A Tale of Two Churches

I am going to post a couple of links from Slice of Laodicea. To my readers (if there are any) this blog is a very good blog. I know the blog is very critical of the contemporary Christian church, but it makes undoubtedly strong cases for its points. As a Calvinist, a subscriber to the five "solas" or "alones" (grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, Scripture alone, to God be the Glory alone), I am bothered by what I observe in the Christian churches today...

...and the Holy Spirit by this blog often brings conviction of my and my church's complacency in its labor of worship...

In these following two posts, Ingrid of Slice gives us a parable of two churches, and each church in the evangelical world is represented largely by one of the two.

Here is church 1.
Here is church 2.

Which one is best represented by your church? Do the members of your church have any inckling of or respect for Whom they are coming to worship? Who does the music actually praise--regardless of its style? Men or God? Do they even try to engage in *gasp* church discipline? One of the Ingrid's points that I greatly enjoyed is this: Does the church service attempt to connect you with the heritage of Christianity's history by the recitation of creeds? How much Scripture is read during the Service?

Look, I understand the hesitancy of a traditional mindset, but Ingrid's point is correct. Every church adheres to a set of traditions; it is a matter of which ones. It is also a matter of whether or not the traditions can be substantiated by the authority of Scripture.

People, we come to church, week by week, going through the motions. We come for the opportunity for socializing. We come to be entertained. Speaking from mine own experience, we do not come to worship the Almighty God, the One Who spoke our beings into existence, Who sustains us by the power of his Word, Who judges evil and wickedness, Who hates sin in its most minute forms, who quickened us from the dead by his grace and love and joined us in union to Christ...

Last night, at our fifth Sunday singing service, I had to face this harsh reality as I listened to a poem titled "Desiderata" distributed by our church leadership and read from the pulpit by a person who was not a member of our church. Its closing stanza began with this: "Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you concieve Him to be..." Where was the discernment and why was this endorsement of mental idolatry allowed to be read? My answer to this is a mere speculation: we didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings.

The Miracle of Conversion (Sermon from 7-23-06)

1 And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, 2 in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, 3 among whom also we conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6 and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that or of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

(Ephesians 2:1-10)

Introduction

What a wonderful experience it is to be saved by the grace of God! Look back upon your life before Christ came to you, and then look at your life now in Christ. My hope and prayer this morning is for you to be able to see that the gross error of your past has been replaced with the passion to know the Lord and his righteousness and the pursuit to walk worthy of Him who called you out from the grave!

And if, this morning, Christ knows you not, it is my heart’s desire that through my words, He comes and performs the miracle of quickening to you as He has to me—that you may know the Lord and the riches of his mercy and the assurance of eternal life.

In the passage of Scripture I have selected, we have a clear picture of what must take place for the soul to be converted to Christ.

Exposition
What Christians Were and What the Lost Are
It is commonplace in evangelical churches to hear the quotation of verses 8 and 9 of Ephesians 2. The words are powerful and clear for those of us who are alive: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, lest anyone should boast.” However, these verses are often isolated out of the context to a point that they convey the wrong idea. When these verses are scrutinized in the context of Ephesians 1 and 2, they become much more powerful and clear. The necessity of grace—our need of grace—becomes as clear as the waters of the Caribbean.
In the Scriptures, the unbelieving world is often referred to as “the perishing” as they are in 1 Corinthians 1:18, in which Paul claims: “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” I want you to understand something: those who know not Christ and believe not in the message of the cross are more than just perishing. They are dead. They are perishing, but only in the sense that perishable foods sour or spoil, or in the sense that a dead corpse corrodes and decays back into dust. These are nonetheless corpses: with no spiritual breath and life. It is interesting that the Greek work pneumos is used to refer both to spirit and breath, for the lost and unbelieving have no spiritual breath! They are dead: dead as body in a casket, dead as the cadavers studied by students of medicine, dead as the road kill on the side of the highway.

As the perishing world is, so were we who are now alive in Christ. We were also once dead. The passage tells us that “we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.” We were then no different than those who are now dead without Christ. We were in rebellion, sowing the perishing seeds of corruption and sin. Our hearts and minds were opposed to God, at war with Him, and resisting Him at every opportunity.

