The Freedom of Not Knowing
The secular humanism (read: unbelief) at the center of our current cultural problems has left us with much chaos - and a slurry of societal anxiety and fear to go along with it. This fear and chaos and anxiety all intensifies every time God, in his kindness to all of us, gives our world troubles that expose our frailties and ignorance. We live in a society that is currently, by and large, in the business of running as far away from the fount of living waters (Jeremiah 2) as it can get. This means that we’re all in a hurry to abandon the source of all wisdom and knowledge (both moral and otherwise). This is increasingly leaving our well-endowed society with nothing but folly, fear, and a kind of insidious pride that eats away at everything. We are left, as a whole in the condition described by my father-in-law as he commented on an unfortunate waiter at a dinner in Chicago as “enthusiastically incompetent.” We have become like the angry and foolish child insistent about what we do not actually know much about. We keep trying to manage or even control what we barely understand. We have rebelled against faith in God - his existence, his strength and his goodness, and thus his words. This leaves us in the precarious position of scrambling to find certainty somewhere, anywhere we can find it - even if it is a remarkably poor substitute.
You see, faith in God - certainty concerning his goodness, his strength, his love, his words- leaves all kinds of wonderful room for uncertainty elsewhere. Faith in God is, in part, a confession that we cannot control the world - viruses, temperatures, our mother-in-law’s mood at dinner. A society isn’t left to scramble to find substitutes. You aren’t haunted by the existential dread of all the scary things you don’t know and what you can’t manage or control. You don’t have to cover your unknowing with a kind of performative scientific or moral hubris. All of this scrambling and existential fear and anxiety works through a society like ours and quickly devolves into an overzealous dependence on what we feel. Don’t get me wrong, our feelings, or better -our affections - matter greatly, but they were are to be sunk deep into what we know, what we trust. They are to be rooted in the knowledge of God.
C.S. Lewis noted an important distinction between what he called science and scientism. I think this distinction illustrates what I’m hitting at above. Scientism is the insecure cousin of science. This insecure cousin roots our knowledge, moral and otherwise, in a place where it can never thrive. It grounds our understanding of what is good and noble and wise in profoundly unstable soil, namely our own knowledge or observations of the world around us. Science doesn’t do this. It was intended to move from something solid and certain (God) out to observe the world around us. It observes, it marvels, and yes, seeks to carefully and humbly use what we learn. Scientism assumes (because it must) a kind of mastery over what it sees and then seeks to manage and control that world. Not only is this hubris of the worst sort - it is also deadly. It is deadly because it cannot acknowledge what it cannot see. It can’t cope with the impossibility of control. It can’t acknowledge that there is simply far more to learn and see about a thing than we will ever be able to know or see about a thing. Events over the past 2 years have exposed the great problem of scientism. It attempts to control and manage again and again with a kind of certainty and an expectation of success without ever acknowledging its own limitations, generally vastly underestimating what it does not understand.
There is a big hill on our family’s land near Pine, CO. I’ve hiked around it and on it. I’ve seen it covered in snow in the winter, fluttering with life in the spring and summer, and (my absolute favorite) accented by changing aspen leaves in the fall. I’ve seen elk roaming along it, a bobcat, and even the rare bear. I’ve hunkered down in my son’s remarkably well-built fort on its steep side. But sitting here across from it now, I am keenly aware of the vastness of what I do not know about this hill. I observe, enjoy, even use that hill, but there is far more I don’t know about the goings-on of that hill than what I do know about it. I know very little about the interconnected ecosystem represented on its slopes. I don’t know about the history of people who may have explored there, what kind of snakes I step past (usually with a very manly squeal and a light jump), or what lives in the dirt up there. This is our way in the world. For example, while we know far more about the human body and our own psychology than we did 50 years ago, we actually know boatloads less than there the body of knowledge to be known about these things. We can observe, experiment, delight in, and use all of this knowledge we do have, but we should do so knowing that there is far, far more to be known - and a lot of that knowledge might be very pertinent to our current troubles. Scientism says things like “I believe in science” without knowing what science is actually for. It simply lacks the wisdom and humility of being far less certain about what we think we know. If this is true for the human body, and I don’t think that’s disputable, then how much more so for things like the climate, or social problems or even seemingly simple things like family dynamics at Thanksgiving dinner. Without the knowledge of God and faith in his word, the knowledge of our unknowing is existentially intolerable. We may confess with our mouths that we love mystery, but we can’t handle a world out of our control. We will desperately scramble to find some relief from the overwhelming anxiety that plagues our culture. (I’ll point out Edwin Friedman’s brilliant description of this communal problem in A Failure of Nerve).
But Christian. You need not fear what you do not know. You need not adopt the fears of this secular age - either out of some ill-advised empathy or the temptation towards unbelief. No - not only need not, you must not. Rest in the good certainty of the knowledge of God. Find roots in the confession that He is good and strong and that his words are True. Let your roots sink deep into the simple confession that He is there and that he is not silent (as Schaeffer said). Then, from those roots, learn to humbly see the world, to marvel at its beauty and complexity, to tremble, to even be troubled by what you see - but do so from the good ground of knowing the God who is there.
The Heart of God Towards Sinners
A few weeks ago I was standing on a beach next to the Hood canal in Washington State. A few families were there with kids running around and the air was cool with a kind of foggy mist that seems to uniquely cover the Pacific Northwest like a kind of cooling blanket. The sky above was mostly clear with the sun setting behind the Olympic mountains to the west. I was struck by the beauty of that place and that moment in a way that those kinds of places do. I asked again my very favorite question to ask in those moments, one of the most important questions any of us can consistently ask: What must He be like? The laughter of the children, the beauty of the sky’s colors, the glory of those strange mountains juxtaposed with the ocean water at their feet all combined to overwhelm me with a sense of gratitude and joy.
A.W. Tozer famously said in his opening to The Knowledge of the Holy: What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. C.S. Lewis spun Tozer’s question on its head saying: “I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.” If you’ll allow me to reconcile two would-be friends, I think both questions to be of remarkable importance. Lewis’ concern must serve as the foundation. God is not whomever we make Him out to be, nor is He shaped by our opinions of who He should or shouldn’t be. God is the one unchangeably absolute person in the universe. As He reveals his name to Moses in Exodus 3:14, “I AM WHO I AM” Therefore what he thinks about us, his creatures, is of infinite importance when we consider our own lives. But Tozer’s point is that our own thoughts about God should, no must, conform to His own and should therefore be submitted to what He says in Scripture. And what He says concerning his own people- the people who cry out to him, who repent of their sins and plead for mercy and help, is simply and incomparably wonderful.
As we have worked our way through the book of Romans over the past couple of years we have seen some of the most glorious heights of His power and glory and work on our behalf in and through Jesus. Revealed in all of this is the heart of God towards sinners. What has been revealed in Romans, and indeed throughout the whole bible, is a God who delights to forgive sin. A God who eagerly welcomes discouraged sinners. A Father who does not wait for his children to get their life in order, but who goes to the uttermost to redeem them, forgive them and to bring them home. We must not minimize the horror of our sins, but we must never minimize the heart of God towards sinners who hate their own sin. As Paul reminded us in Romans 11:22, we must behold the kindness and the severity of God. His kindness towards us, his people, is staggering. His kindness towards us, his people, is the strength to renew weary hearts and anxious minds. His kindness towards us, his people, is steel poured into the spines of people who have grown afraid.
And so for the next four weeks, in preparation for wrapping the final chapters of Romans this fall, we will meditate on this marvelous gentleness towards us, his people. I pray that you will join us to meditate on these truths, and then to worship in response to these truths as we gather on Sundays downtown. We will walk through 4 ways God reveals his heart towards sinners in the gospel:
1- The Wrath of God Against Sinners
2- The Victory of God for Sinners
3- The Intercession of Christ on Behalf of Sinners
4- The Restoration of God to Sinners
Come and have your minds shaped by God’s almost unbelievable words concerning people like you and me. Come and behold what God thinks about us.
Justice isn’t Sexy
Biblical justice doesn’t play well at rallies. It’s not really inflammatory. It doesn’t go well with fits of rage or emotionally-driven appeals. It doesn’t get caught up in the moment. It fails utterly at our current obsession with empathy. If you’re looking for a quick remedy to an immediate social problem, biblical justice may be your best bet, but its going to be frustratingly slow. God is intent on stubbornly protecting the accused from unfair indictment. He refuses to favor the rich. He absolutely forbids showing partiality to the poor. And he is committed to a fair, repeated processes. For these reasons when you see people or courts (be it in online communities, real life churches or societies like ours) rushing to condemn and punish, you aren’t looking at justice. God’s justice is slow. God’s justice is patient. God’s justice is firmly planted in balanced and fair process. God’s justice accounts for all kinds of human madness and refuses to appease crowds, mobs, or our emotional needs. It isn’t designed to be emotionally satisfying.
This is frankly frustrating and it is absolutely best.
Furthermore, almost everyone agrees that we should love our neighbors. But start to define what that means in concrete terms and you’ll quickly see everyone set their hair on fire (masks or personal liberties, anyone?). I don’t know anybody who claims to hate justice, but start to define what that means and how we should go about pursuing it (whether in the context of our homes or in the broader arena of today’s social problems) and things will quickly come to blows. And this simply exposes a few things about us. We can all pretend to be unified about words, but the actual work of embodying those words is where the real division lay. Pursuing a good and just society is apparently desirable to almost everybody. Start defining the word “good” and “just” and you’ll find yourself quickly standing alone. But giving lip-service to ideas like justice and mercy isn’t good enough. God demands that his people pursue these things in concrete and meaningful ways. And he commands us to pursue these things in obedient ways. It isn’t enough to simply repeat slogans and it isn’t enough to simply do what seems best to us. He calls us to obedience, an obedience that actually bears real fruit in the world.
