to Have a Healthy Church.  While these are not exhaustive, I find these insights to be very helpful and, as I look at Walnut Hill, encouraging.   

Dr. Boice suggests there are 6 Marks, which will be published in six subsequent posts: 

I invite you, the Walnut Hill Church family, to reflect on these marks, and consider to what extent they are evident at Walnut Hill, corporately; and in our own lives, personally.

To any degree you find us lacking, please pray that, by God’s grace, these marks would become increasingly evident in and among us. 

Signs of Living to Please God

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

In Galatians 1:10, the Apostle Paul asks a semi-rhetorical question: “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God?”   

 At this time of the year most of us see the opportunity for a new start. Whether you are one who makes New Year’s Resolutions or not, there seems to be a sense of a“Do Over” that comes almost as soon as that ball drops in Times Square, and the Bowl season begins to make way for the roundball & puck.   

The Apostle’s question raises another, more fundamental question: Who is it that we are to live to please?  

I want that to be a question that will be given consideration for this new year (… and every year).  

It would not be appropriate to suppose Paul suggests affirmation from the people around us is a bad thing. On many occasions Paul expressed his thankfulness for having been well received, for the friendships he enjoyed with many among whom he had lived and labored.  Yet his question should remind us: “The primary purpose of man is to glorify and enjoy God”. (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 1)

While earning esteem at work, in your neighborhood, or among family members may often be a good thing, Paul reminds us that it is when this is our driving motivation that we may be out of accord with the very purpose for which we are created, and for which we are redeemed.   

So how do we know when we are falling into this? (Yes, when, not if.)   

The great English Puritan, Richard Baxter, provides us with some thoughts, and exhorts us: “See therefore that you live for God’s approval as that which you chiefly seek, and as that will suffice you.”

You may discover yourself by these signs: 

  1. You will be careful to understand the Scripture, to know what pleases and displeases God
  2. You will be more careful in the doing of every task, to fit it to the pleasure of God rather than men.
  3. You will look to your hearts, and not only to your actions; to your goals, and thoughts, and the inward manner and degree.
  4. You will look to secret duties as well as public, and to that which men do not see as well as those which they see.
  5. You will revere your conscience, paying close attention to it, and not slighting it; when it tells you of God’s displeasure, it will disquiet you; when it tells you of His approval, it will comfort you.
  6. Your pleasing men will be charitable for their good, and pious (holy) in order to please God, not proud and ambitious for your honor among men, nor impious against the pleasing of God.

Baxter Goes on to say:

Whether men are pleased or displeased, how they judge you or what they call you, will seem a small matter to you, as their own interests, in comparison to God’s judgment. You don’t live for them. You can bear their displeasure, and comments, if God is pleased. 

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.

A Christmas Reflection

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Consider Mary’s response to the angel.

The angel has come to Mary and says: “Mary, you are going to give birth to the long-promised  Messiah.” This was a unique promise, and unrepeatable. There is something totally unique here: the birth of the eternal second Person of the Trinity into this world.

What was her response?

  • She could have rejected the idea and said, ‘I do not want it: I want to withdraw; I want to run’…
  • She could have said, ‘I now have the promises, so I will exert my force, my character, and my energy, to bring forth the promised thing’.

But what she did say is beautiful, it is wonderful. She says:

‘Behold, the bondmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy Word.’   – Luke 1.38

There is an active passivity here. She took her own body, by choice, and put it into the hands of God to do the thing that he said he would do, and Jesus was born.  She gave herself to God…

This is a beautiful, exciting, personal expression of a relationship between a finite person and the God she loves.

~ Francis Schaeffer, from True Spirituality

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.  

Some Thoughts About Spiritual Formation

/ Dennis Griffith / Leave a comment

Eugene Peterson, in his recent book, The Jesus Way, writes:   

“Following Jesus necessarily means getting his ways and means into our everyday lives. It is not enough simply to recognize and approve his ways and get started in the right direction. Jesus’ ways are meant to be embraced and assimilated into our habits. This takes place only as we pray our following of him. It cannot be imposed from without, cannot be copied. It must be shaped from within. This shaping takes place in prayer. The practice of prayer is the primary way that Jesus’ way comes to permeate our entire lives so that we walk spontaneously and speak rhythmically in the fluidity and fluency of holiness.”  

My good friend, Seaton Garrett, of Are We There Yet? , has offered some thoughtful reflections about Spiritual Formation, inspired by Peterson’s work, in a post: Ways & Means, The Jesus Way. 

Check it out.