Sunday, May 30, 2004

The Good Fruit Of Matheson’s Dark Despair (May 30, 2004)

George Matheson's great hymn, "O Love That Will Not Let Me Go," came to mind while I was preparing a message on Jesus' response to the despair of John the Baptist. As he waited in prison, John sank so low in discouragement that he sent word to Jesus asking, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?" (Luke 7:19). Matheson likewise reached a place of darkness so severe that he came to doubt his faith - and this on the eve of entering the ministry! The elders of his church gave him time to collect himself, and he recovered his faith and went on to become one of Scotland's great preachers of the latter 19th century.

Matheson's darkness was literal - in his youth his vision was poor and he became completely blind by the age of 20. But his mind was a marvel, and he could memorize whatever was read aloud to him. His sermons - including all Scripture texts - he recited with such fluidity that visitors to his church often did not realize he was blind.

Extraordinary minds often dwell on extraordinary difficulties, and Mattheson was the sort who would probe answerless questions to the point of anguish. On the night of June 6, 1882, he experienced a "most severe mental suffering," the source of which he never revealed. The hymn that he then sat down to write he called "the fruit of that suffering." He wrote it in five minutes, as though taking dictation, and never again wrote another hymn as easily or as easily remembered. Here are the words - may they bless you.

O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O Light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine's blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life's glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Baptismal Commitments, Part 2 (May 23, 2004)

Last week I wrote about the first of five commitments that I give young people to consider before I baptize them, namely, "I will be a Christian all my life." Here are the remaining four commitments:

2) I will attend church and worship God regularly all my life.

I think it used to be more generally understood that it was a Christian's duty to meet with other believers, at least weekly, to worship God. But nowadays it doesn't seem that enough people get this. A pastor friend alerted me to a statistic that even "highly committed" Christians attend church only about 35 times a year. The other 17 Sundays they find something else to do.

This is a scandal, and reflects a distressing trend that, I fear, will shortly lead us to Western-European decadence where churches are mostly empty and less than five percent of the population attend them at all. Nearly everyone in Western Europe, even those who claim to be Christians, "find something else to do" on Sunday mornings. Even here, I see that fewer and fewer Christian homes resemble the one in which I was raised, where church attendance was a given - neither a virtue, nor a sacrifice, but a simple fact of life. On rare occasions my father had to take care of an emergency at work (he fixed two-way radios for ambulances and police cars), but other than that he was in the house of the Lord with the rest of us.

Nowadays just about anything keeps people away from church, and so the message needs to be made explicit and unmistakable: Christians worship God together with his people. They pray, praise, give thanks, receive instruction, participate in holy communion and offer their gifts. They do not look for reasons to stay away. They do not hold God in contempt by denying him their part of the worship that is his due. If a person wants to be baptized as a follower of Christ, I make it clear that we'll expect to see him in church regularly, worshiping the Lord, till death or the Second Coming.

Commitments #3 and #4 have to do with our communication with God: (3) I will talk to God by praying to him, and (4) I will listen to God by learning from the Bible.

I purposely leave out details about the timing, duration and frequency of prayer and Bible study. I don't time my own prayers, believing that that practice ministers more to pride than it does to discipline. I also say "learning from" rather than "reading" the Bible to allow leeway for believers who are illiterate, or poor readers, or who benefit more from listening than from reading.

But the general point is this: Christians have a devotional life in which they talk to God and listen to him. By talking to God I mean prayer - giving thanks and praise, confessing sin and offering requests. By listening to him I don't mean dreaming up a dialogue in our heads and labeling one of the voices "God" (a baneful practice that results in some of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard Christians say). I mean simply listening to his voice in Scripture. He speaks through that. Christians study the Bible to understand the will and ways of God.

Finally, #5: If I get married, I will only marry another Christian.

I like to get this point in early, to middle school students if I can, before they are even thinking of marriage - before any serious, marriage-tending relationships start. Plant the seed early, so that the disobedient act of marrying an unbeliever becomes unthinkable before it ever becomes a temptation. 2 Corinthians 6:14 insists that we not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Finding oneself unequally yoked is never a reason to terminate a marriage (see 1 Corinthians 7:12-13), but a single believer must never knowingly enter into such a marriage.

Our relationship with Christ supersedes all other relationships. Fewer repudiations of this union are clearer than the decision to commit to a life-long, intimate union with someone who rejects him. Don't get baptized in the name of Jesus if you plan to, or think you could, be yoked to someone whose unbelief might drag you away from the Lord.