Our lives before Christ smelled as rotten in the nostrils of God as a carcass withering away in the sun. Do I have your attention?

Let me further clarify.

Not all dead bodies look alike. Some are clearly dead. There are bodies that are mangled and dismembered when they encounter harsh ends like that of an auto accident or a depraved murder. Some are left out in the elements, and begin to decompose, rot and decay, like those in the battlefields of war. However others are not as clearly dead: such as those who have just died of sudden, quiet heart attack, or those who have been kept and preserved for a funeral.

Regardless of their appearance—they are all dead.

So are those who are perishing: Some seek to win God’s approval by abiding to a code of ethics. They are admirable men and women, respected in the word for some reason or another. Nonetheless, if they know not Christ, they are dead. However, others lead lives enslaved to alcohol and sexual immorality, murder or slander. These are no more—or less—dead than the former. A sinner of small trespasses is as dead as a sinner of gross perversion. As the late Charles Spurgeon noted, the lost and ruined—those who have not been touched by the grace of God—are nothing more than corpses without graves.

How Conversion Takes Place
When Paul reveals the nature of those who lie in the death and corruption of sin, he means it. This is no mere analogy: those without Christ are spiritually dead. In spiritual matters—including the gospel—they are deaf, blind, and numb. They cannot smell or taste of the wretchedness of their current state.

When a man physically dies, he has no power to raise himself from the grave. Likewise the lost man, spiritually dead in his trespasses, cannot raise himself from his condition. He cannot breathe spiritual life into himself. This is important to understand: Man, in his natural state, has no spiritual ability. He cannot desire to please God, much less actually please Him. He cannot be convinced to be saved by clever words from a sermon or by emotional intimidation. As the physically dead man cannot will himself to life, the spiritually dead man cannot even will himself to be saved unto eternal life! He is by nature a child of wrath, dead in sin, and in desperate need of reconciliation unto God—a reconciliation he cannot accomplish!

Church, hear me on this. There is no evangelism program that will win souls by its own power! There is not one preacher who has effected the salvation of any man’s soul by his own words! Nothing of man can cause the soul to be born again—to be resurrected unto eternal life. This is why prayer is important, because when we pray for the salvation of the souls of men, we are asking God, the sovereign life giver, to cause them to be saved. This is exactly the business that God is in: quickening the souls of men so that they will come to Christ.

Evangelism without prayer is like a guitar with no strings. Without the strings, the guitar is unable to make a melody. Likewise when the church fails to sustain her evangelism efforts with prayer, she cannot expect souls to be saved. If I preach the gospel to a group of people without praying, it would be better to preach to a graveyard! It is not as if God can’t save men without our prayer, it is that He usually won’t!

It is only by the power of God that men are saved! Listen to the Scripture: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive (or quickened us) together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” In verse five, Paul attributes the rebirth and regeneration of man’s soul to God’s grace. In order for us to respond to the gospel call, we must be quickened—we must be made alive.

In preparation for this sermon, I noticed something that I have never noticed before. In the Greek, the word translated in verse 6 as “raised us up together” is a form of the word commonly associated elsewhere in Scripture with God raising Christ from the dead, the only difference is the prefix “sun”—meaning “with.” When God quickens the soul of man, bringing him from death unto life, He does so by the power of Christ’s resurrection! I understood that Christ’s resurrection demonstrated Christ’s conquering of the grave. I understood that Christ’s resurrection is the guarantee of our coming physical resurrection, the proof that our hope has reason. However, I never connected the resurrection of Christ to the spiritual resurrection of our souls. On the cross, God made Christ “who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in [Jesus Christ].” The guilt of our sin with its corruption and death was laid upon the shoulders of Christ at Calvary. Bearing the wrath of God in the flames of hell for eternity is the outcome of man’s spiritual death. That same wrath was released upon Jesus on the cross, and on that day Jesus died as a man both physically and spiritually. God then quickened Him from the grave, both spiritually and physically, and that power of resurrection takes place every time a soul is saved!

