The Good News in Advance

Posted on October 14, 2020 by salooper57

This message on Galatians 3:8/Genesis 12:1-3 can also be found on YouTube.

It begins at 22:35 and lasts about 28 minutes.

We are in the second week of a series on the gospel titled, …Finally, Some Good News. This week and next, we will explore the biblical context of the gospel. We need context. Truths without context warp into half-truths and untruths. Doctrine without context becomes heresy. Content without context brings confusion.

Let me give you an example. A man was driving along a narrow country road with his German Shepherd in the back seat and his Sheltie in the front. A pickup came speeding around a curve, crossed the yellow line, and forced the man and his dogs into the ditch.

There were injuries and the car was totaled, so the man sued the driver of the pickup. While he was on the stand, the counsel for the defense said to him: “I want you to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the following question: Did you or did you not say at the time of the accident that you were ‘perfectly fine’”?

The man said, “Well, I was driving with my dogs when … ” but the lawyer interrupted him. “Just answer the question ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Did you or did you not say you were ‘perfectly fine’ at the time of the accident?”

“Well, I was driving with my dogs … ” The defense attorney stopped him again. “Your honor,” he said to the judge, “this witness is evading the question. Would you please insist that he answer?” The judge said, “Well, he obviously wants to tell us something. Let him speak.”

So the man said, “Well, I was driving with my dogs when this truck came around the curve, crossed the yellow line, and forced me off the road and into the ditch and the car rolled over. The driver stopped to help and saw my German Shepherd had been thrown from the car and was badly injured. He went to his truck, got a rifle, came back, and put her out of her misery. Then he saw my Sheltie had a broken neck, so he dispatched him too. Then, still holding the gun, he asked me if I was okay. And I said… ‘I’m perfectly fine.’

Context is important. If we don’t get the biblical context for great words like “gospel,” we will invent our own, our ideas will be skewed and our actions will be disproportionate to the truth.

Let me show you how knowing the context helps. I am going to read a statement without giving you any context for it. See if it makes sense to you.

A seashore is a better place than the street because you need lots of room. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill, but it is easy to learn. If there are no snags it can be very peaceful. But if it breaks loose, you won’t get another chance.

Now let me give you a three-word interpretive key that will provide us the context we need. The words are: with a kite. Now with that for context, see if that same paragraph doesn’t make sense.

A seashore is a better place than the street because you need lots of room. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times. It takes some skill, but it is easy to learn. If there are no snags it can be very peaceful. But if it breaks loose, you won’t get another chance.[1]

See what a different context makes? Where can we find context for the meaning of the gospel? The place to start is the Old Testament. Christians sometimes speak disparagingly of the Old Testament. “Well, that’s in the Old Testament,” they say, as if the Old Testament doesn’t matter. But to think that we don’t need the Old Testament because we have the New is like thinking we don’t need the support caissons when the bridge is finished or the roadbed once the asphalt is laid. The New Testament rests on the old and depends on it for its meaning.

The first place to go for context regarding the gospel is Genesis 12. Why there? Because that is where the Apostle Paul went. How do we know that? Because he says so. In Galatians 3:8, Paul says that Genesis 12 proclaims the gospel in advance: “The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: ‘All nations will be blessed through you.’”

“Announced the gospel in advance.” Genesis 12 is a pre-announcement, an early release of the gospel. It provides helpful context. So, let’s find out what is happening in Genesis 12.

To do that, we need to take a whirlwind tour of the first eleven chapters of Genesis. In chapters 1 and 2 the Artist God creates the universe. It is a masterpiece, stunningly good, down to the last detail. At the center of his glorious creation is humanity, which was designed to grow and become vastly more than it was at creation. This might seem a risky innovation –even a design flaw – because it gave finite creatures a brush and let them contribute to God’s creation.

And, sure enough, in chapter 3, the canvass falls off the easel: The creatures toss out the Creator’s plan and introduce their own. This marks the beginning of alienation between God and people and between people and people. Fear enters human experience for the first time. Pain and suffering follow on its heels.

That brings us to chapters 4-11 which show us, in one illustration after another, how humanity is defacing God’s creation. It all culminates at the Tower of Babel, with an attempt to reinvent humanity apart from God. None of us has ever known the perfect creation described in Genesis 1 and 2, but we are all familiar with the alienation, fear, and confusion of chapters 4-11.

Those chapters overflow with bad news. In Genesis 6:5 we read, “Every inclination of the human heart was only evil all the time” while (in 6:6) God’s own heart was full of pain over the damage done to his masterpiece and the devolution of his beloved humans.

To recap: Genesis 1 and 2 are brimming with good news. God’s creation is good at every turn (1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, and 31). Everything is good.

But all that changes in chapter 3. Chapters 4-11 are then filled with bad news. People are displaced from God and alienated from each other. Fear and fault-finding have burst on the scene, and violence follows (Genesis 6:11). Chapter by chapter, the situation grows more ominous: there is jealousy, anger, murder, vengeance, corruption, drunkenness, and sexual exploitation.[2] Chapter 11 caps it all off with an attempt to substitute human governance for God’s. That continues to this day.

Yet into this setting of fear, fault-finding, violence, corruption – which is our setting – God speaks good news. He issues an early release of the gospel. Let’s read Genesis 12:1-3.

The LORD had said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” 

The future of God’s masterpiece was thrown into doubt in Genesis 3 and defaced in chapters 4-11. But in chapter 12, God counters the bad news with good news. The calling of Abraham is stage one in God’s response to the disfigurement of humanity, the conflict between nations, and the estrangement between God and people.

The good news comes from the Lord (verse 1), who is both its source and its content. On seven occasions, the Bible refers to the gospel as “the good news of God.” The gospel is good news from God that is good news about God. The God we find in the Bible, expressed perfectly in Jesus Christ, is astoundingly good news.

We are seeking biblical context for the gospel. I have often heard people contextualize the gospel by setting it in a frame of bad news – and there is plenty of it, as chapters 3-11 attest. God, however, gives good news before and after the bad news. He sandwiches the bad news between the good news of a magnificent creation (chapters 1 and 2) and the good news of a rescue mission (chapter 12).

In chapter 3, the bad news is summed up in the word curse. Adam’s rebellion has brought a curse on the earth and its inhabitants, a curse that is with us to this day. Work, which had been a joy, became a drudgery. Relations between the sexes, which began with delight, were beset by fear (fallen humanity’s principal emotion) and by attempts to dominate. The curse even affected the earth itself and rendered it less fertile.

But if the bad news is epitomized by the curse of chapter 3, the good news is summed up in the blessing of Genesis 12. The words “bless” and “blessing” occur 5 times in just three verses. This is welcome and unexpected news after the nightmare of the previous chapters.

In the beginning (chapters 1 and 2), God bathed the earth in blessing.[3] In chapter 3, earth fell under the curse, which dominated human relations (witness chapters 4-11). But in chapter 12, the good God begins undoing the curse and announcing blessing.

But what does that mean? What does God’s blessing entail? The word “blessing,” like the word “gospel,” is stretched so thin that it is too flimsy to hold much meaning. So what does God mean by blessing?

If we go back to Scripture for context (as careful Bible students should), we will find encouraging things. God’s initial blessing was directed to the animals and it came with the instruction to be fruitful and multiply. He also blessed humans with fruitfulness and multiplication. Then, on the seventh day, he blessed the earth and her creatures with Sabbath rest and holiness. There is an inherent rhythm to God’s blessing of productivity and peace, of accomplishment and rest.

In Genesis, blessing conveys abundance, multiplication, increase, and flourishing. Blessing enables creation (both human and non-human) to prosper. That was God’s original intention for creation (Genesis 1) and, in spite of human failure (Genesis 3-11), it is still his intention (Genesis 12). That is the good news of the good God.

But how will creation be blessed? How can it possibly flourish in its ongoing rebellion against God? How will God respond? Will he destroy humanity and start over? He came close to doing that in Genesis 6. But no, he instead chooses to renew humanity from the inside. He selects a person, which is God’s modus operandi throughout history, and through that person channels the blessing that can undo the curse.