So when we begin to see A) How gloriously frustrating the Bible’s presentation of justice is, and B) How much conflict such concrete ideas can generate in our day - we can be sorely tempted to either redefine our terms “justice” and “mercy” as to be more emotionally satisfying in a secular age, or instead to skirt the top of the trees and refuse to actually engage in concrete definitions of what these things mean in real-world obedience. So we either alter our definitions in unfaithfulness or we refuse to define them concretely in unfaithfulness. Add to this the embarrassing truth that secularism and therefore secular societies are fundamentally incapable of coherent definitions of either justice or mercy (which makes these things all the more controversial - people want definitions independent of faith in God and obedience to the Scriptures while we must insist on both God and the authority of Scripture.) If we are to see our world marked by justice and mercy, then we must turn to what God has said. If we are to be a people who obey the oft-repeated command “Love your neighbor,” then we must learn how to do justice, how to love mercy and how to love our neighbors from a God who commands us how.
Join us as we explore these themes through the whole of Scirpture starting this Sunday and continuing for the next four weeks:
May 9 - The Foundations of Justice
May 16 - The Promise of Justice
May 23 - The Coming of Justice
May 30 - The End of Justice
Act Justly. Do Mercy. (At least for four weeks in May.)
“The Justice of God is fixed, universal, timeless and transcendent, but lawlessness is random, capricious and arbitrary.”
On Sunday, May 9, Trinity will begin a 4 week series of sermons exploring the Justice of God and the justice God commands of his people. God commands us to “Act justly. Love Mercy.” In previous days, these two commands were erroneously set in opposition to one another. Our age has subverted the meaning of these commands completely. This has happened because we live in a what the Scriptures call a lawless age. We have rejected the authority of God and so rejected the authority of God’s laws. To do justice and mercy there must be a universal standard, and One whose standard it is. Godlessness will always lead to injustice and a mercy that crushes and destroys. God’s justice and mercy will lead to joy and peace for all his people.
And so, in an age that is increasingly without any such standards, and yet also an age demanding justice according to lawless and egalitarian standards - How are we to live as Christians? How are we to speak of the God who always does what is right — who always acts justly? At stake in these things are not only our own discernment about the current cultural climate, but also our understanding of the cross, of justification through faith, of the very meaning of heaven and hell. Also at stake are the more mundane, and sometimes far more pressing questions about adjudicating disputes between siblings, how to treat our employees or what to do when your kid wrecks the car. In other words, the question of “what is justice” touches the toughest social questions we face as Christians and the most mundane parts of our lives. And if we don’t do the work of establishing definitions and drawing a clear distinction between what our secular neighbors call justice and what God calls just we will find ourselves in rebellion against God himself.
Sin doesn’t just take the shape of direct rebellion against the commands of God, it also leads to the kind of confusion that calls evil “good” and labels good “evil”. It leads to a world that labels injustice “justice” and calls justice “unjust”. Far too many Christians are inadvertently going along with this confusion and doing so in the name of love. But we are to act justly — according to God’s standards and we are to see clearly the nature of true justice. Such living and such seeing will create a people who love and celebrate mercy.
I invite you to come with us over the month of May to worship the God who is just, to learn from the God who does justly, and to eat with the God who meets us with mercy.
May God use these weeks toward that great end. May God grant us clarity on how to live faithfully before him. May God cause us to marvel at his justness. And may we be a people who learn to act justly and love mercy.
Elders and Parishes
Trinity is publishing a series of short introductions to our church and her life together. It’s an attempt to provide at least some answer to the occasional question "Yeah, but why do you do that?". These will be available as cards on Sunday morning, but we're putting them here for safe-keeping:
We believe that the church has been given a rather remarkable job. In Matthew 28, Jesus commissioned his church to disciple the nations. God has sent the church to see the whole world brought into glad submission to King Jesus. This task is all the more remarkable because he gives them only two tools to use: the word (“teaching them all that I commanded you”) and the sacraments (“…baptizing them…”). There are a number of ways that we wield these tools, but most of all we wield them in faith, faith that the Spirit will take them up and transform people, cities, and nations.
The Bible provides a particular structure and hierarchy to the church as she does the work God has appointed. God calls elders to shepherd the people of God with these tools exercising authority in the church for the good of her people. At Trinity we have different kinds of elders who do this in different ways. Our ministering elder oversees our weekly worship and preaching. Teaching elders work to apply the scriptures to different aspects of the church’s ministry whether through counseling, evangelism or musical leadership. Parish elders care for specific segments of the congregation through hospitality, discipleship and care.
Hebrews 13 describes elders as those who will give an account for the members of the church. We’ve sought to organize our church such that this accountability (before God!) means that all the members of our church are connected to a specific elder. When our elders gather we spend a significant part of our time together praying for the needs of specific people in our church. When issues of church discipline arise, our hope is that our elders are close enough to the people involved as to address these things close up. Proximity to the actual members of the church is a priority as we consider the work God commands the elders of the local church to do.
For many people this feels really strange. Many churches have functioned largely as purveyors of religious goods and services with elders or pastors functioning as a kind of board of directors, voting on budgets and determining particular strategic initiatives with little organizational or relational connection to the actual members of the church. Furthermore, we live in an age that has lost the concept of authority and replaced it merely with power. We’ve grown to distrust authority because it fits prominent secular narratives about privilege and self-promotion. God’s way is better. He establishes authority in the church for the good of the people of the church. Elders use this authority as a responsibility to shepherd God’s people with Word and Sacrament, not lording their authority over others, but using their authority to promote holiness and the Glory of God in the lives of people. They serve, they feed, and they protect. This is the work of biblical shepherding.
When a person joins Trinity, they come under the care of our elders and usually under the specific care of their parish elders. Parishes meet for various functions throughout the month. In addition to these dinners, bible studies, and other get-togethers, parish elders pursue regular meetings with individuals and households. They are available to meet with members of their parish. They help direct diaconate support towards specific fiscal and physical needs of the people under their care.
Where the church devolves into worship experiences and programs she loses her soul and forsakes the mission God has given her to disciple the nations. God has appointed shepherds to lead the church in worship, to care for the people God has brought into the community and to nourish the church with the Scriptures, bread and wine while washing her in the waters of baptism. This is the aim of the church: the discipleship of the nations. This is the means of the church: Word and Sacrament. And the elders are those who wield that means for the formation of God’s people.
Asking the Bible Questions
Here at Trinity we continue to encourage everybody to read their bibles. In the scope of things given by God to encourage the saints, and to build and sustain the faith of God's people I'd place bible reading and prayer second only to gathering with the church for worship each week. In other words, it's really, really important. In counseling anyone who wants to live well in the world: Worship with God's people, read the bible & pray are the soil out of which everything else should grow.
But what should we do when we open our bibles? Well, I'd begin by just reading. "Oh begin!" was John Wesley's exhortation to his fellow pastor when it came to calling him to read. God has set before us a meal to eat and be nourished by. Sometimes you have extended time, sometimes you only have a few minutes, but make coming to this meal and eating a priority. And when you come, come in faith - particularly believing that the bible describes God and the world and you "right side up." Sin individually and at a societal level has turned our understanding of the world upside down and encountering the bible's teaching about sex or gender or judgment or grace can be jarring. Let God correct you in the text. Finally, as you begin to read and listen to the scriptures, it can be helpful to be guided by a few questions. Here are some questions I've found fruitful as I read, whether I have 20 minutes or an hour:
1) What is it I'm reading? (Context, Genre)
Is this a letter or narrative or poetry? What can I know about when it was written and for what purpose? Understanding what we've picked up to read is important to understanding the meaning of what we're reading. Take a few minutes when starting a new book of the bible to get a basic lay of the land and discover what exactly it is that you are holding in your hands. Then as you progress each day, remind yourself what you're reading. We've been given a plethora of resources to aid in learning this information - study bibles, the Bible Project, commentaries. A few minutes here will help you see so much more of what the bible is saying.
2) What preceded this bit of text?
If you find yourself in Romans 11, its important to remember what was in Romans 10 (and 9 and 3 and 1). Scripture does not exist in isolation from other portions of scripture. That verse you really like is connected logically to the verses that came before and after. Take a minute to remember what's come before what you've taken up to read today.
3) Does this point me to anything else I've read in Scripture before?
The bible is always quoting and pointing forward and backward to other parts of the bible. The work God is up to in history is filled with promises and types and fulfillments that help us see numerous layers to what God is saying and doing in the bible. Think back to what you've read before - anything oddly familiar? Use those handy cross-references in the margins or at the bottom of the page- here are gifts given to us that are worth their weight in gold.
4) Are there any clear logical connections or arguments in this text that I should take note of?
The bible argues. Look for words like 'because', 'therefore'. 'in order that' and 'if...then' these help trace the logic behind the bible's arguments. Also take note of how stories are told and in what order they are told in. Look for odd details that seem out of place. This is how the bible argues. Learn to pay attention to these things as you read, and get curious.
5) What does this text tell me about God?
Be constantly asking the question: What must He be like? This is the main thing about every part of Scripture, it reveals to us the character and actions and words of God. May this question undergird all of your reading of Scripture (and frankly your whole way of viewing the world). If you are looking you'll see things that comfort you and disturb you and confront you about who He is and what he does all over the bible. See him as he actually is in the text, not as you want him to be or as you think he should be, but as he actually is. Our family asks this question every time we sit together to read the bible as a family - what does this psalm, story, letter, promise, warning, judgment tell me about the character of God -about what he loves and hates, about how he acts, about his power? This question has borne more fruit in my life than almost anything else.
