Eight years ago, in the summer of 2006, I horrified a group of my colleagues. We were delegates to General Synod, which is the Reformed Church’s equivalent to the Presbyterian General Assembly. A number of us were out for a walk one night, and I made the statement—in response to what, I don’t recall—that the job of the pastor is to be crucified for the congregation. You would have thought I’d set off a bomb.
It wasn’t that they thought I had delusions of grandeur; they knew me well enough to know that I didn’t think of myself (or any of them) as some sort of messiah. Rather, they reacted to it as a highly uncomfortable view of pastoral ministry. I didn’t disagree, but I don’t see any way around it if you’re going to be faithful to Scripture. Jesus says, as we read a few weeks ago, “Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me.” Paul makes clear in 1 Timothy that Christian leadership is about modeling and imitation; the basic principle is one which he states concisely in 1 Corinthians 11:1: “Follow my pattern of life as I follow the pattern of Christ.” We can’t learn to live like Christ just by reading about it, even though the book we read was written by God. We need to see it lived out, which is why God didn’t just give us his word, he also gave us his people.
The first job of those of us called to be elders and deacons for the church—including pastors, as we are called teaching elders—is to be models of the life of Jesus. Yes, we’re all most imperfect models, but we need to be committed to that purpose; and part of our calling is to model the right way to respond when we do sin and fall short of the measure of Christ. We are humble sinners saved only by grace who need grace from the Lord and from his church, just as much as anyone is, and we need to show by our lives what it means to live openly and honestly in that way. Beyond that, if we want to lead the church to be faithful to Jesus’ call to take up the cross and follow him, we need to do that ourselves. To lead the church on the road to the cross, we have to walk that road in our own lives, on our own two feet.Read more→
There is a story about an encounter between Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, and the pope. I don’t know if it actually happened, but it does fit with the time in which he lived. As the story has it, after making some display of the church’s wealth to Aquinas, the pope said, “Thomas, you can see the church no longer has to say ‘Silver and gold have I none.’” Aquinas responded, “True, holy father; but neither can she now say to the lame man, ‘Rise up and walk!’”
Now, as I said, I don’t know for sure that this conversation happened, or that it happened in just that way. I do know this: it’s believable because both statements are true. For all the wars fought by the popes, the Roman hierarchy was wealthy, and its wealth was growing. We have a rich heritage of great artworks and beautiful buildings that were paid for by the blood, toil, tears and sweat of the peasants of Europe. But for all the church’s silver and gold, it lacked spiritual power.
That should have been a sign that something was badly wrong; but it took the explosion of the Reformation a few centuries later to get the point across. As we see in Acts, when God builds the church, he does it by the power of his Holy Spirit, not by the power of the sword or the purse; and as we began to see last week, when this happens, the results look very different from anything the world expects.Read more→
We’ve been spending the last number of weeks talking about revival. We’ve seen that it’s God’s work, not ours, and that we’re utterly dependent on him—that only God can bring the dead to life, and that’s exactly what he’s on about doing. We took some time to read the end of the story so that we know where it’s going, which is the total renewal of creation: all things (including us) will be made entirely new. We’ve been reminded that everything we have is God’s, and he calls us to spend all of it—our time, our money, our talents and skills—in his service. Where we might use our lives to pile up temporary treasure in this world which is passing away, he gives us the opportunity to use them instead to store up treasure in the next, which is eternal.
With all of that said, we need more—we need to go beyond the limits of our own experience and see what revival looks like. That’s why we’re going to spend the next several weeks in the first part of the book of Acts, which records the first mass movement of the Spirit of God in human history. When the Holy Spirit goes to work on a large scale in the full power of God, what happens?Read more→
Kaleb’s experience illustrates a couple aspects of the reality Paul’s talking about in 2 Corinthians 8. First, he reminds us that God provides for his children, and in fact that everything we have is God’s provision. Yes, none of the extra money they received simply appeared miraculously out of nowhere; it could all be tracked to where it came from and why. But God was in command of all those events; he set each in its proper place and time to meet Kaleb and Ashlea’s needs at that point.