That person was Abram, also known as Abraham. God’s plan was to bless him – that is, make him flourish, multiply, increase, and experience abundance – so that, through him, he might bless all the peoples on earth. God would (verse 2) make Abraham a great nation, bless him, and make his name great …

The Hebrew of verse 2 (as I understand it) does not say, “and you will be a blessing,” as though this were a promise. Instead, God tells Abraham to be a blessing. It is a command – the same command he gives to Abraham’s children today, to us who belong to Jesus. “Be a blessing. Be a blessing to your neighbor. Be a blessing to the elderly. Be a blessing to the foreigner. Be a blessing to children. Be a blessing to your family.” The God of blessing instructed Abraham to be a blessing and we, as Abraham’s children, are called to do the same. God does not, as Warren Wiersbe pointed out, bless us to make us happy. He blesses us to make us a blessing.

Can you imagine the impact we would have if we fulfilled this calling? What if the boss knew us to be someone who brings fruitfulness and abundance – blessing – into the workplace? What if our neighbor turned to us because he knew we were a source of blessing? What if the schools sought us out to help them prosper? What a difference we would make in our community.

The blessing continues in verse 3. “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

“All peoples on earth” – that’s the phrase Paul describes as “the gospel in advance.” That God is planning to bless all peoples on earth is great good news. African peoples. Asian peoples. Indigenous American peoples. Australian peoples. Black peoples. White peoples. Brown peoples. Arab peoples. Jewish peoples. Berbers and Tuaregs. Hans and Malays. Kazakhs and Brahmins. Rohingyas and Palestinians. All people.

As if to drive the point home, the promise is stated five times in Genesis: 12:3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; 28:14. It looks like God will bless anyone who is willing to be blessed. The blessing is out there, waiting for them. The way to enter the sphere of blessing is through what Paul calls “the obedience of faith.”

Obedience is not the way to earn the blessing – there is no way to earn the blessing. How can you earn something that has already been given? No, obedience is not the way to earn God’s blessing but the way to live within it. This is not slavish obedience motivated by fear but grateful obedience motivated by faith – faith in Jesus.

In Genesis 18:19, God lets us in on a secret. He tells us why he chose Abraham. (This is Christopher Wright’s literal translation): “that he [Abraham] should instruct his children and his household after him that they should keep the way of the Lord, by doing righteousness and justice, for the purpose that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what was spoken to him,”[4] which was, of course, the blessing of all the peoples on earth through him. God chose Abraham because from him would descend a people that would keep his way. Then, from his descendants, God would bring someone to save the world. He would bring Abraham’s seed. He would bring the messiah.

The blessing of God for the world comes through the son of God and son of Man: Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, the curse is being taken away (Galatians 3:13). Through Jesus, God’s initial creation purpose is reestablished, blessing reintroduced, and salvation accomplished. All this – the coming of God’s son and Abraham’s seed, his perfect submission, his sacrificial death, his glorious resurrection – was already in God’s mind when he called Abraham. For evidence of that, read Genesis 22.

Remember that God’s M.O. is to choose a person and through that person to extend his blessing. God wants to extend his blessing through you to family, friends, neighbors – even enemies. The people who best channel God’s blessing are those who, like Abraham, live “the obedience of faith.” Through them, God’s Son brings his blessing to the world.

Blessing conveys abundance, fruitfulness, increase, and rest. It expresses God’s love and intention. It comes in the form of actions, attitudes and, sometimes, words.

Bill White was kneeling in prayer in the front room of his house at 6:30 in the morning. He’d just confessed his sins and was asking God for a blessing. (On that particular day, he says, he really needed to feel God’s love.)

As he prayed, he heard his little boy Timothy, who was 22 months old at the time, come into the room. Timothy often got up while his dad was praying, but he was always quiet until his dad finished. But on this morning, he came straight over to his dad, put his little hand on dad’s clasped hands, and said, “Hi, special one. Hi, special one. Hi, special one.”

He’d never called him that before. On that day he repeated it six times. As he kept calling his dad “special one,” it occurred to Bill that God was giving him the blessing he asked for through his son.

He wants to give blessing through us as well. Sometimes that blessing will take the form of words, assuring people of God’s love. Sometimes it will take the form of help, of money, of mercy, or forgiveness. But whatever outward form the blessing takes, its inner substance will always be the same: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the seed of Abraham, the savior of humanity, the embodiment of good news for all the peoples of the world.

Go! Be people of the good news!

[1] Adapted from Christopher West, Fill These Hearts (Image, 2012), pp. 99-101

[2] Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God’s People, p. 65

[3] Wright

[4] Translation by Christopher Wright

Posted in Bible, Christianity, Sermons | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Will God Answer Your Prayers This November?

Posted on October 10, 2020 by salooper57
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Tens of millions of people are praying that the Biden/Harris ticket wins the presidential election. Tens of millions of people are praying that the Trump/Pence ticket wins. That means that whoever wins in November, tens of millions of people will be disappointed.

The fact that millions of people can pray for mutually exclusive outcomes is a problem, if not for God, at least for theologians. But it is also a problem for the people doing the praying. They passionately desire a particular result. They genuinely believe their wellbeing, and the wellbeing of others – the nation, even the world – hangs on a positive answer to their request.

Yet tens of millions of people will not receive a positive answer to their request. What are they to think? That God has abandoned them? That God does not care; that he is, as the ancient Greeks believed, apathetic about human needs?

Many of us have prayed desperately for something – in my case, healing for a family member – only to be disappointed. What is a person to think then, when the job that was absolutely perfect (or at least urgently needed) falls through or when a son or daughter sinks deeper into self-destructive behaviors?

This is sometimes referred to as the “problem of unanswered prayer,” but I’ve noticed that unanswered prayer is a much bigger problem on some occasions than on others. If my prayer for nice weather for the church picnic goes unanswered, I can say, “Oh, well, the farmers needed the rain more than we needed the sun.” But if my prayer for my child’s survival goes unanswered, I will not say, “Oh, well…”

The people who wrote the Bible were aware of the problem of unanswered prayer. They complained about it just like we do, if not more vehemently. Psalm 89 provides a good example. After rehearsing God’s goodness, the psalmist laments his apparent absence: How long, LORD? Will you hide yourself forever?” Then, almost pathetically, he adds: “Lord, where is your former great love?”

Not only did the biblical writers complain about unanswered prayer, they questioned it, wrestled with it. How was it possible, they wondered, that God does not act? The lack of divine response made no sense. They were confused.

“Confused” is a fitting description of the great John the Baptist, as he waited, seemingly forgotten, in a prison cell. Not only did he not understand why God did nothing about his own circumstances, he began to doubt his previous convictions. Doubt can be a painful byproduct of unanswered prayer.

The apostle Paul was also familiar with unanswered prayer. He was deeply troubled by what he called a “thorn in the flesh.” The nature of this thorn is uncertain. Many scholars believe it to have been a physical disability, perhaps a condition that affected his vision. He prayed repeatedly for healing, but to no avail. When he finally received an answer, it was an unmistakable no.

Even Jesus experienced unanswered prayer. “He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death” and, though “he was heard,” he was not spared. If these great people experienced unanswered prayer, perhaps we should not be surprised if our prayers are not always answered as we wish.

God, the Bible teaches, is actively pursuing his own goals, not slavishly serving ours. He has, to put it crudely, bigger fish to fry than our general election results. Free to work outside our temporal limitations, he is confidently and fearlessly pursuing his own goals which, thankfully, include human blessing and plenitude.

They also include the flourishing of the person whose prayer seems to go unanswered. Oddly enough, unanswered prayer can benefit the faithful. Their suffering teaches them to listen for God and obey him. Their endurance shapes them into people of compassion and courage and makes them a source of benefit to others. People who pray for a specific result in the upcoming election may be disappointed but they will not be abandoned or forgotten. God will remember and bless them as he pursues an even better future than they – or Donald Trump or Joe Biden – can imagine.

(First published by Gatehouse Media.)

Posted in In the News, Prayer, Worldview and Culture | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Fake News

Posted on October 8, 2020 by salooper57

(You can also listen – or watch – Fake News here. The sermon begins at 22:26 and runs approximately 22 minutes.)

Many of us know that the Greek word translated “gospel” means “good news,” but in what sense is it good? In what sense is it news? And is it news we can trust? In our day, that is a pressing concern.

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries people chose the term “post-truth” as their “word of the year.” Questions about truth and even doubts about there being such a thing pervade society. A number of things have brought us to this place, not least of which is the ubiquitous presence in our lives of social and news media.