Every soul that is saved is a miracle of resurrection! Men do not have power to perform miracles, only God. Yet we so often rob God of his glory when He calls someone unto himself through our ministry efforts! Each and every time that God uses us to bring someone to conversion we should give all the glory to God! He the only one who has the power to make alive the hearts of men so that they do come when called in the proclamation of the gospel!

Now we come to verses 8 and 9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not by works, lest anyone should boast.” Connect these verses to the ones that precede it. God’s grace—his unmerited, undeserved, and unsolicited favor—has saved us through faith. Earlier, Paul said we were quickened by that same grace. Can a man believe when he has not been quickened? If man, in his natural and sinful state, cannot understand any spiritual message of God, and if the gospel is a spiritual message (which it surely is), then the answer is no! Hence the reason Paul says, after he mentions salvation by grace through faith, “and that not of yourselves.” When we came to trust Christ, we did not do so by our own power, but by the enabling of the Holy Spirit. Even our faith is a gift, hence the phrase “it is the gift of God; not by works.” “The gift of God” refers back to everything up to this point, even before this verse: the quickening, the grace, and the faith. There is no work, no merit, no attribute of man that caused his salvation; all of it is of God.

The last phrase is most important, “lest anyone should boast.” Some translations say “so that no one can boast.” Tell me, if a man has within his own power to believe in Christ, does he not have reason to boast in himself? If tell you that I believed Christ out of my own choice, then I am telling you that I am not as spiritually darkened as the others. There was something about me that effected my salvation. Is this grace? If I said such a thing, then I contradict what the Bible teaches about men. How could I be any less dead than the rest? Either I am dead or I am not! If I am, then Christ must come and quicken me, for I cannot will to come to Christ!

The quickening of God is what causes belief in men. It is not the contrary. My faith is the result of God’s quickening of my soul, not its prerequisite. If I must believe in order to be born again, then salvation is not wholly of God’s grace and doing and I do have reason to boast—for I had more sense as a lost man and I was less spiritually hardened than many others. However, if I were unable to come to Christ because of the corruption of sin and Christ must come and do a work in me in order for me to believe, the salvation is wholly of God’s grace and I cannot boast in myself, I can only in Christ.

The Result of Conversion
So often we stop at verse 9. We will not do so this morning. Verse 10 reads, “For we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” At this point I must step on some toes—perhaps stomp on some feet.

Because of this verse, I fear many who sit in pews every Sunday morning may be dead—and they do not know it. Friday night, my wife and I went to watch M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie, Lady in the Water. As I watched this movie, and as I was thinking of this text, I remembered one of M. Night Shyamalan’s earlier films: The Sixth Sense. In this movie, a child is able to see the ghosts of dead men and women, and he whispers to Bruce Willis’s character, “I see dead people, and the worst thing is, they don’t even know they are dead!”

Folks, I see dead people sitting on the pews of churches—and they don’t even know they are dead. I know they are dead because their lives show no evidence of God’s grace. They name the name of Christ, but act worse than the average unbeliever. They think of only themselves. Profanity commonly crosses their lips. They continually give in to the lusts of the flesh, and they have no desire to come to church and find any excuse not to.

We are not saved by works, but we are saved unto works which God has ordained for us to accomplish. Those who claim to be Christ’s and show no evidence of change in their lives only make a mockery of the power of God’s grace! If their souls have been resurrected from death, how can they show no signs of life?

There is a reason why Paul’s conversion is so powerful: He was a persecutor of Christians before Christ came to him! When word came to the churches of his conversion, the churches praised God for his grace because they knew only He could accomplish such a thing. Did Paul go on persecuting the church after his conversion?

Likewise, when we observe the conversion of those who were once vile men and women, sexually immoral, alcoholics, drug addicts, and even murderers, we give glory to God for his grace when we the change in their lives! Do they continue as they were before? No! They may struggle with ghosts from the past, but God grants them power by his quickening over the lusts of the flesh.

Men and women, I want you to survey your lives this morning. On judgment day, when God asks you as to why He should let you into heaven, several, if not many of you, may say, “I was lead by a preacher to pray a prayer once.” God in return will only tell you this: “Your trust is not in my Son, but in a prayer you prayed—a mere work of words you made with your tongue.” You prayed this prayer expecting to use it as a magic feather, and went on living your live as you did before, having no change. That is not what the quickening power of God accomplishes.