The fact is, God most often works through other people to accomplish his purposes, even when they’re completely unaware of it. As we see in Paul, he provides for our needs through other people, and provides for the needs of others through us. This is simply how he chooses to operate. I don’t know all his reasons for working this way, but at least in part, it’s a matter of taking us seriously and treating us with respect.
When God uses us to take care of other people, it makes our actions and our lives meaningful. He could easily do everything directly, all by himself—but then what would we have to do? What would we matter? He makes us instruments of his blessing so that we can see that our lives are important. He does it in ways that are completely apart from our own plans—like that woman who ended up blessing Kaleb by accident—to help us see that everything we do, even the smallest thing, has consequences which ripple out far beyond and outside anything we could ever predict, or even understand.Read more→
Or as Jedi Master Yoda said, “Do. Or do not. There is no ‘try’.” For anything important, anything that really matters, anything that’s truly a challenge, either you abandon yourself to it and you give it all you have, or you’d best walk away and go somewhere else. Otherwise, “squish like grape.” There’s no three ways about it.
This is truest when it comes to following God. That’s why God is very clear—we see it in Moses, and we see it in Jesus—that either you’re striving to follow him with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength, or else you’re not following him at all. Granted, even at our best, the execution is never entirely there; but the intent and the desire and the commitment have to be. Obedience that wants to make an exception at any point isn’t obedience at all.Read more→
I’m not sure if it’s common knowledge these days, but Switzerland has long been known for its neutrality. It stayed out of both world wars of the last century, neither attacking anyone nor suffering invasion. Its neutrality was established by treaty among the principal military powers of Europe—specifically, the Treaty of Paris of 1815 that ended the Napoleonic Wars.
You also might know that the Pope’s bodyguards are Swiss. I’m not sure if that was widely known in this country or if I just learned it from reading Richard Scarry growing up. I know that’s where my mental image of the Swiss Guard came from (see above). Right along with the Queen’s Guard in their big bearskin hats, you had the Swiss Guard in Rome dressed up like a bunch of clowns. Knowing as I did that Switzerland was neutral, I figured they were a joke.
You can imagine my surprise when I found out that for over two centuries, Swiss mercenaries were the elite soldiers of Europe. The beginning of the end came in 1515 when Swiss troops suffered their first defeat since the 1200s, and the leaders of the Swiss Confederacy realized that there were major downsides to all that warfare. For one thing, after so many battles, other nations were learning to copy their tactics, and some of them were getting pretty good. For another, while exporting their people had brought a lot of money back into Switzerland, it had also put the country at risk. That wasn’t clear as long as they were winning, but once they lost a battle, the risk became obvious. Switzerland declared itself neutral and outlawed mercenary service, allowing only those troops serving in the French army and the Swiss Guard at the Vatican.Read more→
Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. He was also the only pastor in Eilenberg, Germany in 1637. I don’t know what happened to the rest of them, but I have my suspicions. You see, this was during the Thirty Years’ War, and in 1637 Eilenberg was attacked three different times. When the armies left, they were replaced by desperate refugees. Disease was common, food wasn’t, and Rinkart’s journal tells us that in 1637, he conducted over 4500 funerals, sometimes as many as 50 in a day. Death and chaos ruled, and each day seemed to bring some fresh disaster. But out of that terrible time, Martin Rinkart wrote these words:
Now thank we all our God with hearts and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in whom his world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms, hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
During Napoleon’s reign in France,a man named Charnet offended the emperor—unintentionally—and was thrown in jail to rot. As time passed, Charnet became bitter and lost faith in God, finally scratching on the wall of his cell, “All things come by chance.”