Our days are saturated with information, whether about people we know on Facebook or about the president of the United States on the evening news. Some of this news (and in certain settings, much of it) is either fake or what I call “enhanced” news. Fake news reports something that is not true and has not happened as though it is true and has happened. Enhanced news presents something that has happened but does so in a way that is intended to move the reader or listener in a certain direction.

When I am in the car, I frequently listen to classical music, which is presented on a platform that includes hourly news updates. The corporation behind that news prides itself on its fair and accurate reporting. But for a couple of years now, I have noticed the extensive use of emotionally ladened words that at best reflect the new staffs’ biases and at worst expose a calculated attempt to shape listener’s views and influence their actions. That is enhanced news.

Can we trust what we hear? Did you know that many of the online sites you visit employ tools to covertly influence your thinking? Some are relatively straightforward (paying people to submit likes or to become followers), while others are more sophisticated, like stuffing online polls, forcing site owners to take down stories, crashing entire sites, and more.

A study from Carnegie Mellon found that something like 45% of tweets on the coronavirus originated from bots – automated computer programs – instead of people. Evidence points to China’s and Russia’s involvement. Furthermore, 80% of the most retweeted posts on Twitter came from bots. The “likes” that boost a post and give it visibility often come from bots created by people who are trying to game the system.

In this environment, who can we trust? I say, “In this environment,” but fake and enhanced news is not news; there is nothing new about it. Fake news has been a thing throughout our lives. What’s more, it was a thing in our great grandparents’ lives and a thing in the lives of the apostles and prophets. Fake news has been around forever. It’s just the form it takes that is new.

The difference between real news and fake (or enhanced) news is that someone tells real news because something has happened. Someone tells fake news because they want something to happen. Keep that difference in mind for a few minutes.

We are starting a series today on the gospel: what it is and what it means. In the weeks to come we will look at the context of the gospel, the content of the gospel, and the consequences of the gospel. What do we do with the gospel? What does it do with us?

I had a friend who loved to use the word “gospel.” The word would come up in conversation a dizzying number of times and I would sometimes get a little lost. It seemed like “the gospel” covered an awful lot of territory. This thing was gospel. That thing was gospel. It seemed like everything was gospel—but if something wasn’t gospel, it wasn’t good.

That is not how the Bible uses the word “gospel.” By trying to make the word mean more than it does, we only succeed in making it mean less. Many good things are not gospel.

Let me give you an example.[1] In First Corinthians 15, Paul summarizes the gospel in five bullet points. (We’ll look at his summary – and it is a summary; it isn’t meant to be comprehensive – in a couple of weeks.) That summary takes only four or five of the letter’s 453 verses. 1 Corinthians also addresses church unity, which is extremely important and has a bearing on the gospel but is not gospel. He takes on marriage. Again, important stuff that has gospel implications, but it is not gospel. He talks about meat sacrificed to idols, the Lord’s Supper, and spiritual gifts, all of which is inspired by God’s Spirit and important for our lives but not all of which is gospel.

Sometimes people will say a person is a “gospel preacher,” when all they really mean is that he invites people to trust in Jesus. Or they say a particular congregation is a “gospel church,” when they only mean they have high regard for the Bible. But that is not what “gospel” means – certainly not what Jesus meant by it, nor Paul, nor any of the apostles.

Why go on about this? Isn’t this just an in-house quarrel over words? What difference does it make to any of us in real life?

A big difference. The gospel, when we really understand it, is life-transforming, mission-initiating, and endurance-inspiring. The gospel is to the Bible what the core is to an apple. It is to the church what the constitution is to the country. The gospel is not fake news; not enhanced news; it is remarkably good news.

That brings us to something we must get straight if we are to benefit from this series. The gospel is news about something that has happened. One scholar suggests translating the word as “newsflash.” Someone else thought “breaking news” might be better. Both have their problems but they do capture something fundamental (and fundamentally important) about the word: it conveys the idea that something has happened.

So when Paul writes in Romans 1:16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile,” he means by gospel the news report of something that has happened. When he writes to Timothy, “This is my gospel,” he is talking about the news report he had broadcast around the Mediterranean regarding something that had taken place.

Now the Apostle Paul wasn’t the only person using the word “gospel” in the first century. Jesus used it before him. John the Baptist used it even earlier. When we hear that Jesus, John the Baptist, and the Apostle Paul all used the word, we are liable to conclude that “gospel” is a religious word, but that would be a mistake. It may be a religious word now, but there was nothing religious about it then. The word simply referred to something that had happened or was happening, particularly – and this is important – something that was welcome and good. “Gospel” refers to an announcement of “good news.”

In the first century, the word “gospel” got a lot of use. There were gospels about government projects, military victories, weddings, births—even about the flash sale on anchovies down at the market. (I’m not kidding about that.)[2] They didn’t use phrases like “news release” or “breaking news.” They used the term gospel.

Just a few years before Jesus was born, the proconsul Paullus Fabius Maximus recommended the Roman calendar be retooled so that the new year would begin on Caesar Augustus’ birthday, rather like we reckon time around the birth of Jesus. He sent a letter to the Provincial Assembly with that request, after which this news release was published. Note the use of the word “gospel”:

Augustus has made war to cease and has put everything in peaceful order; and whereas the birthday of our god [Augustus] signaled the beginning of the gospels for the world…Paullus Fabbius Maximus … has discovered a way to honor Augustus that was hitherto unknown among the Greeks, namely to reckon time from the date of his birth.[3]

“The birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the gospels for the world.” How much that sounds like the first verse of the Gospel of Mark: “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” There were many gospel announcements made round the empire when Paul was working, some about Augustus and some about anchovies, some that were fake gospels (as in Galatians 1) and some that were enhanced gospels (as in 2 Corinthians 11).

Paul traveled the empire announcing his gospel, the good news about what had happened through Jesus Christ. We will explore what he said in the weeks to come, but for now I want us to get firmly in our minds the basic truth that the word “gospel” refers to something that has happened – something good.

When we are trying to get up the courage to tell a friend or family member the gospel, do we picture ourselves sharing good news or do we picture ourselves trying to get them to do something? If the latter, it may be a sign that we are not quite understanding the gospel. We have forgotten that the gospel is news about something that has happened in real life, in the real world, with real consequences.

Now you might be thinking, “Okay, okay. We get it. The gospel is about something that has happened or is happening. You can move on now.”

I know it may seem like I am belaboring the point. I don’t think I am. I am trying to firmly root in our minds the idea that “gospel” refers to something that has happened or is happening because many people use the word to refer to something else. They use it in a way that is inconsistent with the Bible and they don’t even know it. Instead of talking about something that has happened, they are talking about something that should happen or could happen.

Let me get specific. People repeatedly use the word “gospel” to refer to the invitation to accept Jesus so that you can go to heaven when you die. That’s the gospel. Jesus died for you so that you can go to heaven. In other words, the gospel is not seen as something that has happened but as advice a person might take or a cure he might swallow or a deal he might strike.

That last one is particularly troubling. When I was a young pastor in a denominational church, the district superintendent sent me off to a week-long conference on evangelism. (He knew I was an introvert and he wanted to give me some tools to use and maybe help me come out of my shell.) So I went off and learned how to sell Jesus. It was a spiritual The Art of the Deal seminar. I don’t say it was all bad – I learned some helpful things – but it changed the gospel from telling the news about something that had happened into selling a deal you can’t afford to miss. And it turned gospel messengers into salespeople.

Those natural born salesmen among us might be fine with that, might even relish the challenge, but we are not all salesman. I am certainly not. I once sold a boat to some people who couldn’t wait to buy it and, by the time I got done, I felt like I needed to pay them to take it off my hands.

After attending that spiritual Art of the Deal conference, I spent a couple of years knocking on every door in our neighborhood – probably 1200 homes – trying to sell Jesus to people. It was a joyless task which I thoroughly disliked. You know, a person ought to pray before knocking on a door when doing that kind of evangelism—and I did. I prayed, “O God, please don’t let anybody be at home.”

If we don’t share the gospel because something has happened (as is the case with real news) but because we want something to happen (which is the case with fake news), people will sense the difference.