6) In what ways does this text confront me or the world around me?
If the bible is right side up and often times my way of thinking or feeling or desiring is effected by sin, then I should find myself surprised and confronted when I read the bible. The same is true with our secular culture. Take note of the ways that the bible is out of sync with how I naturally feel or think or the world around me feels and thinks.
7) What surprised me about this text?
Take note of places where something surprises you in the bible. And, you should look to be surprised. Where does something happen that shocks you or offends you? Does Jesus say something that delights you, or makes you laugh? Does God do something that causes you to throw up your hands in shock or incredulity? Don't blow past these things, take note of them and think on them.
Lastly, pray. Pray before you read. Pray while you read. Pray after you read. The Spirit loves to illumine the words of God to help us see, to love, to worship, to repent. Pray that God would cause you not only to see and understand the words on the page, but also to learn how to delight in the words and the commands of God.
For Further Reading:
Theopolitan Reading, Peter Leithart
Through New Eyes, James Jordan
Reading the Bible Supernaturally, John Piper
Beholding and Becoming
G.K. Beale has written a wonderful book with a wonderful title: We Become What We Worship. His idea picked up from a variety of places throughout the Scriptures, but most explicitly in Psalm 115 and Psalm 135, is that transformation happens in the context of worship - and that our vocation of image-bearers is part and parcel of what it means to be human. In other words, you will always image what you worship. If you worship the triune God you will reflect his image, you will become like him. If you worship other gods, then you will reflect them. The secular gods will produce secular Christians. Which explains a whole bunch of what's happening to the church in our day.
Paul develops this idea a bit further in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4. There he links this becoming to beholding. In 2 Corinthians 3:18, he says, "And we all with unveiled face, beholding (or reflecting) the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness..." He goes on chapter 4 to link this "glory of the Lord" explicitly to the "face of Jesus Christ." His point is not simply that we become like what we worship, but that we become like what we look at.
Much of pastoral work is meant to be ruthlessly practical. How do we live Christianly in the world? It is about practice and life and relationships and living Godly lives under the reign of God in the world. The bible speaks in the most earthy ways imaginable to almost every human relationship and institution and when it doesn't speak directly to a thing, it lays out principles and ideas that are applicable. It is authoritative to everything it addresses, and it addresses everything.
But there is another, vital, non-negotiable aspect to pastoral work and to the life of the Christian that is easily lost or buried under the deluge of practical questions. We are called to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. I don't think this means some sort of abstract existential "beholding." When Paul describes this process he is explicitly talking about the reading of the Scriptures in 2 Corinthians. We behold Jesus by actually looking at how the text of Scripture describes Jesus. Be it through the law and his fulfillment of it. Be it through the types that give us the meaning of his coming or even more clearly through the actual descriptions of his work and person given to us in the gospels. There is enormous value in simply looking at Jesus and discovering who he is - as he actually is. The Spirit of God takes this seeing and transforms us into Jesus' likeness. This will involve denying our imaginings of what we think Jesus is like, or who we think Jesus is like and coming to terms with the actual contours of who he really is, in the bible. We will be confronted with a Jesus who did things and said things that seem remarkably unChristlike. He was at times harsh, at times gentle - and often gentle when we expect him to be harsh and vice versa. But we will not be served if we come to the gospels with our own pre-packaged understanding of who Jesus is or what Christlikeness means. We must come as children to discover and to see who he really is.
As we head into the final weeks leading up to Good Friday and Easter, may we be compelled to go to the Scriptures and behold the One we worship again. May the stories of Jesus' final weeks surprise us and shock us. May we be fascinated again at his words and actions, scandalized by his authority and his demands, and stunned by his grace.
May God open your eyes to behold marvelous things in his word.
The Narrow Way is Expansive
I've been to Glacier National Park 3 times in the last 4 years. It's not easy to get to. It's not on the way to anywhere. I go there, and will continue to go there, because I love gasping as my heart leaps through my chest and I'm reminded of how remarkably small I am - cosmologically speaking. I've been to a handful of places in my life that caused me to stop and weep as I get about as close as imaginably possible to what C.S. Lewis said we all secretly long for: not simply to see the beauty but "to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
I've been on a handful of hikes in the park and my favorites inevitably lead out of the trees into sweeping vistas, huge drop-offs and very narrow trails. It's always a bit disorienting as you try not to fall to your death as you resist looking down so you can keep your eyes on the scene in front of you. My first time on the Highline trail was a doozy. The trail had shrunk to about 3 feet wide with a drop of a few hundred feet and you could see mountains for miles. I found myself involuntarily whispering "My God! My God!" as a kind of overflowing prayer of gratitude while also becoming increasingly aware of how far down I was looking. Oddly enough, I didn't think, even for a second, "This trail is terribly confining - so narrow." Also, and perhaps more odd given the nature of our current age, I wasn't caught up into deep reflection on who I am and how I can finally be free to express myself and my desires. No, in that moment and in that place I was free. Free to forget about myself almost entirely and to marvel and to tremble at the sheer size and weight and color and hardness of reality as it exists completely independent of my own anxieties, lusts or insecurities.
Modern American life is obsessed with the liberated self. Selves unencumbered by nature or God or God's law. So much of our recent and ongoing arguments about equality and justice and gender and sexuality are so muddled up by false notions of liberation that we can't get anywhere. We get sucked into staring at our own navels or other people's (which gets a little weird) and find ourselves fighting in a vacuum of our own insecurities, anxieties and emotions. It is frankly like standing on that trail, closing my eyes, trying to feel something inside and move accordingly. But we are forgetting that there is a world that is simply there, with a particular order and design and beauty, that is, quite frankly, independent of what you think of it. It was made and ordered by God. He didn't make it for you. It wasn't custom designed with your preferences in mind. It's not a blank canvas on which you are to write your own story. It is a world with an order, a beauty, a morality hard-wired into it and then - grace upon grace, described and revealed by God in his book. He gives us laws fitted for this world He made. He gives us wisdom so as to help us all not be fools in this world He made. He even gives us stories and songs and promises and warnings. He has made a world and placed us in it. And it is a world designed in all kinds of ways that you are absolutely going to hate. You'll find whole bits of it designed in poor taste. Big nasty smells and poor color choices. Where he designed the trail 3 feet wide, you'll have expected 6. He likes to bring hail and rain at exactly the worst moments. But here's the thing about this world that He made.... He didn't ask for design input from you. He didn't get anyone to sign off. There were no safety or equity inspections.
Given a world like that, we are all confronted with two staggeringly different approaches. One, increasingly attempted in our current society, is to put me and my feelings- and by extension humans and humans' feelings at the center of everything. I become the measure of beauty, liberation, equality and justice. We redefine the world and ethics and beauty and sexuality and gender and justice around ourselves. At first this feels so expansive! We get what we want! It feels so free! But such a world is so terribly small. In the end I find myself alone with my tastes, my preferences, my own self-righteousness, my own desires and my own foolishness. I can only be confronted by my own conflicting desires, other people's conflicting desires and the stubborn consequences of all these desires.
But another life is possible - actually its eventually unavoidable. It looks very, very narrow. It's filled with all kinds of doctrines and ethical norms and family structures and babies and endlessly mundane days and churchy people and early mornings with loads of laundry and blisters and learning to say no to yourself (a lot!). Its a whole life where you learn to bring your appetites and feelings and thoughts into line with something outside of yourself - and that is frankly hard, painful work. Learning to believe what God says, to trust what God commands - to bring your life and your appetites and your definitions into conformity with this Word seems, at times, restrictive and confining. But, I mean wow, it is beautiful. There are these marvelous turns where you behold something other than yourself and your own hopes and dreams and desires. Here is a joy rooted in something other than the endless pursuit of your own self-actualization. Here is sanity and liberation and an expansive beauty and joy that can only be found along a narrow road.
So may we give up endless quests to discover ourselves, and learn to lift our gaze to see the God who is simply and wonderfully there. May be overwhelmed with gratitude for a world with rules and a design that is put in front of us without our consent. May we tremble at the steep drops, gasp at the prominent vistas, and learn to enjoy the cool meadows. But above everything else, may we have the gift of forgetting ourselves.
Eros, Friendship and Cultural Accommodation
In a world straining for eros we have lost the meaning of friendship and are thus in danger of losing the heart of Christianity. The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis is a wonderful and insightful book. I commend it to you if you have not read it recently. In the book, he defines the nature of eros as two people facing one another. It is a kind of delight in the person of another. It makes much of the person with whom eros is shared. I delight in your delight. I savor and enjoy the person before me. Friendship, alternatively, is imagined by Lewis to be represented as two people facing something else and walking side by side. It is a shared delight in something outside of either person. It is an ambition aimed at something beyond or greater than either of them.
Our world is drenched with a kind of explicit and yet tepid sexuality. It is a distortion of eros that has taken over everything from entertainment to advertising for potato chips. Sex is everywhere, which is to say that one (potential) expression of eros has become the dominant motif of our culture. I say potential because sex is not equivalent to eros. Sex can still be bent further in on the self and thus lose its true eroticism - its real nature, love for another. In a culture like that one, we find that other forms of love - like Lewis' notion of friendship - atrophy and even die.