But there was a little space for sunlight to enter his cell, and for a little while each day a sunbeam cast a small pool of light on the floor; and one morning, to his amazement, in that small patch of ground he saw a tiny green blade poking out of the packed dirt floor, fighting its way into that precious sunlight. Suddenly, he had a companion, even if only a plant, and his heart lifted; he shared his tiny water ration with the little plant and did everything he could to encourage it to grow. Under his devoted care, it did grow, until one day it put out a beautiful little purple-and-white flower. Once again, Charnet found himself thinking about God, but thinking very different thoughts; he saw that however much we may pound down this earth, the glory and beauty of God still breaks through, and so he scratched out his previous words and wrote instead, “He who made all things is God.”Read more→
In October, we’re going to be participating in an initiative called Pray31. The men who’ve launched this are hoping to get one million Christians in this country to pray together methodically for the US every day in October. They aren’t asking for a major time commitment; the guide for this initiative is what they’ve called the “US Prayer Atlas,” which gives two simple prayer requests per day. These requests are laid out through the month to get all of us praying for every US state and territory, for our national system and institutions, for the church in this country, and for revival in the land. I’ve ordered copies of the Prayer Atlas for everyone, and I hope everyone in the church will use theirs daily next month as we pray together for our nation.
Now, I think this is an admirable project, and I’m glad to have our church join with churches across America in prayer for this country, but I do have one criticism: I think the vision of the men doing this is too small. Their materials seem primarily concerned with public moral standards and whether the US is being governed according to biblical principles, and I suspect that if suddenly this nation looked a lot more like it did in the ’50s, they’d figure their prayers had been answered. Certainly, back then there were many more people in church, the mainline denominations were still planting lots of churches, and there was public respect for Christian faith which is now going if not gone. On the other hand, I had a colleague in Colorado who pastored one of those 1950s church plants; I remember her saying that when she got there, the church knew nothing about Jesus, because their previous pastors had never talked about him.
Donald Grey Barnhouse, who was then the pastor of Tenth Presbyterian in Philadelphia, read the signs of the times clearly. As Michael Horton of Westminster Seminary California tells the story,
Barnhouse speculated that if Satan took over Philadelphia, all of the bars would be closed, pornography banished, and pristine streets would be filled with tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The children would say, “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full every Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
I think he was right. The Devil would as soon damn people through religion as debauchery, through morality as immorality; after all, people who are immoral and debauched are just likely to hit bottom and realize they need God. Moral, upstanding citizens are likely to think they already have him, whether they have any actual relationship with him or not.Read more→
I got this sermon from Solomon Dickey. (Well, from Solomon Dickey and the Holy Spirit.) To many of you, that statement seems strange because you don’t recognize the man’s name; to old Winona hands, it seems even stranger, because Solomon Dickey has been dead for quite a long time. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, the Rev. Dr. Solomon Dickey was the Presbyterian minister who founded the Winona Assembly in 1894; this church developed out of that in 1905, with the town of Winona Lake formally coming into existence in 1913. Dr. Dickey is, in a sense, my ultimate predecessor in this congregation.
Obviously, then, I’ve never spoken to him directly; but the dead do still bear witness, in various ways. In Dr. Dickey’s case, there’s his bust down on Park Avenue across from the Post Office. Beneath the bust is a plaque; on the plaque is Psalm 125:1. One day last year when I was down to the Post Office for something, I saw that and thought, “If you have faith and do not doubt, you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.”
Now, it’s not certain these two verses are talking about the same mountain. Scholars are evenly split, as far as I can tell, between those who think Jesus is talking about Mount Zion, on which Jerusalem and the Temple were built, and those who think he was talking about the Mount of Olives. The Gospels don’t tell us for sure. But even if Jesus and his disciples were walking along the slope of the Mount of Olives at this point, they were on their way to Jerusalem, looking toward Mount Zion. The focus of this whole section of Matthew is on Jerusalem and the Temple. It seems most natural to me, then, that Jesus was referring to the mountain ahead of them, which though not a particularly tall peak, stood at the heart of the nation.