C. S. Lewis described the gospel as “Something perfectly new in the history of the universe [that] had happened.”[4] He complained that the great difficulty was keeping before people the question of truth. “You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point.” The gospel is not an ethical system. It is not a set of religious practices that can be compared to Islam or Buddhism. The gospel is news about something that had happened.

That “Christ died for our sins” is part of the gospel. It is, in fact, the centerpiece of the gospel. But understand that it actually happened. God sent a person we know as Jesus into our world who died by order of the procurator Pontius Pilate. It happened. It is news. It is not advice. It is not a sales contract. This is news, in the same way that the President of the United States contracting the coronavirus is news. It is news as the Lakers winning Game 2 of the NBA finals is news.

If you tell someone that the Lakers won, you will not be giving them advice, though that news may change their behavior – especially if they recorded the game to watch later or if they were planning to bet on the Heat. Similarly, telling someone that Jesus died is not advice. It is news. Now it is news that makes a difference, that can change a person’s life, as we are going to see in this series. But if we think of the gospel as advice to give or a product to sell, we will not handle it the way the apostles did and we will not see the results the apostles saw.

The Apostle Paul crossed Asia and Europe, enduring scorn, mistreatment, and imprisonment because he believed something remarkably important had happened and people needed to know about it. The God who made the world and maintains a relationship with it entered the world through the person of Jesus. He sent him to save the world (John 3:17), but he was misunderstood, opposed, and killed.

God, however, refused to allow Jesus’s death to be the final word. He raised Jesus back to life, which had been the plan from the beginning. Jesus has now returned to heaven but is going to come back to earth and make things right. Things will not always be broken, painful, and sad. They will be right, good, and joyful. That is good news.

Now if we hear that news and believe it, we will want to know what to do about it. We will ask (as people in the Bible did), “What should we do?” Paul had a ready answer for that question, which he summarized as: repentance toward God and faith toward Jesus Christ. That is, rethink your life in the light of what God has done (repentance), entrust yourself to Jesus, and join him and his people (faith). But this only makes a difference if something really happened.

At Lockwood, we try to win people for Jesus. We don’t do this because we believe Christianity is the best religion out there. We don’t do this because we think it will change people’s lives for the better (though we do). We don’t do this because we believe the Christian moral code surpasses those of other faiths. We do it because we believe something has happened: The creator of the universe has sent his Christ to earth on a rescue mission. This happened at a point in earth’s history when Augustus Caesar was Emperor of the Roman Empire and Quirinius was governor of Syria. It happened when Pontius Pilate was procurator in Israel and Annas and Caiaphas were high priests In Jerusalem. It happened and it makes all the difference.

This is news worth telling. God cares, God has come, things have changed. In light of this, we should (in the words of Jesus) “repent [rethink our lives] and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15). It is news—news that ought to be spread.

[1] From Dickson, The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission.

[2] Dickson, p. 112

[3] Dickson, p. 113, taken from Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones 2:458

[4] Letter, May, 1944

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…finally, some Good News

Posted on October 7, 2020 by salooper57

We’re beginning a new series that examines what the biblical writers and the early church meant when it spoke of the gospel. We will look first to the Old Testament, to Genesis, where the gospel is “preached in advance,” according to St. Paul. Then we’ll head to Isaiah, who brought the word into our vocabulary. and on whom many New Testament writers depend.

Once we’ve done that, we will enter the New Testament to listen to John the Baptist and to Jesus as they announced the gospel in the Gospels (and if you’ve ever wondered about the connection between the gospel and the Gospels, we’ll consider that too). We’ll spend a couple of weeks in 1 Corinthians, then move on to Acts, and elsewhere. We are going on an exploration, one I hope will include delightful discoveries into one of the principal glories of the Bible.

The first sermon in the series, like all series introduction sermons, will be tricky. Tricky because we need to cover lots of ground, whereas I much prefer to camp out in one biblical passage. It will also be also tricky because that ground needs to be leveled and cleared of theological debris before a foundation for understanding can be laid.

Tomorrow we will post the first installment in the series …finally, some Good News. It is titled, Fake News.

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Forgiveness Acts as an Identity Marker

Posted on October 3, 2020 by salooper57

Christians are expected to live differently. This has been universally recognized but not universally practiced. When it has, what ought to be different has been hotly debated. The Amish, for example, are different in the simplicity of their dress and their use of technology. Their submission to their leaders differentiates them too. Further, like their Mennonite forebears, they are marked by a commitment to pacifism.

Most of those who follow Jesus are not as easily distinguished from their non-Christian friends and family. However, the difference, though not so readily marked, will inevitably manifest itself.

Some of the key markers that a person is truly following Jesus are generosity, truthfulness, and faithfulness. Add to that humility, regard for enemies, and a readiness to admit wrongdoing. These are not things that immediately catch the eye, but, over time, they cannot help but become apparent.

Photo by Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash

The characteristic that stands out most strikingly against the backdrop of today’s anger culture is the Christian’s willingness to forgive. Self-righteousness is spreading more rapidly than the coronavirus and causing inestimable harm. The self-righteous can boast about many things, but the one thing they cannot do is forgive.

The telltale sign of this occurred when the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston forgave the white supremacist who killed nine of their members, including their pastor. They did so in obedience to their Lord. Yet their forgiveness sparked almost as much outrage as Dylann Roof’s mass murder.

This kind of thing is everywhere evident in our culture. Americans cannot forgive the failings (almost universal at the time) of their founding fathers nor their current leaders’ adolescent faults. Recently, the Sierra Club disowned its own founder for views he held as a young man and almost certainly came to abandon. People cannot even forgive themselves since they refuse to acknowledge their own sins.

Yet Jesus taught his followers to forgive everyone, brothers and sisters, and even enemies. They forgive as they have been forgiven. They forgive, knowing that they otherwise close the door to their own forgiveness. In today’s climate, forgiveness stands out as clearly as the dark clothes and beard of an Amish man.

In 1925, G. K. Chesterton published a short story titled “The Chief Mourner of Marne” that cleverly portrays forgiveness as a characteristic Christian virtue. The plot goes like this: A good man is forced into a duel with a younger cousin – an accomplished athlete, artist, and actor – whom he has loved like a brother.

Everyone knows, including the duelists, that the one thing the younger cousin cannot do well is shoot, so why he chooses a pistol for the duel is a mystery. The older cousin reluctantly fires and the younger cousin falls. The older cousin rushes to his side, but death is unavoidable. Grief-stricken and burdened by guilt, he flees England to live abroad. Years later, he returns to his English estate but lives like a hermit in complete isolation.

His former friends try to make contact, but he refuses to see them. They insist his crime is understandable and forgivable. It makes no difference.

Then comes the twist. It was not the younger cousin, the actor, who died. He fell a split second before the shot was fired, waited for his cousin to come to his aid – as he knew he would – then killed him in cold blood. He then buried his cousin, assumed his identity, and fled the country.

When the ghastly truth is finally revealed, the old friends demand a hanging. They were quite ready to forgive a sin they considered excusable, but staunchly unwilling to forgive something they considered truly sinful. One character says, “You don’t expect us to … pardon a vile thing like this?”

In reply, Chesterton’s protagonist priest answers: “No, but we [Christians] have to …pardon it. Go on your primrose path pardoning all your favorite vices and being generous to your favorite crimes; and leave us … with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes.”

The point is clear. Christians must stand ready to forgive, though never excuse, sin. (Excusing sin is downright unchristian.) Forgiveness is what marks Jesus’s followers as different. It is their telltale sign.

(First published by Gatehouse Media.)

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Bride of Christ (Revelation 17-22)

Posted on September 30, 2020 by salooper57

(This is part-two of a look at the Church as the Bride of Christ. If you prefer to watch or listen to the sermon, click here. An approximately six-minute explanation of the apocalyptic genre begins at 19:52, while the sermon starts at 25:36 and lasts approximately 23 minutes.)

Today we’ll see something of the pre-wedding jitters the church experiences (chapter 18), we’ll glimpse the great wedding of the king and his bride (chapter 19), and we will see what their life is going to be like in the age to come (chapters 21-22).

First, the pre-wedding jitters. People normally experience pre-wedding jitters because they are conscious of the enormity of the life-long life change that is about to take place. But there can be other reasons for pre-wedding jitters.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

In 1942, young American men went off to war in record numbers – something like 4 million of them entered the armed services. Some of them proposed to their girlfriends on the eve of their departure to Europe or the South Pacific.