Sunday, May 16, 2004

Baptismal Commitments, Part 1 (May 16, 2004)

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the tension between the biblical practice of baptizing people immediately - as soon as they're converted - and the similarly biblical practice of warning people to "count the cost" before committing to Christ. Today and next week I would like to tell you some of the "counting-the-cost" details as I teach them to middle school students in a baptism class. I give baptismal candidates a sheet with these five statements on it:

1) I will be a Christian all my life.
2) I will attend church and worship God regularly all my life.
3) I will talk to God by praying to him.
4) I will listen to God by learning from the Bible.
5) If I get married, I will only marry another Christian.

I don't make the young people sign anything or raise their hands or take an oath - I just want them to think carefully and soberly about what they are doing. Here are some reasons why I make these commitments explicit:

1) "I will be a Christian all my life." There is a cloud of sorrow that hangs over my life, and it is the fact that I personally know people who "used to be" Christians. I am not saying anything about the doctrine of eternal security - I'm just saying that I have known lots of people who once said they were Christians, and acted like it, and gave good evidence that they were sincere; but now give no sign whatsoever that they love, serve, or even believe in Jesus. I can't understand it. What were they thinking when they became Christians in the first place - that they would "give it a shot" for a few years and then dump the Lord as soon as the mood struck them? How did Jesus fail them? Did he rescind his sacrifice on the cross? Did he stop ruling the universe? Did he cease to be the one whose face they will see after their death, and to whom they will render account? For the life of me I don't know how anyone could walk away from the Lord. But people do, and I have seen it, and I don't know how to stop it.

But I can at least warn people in advance, and I feel it is a duty to warn converts as they approach the act of publicly sealing their commitment to Jesus in baptism. This commitment is forever. A marriage covenant must last a lifetime merely, but our covenant with Christ is eternal. In baptism, we say that we belong to Jesus Christ now and for all time. He will never forsake us - God forbid that we should ever forsake him. It is better not to get baptized at all than, having been baptized, to abandon the faith we once expressed.

The remaining four commitments, Lord willing, I will discuss next week.

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Sunday-School Goodness In The Arena Of War (May 9, 2004)

I am a big fan of the late Stephen Ambrose's books on World War II - D Day, Band of Brothers, and Citizen Soldiers. In one of his books (can't remember which) he talked about the difficulty of trying to gauge the likelihood that a young man would act heroically in battle. Sometimes the macho, strong, tough guy in boot camp would turn into a whimpering coward under fire, while the quiet, nervous fellow morphed into a Medal of Honor recipient. One pattern that emerged, Ambrose noted, was that the heroes tended to come from peaceful Christian homes where the children all went to Sunday School. Contrary to stereotype, the guy you wanted in your foxhole was the soft-spoken, clean-cut Bible reader - not the tattooed, foul-mouthed dispenser of venereal disease.

The need for a devout Christian presence in our military has been heightened in recent days by the release of all those sick photos depicting the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. A question that crossed my mind in seeing those pictures was, "Weren't there any Christians guarding those Iraqis?" Apparently not. I like to think that a simple, Bible-believing Christian would have acted to prevent the abuse. Even if he could not stop it, a humble Christian would intervene as best he could, rebuking the perpetrators and reporting the matter to his superiors. The real Christian knows that he must always do the right thing no matter what, because, ultimately, he is answerable to God.

On October 8, 1918, a Christian sergeant named Alvin York did the right thing by heroically firing bullets into the heads of 28 German combatants. He and his small squad of eight men captured 132 soldiers that day, all of whom meekly surrendered rather than face the wrath of God's little warrior. But York was no bloodthirsty sadist. He was a kind-hearted Christian man who labored mightily in prayer before he overcame his reluctance to kill.

York was the kind of hero we needed in that Iraqi prison, because the Christ-centered man who is strong in battle is also humane in victory. A hero is a hero whether he is vigorously killing the enemy or conscientiously sheltering prisoners of war. Likewise, a creep is a creep whether he is running from battle or forcing the vanquished into positions of homoerotic barbarity.

As I have followed the Abu Ghraib scandal, I have seen all the usual excuses for our soldiers’ bad behavior, like "They were just following orders." Oh no, not that again. There is never a good reason to followa bad order. As I discussed this matter with my son Peter, I explained that the Holocaust resulted from ordinary people following bad orders. He responded (showing how well he understood) that Hitler did not personally stuff six million Jews into ovens. Right. Atrocities happen when cowards numbly carry out the dictates of villains, and not enough good people object.

Another excuse I've been hearing is that our abusers had received no training in the handling of prisoners. Granted, they should have been trained, but I'm still left wondering, as I look at the goofy grins of American soldiers humiliating their charges, "Didn't anyone ever train you how to be a minimally decent human being? Did you really need to take a class in that?" Maybe they should have gone to Sunday School.