A word on the fig tree here, because it’s easy to read this passage and think Jesus is being wildly unreasonable. The fact is, while it was not yet fig season, Jesus actually had good reason for what he did. Let me quote you here from a couple of the commentators on Matthew. First, here’s R. T. France:
At Passover time in Jerusalem (March-April) fig trees are beginning to come into leaf, but there is not yet a full covering of leaves. Once the leaves are fully developed, it is time to look for the early fruit . . . This “single fig tree” . . . apparently stood out as having an unusually full coverage of leaves for Passover season, which encouraged the hope of early fruit even though, as Mark conscientiously reminds us, “It was not the season for figs.”
At this time of year, such fig trees contained only green early figs . . . which ripen around June but often fall off before that time, leaving only green leaves on the tree. Because of their unpalatable taste, these early figs rarely were eaten; but someone too hungry to care about the taste would eat them anyway, as some do today. A leafy tree lacking such early figs, however, would bear no figs at all that year.
In other words, this fig tree had a fine display of leaves, but the leaves weren’t leading to any fruit and weren’t going to lead to any fruit. The tree was putting all its effort into itself and offering nothing for anyone else. As France concludes, “it offered promise without fulfillment.”
To that Jesus says, in effect, “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way you’re going to get it. You have all these leaves but you’re not bearing any fruit—fine: you’ll never bear fruit again.” And with that, the tree begins to die from the roots up. Don’t take that “immediately” too seriously, by the way—it’s the same word translated “quickly” in verse 20. There’s a Greek word that means “immediately,” and it occurs about four thousand times in the Gospel of Mark, but that’s not the word here. Matthew isn’t saying the tree magically withered before their eyes, or that verses 19-20 happened in the same moment. He puts the story together like this to make it clear that nothing natural killed this tree, but only the word of Christ.
The disciples certainly got that point, because they’re astounded; they want to know how that could possibly have happened. Jesus responds by telling them, “If you have faith and don’t doubt, you’ll do much greater things than this. You see Mount Zion up ahead there? The psalmist said it can’t be shaken but endures forever. Micah said that in the last days, it will be established as the greatest of the mountains. But you, if you have faith and don’t doubt, you can tell it to go throw itself in the sea, and it will be done. What cannot even be shaken, you can uproot, if you pray and believe.”
Now, to our Western minds this seems to say, “You’ll get whatever you want as long as you’re completely convinced God will give it to you”; and unfortunately, that’s how a lot of preachers and teachers present this passage and others like it. Equally unfortunately, a great many others react in the opposite direction and dismiss Jesus’ teaching altogether. Both groups make the same mistake: they think the faith is the point. They think Jesus is saying that the power is in our faith, that it’s our belief that makes things happen. This is completely wrong. There was a song called “Faith” that was big on Christian radio 25 or 30 years ago that declared,
Faith can move the highest mountain,
Turn deserts into fountains,
And part the mighty waters of the deepest sea.
Faith can make a broken heart mend,
Bring the rain from heaven;
Faith can even change the course of history.
That’s popular theology, but it’s pure malarkey, 200 proof. Faithdoes nothing itself; without works, it’s dead. God does everything.
So when Jesus says, “If you have faith and don’t doubt,” or, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer,” if he doesn’t mean that faith lets us call the shots, what does he mean? Well, when the Bible talks about faith, faith is inGod alone, faith is about God alone, faith is from God alone. If your belief comes from you, it doesn’t matter how passionately you hold it or how utterly convinced you are about it, it isn’t faith, it’s just wishful thinking. Biblically, if you have faith and don’t doubt, that can only be because God is calling you and God is commanding you to act. It’s not a matter of dictating to God, but of obeying him.