Love in our day has been largely redefined as giving someone good feelings, or avoiding making someone feel bad. It is, increasingly in our day, to make much of them, to make much of their feelings. In other words, where people are condemned for being unloving, it is increasingly more about how someone else felt rather than about their objective good (I realize here that it is possible to harm someone and for them to feel it emotionally - but it is also possible to seek someone’s real good and it feel really bad emotionally). In other words, we've come to define love in almost exclusively erotic terms. For me to love you, I must magnify you, magnify how you feel, and act accordingly.
Friendship isn't like that. It is surely patient and kind and slow to anger like all real expressions of love. But it is a kind of love that is aimed supremely at something else. It is concerned mostly with a third thing, a love shared by two people that delights in something outside of either of them. It is no wonder that in a culture pervaded by sexuality, that we've lost any conception of love that does not end in making much of the self. It is no wonder that preaching in our age has, in many places, distorted the message of the bible to make the gospel largely about how God makes much of me - and this is redefined as his love. It is no wonder that calls to behold the majesty of God, to consider the wisdom of God's law, to tremble before the terrible wrath of God and to reorder our lives in accordance with these things is seen as unloving or ineffective. When love can only be experienced as a distortion of eros - as a making much of me, then the call to behold and be chiefly concerned with someone gloriously big and sovereign who is not centered on your emotional well-being or fulfillment can seem like the furthest thing from love imaginable. And yet this is what Christian discipleship and Christian worship is supposed to do. When we accommodate the message of Christianity to a world like that one, we gut it of its true power: a power that can bring sanity and beauty and goodness. A power that lay in its ability to lift the gaze of self-obsessed people.
Cultural accommodation in a world consumed with the me and how I feel will mean recasting biblical Christianity in terms that make much of me or you and fails to confront us with the infinite superiority and worth of Jesus - and such a Christianity will never be truly good news.
What are we doing here? Worship at Trinity
Trinity is publishing a series of short introductions to our church and her life together. It’s an attempt to provide at least some answer to the occasional question "Yeah, but why do you do that?". These will be available as cards on Sunday morning, but we're putting them here for safe-keeping:
Here at Trinity, we believe that the worship of the church is the most potent thing that the church is commanded to do. This worship both transforms God's people and is the vanguard in God's work to renew the whole world. The strange thing about all this renewing and transforming work that occurs in worship is that it is not fundamentally oriented to people or to the world at all. It is fundamentally oriented towards God. We gather because God has called us. We confess our sins to God. We offer our praise to God. We listen to God speak through His word. We eat bread and wine provided by God. We are sent out by God wherein we give thanks to God. Sunday worship reorients us to God and the great work of Jesus in the gospel. And it is this reorientation that provides the means by which we and the world are renewed.
If you've been around churches much, you've likely experienced a lot of different approaches to the church's worship. Worship at Trinity may seem a little different to you. We follow a formal liturgy that is scripted for us each week. At the center of our worship, each week is the bible and the sacraments. The word is sung, read, prayed, and preached and every time we gather we eat bread and drink wine together. God calls us and speaks to us and feeds us - and in this process, we renew our covenant with God each time we gather.
All of this requires our participation. God speaks and we respond. God calls and we sing. We stand and kneel and raise our hands. For many in the broader church, worship has centered on a handful of professionals who provide an experience for attendees. But worship is meant to be work for all God's people. Work that renews. Work that is the fruit of grace, to be sure. But it is the work of God's people in his presence. Sundays should involve an ongoing conversation between God and people. Sundays should involve the whole person - our bodies, our voices, our minds, and our affections. Every part of us presented to God and engaged in the act of worship.
We sing a wide range of songs. You should pick up on old hymns as well as some newer music. But at the heart of our singing, you should hear scripture and particularly the psalms. We sing the Psalms because they are the headwaters for prayer and worship given to the church in the bible. We sing hymns and other songs because they testify to the Spirit's work throughout the history of the church.
Finally, you'll notice that you might be distracted by the people sitting and standing around you. You are not sitting in a dark room looking at a screen. You are surrounded by brothers and sisters, children and their voices (and the occasional toddler's yelp). This is very much on purpose. Worship is something we do together as a community that God has brought together. The church includes her children and we don't want them hidden away when we worship God. We believe that they are learning to worship Jesus alongside us, even when it involves challenging seasons for parents. Worship not only brings us into the presence of God, but it also binds all of us together as God's covenant family. Children, parents, friends, grandparents - all of us together. Sunday worship is not supposed to be a private experience between you and God. It's a family with all our distractions and joy and crying babies and pain and clumsy worship guides standing and singing and kneeling in a very physical and human practice. We come together from a whole slew of different contexts and backgrounds to sing and read and pray and break bread together in God's presence.
Welcome to Trinity. May God meet you here, right in the middle of his enormous gifts of word and sacrament, as well as in this growing community of people who are learning to love the good reign of Jesus, to seek the welfare of the city where God has sent us, and to worship the God who is worthy of all honor.
2 Questions... for Pastors, leaders of things, and Christians generally.
I find the right questions to be remarkably valuable. They can help to clarify points of actual disagreement and agreement (one of the more important tasks in our day). They can distill issues into their essence. The wrong questions will almost always get you the wrong answers and will muck up already cloudy conversations. But the right questions can create clarity and dispel anxiety in a way that few other things can.
In a truly helpful conversation with a few pastors from other churches a series of interconnected conversations about the church and this cultural moment was distilled nicely as one of the more stately fellows summarized nicely: "Its fine to disagree about the particular placement of the line for political resistance or social offense, so long as we can agree that such lines should exist and churches need to know how to find them." There has been a lot of back and forth in these months about the actual authority and role of the magistrate, societal health concerns, and how the church is to best love her neighbor and communicate that love. This conversation has run the gamut of topics from masking, and church gathering restrictions, to broader social issues like sexuality and race. For my own part, I've had to wrestle with a great deal of confusion about how to think biblically and theologically through these different and oddly interrelated issues. It hasn't helped that for decades I was a participant in an unofficial cultural movement of pastors and Christians who approached mission and evangelism from a perspective that was firmly committed to, as best we could, covering up or softening the offensive bits of biblical teaching in order to make sure that the gospel was the main thing left to offend people or compel people. Without getting too far into the remarkable limitations with such an approach. I want to propose two questions that I think are particularly important for churches and leaders of churches to consider right now. Two questions have served me well in the last few months and I think will be helpful as Christians consider what we're up to at this moment. They certainly aren't the only questions to be asked right now. But they should be in the mix.
Before I ask them, I want to point out a historical comparison Carl Trueman has made in his wonderful book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In it he argues that the most relevant age of church history for us to learn from at this particular cultural moment is the 3rd Century. During the third century, the church existed in a tenuous relationship with Roman society. There were occasional outbreaks of violence and persecution, but nothing of the sort that the church had seen earlier or would see later. Instead, the church's beliefs and worship practices were seen by the broader society as immoral, even evil. They were considered a threat to society and the good of their neighbors. The church learned to maintain her faithful witness during this period and it eventually gave way to significant conversions and a cultural shift in society. But she had to learn how to hold fast to what was objectively good and to do so while being perceived as the bad guys. I believe that this will increasingly be the challenge we face in the west. With this in mind, here are two broad questions we are considering:
1) At what point would you be willing to say ‘No’ to the powers-that-be (be it the local magistrate, the state or the Federal government - or landlords, other pastors, denominational leadership, etc.)?
There has been an abundance of helpful reflections offered encouraging the church to defer, when possible, to the authority of the magistrate (Here is one from Steven Wedgeworth and the Gospel Coalition. While I disagreed with some of his conclusions, I do think he framed the issues helpfully). From where I sit, almost no pastors I know needed that encouragement. There were very few pastors locally, publically raising questions about the authority of the magistrate to pass the ordinances that were passed on churches. And while granting that different circumstances may dictate different responses to various government mandates or laws, as well as recognizing that wisdom is essential to discern when to apply what principles from Scripture, almost all Christians admit that there is a point at which church leaders should resist laws and orders from those who bear authority. We may disagree on whether that line is 12 weeks into this pandemic or 12 months or 18 months. We may disagree on whether the point of resistance should come with mask mandates or attendance restrictions or banning public worship altogether. Finally, we may disagree on whether a pandemic killing less than 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 or 1 in 100000 justifies such restrictions. The point is to recognize that such a point of resistance exists - that there is a point at which Jesus requires the church to say, “No.” Perhaps it will be an issue unrelated to global pandemics and will instead have to do with regulations on what can be explicitly taught or who can or can't be hired. But what is that point? What theological principles will be determinative for you, your church and your leaders? Can you imagine what that line looks like and how your church’s leadership could arrive at such a point and what it would look like to lead your people at that cultural moment? It is important, I think, to add the further circumstance of public opinion here. When the church resisted Rome’s rule in the 3rd century they did so as a community perceived to be immoral and a threat to the public good. When churches in China resist government edicts that appear so obviously anti-religious from our distance, they do so as communities perceived to be enemies of their neighbors. Do not presume that such a point of resistance will come with anyone believing that you are doing anything other than making a selfish power grab or behaving in a way that is harmful to society and your neighbors.
2) What social, ethical or theological positions would you be willing to state, with biblical clarity (being willing to state what the bible says in the way the bible says it), knowing that such claims will lead to you and your church being deemed bigoted, evil, or unloving?