Girls made wedding plans, composed guest lists, and wrote out invitations, but they left the wedding date off because they didn’t know when it would be. Some got married when their fiancé came home on leave, but others had to wait until the war was over.

They had “war jitters.” So does the church. The marriage of Christ and his church will not take place until the war is over and the King has returned. Are you aware that a war is going on? It is the great war, the war that births, and will finally end, all wars. Revelation uses twin images to represent the combatants in this war – images of cities and of women.

Now, remember the genre. Revelation is more poetry than prose, more song than manual. In apocalyptic literature images sometimes overlap. They can flow into one another. That is especially true in Revelation 17-19, where two women are 2 cities that express one age-old reality.

Chapter 17 introduces us to the woman called the “the great prostitute.” These are verses 3-6:

I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. 4 The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. 5 The name written on her forehead was a mystery: Babylon the great, the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth. 6 I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of God’s holy people, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus.

Both the woman prostitute and the city Babylon image the same enemy of God’s people. To further complicate matters, Jews and Christians of the time often referred to Rome as “Babylon.” We find this in 2 Esdras, 2 Baruch, and the Sibylline Oracles but, more importantly, in 1 Peter, where “Babylon” is a code name for Rome.

And if that isn’t confusing enough, add apocalyptic symbolism to the mix. In 17:9, we read: “The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman [the prostitute] sits.” Rome was and is known as the City of Seven Hills.

So, on the one hand, we have the woman who is Babylon which is also Rome. But I said there were two women. What about the other one? The other woman (19:7) is the bride of the Lamb, the Church of Christ. She is also a city (21:3): “…the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.”

So, this is the Tale of Two Cities,[1] which is also the tale of two women, which is also the one story of the earth’s history. The two cities could not be any less alike. Babylon is (18:2) “a home for demons and a haunt for every evil spirit” while New Jerusalem is (21:3) “the dwelling place of God [and] men.” Babylon is self-indulgent. New Jerusalem is sacrificially compassionate. Babylon’s sins are piled up to heaven (18:5) but New Jerusalem is clothed in righteous deeds (19:8). Babylon draws its energy from hell while New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven.

So we have two women who are two cities that express one age-old reality. That reality existed before there were cities, when there was only a garden, when there was Eden. It has expressed itself in city after city: magnificent Pi-Ramesses, Egypt; brutal Ninevah, Assyria; beautiful Babylon; intellectual Athens; powerhouse Rome; Enlightenment Paris; Nazi Berlin; Marxist Moscow; and Maoist Beijing. They all have rejected God’s rule and oppressed his people. Age in and age out, in one city after another, this spirit has emerged. Please God that “pursuit-of-happiness America” (as Eugene Peterson once put it) doesn’t follow suit.[2]

Babylon is what takes God’s people away from him. It is seductive, luring people away from God to luxuries and distractions. It is also bloodthirsty, slaughtering the people of God, whenever they get in the way. When this letter was written, that spirit had broken out in Rome. Today, it is has emerged in China. Where will it rage tomorrow? It is ongoing but it is not endless. There will be a last battle.

The war will come to a head someday – perhaps in our day – and when it does, it will not go well with Babylon, or whatever its global expression is at the time. That is why, in 18:4, heaven cries, “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues.” The language is taken from Jeremiah and repeated by Paul in 2 Corinthians. The church of Jesus must not allow itself to be enmeshed in the lifestyle of Babylon. To do so is a betrayal of the king.[3] The time to choose a side is not when war has already broken out. The time is now.

Revelation 18:10 pictures how the age-old war ends: “Woe! Woe, O great city, O Babylon, city of power! In one hour your doom has come!” The long torture of the earth, the brutal mistreatment of her poor, the harassment, minimization, and persecution of God’s children will be over. The half-truths, the dirty dealings, the under the table bribes, the hubris of wealth, the misuse of power, will end. Unhealthy working conditions, starvation, lack of water, coercion, loss of dignity will be gone, replaced by peace, kindness, respect, and joy. The war will be over. The kingdom will come. The king will reign.

Not everyone will be happy about this. In fact, those who have succumbed to Babylon’s seductions will be shocked and grieved. The kings (18:9, 10), the national governments that have increased their power through an alliance with the Prostitute, will “weep and mourn” and “be terrified.” Without her seduction and distraction, their power over people will be broken.

The merchants, the economic drivers, the stock marketers, the Davos crowd, the one-percenters and their entourage of 10 and 20-percenters, will “weep and mourn and cry…” (18:15,16a). They “were the world’s great men” (18:23) who cast their magic spell – from places like Silicon Valley – to make themselves rich. But the war doesn’t go their way. They lose everything. They are broken.

Then there are the working people who earn their living by an economy they’ve inherited and on which they depend. These people are us. John points to the logistics guys of his time, the people who shipped goods. In our day, the job that employs the most people in the U. S. is truck driving, delivering the kinds of goods Revelation 18 describes. These people, too, are in shock. What are they going to do now?

But while these people are weeping, the people of God are whooping it up (18:20). “Rejoice saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you.”

It is important to understand this: The welfare of God’s people is not linked to an economic system. Their lives do not rise and fall with the numbers on Wall Street’s big board. They are in the hands of the big God, and he is strong to save. He has long been patient, not willing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9) but he will not bear with injustice, violence, hatred, and haughtiness forever. He will make an end.

He will make an end. That is powerfully clear in chapter 18, where in one short section (verses 14-23), the words “no more” appear six times. There will come a day when God says, “No more. It is enough.”

A student in an African seminary asked his professor what Jesus is going to say when he returns. He wanted to know because 1 Thessalonians 4:16 says: “For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a shout …” What, he wanted to know, will he shout? The professor thought for a moment, then said: “I think he’ll shout: “ENOUGH!” Enough deceit. Enough injustice. Enough hostility and coldness. Enough death. ENOUGH!”

He will say, “Enough,” and, before anyone knows what has happened, the world will change. Economies will collapse. Nations will crumble. The long night, with its nightmares and frights, will finally end. And that end will usher in the new beginning.

The jitters will be over, liberation will be accomplished, and the victory of the king will be complete. Heaven will yell “Booyah!” or “Hallelujah” (which is the biblical equivalent). With the war over, nothing stands in the way of the marriage of the King and his bride. This is Revelation 19:5-7:

Then a voice came from the throne, saying: “Praise our God, all you his servants, you who fear him, both small and great!” Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting: “Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.

This is not the event of the season; this is the event of time and eternity. Isaiah wrote about it this way:

“…the Lord will prepare a feast for all peoples, a banquet of aged wines – the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain, he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever! The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of his people from all the earth. In that day they will say, ‘Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation’” (Isaiah 25:6-9).

The weight we have carried throughout our lives – seldom aware of it but always weighed down by it, robbed of joy, sabotaged in our relationships, and deceived in our thoughts; the burden of sin – will be lifted from us, and our hearts will be buoyant as we cannot now imagine. The church will then be joined to her King, and a new life will begin, a life beyond imagination.

Revelation 21:1-6 sketches the outline of that life, which the rest of chapters 21 and 22 fill in.

I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “Behold: I am make all things new!”

It is a life of presence, where God is with us. (That is outlined in verse 3 and filled in from verses 10-21.) No more doubt, no more separation. No more fear.

It is a life of safety. How can we feel unsafe in the presence of our King? Verses 22-23 fill this in, as does 22:4.

It is a life of happiness. That is outlined in verses 3 and 4, where death has died, and mourning, crying, and pain are gone forever.

It is a life of purity. (Verse 25 fills this in.) The sins that have clung to us, that we have hated but held, renounced but obeyed, will be lifted from us forever. They will bother us no more.

It will be a life of fruitfulness. We will have good, creative, joyful, life-giving things to do. Our work will not destroy the earth but enrich it. Our work will not harm our neighbors but bless them. Our work will stretch us out but never wear us down.

It will be a life of rest that is not idle, of work that is not wearying, of surprises that are not unwelcome. No more boredom, no more fear, no more wishing the day to be over, or dreading the day to come.

If you say, “But this is too good to be true,” I will counter: It is not yet good enough to be true of the One who is faithful and true. He has more – and better – planned for us than we can conceive. For “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has the human mind imagined the things that God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

If you say we are unworthy, I can only respond: Of course! This is not about our worth but about our King and Savior Jesus Christ. When we look at ourselves, we will worry about this (and everything else). When we look at him, we will forget all about it.