If Ezekiel had taken it on himself to prophesy to a carpet of dry bones, he could have preached himself hoarse, and they would have just lain there. When the Lord called him to prophesy to those bones that God was going to restore them to life, he went out and preached, and they stood up before his eyes. Jesus was humanly inconceivable, but God told Mary what he was going to do, and she said, “I will obey,” and then she conceived him. Jesus didn’t tell any of his disciples to command Mount Zion to throw itself into the sea, because that wasn’t in his plan; but even that, if they had done it at his word, would have happened. And though it didn’t happen literally, the disciples did see it happen metaphorically in 70 AD, when the Roman army overthrew Jerusalem and tore down the Temple, leaving not one stone on another.
Nothing God commands is impossible, no matter how implausible or unbelievable we might think it to be. Nothing God prevents is possible, no matter how easy or obvious it might seem. The only thing that defines reality and sets the limits of the possible is the will of God. If God calls you to prophesy to a field of bones that he’s going to restore them to life, then go out and preach, and they will stand up before your eyes. If he tells you to command the immovable to move, then give the order, and you will see it done.
One of the key words in our passage from John is the word translated “Advocate.” The Greek word here is parakletos, which has been turned into the English word “paraclete”; some of you may have heard that word at some point. It’s not really a translation, and if you try to use it, people usually think you’re weird. Either that, or they ask, “Didn’t you mean to say ‘parakeet’?” So just trying to use an English version of the Greek word doesn’t work very well, but I understand why some people do it, because this is another one of those words that doesn’t really have a good English translation. Our Bible versions try words like “Helper,” “Advocate,” and “Counselor,” and of course the King James Version used “Comforter,” but none of them really does the job.
In fact, the King James translation has been rather unhelpful over the years, not because it’s inadequate—like I said, every translation is inadequate—but because it has pointed the mind of the English-speaking church in the wrong direction. When we think of the Holy Spirit as the Comforter, we think of him as being primarily for us, given to us for our benefit. That’s clearly part of the Spirit’s ministry, but it isn’t the main part, as John 14-16 makes clear. First and foremost, the Holy Spirit has come to us to work in and through us for the sake of the world. The Spirit comforts and consoles us because God loves us, but part of that is that he comforts us so that we will be strong to carry out God’s purpose for us, which is: wherever you go, make disciples of Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit is working in us to empower and equip us for outreach—making connections and building relationships with people who don’t believe in Jesus—to lay the groundwork for evangelism—communicating the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God—so that people will come to faith in Christ and become his disciples, who will then begin to do the same thing wherever they go. To that end, the Holy Spirit is our Helper/Counselor/Advocate/Comforter/Encourager/Strengthener/Guide, and so on. If “Inspirer” were a word, we could call him that too. He is the one who is with us to testify to us, and to testify through us to the world, about who Jesus is and what he has done and why it all matters.
Note, one, what this means for our mission as Christians and as the church: our first priority, if we go where Jesus sends us and the Spirit leads us, is out into the world to seek and save the lost. Ahead of worship, and of taking care of each other? Yes. The latter is certainly important, which is why the apostles raised up the first deacons in Acts 6, but even there we see it wasn’t first on the list. As for worship, that isn’t part of our mission, it’s the source of our mission. True worship focuses our eyes, our minds, our hearts, and our trust on God, and thus opens us up to the guidance of the Holy Spirit; and where the Spirit points us first is out into the world. It was easy for the church in America to lose sight of that when the world around us looked pretty Christian, but those days are gone. We have a mission field just beyond our front door.
Two, while the mainstream American church in recent years has tended to think of evangelism in terms of attracting people with a certain sort of church experience and focusing on their felt needs, Jesus is talking about something quite different. This isn’t about being seeker-sensitive; it’s more a matter of challenging people to seek Jesus in the first place. The Holy Spirit bears witness to Jesus by putting the world to shame about sin and justice and judgment. He brings conviction, not as a prosecutor seeking a legal verdict, but but in our minds and hearts. You’ll note, by the way, that the NIV has “righteousness” rather than “justice”; we’ve seen before that while these are two separate words in Hebrew, the Greek has one word for both. This world calls good evil and evil good, and it has sought to redefine justice and corrupt judgment to feed its own desires; the Spirit confronts it with its guilt in a way that cannot simply be ignored.