We live in an age where it is increasingly common to see traditional ethical or social dividing lines between secular people and Christian people become volatile. It is no longer deemed a moral oddity that Christians believe that homosexuality is a sin or that sex is given only to a man and a woman who are married, it is seen increasingly as a societal evil. The doctrine of hell and God's judgment is morally unacceptable in our day when applied as broadly as the law of God applies it. We live in a world comfortable with Christians who can articulate a softened vision of God's love or a vision of the Kingdom filled with people from every conceivable ethnic group (seen as a reflection of secularism's inclusiveness). But we live in a world where a real call to repentance for real sins is no longer seen as a religious oddity. It is increasingly perceived as a fundamental and divisive problem with the world. So, granted that there may be disagreement on where and how the best ways to articulate these calls to repent of sin and believe in Jesus, what are the points of contention you see where love requires we call our neighbors to repent and believe? The rub here will likely come in the issue of specificity. Our neighbors will not be offended by calls to repent of generic, ambiguous idolatry. They will be offended when you actually burn the idols. The gospel proclaims that sins have been atoned for in the death of Jesus. But these are not ambiguous unnamed sins, they are real rebellions against actual commands given to us by God. Those commands are likely to get everybody in trouble someday.
A Chaotic Unity
Worship simultaneously reflects and creates cultures.
Yesterday, the National Cathedral hosted an inauguration prayer service. It featured representatives from about as far and wide as could be imagined - at least with regards to religious traditions. Muslim Imams prayed alongside Jewish rabbis who prayed alongside liberal Protestants including a transgender pastor from Longmont. It was intended as an expression of unity in prayer to (what was called upon at the close of the inauguration) “the great name of our one shared faith.” It was an attempt to give expression to and perhaps even garner some sense of national unity at a time in which our nation is deeply divided and for whom the last 8 months have been marked by social chaos. And while the attempt was unity, the affect was chaos. Disparate voices all barely connected to their own religious traditions praying in the name of some shared faith. The worship of the people will reflect and create culture.
If you read the Bible much, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that if you pray to Brahma among the other unnamed monotheistic gods on Sunday night you will get chaos and a Buffalo Man standing in the same spot at the Wednesday night prayer meeting. The worship of the people will both reflect and create culture.
Religious chaos reveals cultural chaos, more than that, religious chaos creates cultural chaos.
Paul, in Ephesians 5 pushes for a different sort of unity. He has talked about the ethics and truthfulness of unity in chapter 3. A beautiful (if difficult) combination of truthful speaking and gentle humility towards one another. But in chapter 5 he begins to describe the practices of this unity, particularly a call to sing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Here the unity that the work of Jesus creates among a people redeemed by him is sustained and expressed in the practice of singing to Him and to one another. This is one of the many reasons the people of God gather to sing to Jesus every Sunday in our worship: It is an expression of and the creation of real unity. Jesus calls and saves a people who then, in his name (and not some other unnamed god), sing - this is a sort of confession of faith (that we are, despite appearances one) and the creation of that unity (we are singing together). You see, Worship both reflects and creates culture. But this isn’t simply something the church does for herself. She worships as salt and light in the midst of culture that has gone chaotic. Churches spread like salt throughout a city and a nation, calling on the Father in the name of Jesus, singing as one, and the cities and cultures are both preserved and even changed . When the church doesn’t gather, in force, to worship in the presence of God together - there is a cost to society, not just the church.
We think this singing is so important at Trinity that we’re willing to gather together and practice. Practice doesn’t sound like fun, but we have a good and rowdy time gathered together, laughing and learning how to sing the Psalms in harmony and unity. This is both an expression of a real unity in the name of Jesus Christ, and a means by which such unity is sustained and grows. Worship both reflects and creates culture.
You cannot use scotch tape and strip the gods of their names to pretend some national unity. You will only get chaos and madness. Choose which god you will worship. But if you worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Triune God who made heaven and earth, and who has come in Jesus to rescue us from our sins, conquer death and reign forever, you should count on something: He will not share his glory. All honor and glory and power is His and he will not share the podium with other gods. And he loves to teach us to sing together.
Worshipping Jesus in a Storm
One of the central tasks of Jesus’ church in the midst of any culture and all the cities is to gather for worship. It is a work of fidelity to our King, but it is also a work of love for our neighbors. You see, every culture is prone towards paganism, towards abandoning what is True to follow after lies. The church gathers and gives testimony to the True and the Beautiful and the Good in Word and Song and Sacrament. We do this every week for one another, in the presence of God and for our neighbors - even the ones who don’t believe.
An interesting part of this new season for Trinity is that we are gathering to do this work about a half block from the cultural and political center of our city and state. Nearly every festival, rally, protest and riot will pass a stone’s throw away (though, please, no one throw any stones.) Tomorrow there are scheduled protests and counter-protests and we will gather nearby, united by an all-encompassing allegiance to Jesus to sing together, to eat Jesus’ meal together and to proclaim what is central and true and real together. In a culture that is currently marked by outrage and counter-outrage, lies and half-truths, we come together to celebrate what is true and beautiful and good. In a world increasingly divided into identity groups and political tribes. We come together. I don’t think there is any more important work and it has been appointed by God that we get to do this work right smack dab in the middle of it all.
May we gather, sing the songs of our King, hear him speak in his word, and feast on his body and blood. We we be reminded of what is truly true and gloriously beautiful and profoundly good for Jesus is Lord and this is a marvelous time to be a Christian.
Kill the Dragon, Get the Girl
“Kill the Dragon! Get the Girl!”
This is the central story of Scripture. A dragon, a bride to be won, and a king who comes to accomplish this great end. It is the story of Christmas told by John in Revelation 12 with all the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse. We’ve sentimentalized the other gospel tellings with Christmas pageants and Peanuts Christmas specials, but John’s telling is strange and wonderful and terrible.
John gives us a dragon, a woman, and a child whose birth will mean the end of the dragon. There is a flood of rage, an open earth, and angelic warfare. The whole thing is pretty marvelous. At the center is the conquering of a dragon, and this is the meaning of Christmas.
The terror of dragons is no small thing, and the need for someone to come to rescue us from this particular dragon is great. Of all the troubles we might find in humanity, this is the root of them all. Here is our primal enemy, the serpent-dragon of the garden, the cursed one who seeks to devour and destroy. John tells us that this dragon has been doing two things from the very beginning: Accusing God’s people day and night and deceiving all humanity.
The dragon does not come like a bogeyman at night. He does not burn cities with fire or horde gold in mountains. No, his devouring work is done through accusations and lies. The Bible’s assessment of our troubles is far simpler and far more incisive than our current social, psychological and political assessments and solutions. Our trouble is that we have been and are still deceived, and that we stand accused.
From the beginning the great serpent has been twisting God’s words, undermining their authority, questioning their meaning, turning men and women to distrust what God says.. To twist God’s words is to twist our very understanding of God himself. In the garden the question stood - “is that what God really said?” Did he really mean that? And so, for centuries now, humanity has disregarded God’s words, mocked God’s words, dismissed God’s words, softened God’s words and otherwise failed to simply come and receive his words - all of his words.
This terrible deception has always had one great end, one great effect: to displace God from his place at the center of all reality, and particularly from his throne, from his authority. Man becomes the measure of all things. Men become the standard of righteousness, of justice, and of morality and love. In the past, paganism has masked this displacement with idols and Superman gods, but in our day secular humanism has made the displacement fixed and explicit. God and his religion, if he exists at all, exists to serve humanity and our ends.
Everyday this lie is told and embraced. Our great project of a humanistic utopia feels possible. With God’s standards out of the way, we might find ourselves to be righteous and moral and just. We might express love far better than some ancient religion with frightening moral judgments. So we sit in judgment on our ancestors for the deceptions they accepted, while embracing our own lies with even greater vigor.
In addition to this great deception, the dragon has stood before the Judge of all the Earth accusing us day and night. Humanity is deceived and so humanity seeks to cast off the words of God and so the Dragon points day and night in the presence of God at our rebellion. The trouble is that we really have sinned. We really do seek to be our own gods. His accusations are accurate. We have been deceived and we have warmly embraced these deceptions which are destroying us, our world and one another.
The story of Christmas told in Revelation 12 is that the coming of Jesus means the dragon is cast down and overcome. We feast for 12 days because the birth of this king marks the end of his deceptions and his accusations for all those who “dwell in heaven” - a code in Revelation for those who worship the Lamb. How is this dragon overcome? Two things are described as defeating the dragon’s work: The blood of this Child-King and the Testimony of God’s people.
First, the accusations of the dragon, before the throne are silenced. His accusations are no longer heard in God’s throne room. You see, they have all been paid for, they have all been atoned for with the death of this king on the cross. The dragon is cast out of the throne room because his accusations will no longer be heard by our God.
Secondly, the lies of the dragon are overcome by the truth-telling testimony of God’s people. When the church gathers to sing songs that are true, to confess things that are true, to hear the Word that is true, the dragon’s lies are overcome, his deceptions undone. When God’s people love God’s words and testify to God’s words and trust God’s words and obey God’s words in the midst of the nations, lies are shown to be lies.
This is, at least one reason why the gathered worship of the church is so vital to us and to our world: Here are a people who gather to give testimony to what is true. In a world overrun with humanistic lies, here is the truth declared and loved with joy and gladness. And in this repeated testimony of the Lamb’s people, the dragon is overcome.
So continue your feasting and celebrating on this 5th day of Christmastide. It is one more testimony in the midst of a world that only seems dark, of what is actually true: the light has dawned. The Dragon’s accusations have been silenced. His lies are, well, lies, for look! We have eggnog, and presents and Christmas lights. A Child-King has been born, whose blood has dealt utterly with our sin and who is the True Word, spoken by the Father and sung by his people.
Kill Children’s Church
A good sign of God’s blessing in scripture on a city is the sound of children’s laughter in the streets. For several decades now a lot of evangelical churches have been involved in a dangerous experiment wherein they sought to remove the sounds of children from their worship. It was an experiment thought up by church growth gurus who wrongly saw children as a distraction to the main event of church for parents and other attenders to the grand worship experience. It was excused because, as the thinking went, we can provide more effective ministry to these children and youth by pulling them out of worship with their parents. This experiment has been a dismal failure for parents and for children, while being wildly successful from a church-growth standpoint.