Joni Eareckson Tada (a remarkable saint of our time), was paralyzed in a diving accident as a teen. When she was in her 30s, she fell in love and was engaged. But when the wedding finally arrived, she was filled with anxiety.

She says: “I felt awkward as my girlfriends strained to shift my paralyzed body into a cumbersome wedding gown. No amount of corseting and binding my body gave me a perfect shape. The dress just didn’t fit well. Then, as I was wheeling into the church, I glanced down and noticed that I’d accidentally run over the hem of my dress, leaving a greasy tire mark. My paralyzed hands couldn’t hold the bouquet of daisies that lay off-center on my lap. And my chair, though decorated for the wedding, was still a big, clunky gray machine with belts, gears, and ball bearings. I certainly didn’t feel like the picture-perfect bride in a bridal magazine.

“I inched my chair closer to the last pew to catch a glimpse of Ken in front. There he was, standing tall and stately in his formal attire. I saw him looking for me, craning his neck to look up the aisle. My face flushed, and I suddenly couldn’t wait to be with him. I had seen my beloved. The love in Ken’s face had washed away all my feelings of unworthiness. I was his pure and perfect bride.” [4]

This, I believe, will be the Church’s experience too. Seeing our Lord (the beatific vision) will change us and everything else. We can never make ourselves worthy but we can make ourselves ready. How do we do that? Revelation 21:7: “…the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready.” How? Verse 8: “‘Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.’ (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.)”

The church pretties herself, prepares herself for her wedding day by doing the righteous acts God has given her to do (Ephesians 2:10). Her deeds cannot make her worthy but they can make her beautiful. The church, and not just the individuals in it, is directed by our Lord, empowered by his Spirit, and readied for our big day by the good deeds we do, deeds that are contrary to the self-indulgent spirit of the age, with its Babylon mentality. We are not like everybody else. We are different.

We have seen the Church as temple in which people meet God, as royal priesthood bringing God to people and people to him, as family, as Body through which Christ acts, as Kingdom of God colony on earth, and today as Christ’s forever bride. There is nothing like the church, no substitute for it, no alternative to it.

Yes, the church is partially paralyzed. It doesn’t wear its good deeds well. It is awkward and unsightly. But the King has chosen the Church and he will heal it. To remain outside of it is incalculable loss. Love the Church – Christ does. Be a part of the Church. Help her ready herself for her big day.

[1] Larry Helyer

[2] Eugene H. Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Eerdmans, 2005), p. 288.

[3] Helyer, p. 247.

[4] This We Believe: The Good News of Jesus Christ for the World, (Zondervan) p. 222

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Why Is the Book Revelation so Hard to Understand? (Guest post by Kevin Looper)

Posted on September 29, 2020 by salooper57

This past week, I (Shayne) completed a series on The Church in Images – the biblical images used to represent the Church. We concluded with the image of the Church as Bride from The Book of Revelation (a sermon I will post tomorrow). I asked my son Kevin, who is both a great youth pastor and a capable Bible scholar, to help us understand how to approach the Revelation. What follows is what he share with Lockwood Community Church.

Earlier this year, one of our students read the NT all the way through for the first time…that is, he read it all the way until the middle of Revelation and gave up.  It was too hard to comprehend. So what do we need to know about Revelation in order to hear God speak to us through the book today?

There are three main reasons why people do not understand The Book of Revelation:

  1. The genre isn’t one that we are used to. We know how to read biographies and fairy tales, and journalism. Revelation, however, belongs to a class of literature that was popular before and slightly after John’s time which we don’t use anymore.  It is called “Apocalyptic Literature”.  Apocalyptic does not mean “end of days” “zombie apocalypse” “earth destruction.”  The word is Greek and means “revelation” (hence the title of the book).  The point of the literature is to reveal something.  Authors who used this genre wrote to express the spiritual realities that were happening behind physical events.  Ancient people thought that the events of earth were reflections of what was happening in heaven.  If a battle was happening between two armies on earth, it was a reflection of the same battle that was simultaneously going on amongst spiritual forces in heaven. The outcome was decided in heaven and was only reflected on earth. 

            Revelation is a book where John “opens up” heaven and shows us the battle taking place there between God and the forces of evil in order to reveal to us what was happening in his time and, I believe, what will happen in the future.  On earth the church may be persecuted and killed and hurting because Satan is out to destroy it, but in heaven God, as the book of Revelation assures us, is on his throne and set to bring judgment against evil.

2. Another reason why it is difficult to understand the book of Revelation is that almost everything in the book has its origin in the OT. It is filled with language, ideas, and images from the Old Testament in almost every sentence.  The beasts, the locusts, the whore of Babylon, the lampstands, keys, weird numbers, and everything else come from the OT and the meaning of the book of Revelation has its source in the OT.  In fact, I think that is what is being “revealed.”  But we do not know the Old Testament as well as John’s first readers. One of the things Apocalyptic literature does is to say, effectively: “Look, God has had this all planned from the beginning, and you can see the plan in the OT.  Your suffering and turmoil are a part of it. He has not been defeated. He is still in control.”

3. We don’t understand the point of the book.  The point of the book is NOT to give some kind of twisted fortune telling.  I do think that there is prophecy in Revelation that is yet to be fulfilled. But it is not a code that you have to crack to find out what country will attack what other country and when the end of the world will be. The point of Revelation is to give the church hope in the midst of persecution and troubles right

Why was Revelation written? To encourage the church to remain faithful to God and endure suffering, because everything God had planned and promised in the Old Testament was being brought to fulfillment through Christ.

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Doormat Faith: There Is Something Better

Posted on September 26, 2020 by salooper57

Some people have a “doormat faith.” I found the term in John Dickson’s book, “The Best Kept Secret of Christian Mission.” Dickson is not referring to a faith that makes people into a doormat, but the kind of faith that brings people to the door but does not see them inside.

To avoid argument, I willingly acknowledge that some people of faith act like doormats and let people walk over them. Critics have gone further and argued that some people let others walk over them because of their faith, because pastors and Sunday School teachers have taught them that acting like a doormat is pious and godly. I will not deny this has happened. I will strenuously deny this is the result of faith.

Take the person who has suffered spousal abuse on and off for years. She has been instructed by her pastor that her marriage vows are sacred. She has been taught to submit to her husband. In a case like this, is her faith not responsible for her “doormat” status in the marriage?

I would argue it is not. It is a misunderstanding of faith, perpetuated by misinformed church leaders, that has enabled the abuse. This is not faith at work, but ignorance. Rather than enabling the abuse, the church ought to be the first to confront the abuser and empower the abused.

It is true that the church teaches submission, including in marriage. It is not true that this teaching is limited to marriage or directed only to women. Submission is a characteristic trait of all Jesus’s followers, both men and women. They submit to God, first of all, but also to duly appointed government leaders. They submit to church leaders, to spouses, and to each other.

It would be a serious mistake, however, to think that submission makes them a doormat. Submission makes them supportive and encouraging, not weak and exploited. Submission does not remove their responsibility to judge for themselves what is right and to stand against what is wrong.

When people who have faith act like doormats, it is not because of their faith but in spite of it. Faith makes people courageous, not cowardly. It makes them firm, not feeble.

By “doormat faith” I (following Dickson) do not mean faith that turns people into doormats but faith that gets people to the doormat and leaves them there. They remain outside of the kind of life that apprenticeship to Jesus makes possible.

Doormat faith is not the obedience-producing, righteousness-accompanying, love-expressing faith about which St. Paul so frequently wrote. Doormat faith brings no assurance. It falls short of being transformational.

This is not to say that doormat faith is a bad thing. It is certainly no substitute for the faith that connects a person to God, but it can be a precursor to it. Its strength is that it leads people to the doorstep of a richly satisfying life with God. Its weakness is that it cannot bring people through the door. It is good, but it is not enough.

Doormat faith is the kind that professes belief in God but fails to provide a connection to him. It says, “I believe Jesus died for my sins,” but does not go on to confess Jesus as Lord and leader of life.