Sunday, May 2, 2004

“Forgiving Yourself” Is A Bunch Of Nonsense (May 2, 2004)

I would like to speak against the doctrine that we must forgive ourselves.

I do not know how this doctrine got started. It is not in the Bible. As far as I can tell, it is not in the writings of any church father, pastor, theologian or evangelist before the latter part of the 20th century. I would be happy to stand corrected on this, and will welcome any quotes on self-forgiveness from before, say, 1960. My gut tells me that you won't find Augustine or Luther or Edwards or Wesley or Spurgeon or any giants of the past talking about our need to forgive ourselves.

Today, though, self-forgiveness is preached as a duty such that the failure to do it is considered a sin against God. Here for example are some quotes from influential pastors whose congregations number in the thousands:

"The past is over! God has forgiven you! Forgive yourself!" Ron Lee Davis.

"The bottom line is this: Not forgiving ourselves is wrong and dishonoring to God." R. T. Kendall.

"When we say that we cannot forgive ourselves, we depreciate the value of Christ's sacrifice." Erwin Lutzer.

I differ from these sentiments with a zeal that borders on outrage. Forgiving yourself neither honors God nor depreciates the sacrifice of Christ. Quite the opposite: it is an abomination, because it usurps the role of God.

One thing I have noticed in my research on forgiveness is that when Christian writers advocate forgiving ourselves, they never quote Scripture to support their point. The reason they don't is because they can't. There are no such Scriptures. In the Bible, when it comes to pardoning sins, God is the one who does all the forgiving, and we are the recipients of his grace. The Pharisees understood this when they objected to Jesus telling a paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven," for they thought, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" They were right. All the sins that the paralytic had committed, or that anyone has ever committed, are crimes against God. God alone has jurisdiction over them. He alone determines what to punish and what to forgive. Therefore, claiming to forgive sins (except for that small subset of sins committed against us) is a claim to be God. Jesus' pronouncement of forgiveness was a none-too-subtle claim to deity.

We mere human beings simply don't have jurisdiction over our sins. We have committed them against God and others, and must beg their forgiveness and be grateful for their mercy. It is absolutely ridiculous - a sickening arrogance, to forgive ourselves. The best we can do is recognize that we have been forgiven. But that is as far removed from "forgiving ourselves" as "recognizing that we are saved" is from "saving ourselves." This distinction is not trivial, it is not a matter of semantic pickiness. Grace, like salvation, must never be regarded as reflexive or self-generated. It is all one way, from God to us.

I am willing to grant that when Lutzer and Lewis Smedes and others tell us to forgive ourselves, they don't really mean it. They are not guilty so much of advocating a monstrous usurpation of God’s prerogative as they are of using the word "forgive" a little carelessly. Even so - even granting that point - I still disagree with what these Christian writers seem to be saying when they urge us to self-forgive.

As best I can make out, they are saying, "Stop beating yourself up over past wrongs. It is time to move on. Forget the past." In the words of Ron Lee Davis, "If you have been unable to forgive yourself for some sin in your past,...then [the Apostle] Paul would say to you, 'The past is over. Forget what is behind. Move out into the future with your eyes fixed on God and His love.'"

That is garbage. The Apostle Paul would say nothing of the kind. It is abundantly clear from his writings that the one thing he never forgot was what a terrible sinner he was. Some 30 years after his conversion, toward the end of his life, he wrote to Timothy saying, "I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man," and, "Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners - of whom I am the worst." He dutifully revisited this truth to the very end - and rightfully so, because the memory of his great sin was a constant reminder of God's great grace.

The most recent issue of Christianity Today tells the story of John Newton, author of "Amazing Grace." Newton had been a captain of a slave-trading vessel, and, even as a converted Christian, continued for years ferrying slaves across the Atlantic. He would read the Bible and commune with God in his cabin while up to a third of his "cargo" lay dying in the hull below. Later, Newton gave up the slave trade and became an abolitionist. God forgave his slave-dealing, but Newton never forgave himself. Professor Mark McMinn writes, "As Newton's eyes opened more fully with each passing year, he became horrified at his sin. One of his friends later recalled that he never spent 30 minutes with Newton without hearing the former captain's remorse for trading slaves. It was always on his mind, nagging his conscience while reminding him of his utter dependence on God's forgiving grace."

That is as it should be. We don't forgive our sins, and we don't forget them. Let them serve, as long as we live, as reminders of God's grace and as spurs to provoke gratitude for his love.