I say experiment because past generations didn’t do this. I grew up in a church during the 80s in which kids worshipped with their parents. There was a nursery and some classes for very small children, but everything was oriented around getting the kids into worship with their parents. We had Sunday School after the service. We had youth group on Wednesday nights. But the backbone of our life as a church was the gathering of the church for worship on Sunday morning - everybody together, young and old, in God’s presence. Most churches had a similar plan. But then, sometime during the 80s and 90s a lot of really large churches began championing age-segmented Sunday mornings as a way to grow your church and serve more people. Maybe we can get more people to come to church if we offer to watch and educate their kids for an hour was how the thinking went. This has been devastating to generational discipleship and covenantal worship.
A Barna survey released last year shocked a lot of us when we discovered that 64% of those raised in Christian churches leave the church in their 20s (https://www.barna.com/research/resilient-disciples). Organizations have surveyed the church-leavers over their reasons for leaving to try and help us all adapt to the sensitivities of these 20-somethings and their particular social and political concerns (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/january/church-drop-out-college-young-adults-hiatus-lifeway-survey.html). I think this is dumb for a number of reasons, but dumb in the same direction we’ve been headed for several decades now. We evangelicals love, in the name of mission, to survey people who do not love the Jesus of Scripture as to why they don’t love the Jesus of Scripture and then make sure we adequately adapt our presentation and practice of what Christianity entails.
But the surveys don’t tell us much more than what the Bible does. Of course non-Christians or ex-Christians think a church or a religion is judgmental that maintains moral or ethical norms which fly in the face of our culture’s moral norms (or lack-of-moral norms). “Discovering” this in a survey is not a remarkable thing. If one is newly discovering that belief in Jesus and obedience to Jesus is incompatible with humanistic secularism then one probably had a remarkably thin understanding of what belief in Jesus actually meant all along.
I want to look at a different source of all this apostasy: kids’ church, specifically, kids going to children’s ministry and not worshipping with the rest of the church on Sundays. A few qualifiers.... I don’t mean to say that there aren’t remarkable and yet anecdotal exceptions to what I’m about to say. I don’t meant to say that there aren’t wonderful, godly, well-intentioned ministers leading some of these kids’ ministries. I also believe that there are a whole slew of ways that churches and Christian schools should provide opportunities to train and educate children. I just think that removing children from the worship of God’s people is fundamentally destructive to Christian discipleship - for everybody, young and old alike.
But kids’ church or youth church or whatever-clever-name-one-comes-up-with church (a title that indicates we don’t have a clue what the word “church” means) is a failed experiment. Many churches have taken their children (of all ages) out of worship for the past 40 years in the name of “age-appropriate” lessons, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is merely cognitive. They’ve separated the church by generations in order to have stylistic distinctions, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is mostly about your personal taste. They’ve taken children from parents for the most formative thing in the world: the liturgy of the church and so we have kids who haven’t grown up watching their parents humbly kneel in the presence of God and confess their sins. They’ve grown up and not seen their parents raise their hands in praise and honor. They’ve grown up without eating God’s meal of bread and wine with their parents and without seeing old and young together, as God’s people singing, reading, and listening to God’s word.
A few thoughts about all this, and the 64% of our kids who are abandoning the church and thereby abandoning the God who speaks to us in Scripture.
1) The church is charged with giving word and sacrament to God’s people (young and old). To remove children from the place where this work is fundamentally done (the gathered worship of God’s people) is to cut them off from the means by which God intends to feed them and nourish their faith. Kids’ ministries, in an attempt to feed God’s children, have ironically cut them off from the family table and has thereby led to the malnourishment of God’s children.
2) The primary place where your children will learn to worship God and to love his word is by watching you, their parents, worship God and love his word. The ground of all our worship in the rest of life is the gathered worship of the saints. In the name of teaching our children how to worship, kids ministries have cut them off from the fundamental place where God intends to teach his children how to worship.
3) If your understanding of church is largely shaped by age appropriate, stylistically and generationally distinctive worship programs, it is almost impossible for you to not be shaped to believe that worship is primarily about you and what you “like.” We inadvertently ingraining our children to believe that the worship of Jesus is about finding a bunch of people like them, in their age group, singing music they like and finding a communicator whose communication resonates with them - not too preachy, not too harsh, but authentic and like me. The center of their Christianity will not be God, his holiness and his word. The center of their Christianity will be them, their feelings, and their personal tastes.
4) We need the sounds of children in our worship. It may seem distracting, but when you recognize and learn to savor the blessings that God gives us in Scripture, then there are few sweeter sounds than an ill-timed yelp from a two year old during the sermon or prayer of confession. They are reminders of our deep and varied humanity as a people gathered for worship and most of all of God’s kindness to give his city children to do the yelping. Parents, your children are a gift to the church, even with their fussiness and discipline issues. Your work to discipline and to teach during worship is a gift to the church.
Worshipping with a few toddlers and a newborn is incredibly hard work. Teaching a 5 year old to manage a long-winded sermon (especially one of mine) is, well, effort. But this is the labor, the work, of parenting and discipleship: Teaching our children to worship with the saints in the presence of God. Taking children out of worship for their own private lesson and music robs parents of this effort-filled joy. It robs children of the feast of God’s people and it robs the church of one of God’s surest blessings.
At Trinity we encourage all parents to keep their kids during worship. During most seasons we will offer some care for children up through age 5 where we essentially help prepare these kids to worship with their parents, walking through the different parts of the liturgy and teaching them how to participate. But even this is meant to be temporary. Our hope is that parents will eventually stop utilizing this resource and bring their squirrelly, yelping 2 year old into the service with them.
We also provide a number of resources from bags filled with helps during the service, to some simple ways that you can practice as a family with your kids during the week to prepare them to worship with you on a Sunday. If it feels weird to practice for church, consider what’s at stake when we gather for worship.
Worship is about God. Christianity is about God. The church’s life and worship is centered in the person and work of God. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing to hear the cries of toddlers mingled with the singing of grey-haired saints and teenagers together in God’s presence. Do not rob your children of this glory. Do not rob yourself of this glory. Do not rob the church of this glory. Kill kids’ church and the expectation of kids’ church. Instead train your children, teach your children, but above all else, worship with your children.
The Good Terror of Christmas
When Isaiah saw God, his first response was to say, “Woe is me! I am lost...” Not many people say such things any more. We hear him speak in the Scriptures and almost no one says, “Woe is me!” Instead we go on at length about how I feel about the text. We stand in his presence in the gathering of the church (his Temple) and almost not one trembles in fear anymore, almost no one has an immediate sense of their need for atonement, we just complain about the music, or the temperature, or the preaching). We speak horrid words, trite words, ugly words, slanderous words in jest around a table, in some self-righteous political tirade on social media or in anger while driving never considering in whose presence we said such things nor crying out, “I am a man of unclean lips!”
Tozer once observed that there are few things more important to a person than what it is that comes to mind when they think of God (Lewis’ response to this notwithstanding). Those thoughts will either conform to reality (in other words, they will be true) or they won’t. And it is really important that they to conform to how the world actually is theologically, morally, physically.
There are few attributes of God more centrally attested in the Bible and yet so difficult to grasp as is the issue of God’s holiness. Without it laying at the center of our conceptions of God, everything else He is and does gets reduced, or worse, distorted beyond recognition. His love is reduced to sentiment. His righteousness becomes mere politeness. Our own experiences become the center and God’s attributes become relative (he becomes a super version of us), rather than God’s character being central and our own relative to him.
We have failed to attend to God’s holiness and this is reflected in a whole range of our current troubles. Evangelical worship has become exceedingly casual and a matter of mere religious self-expression - we have abandoned the God-instructed worship in the temple, for our own self-built high places. Or worse, we quickly abandon the worship of God in the church in the name of questionable (at best) public health policy. We unhesitatingly make calls for justice without considering the absolute nature of God’s justice and how His justice comes in both glory and horror - we treat God’s standards as a trifle. We take to social media, quick to slander public figures with little to no pause or actual knowledge of these people - our mouths are unclean.
God is holy. Angelic beings, before whom we would fall down as dead men, cover themselves and cry out “Holy! Holy! Holy!” In his presence. He is not like us. He is not common. He is not simply another being in the world of being. His thoughts are not in the same category as our thoughts. His words are not attempts to describe reality, they create reality. His moral judgments do not accord with some eternal, platonic and rational form, his moral judgments determine morality and rationality and are eternal. His authority is not dependent on us. His purity and righteousness is not on some sort of subjective scale. He is holy and the appropriate universal reaction to coming into his presence is terror. The appropriate human response to God and his holiness is to cry out, “I am lost!”
Without the terror of God’s holiness, Christmas is reduced to mere sentiment. The wonder and the trembling of the incarnation is that all of this holiness comes as a baby. Christmas is the juxtaposition of the holiness of God and a child born of a woman, come to rescue God’s people from their enemies. When God’s holiness is little considered, our ability to marvel at the grace of this season is lost. Jesus is simply a cute baby who will do some fairly marvelous things. But the glory and terror of the world was lying in a manger. The glory and terror of the world was crying and pooping and needed feeding that night. This is why Christmas is marked by glory and terror. It is why we should tremble and sing. The Holy One has come to rescue us, to conquer unbelief, to destroy our enemies, to crush the head of death.