Jesus in his ministry on Earth drove people to commitment—either for him or against him. No one ever looked at Jesus and said, “Meh. He’s OK, I guess.” With all due apologies to the Doobie Brothers, no one who knew him ever said, “Jesus is just alright with me.” He didn’t intend to allow anyone the safety of that response. He told people the truth so purely and relentlessly that either they threw away their pride, repented of their sin, and gave him their lives, or else they tried to kill him. No other stance was possible, because he presented the human ego with a rival with which it simply could not peacefully coexist. The Holy Spirit speaks to us, and through us, whatever he hears from Jesus, and so he carries on that same work.
As noted a minute ago, Jesus says three specific things. First, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame for its sin in refusing to believe in Jesus. As New Testament scholar D. A. Carson puts it,
The world’s unbelief not only ensures that it will not receive life, it ensures that it cannot perceive that it walks in death and needs life. The Holy Spirit presses home the world’s sin despite the world’s unbelief; he convicts the world of sin becausethey do not believe in Jesus. This convicting work . . . is designed to bring men and women of the world to recognize their need, and so turn to Jesus.
Some listen. Others refuse that recognition, unwilling to admit they’re wrong, and either turn and run from Jesus, or else choose to attack.
Second, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame by revealing that its understanding of what is right and just is false, corrupt, and pitifully inadequate. To quote Carson again, “One of Jesus’ most startling roles . . . was to show up the emptiness of [the world’s] pretensions, to expose by his light the darkness of the world for what it is.” Because Jesus has left this world and is no longer here to do that, the Spirit carries on that work in us, empowering us to live as Jesus lived so that his light shines through us to expose the darkness of the world around us and the emptiness of its claims of justice.
Third, the Holy Spirit puts the world to shame by proving that it’s bowing down to a false judge, for the prince of this world is a liar from the beginning. At his command, the world judged God himself, who is perfectly good and perfectly innocent, to be the worst of sinners, and put him to death. By his resurrection, Jesus proved that judgment to be utterly wrong, the maximum possible error. By that error, the prince of this world stands judged and condemned, and the judgment of the world which follows him is shown to be “profoundly wrong and morally perverse.”
When we think about evangelism, then, we need to realize that our good news for the world doesn’t begin with “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” The American journalist and cynic H. L. Mencken once said, “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew Lord Jones is alive”; similarly, many modern American approaches to evangelism consist in saying “Jesus died for your sins” to people who never knew they had any, and have no real idea what Jesus dying has to do with anything anyway. The message of Jesus is only good news to people who’ve accepted the bad news. That’s why prostitutes liked him better than Pharisees did—the bad news wasn’t news to them—and it’s why the bad news is where the Spirit begins.
I’ve been encouraging you to be praying for four non-believers, and asking God to open up opportunities for you to share your faith with at least one of them. Sean Johnston has added to that the suggestion that at least one of those four be an enemy of yours. I want you to have an eye toward inviting one of those for whom you’re praying to come with you to our Christmas Eve service. But as you’re praying, be open to the Spirit of God and asking him to tell you what to say, and remember this passage from John; be aware that before you can share the good news of new life in Christ, the Spirit may first call you to be the bearer of bad news about sin and justice and judgment.
We saw last week, looking at Ezekiel 37, that the bones of Israel were dry and lifeless, but they did have one thing going for them: they knew they were dead. This world believes it’s alive and doing just fine, even as it stands under the sway of the prince of death. The work of revival in any of our hearts begins with opening our eyes to see through its illusion of life to recognize our need for true life, which can only be found in Jesus Christ; this is the work the Spirit seeks to do through us for others. May we be people who love others enough to speak this inconvenient truth.