As a long-time pastor, I have met many people with doormat faith. I am thankful for them, yet I know there is so much more for them to experience now and forever. If they are content to say, “I believe in God,” they are too easily contented. Such faith is meant to be the beginning of a journey, not its end.

How sad when people arrive at the doorstep but fail to go in. Their faith does not move them to action. They don’t become part of a life-enhancing community of Jesus’s followers. They don’t forgive – or even think they should. They don’t experience peace. Yet the door is open.

Sometimes these folks – I have met some – cross the threshold at the end of their lives and enter into a genuine connection with God. It is good that their doormat faith has led them to something better but it is heartbreaking to see them wait so long and miss so much.

(First published by Gatehouse Media.)

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The Church: The Bride of Christ (pt. 1)

Posted on September 23, 2020 by salooper57

(You can watch and listen to the sermon The Bride of Christ (pt. 1) here. It begins at 23:34.)

We are winding up our series on the church this week and next. During the past months, we have been pouring over biblical images that express what the church is about. That has been rich (for me, at least) but it has also been limiting. There is much to discover about the church that we have not explored, much that is spelled out in statement and command rather than portrayed in image. But we will save that for another day.

The images of the Church we have looked at include: temple and priesthood; family; new humanity; and Body of Christ. Last week we explored the image of the church as a Kingdom of God colony. This week and next week, we conclude the series with the image of the Church as the Bride of Christ.

Today, we will be surveying biblical texts from Old and New Testaments, which means there will be more teaching than preaching. Step one will be to discover Old Testament sources, where the images are like film before it has been developed, what photographers call “negatives.” Then step two will take us to the Gospels, where the images are brought into contact with Christ and are changed.

Then we will turn to the letters of Paul, where step three in the development process takes place. We’ll take the final step next week, when we go to the Book of The Revelation, where the hope-inspiring picture of the Bride of Christ is framed. We start, however, in the Old Testament with the originals.

Before we start developing the image, though, there is a little straightening up to do. There are songs, poems, and hymns, as well as liturgies, that speak as if individuals are the Bride of Christ. That kind of talk began somewhere around the 14th century among Christian mystics. Union with Christ was romanticized. Individuals, both women and men, pictured themselves as brides of Christ.

In the Catholic church, a ritual emerged in which women who had taken orders – nuns – were ritually married to Christ. The catechism says, “Virgins who … are consecrated to God by the diocesan bishop according to the approved liturgical rite are betrothed mystically to Christ…”

There is much here I do not understand and do not intend to criticize. There is something beautiful in the picture of a person being mystically betrothed to Christ but it is not a biblical picture. It was not developed in the Bible but in the medieval Church. The biblical picture is not of an individual, not even a nun, being the bride of Christ. Rather, it is the Church that is Christ’s betrothed and will become, on some glorious future day, his bride.

With that, let’s turn to the Bible. Doctrines don’t come out of nowhere. St. Paul and St. John did not conjure up the image of the Bride of Christ out of thin air. They were men who knew the Old Testament, memorized large parts of it, and thought about its message a lot. As they thought about those biblical passages, the Holy Spirit gave them the image of the Church as a bride—the Messiah’s bride, the bride of Christ.

One of the earliest sources for this image is Psalm 45, which is a wedding song, composed for an ancient king of Israel. It pictures the king, in all his glory, on the day of his wedding. Then it turns to the royal bride. She has the bridegroom’s full attention: he is enthralled by her beauty. The nations pay her tribute. Her future is brighter than her past.

The author of Hebrews quotes word for word from this Psalm[1] and – here’s the thing – applies what it says about the king to Jesus. He identifies Jesus as the Psalm 45 bridegroom. But who is the bride? He doesn’t say. He doesn’t go there.

When we move out of the Psalms, we come to the ancient prophet Hosea, another early source for the Bride of Christ image. In Hosea, God speaks of wooing Israel as if it was a woman. He tells her what life will be like for her when she is his wife. He then says, “in that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband’” (see Hosea 2:14-23). So, here we have an early picture of the covenant people as a bride and God himself as the groom.

That brings us to Jeremiah, who prophesied during the darkest time of Judah’s history. Her enemies were powerful. Her kings were corrupt. Idolatry was everywhere. In chapter 2, Jeremiah reminds the nation that they once loved God and were faithful to him. He pictures God saying to them: “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness…” (Jeremiah 2:2). But Jeremiah goes on to picture God’s people as having lost interest in him. They are like a wife who has feelings for other men. They have – this is Jeremiah’s word – “strayed.”

That idea is repeated again and again when the Old Testament takes up the image of wife or bride. The bride is not pure. She is flirting with other men. She has been unfaithful.

One of the clearest pictures of God’s bride comes in the exile prophet Ezekiel.[2] He pictures Israel as a young waif, dirty, not much to look at, pitiful. But God notices her, cares for her and, when she is old enough, enters into a covenant of marriage with her; he becomes engaged to her. He provides her with the best clothes and jewels and her transformation is amazing.

She was, for lack of a better word, a street kid: poor, filthy, and uneducated. He changed her life, made her wealthy, made her famous. But she became vain, more interested in her looks and what they could bring her than she was in her husband-to-be. As in the other pictures, she strayed. She was unfaithful.

These pictures are the source for the image of the Bride of Christ. They are bittersweet. The sweet is the unfailing love God has for his people, which is like a husband’s love for his bride. The bitter is the flaw in his people’s character that causes them to act unfaithfully toward God, like a wife who strays from her husband.

Yet the Old Testament writers were also hopeful. Hosea insists that a day is coming when the bride (or bride-to-be) will no longer stray. God will then say: “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD” (Hosea 2:19-20). Isaiah speaks of a day when God will rejoice over his people as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride. (Isaiah 62:5).

All that brings us to the New Testament and to two of the Apostle Paul’s letters. He takes up the Old Testament image of Bridegroom and Bride and applies it to Christ and his Church. And some of the same themes emerge.

But there is a step in the development process that comes between the Old Testament and Paul: the Gospels. Before Paul pictured Jesus as a bridegroom, John the Baptist did. During Jesus’s earthly ministry, he said: “I am not the Messiah but am sent ahead of him. The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.” John pictured Jesus as a bridegroom.

Jesus put his seal on the image by telling a story in which a bridegroom comes to take his bride to the wedding.[3] From the earliest time, the church understood that story to be about Jesus himself. 

Now, we’re ready to go to Paul’s letters, starting with 2 Corinthians 11. Paul says to the Corinthian Church: “I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.”

The Old Testament themes are there. The new covenant people are betrothed – “promised … to one husband, to Christ.” They are to be faithful to him. But Paul fears they will stray, their devotion to Christ will fade, and they will look to others for fulfillment. They are too easily swayed, too ready to accept the sweet talk of another.

That was a danger for the Church in the first century. Do you think it is a danger now? It is always a danger. It is what the prophets complained about and warned against in Old Testament times, what Paul complained about and warned against in New Testament times and, what we must guard against in our time.

The church must not let itself be led away from its sincere devotion to Christ. The temptation to stray is subtle. It often begins with an implied (and conditional) promise of importance, or power, or safety.  It is not exactly wrong – at least, it can be argued that it is not – but it is not quite right either. Mayor LaGuardia once described it as “a very reasonable request which you know you shouldn’t grant.”

The temptation appeals to our pride or plays on our fear. It warns of all the things that may be lost but hides the cost of keeping them. It makes us think that we can get control of our situation, but we will have to give ourselves to something other than Christ to do it.

Before we know it, our devotion has been transferred from Christ to someone or something else. We are more excited about it than we are about him. We promote it more eagerly than we promote him. If you asked us, we would, like the Corinthians in Paul’s day, say that our devotion to Christ is unchanged. But it has changed and we didn’t notice it – or didn’t want to. Something has taken his place in our lives.

There is a word for that: “idolatry.” It is spiritual unfaithfulness – just what Paul was afraid of. There are three things about idolatry we ought to know. First, it somehow doesn’t seem idolatrous. There is a fascinating story in Judges of a family that makes an idol, sets up a shrine, and then hires a priest. It is an egregious violation of God’s covenant yet, amazingly, the man does not see it as idolatry. In fact, after hiring the idolatrous priest, he says, “Now I know that the LORD will be good to me…” (Judges 17:13). Idolatry doesn’t seem idolatrous to the idolater.