May you consider the holiness of God as you light candles and drink eggnog and exchange gifts. May the mystery of this glory terrify you and fill you with wonder.
Railing against Egypt whilst in Midian
You don’t hear much about Phinehas these days. We have pin the tale on the donkey games and put the nose on the cartoon mouse games, but nobody hangs a poster and plays “run the spear through the people having pagan sex during prayer” games. Yet the story of Phinehas (Numbers 25) is arguably the best story in one of the most interesting books in the whole of the Old Testament. Israel has been rescued from Egypt, they are wandering in the wilderness near Midian, unlearning the worship of the gods of Egypt, and learning to live and worship in the presence of Yahweh. They are surrounded by the local Midianites with whom they will have a rather checkered history. Now Egypt was one of the great super powers of the time with its gods and chariots and represented those deplorable people over there. Midian with their Baal worship and pagan sexuality were right here and were in fact becoming rather insidiously integrated with Israel’s own worship and culture and life (which had been the plan all along coming out of Numbers 22-24 and Balaam’s prophecies against direct warfare with Israel). As God began to bring judgment upon Israel for their whoring and compromise with the Midianite gods (the worship of false gods and the transformation of human sexuality always go together in history), the people gathered in repentance to turn away God’s anger. While they were having this gathering of repentance an Israelite man brought a Midianite woman into the camp, and they began, well, knowing one another. Phinehas takes a spear and runs them both through in one shot. God names him a priest forever for his zeal for the holiness of God’s people in the midst of strange gods and their strange sexuality.
Now besides this story creating all sorts of problems for us modern evangelicals with its violence, sexuality and intolerance for paganism in the church, it also functions as a kind of parable for our time, and I think particularly for our place.
Much of modern evangelicalism - particularly in its urban forms have been very outspoken about the evils of nationalism and conservative moralism. These gods have been very visible and made more so by the ways social commentators like to categorize almost any Christian morality or political theory as belonging to those two deities. That being said, the gods of nationalism and moralism are deplorable. They involve the idolatrous intermingling of Americanism with Christianity. They sustain a kind of religious, apple-pie eating moralistic self-righteousness that is quick to forget the mercy of God, the necessity of his grace and the importance of real repentance for sin. It trades the laws of God for human traditions and is fraught with a kind of wicked bigotry that forgets the mercy we have received. They are wicked gods. They are wicked gods who are largely hated in progressive, urban America where these gods are denounced and mocked, their historic hypocrisy is noted again and again, and there is a considerable amount of social pressure to make sure you aren’t one of those people. And just as there was likely a lot of misidentification of the Hebrews’ religion with Egyptian religion, a lot of secularists see biblical Christianity and the idolatry of Nationalistic Conservative Moralism as essentially the same thing. SO there is an understandable effort to distinguish the two as Christians make their home in progressive cities like Denver and Boulder. We are making our home among the Midianites having come from Egypt and we don’t want there to be any confusion or misidentification. But we also don’t want to be disliked. And herein lies the door to our own temptations as people seeking to trust in the work of Jesus and love Jesus and obey the word of Jesus when real obedience to Jesus and the real teaching of Scripture is often simply considered to be of the same fabric as hypocrisy, self-righteousness and hatred.
The Midianites (or secular progressive humanists) see everybody who isn’t them as hated Egyptians, and in our deep desire to not simply avoid misidentification but to avoid being disliked, we rail against the gods of Egypt and forget to rail against the gods of the Midianites. We minimize the actual apostasy happening in our midst in order to make sure we aren’t confused with wretched self-righteous moralists. As one social commentator put it “Evangelicals are punching right while coddling the unbelieving left.
Secular Progressive Humanism or Postmodern Social Justicism or The Cult of the Self (its hard to pick one name for this pantheon) are deplorable. They destroy human beings (and kill unborn babies by the millions) and call it good. They destroy the givenness of the world - that it was created and ordered and is ruled by a God with all authority over everything - to remake the world however we see fit. They demand the autonomy of the individual, while destroying the individual with intersectional identities and oppressed/oppressor tribes. They demand justice while defining justice unjustly. They demand a slavery to your own image while promising that such a suicidal life is real freedom. And then missionally sensitive evangelicals adopt much of this dogma, blend them up nicely with Christian dogma and rail against the churches doing the same thing with Egypt’s gods. We take these distortions of love and justice and goodness and beauty and then go and find the words justice and love and goodness (righteousness) and beauty (glory) in the Bible and do a nice little definition swap, trading Scripture’s meanings for those provided by the Cult of Self. We affirm this religious irreligion and naively neuter or destroy the Biblical Christianity we were commissioned to teach, believe and obey. We bring Midianite women into the camp and let them redefine the nature of Christian worship, mission and obedience - all the while careful to distinguish what we’re doing from what those Trump Lovers are doing down south in the Bible Belt.
2020 has exposed the church’s willing enslavement to the gods who surround us. We trade, again and again, the birthright given to us in the Gospel, a glorious and God-centered freedom to serve the Lord alone, for slavery to a pantheon of deities. Leslie Newbigin once described the surprise he felt on discovering an icon of Jesus in a Hindu temple. He said he was never confused as to whether the presence of this image represented the genuine arrival of Christian faithfulness, but I fear we’ve done precisely that with our progressive religions here.
A plague has broken out in our midst and many don’t know the way back. We need a Phinehas with a javelin in hand. We need a restoration of worship and a rediscovery of the kind of freedom Christ has freely set upon us in the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of our lives from slavery to Egypt’s and Midian’s gods. We need a renewed commitment to let God speak clearly and sometimes painfully, from the Scriptures - and let Him say whatever it is that He has chosen to say, unencumbered by our embarrassment that we might be misunderstood.
More Singing Together
We’re continuing our foray into singing the Psalms together and in parts the Friday - Here are some more reasons why:
One of the stranger things, culturally speaking, that the church does when it gathers for worship is singing. Public singing has all but disappeared from broader life in our century with the exceptions of the strange phenomena of karaoke bars and concerts. Add to this absence the significant lack of clarity concerning what exactly the church is doing when we sing or why we sing and you have all the necessary ingredients for the church’s music to slide into entertainment and merely experiential categories. We start to evaluate the church’s music merely on the basis of how it made me feel and approach singing on Sunday less as the labor of God’s people and more as a service or product to be digested. But the singing of God’s people, when they gather for worship, is intended to be a sacrifice of God’s people. It is supposed to be, in the first place, the work of God’s people in God’s presence. In other words, it isn’t designed to entertain or to grant a certain experience. We should sing in spirit and truth - in other words, we should truly believe the stuff we sing, and the musical setting helps to align our affections with what is held out to us in the Psalms, but we can’t forget what it is we’re doing when we start singing together as God’s people. We are bringing offerings of musical labor into God’s presence - offerings of thanksgiving to the one who has redeemed us and invited us into his presence. We find joy as the byproduct of this work. We do receive marvelous gifts as the fruit of this labor. But it begins as the worshipping response of God’s people to his grace.
As David begins to develop the liturgical life of God’s people in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles, the sacrifices of God’s people are accompanied and even overshadowed by the work of music. The songs and prayers of God’s people are collected in the Psalter and a whole musical culture develops. There is some foreshadowing here. The complex and bloody sacrificial system will ultimately find its fulfillment in the blood of Jesus, the church’s covenant meal, and the liturgical music of the church. But the sacrificial system was precise, it was labor-intensive and it called on God’s people to offer their very livelihoods before God. When we gather for worship we come to offer sacrifices to God in song and in bread and wine each week. We should approach the music of the church in the same way - with intentionality and excellence. And while the lyrical content of our singing should be of great importance to us, so should the musical quality be of great importance. It involves a set of skills we should give ourselves to developing. Furthermore, we should be sure that we are using the gifts that God has given to the church for this task. While our music shouldn’t be limited to only the Psalms or the songs given to us in Scripture, these, if for no other reason than that God has explicitly given them to us, should serve as the foundations for all our other singing.
These are some of the reasons we’re gathering again on Friday night to learn how to sing together with greater skill and to learn how to sing the Psalms. We’ll have beer and wine, and plenty of room to laugh and to make mistakes. But the goal of our gathering on these monthly Friday nights is to learn how to sing Scripture together, in parts, and with excellence and joy. Join us Friday Night
Fight Club, the 4 Horsemen, and Seeking the Good of the City
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was one of those books that got stuck in my head for a few years. Like all of Palahniuk’s earlier books (his later books seem to indicate his story-telling abilities have been dissolved by his nihilism), he seeks to exploit some aspect of Western Culture and expose us to its troubling underbelly. Here he attacks the kind of nice-guy, consumeristic careerism (its own kind of nihilism) that has eroded any form of purposeful masculinity in our culture. He (quite literally) aims a gun at its head and seeks to kill it. He doesn’t offer any constructive alternatives (Project Mayhem’s aim was simply the destruction of civilization), but he does awaken an army of men to the idea that being the quiet, conformist nice-guys was destroying them and sustaining a soul-crushing society.
Christians have, for far too long, been trained (and happily complied) with a kind of quiet, respectable role. We’ve had our nice-guy and consumeristic career to play in this Postmodern American Project (PAP) and we’ve played it quite well. We’ve offered little resistance to the whims of political power or social corruption or sexual deviance. We keep showing up at Christmas with the typical protests about someone using ‘X’ instead of Christ. We help out at weddings and funerals (occasionally insisting, with much made of our great courage, that we be allowed to choose which weddings we officiate). We adopt secularism’s definitions (of justice and peace and virtue and love) and then pretend that Jesus blesses all these godless projects. But we play our role of cultural chaplain, largely blessing the direction of the culture at large, some of us troubled by the speed at which the whole thing speeds along, but mostly content to play our largely decorative and irrelevant role. We do it all in the name of some refashioned love, meanwhile, the vocation of salt and light has been largely abandoned.