When God quickens you, you do not come merely to receive a “get out of jail free” card! When God makes you alive, alive you are! Changed you are! There should always be a desire for more of God, and sin should become a loathsome thing. So many have prayed a prayer having no conviction of sin; such a prayer accomplished nothing at all. When God makes you alive, the wretched, rotten stench of your sin is the first thing you notice. It horrors you and you begin to despise it. It causes you great pain to continue in it. The most miserable men on earth are Christians who have fallen into sin—and if you lead a life of sin and it bothers you not, you may be dead!

Call of Invitation
If you realize that you are one of the ones who are dead, and if that pains you and you want to live, then Christ working in your heart. Wait not this morning, delay no longer! Run to Christ and He will embrace you in His great love and save you from the death of your sin forever!

My hope this morning is not that you come to Christ of your own willing, but that Christ comes to you and conquers the grave of your heart, and if that so happens, then He will give you no opportunity to resist.

To Be Fair...

Here is a link from the President of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary about the resolution to abstain from alcohol. He supports it, but it is a good description of why he does.

Knowing the Will of God -- Part 3 of 4

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 2

The difficultly in making decisions comes when we are confronted with choosing between rights or between evils. The example questions above demonstrate those difficult decisions. However, let me add a few more examples: Which jeans should I wear? Should I eat Sonic or Wendy’s? What color should I paint my wall?

These questions are apparently trivial. In most cases they are trivial. However, if one of the pairs of jeans is too revealing or immodest, you still have a choice between a right and wrong. If one of the restaurants happens to donate a portion of profits to abortion research, the choice is still between a wrong and a right.

If these stipulations don’t exit, should the choice be difficult? Should I spend an hour in prayer to determine the hamburger joint for the night? As moronic as it may sound, there are people who are in bondage to this type of thinking. They look for a heavenly sign to decide which shoes or boxers to wear. They worry if the color of their carpet pleases almighty God—who we all know loves LSU purple and gold. (Sarcasm)

People in these circumstances are in bondage. They do not understand what it means to be free in Christ. Look at Look at Galatians 5:1-12. Paul was directly addressing the issue of legalism, the adding of requirements for any aspect the Christian salvation or living. After Paul’s departure from the churches at Galatia, some Jews began to corrupt the gospel message of “Christ alone!” These Jews were teaching “Christ plus the law.” In order to be spiritual, you needed to be circumcised and eat kosher and observe Jewish holidays, etc. Paul in return tells these corrupting Jews that he wished for their castration. (“cut themselves off” is a polite rendition of the Greek)

Why was Paul so angry? In Christ, we have been set free from the legal requirement of the law. This is not a call for anarchy or antinomianism, nor is this a license to sin. It is call to confidence, realizing that God’s pleasure in us is due to Christ’s work on our behalf on the cross and in our lives—not in our efforts and feeble attempts to win God’s pleasure. In Christ we are free—free from the bondage of our sin nature and free from the obligation of the Law. We live by faith now. Therefore, we don’t need to fret over the every trivial decision we make.

When we fret about nothings, we place ourselves in a bondage that enslaves our conscious to legalism. In Gal 2:20-21, Paul status, “(20) I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ live in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (21) I do set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, the Christ died in vain.” Paul knew that the work that pleases God is the work that Christ accomplishes through us when we trust Him in faith. Verse 21 not only talks about our position of righteousness in Christ Jesus, but also the righteousness of the works of our hands. In Christ, we stand justified in the eyes of God because He has declared us righteous, and that decree of righteousness on our behalf rests in the atoning work of Christ. However, only in Christ will any good work performed by my hands be pleasing to the Father. No set of laws or regulations or rituals will make my works acceptable.

Fretting over the trivial issues is an expression of doubt. When a man worries about the color of his shirt, he trusts not in the merit of Christ’s work—but rather his own deeds. However, if there is any way other than Christ to stand righteously or to do righteously in God’s sight, then Christ wasted his time dying on the cross. It is offensive to the cross to make mountains out of molehills—to worry frivolously over the smallest of decisions.

Tommorrow, Part 4 of 4. Remembering the Sovereignty of God in both the small and big choices.