The second thing about idolatry is that it – whether political idolatry, economic idolatry, job idolatry, the idolatry of a cause – usually seems to work … at first. Give your job the devotion you owe to Christ, and you are liable to get a promotion. People will notice. You will get a raise. It will work … at first.

But your job is a lousy god. Make it an idol and it will let you down, cause you to question your worth, and corrode your relationships. How many people who make a job their idol succeed just long enough to lose everything important to them?

The third thing about idolatry is that it relocates our identity to the idol and away from Christ. If it is political idolatry, we reflexively think of ourselves as a Democrat or a Republican. That becomes our identity. If it is job idolatry, we think of ourselves as the I.T. guy or the boss or the right-hand man or woman. If it is the idolatry of a cause, we identify as the social justice hero, or the balanced budget warrior, or the environmental enthusiast.

I say nothing against the Democrat or the Republican. I applaud the social justice activist. I will stand with both the balanced budget warrior and the environmental enthusiast, but I am first and last a person who belongs to Jesus Christ. That is my identity. I will not let an identify thief steal that from me.

Don’t let it be stolen from you either. If it has already been stolen, and you are just learning about it (which is what happens in identity theft), take steps to get it back! Rethink things, confess what has happened to God, and acknowledge Jesus as more important than any person or thing in your life.

When we come to Ephesians 5, the same themes reappear. Paul is writing about the Spirit-filled life and how it expresses itself through submission and love in Christian relationships, including marriage. He illustrates by pointing to the church’s submission to Christ and Christ’s love for the church. He talks about the church being a pure bride on her wedding day: “a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (Ephesians 5:27).

This is the Bride of Christ. And, in case we got a little lost in the other relationships he’s been talking about, Paul makes it perfectly clear in verse 32: “I am talking about Christ and the church.”

Alright. Let’s pull it all together. The Church of Jesus, as new covenant people, are dedicated to Christ the way a fiancé is dedicated to her soon-to-be husband.

The great danger is that we will let something come between us and our Lord, just as things came between Israel and her God. Those things can be summarized in a single word: idolatry. We may – rather, we will ­– be tempted (2 Corinthians 11:3). We must not be deceived by subtle proposals and flirtations that lead the church away from its pure devotion to Christ.

Since the Church is not an organization but a people who share the same Spirit – one body (as we have seen) with many members – being led astray happens one member at a time. One is led astray by the promise of money, others by the promise of influence, ease, or prestige, but where her members go, the church goes.

When it comes to the church, what a person does in the privacy of his own home or in the complexity of the workplace has an effect on the entire church. No Christian can say, “That is a private matter, just between God and me.” When a single member succumbs to idolatry, the church’s devotion to Christ is enfeebled.

But if this is the situation, what hope is there? With millions of people, even hundreds of millions, forming one church and the devotion of every single person playing a role, what is the likelihood that the church will be “without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish?” The bride mustn’t show up for the wedding in a dirty, stained, and wrinkled dress and the church must not show up stained with idolatry. But what hope is there of that? The hope – the church’s only hope – is in her Bridegroom.

Emma Howard and Chris Greenslade were getting married at Christ the King Church in Christchurch, New Zealand in just three days. On February 22, 2011, just after 1:00, Chris got a text from Emma that said: “It’s Emma here. I’m OK and I love you very much.”

That scared Chris. You see, a 6.3 magnitude earthquake had just hit Christchurch, and he didn’t know what might have happened to Emma. He dropped everything and rushed across town.

When he reached her workplace, he found the building collapsed and rubble everywhere. He called for rescue workers and began an all-out search for Emma and other survivors. For six hours, they dug through debris, moving fallen beams and chunks of concrete. Then they found Emma trapped in a tiny cavity, but safe.

The entire time this was going on, Chris kept sending Emma texts: “I’m with your parents.” “I love you.” “There are lots of men trying to get you out.” Out of the wreck and ruin, the dust and grunge, the death and dying, Chris rescued his bride to be. Three days later, Emma and Chris were married.[4]

In the chaos of contemporary culture, amidst the wreck and ruin and the dust and grunge, how will the church of Jesus possibly be found “without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish?” Only through the rescue efforts of her true love and great savior.

He will rescue his beloved and, while he is doing so, he will send her encouraging texts, assuring her of his love and exhorting her to hold on. Nothing can stop him from reaching her and, when he does, he will “cleans[e] her” (Eph. 5:26) “by the washing with water through the word.”

And then the great day will arrive: The Marriage of the Lamb. It will mean a new start for us, for the world, for the universe. The preparations will be worth it – infinitely so. Faithfulness will have its reward.

Until then, do not stray from your devotion to Christ. We all are depending on you. Do not flirt with anything that will draw you away from him, whatever promises it makes. Check your text messages regularly – you will find them in your Bible! The big day is coming. Let’s be ready for it.

[1] Hebrews 1:8-9

[2] Ezekiel 16:4-16

[3] Matthew 25:1-12

[4] (Kristen Gelilneau, “Amid New Zealand Tragedy, the Wedding Must Go On,” Associated Press (2-25-11); submitted by Quintin Stieff, West Des Moines, Iowa)

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People and Their Rituals: Why Do They Do That?

Posted on September 19, 2020 by salooper57

Life is full of rituals, from high church liturgies to baseball players’ on-deck circle routines. Humans are ritual-making creatures. Rituals connect us to the past and remind us of what is important in the present.

How some rituals came into existence is a mystery. For example, who was the first person to think it was a good idea to throw newborns off the Sri Santeswar Temple in Karnatak, India? Don’t worry: family members wait below to catch the child in a cloth-like net. But how does it bring the child good luck?

Then there is the world-famous Running of the Bulls in Pamplona. In what possible way does running wildly through narrow streets with a stampede of 1,000-pound bulls at people’s heels bring honor to St. Fermin, the city’s patron saint?

Photo by San Fermin Pamplona – Navarra on Unsplash

Americans have their own strange rituals. Sailors who cross the equator are inducted into the “Order of the Shellback” by King Neptune, with Davy Jones and others in attendance. The ritual usually includes a breakfast that is too spicy to eat and requires “pollywogs” (sailors who have not previously crossed the equator) to kiss the belly of the “royal baby.”

Readers might think that Christians like me would be at home with strange rituals. After all, we take people who profess faith in Jesus Christ and submerge them in water. What possible connection is there between believing in Jesus and getting wet?

It does seem an odd thing to do. “Oh, you want to begin a new life with God? That is great! I am so excited for you. Now, let me stick your head under water.”

Photo by kaleb tapp on Unsplash

I have officiated over baptisms in public swimming areas and have wondered what the lifeguards thought about it all. Did they wonder if they should jump in and save that poor woman from the madman holding her under water? Why would Jesus’s followers do such a thing?

The short answer is that Jesus told them to, but that just kicks the can down the long and winding theological road. Why did Jesus tell them to do this? That question can only be answered by approaching it from two different directions. First, what does baptism mean and, second, what does baptism do?

What baptism means is wrapped up in various images. There is the image of cleansing. Baptism pictures a person’s sins being washed away. So St. Paul, recalling his own baptism, says he was told to “Get up, be baptized, and wash your sins away.”

Baptism also represents the end of the old life and the beginning of a new one in which Jesus is leader. According to the apostle, the baptized person is immersed into Christ’s death in preparation for the new kind of life they are beginning. When they rose from their brief “water burial,” they imaged the resurrection.

To be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to be “immersed” (that is the principal meaning of the word) in a life in which God himself is present and preeminent. Baptism is about bringing people fully into the divine fellowship of the Trinity.

Much more could – and needs to be – said about what baptism means. But what does baptism do? In answering that question, it is important not to separate the outward rite from the inward reality it represents. Unless both are present, what I am about to say does not hold true.

Assuming both are present, baptism gives someone a new identity. He or she is identified as Jesus’s person and a member of his people; that is, his church. To be baptized is not merely to join an organization called First Church (or something like it) but to join the world-wide company of those who believe Jesus to be earth’s rightful ruler. It is to join the insurgency of love.

Certain clubs and orders identify their members by passwords and signs. The members of Christ’s insurgency are identified by baptism. Whenever they meet someone who has “come through the waters,” they know they have met a brother or sister in Christ’s service. Baptism is the not-so-secret sign that they belong to Christ and to each other.

First published by Gatehouse Media

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