But the church is called, often, to be the “bad” guys. I don’t mean the objectively “bad” guys, but I do mean the ones causing all the right kinds of trouble. There is a kind of turmoil that follows the church everywhere it goes in Scripture. Example after example is given to us in the book of Acts of the gospel being preached and the whole city getting turned upside down. The gospel was not a message of peace and love and happiness, it was a message that divided entire cities and led to all sorts of economic turmoil, violence, and preachers needing to sneak out of town in baskets. Paul and Peter aren’t killed because they were doing their best to be a blessing to the Roman Culture and her Polis. They were killed because they heralded a message about the absolute and universal authority of King Jesus and they insisted that it be believed and obeyed by everyone.
While the book of Revelation is marvelously confusing - largely due to terrifically bad readings of it put to almost satire-level fiction in forms like The Left Behind series, it does provide a revelatory look at what the Church is commissioned to be and do in the world. It is a book that promises to reward study and I want to take just a quick bit of it (chapters 5-7, really focusing on a short section of chapter 6) to give us a better understanding of our vocation in the world, and why the church’s mission in the book of Acts (as well as in other times in history) rightly and predictably caused such a ruckus. I also hope we can learn to be the “bad” guys again.
Revelation 5 opens with a scene that is reflected from a number of different angles throughout the bible. It is a scene packed with meaning and beauty and is worthy of much thought and probably some good songwriting. To see it from other angles read it alongside Acts 1:6-11 (where you can see how the scene starts), Daniel 7, or Psalm 24. But at the heart of the scene is a throne - with God, the one who made heaven and earth, seated on that throne and all creation worshipping this One. In the midst of this universe-wide worship a question, a problem really, arises. It is the question of who will fulfill this One’s purposes for the whole world - purposes of judgment, of glory, of redemption? Who is worthy to open the scroll (which represents all of those purposes executed in its opening)? The answer given in Revelation 5 is the Lion/Lamb of Judah, namely Jesus. As this is revealed a rather remarkable celebration breaks out and we’d be forgiven if we just sat here for a bit, but I want to press on to chapter 6 and the question of what Jesus does when he opens the scroll. In other words, how does Jesus execute his purposes for judgment and redemption in the whole world?
As he opens the scroll he sends 4 horses of different colors into the world that, well, cause a ruckus. What happens in Acts as a reflection of these goings-on in the heavens is the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2) to empower and send the church into the world. Peter Leithart has argued compellingly in his commentary on Revelation that these horsemen represent the Spirit-empowered ministry of the church - or at least, the visible cultural-political effects of the Spirit-empowered mission of the church. In other words, these “4 horsemen of the Apocalypse” don’t represent some far off future evil, but instead, these “bad” guys are the church, or at the very least, the intended effects of the church’s faithful ministry.
Let’s look at the horsemen:
1st is the White Horse who comes with a bow and a crown. He comes to conquer. Here is the gospel announcement of Jesus’ reign over all the earth. Here is the message of his death, resurrection and ascension to the throne. The Church is empowered by the Spirit and sent by God into all the cities and neighborhoods and industries and nations to declare the Good News of the Reign of Jesus and to call everyone and everything to believe in him and to bow to Him. This is the message we are sent to embody and to declare - un-compromised and unapologetic.
Next is the bright red horse. Here is what this message does as it is sent into the world. It takes away peace and creates division and strife. As Jesus said concerning his own ministry - he came to turn father against son, mother against daughter - he came to bring a division that would go all the way down. The church proclaims a message that does not leave the world as it is, it is not a message that can be simply ignored or relegated to the religious or self-help section of the book store. It is a message that redivides humanity and brings division and strife. In other words, the church brings strife. It doesn’t bring strife because it sets out to physically harm people. It brings strife because it proclaims a message that requires one of two responses: faith and obedience or rebellion and suppression.
3rd comes the black horse. Its rider carries a scale and we see how the impact of the church’s mission is not merely in the realm of ideas and theology but transforms the economics and politics of the cities and the nations. The whole economies of places are transformed by the mission of the church. In the book of Acts a number of riots are started because the growth of the church meant the collapse of certain corrupt industries (Acts 19), others began explicitly because of the jealousy of the Jews - holding onto the old bread rather than receiving the wine of the New Covenant. But the point here is the church in her Spirit-empowered ministry is not the good guys, simply reinforcing and expanding the economic and social elements of the culture. Their ministry reorders everything around the person of Jesus and belief in him.
Lastly comes the pale horse made famous by Wyatt Earp. This horse brings death. The church brings death too. One way or another the church’s message, the message of the gospel, is a message of death. As Lewis said in his masterpiece, ’Til We Have Faces - “Die before you die, there is no chance after.” We call all people to come to the waters of baptism and die - before they die. The gospel comes as a message of grace, one which bids people die in these waters, or it comes as a message of judgment - the stench of death to those who will know only judgment (2 Cor. 2:16). We do not bring any sort of neutral message but a command from our King, who bids all men come and die and then be raised in him. This is no feel-good message that can fit nicely into a chaplain’s role to secularism. It is a message of maximum disruption.
The result of this 4-fold ministry of the church in the book of Revelation is laid out for us in chapter 7. It’s a confusing image - 144,000 all accounted for, who are truly a number that can’t be counted. Here is a set number of people (God won’t lose any) who cannot be counted from every nation on earth. The result of this “bad” ministry is a people redeemed from every nation on earth. A people who have died before they died. A people whose lives and vocations in the world are unsettled and transformed by the rule of the Lion/Lamb. A people divided from all the others, enemies for the sake of Jesus. A people sent into the world with the gospel of our Ruling King conquering and to conquer.
May we joyfully learn to stop behaving as if our job were to comfort unbelief and to keep the peace. Stop conforming to unbelief’s expectations regarding who the “good” guys are. Stop trying to be respectable. It might start by insisting on going to church, insisting on breaking bread and drinking wine, and insisting on giving thanks and singing loudly the songs of the Lamb.
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Revelation 5:12
Know This Thing
There are a rather enormous number of things I don’t know. This is one of the gifts of being “not young” anymore. Not knowing things is something that has gone from being a source of insecurity in my youth to a great comfort in my not-young-ness. A lot of you still think you know all the things… Things about a guy named Trump whom you haven’t met. Things about a guy named Biden whom you’ve never met. Things about why that person says those things that way. You even know why I said Trump first and not Biden (totally because my computer is running that Dominion Software algorithm that everybody is talking about.) You are absolutely certain about the real dangers of the Corona Virus, so much so that you are willing to abandon many of the things God has given us, like worshipping with God’s people, warm hospitality and the nearness of friends. Or, you know its all a hoax - a very complex ruse and there’s no need to risk anything.
All this knowing about all these things runs up against Romans 8:26. Here Paul does something rather mean. He calls all of us “weak.” Its not a very sensitive calling out, but it gets a bit worse. You see, he then goes on to say that we don’t even know what we should pray for. His assertion is that you and I are weak and that this weakness is clearly seen, mind you, not in the fact that we must pray and ask for God’s help. No, our weakness is seen in that we don’t even know what we’re supposed to ask God for in the first place. In other words, we’re super weak. Normal weak is recognizing that you can’t do something and getting help from someone stronger. Super weak is not even knowing what you need help with. In other words, Paul says that we don’t know what we don’t know.
I find this to be a marvelous antidote to all our human knowing here in this Information Age. We have access to more data, more opinions, more expert testimony than any other people in the history of mankind, and we don’t know what any of it actually means or what we’re supposed to do with it. And all the unknowing can create quite a bit of insecurity and devastating, society-wide anxiety.
Paul then counters this with a declaration of something that the people of God do know. In the midst of this terrible unknowing, immersed in data, swimming in opinions, Paul points to a rock on which Christians (those he calls “God Lovers” and “Called” - what marvelous names!) are to stand. He says that even when we have no idea what to pray for, such that the Spirit of God just groans for us, we do know something.
We know that God is at work in all things for our good.
Let these words stick for you just a bit….
We know…
…all things…
…for our good.
And this isn’t meant to be some sort of sentimental truism pasted onto a coffee mug. He’s writing to a people that will be burning in Nero’s garden in a few years and watching their children ripped from their arms. In other words, it is meant to be a rock on which to build a life of unshakable trust in God and faithfulness to His words no matter the dangers or questions you face. Here is a truth that should lead us not merely into quiet, private pietism, but will lead these Christians in Rome into bold and courageous witness that will cost them their lives. Here is something to know when you don’t know anything else, and not knowing enough might cost you. Here is something to know when you are overwhelmed by your unknowing. God is at work for the good of the God-Lovers. God is moving everything (sometimes in very seemingly strange ways) for the Ones Whom He Has Called.
Paul grounds our knowledge of this wonderful fact in 5 verbs - the stupidly controversial “chain of redemption.” God has Foreknown, Predestined, Called, Justified, and Glorified us. God is the subject of these verbs in Romans 8. We are the objects of these verbs in Romans. 8. How do we know God is working in and through all these things happening around us for our good? Because God has done these things already. Here is not simply a rock on which to put our feet, but a place from which to discern and understand everything else that is happening around us and to us. Here is a description of what God has already done for us and to us so that we might worship Jesus and bear witness to Jesus and obey Jesus even in the face of a Nero and his soldiers.
May we all get really good at admitting what we don’t know. And may we cling to these things that we do know.
Oh… And go to church.
