Pure Church

When you pastor in the Washington, D.C. area or an area like Grand Cayman, you will see a lot of people come and go. Some places are really quite transient; they are destinations for people with specific short-term purposes but not necessarily a long-term plan for staying.

This creates a number of interesting benefits and challenges to living in such places. On the one hand, there is great diversity and exchange of peoples. But on the other hand, seeing your friends leave with such frequency can be hard. Such places make great export stations for the gospel. But, you have to work hard against the mentality of "short-timers" for whom spiritual growth is a low priority "because they won't be here long." So, it's a mixed bag.

But this is constant. As a pastor, you'll always be in the business of recommending churches and pastors in the next city or town your people are heading off to. "Do you know a good church there?" "Are there any good pastors there?" That's one of the constants in a transient location.

This morning I was helped to understand that part of what a pastor should be doing is helping his people discern between a good pastor and a "pastor" in name only. I can always answer those questions for them, but it's far superior that they should be able to answer it with discernment and skill themselves. It was a brief reading in A Consuming Fire that did this for me. Lest I put the entire book on-line and weaken sales, this will be my last quote of it. But, it's a good one and one we should pass on to our people in some form. Enjoy.

Knowing a Good Minister

Now, my brethren, two dangers, two simply terrible dangers, arise to every one of you out of all this matter of your ministers and their knowledge.

1. The first danger is, to be frank with you on this subject, that you are yourselves so ignorant on all the matters that a minister has to do with, that you do not know one minister from another, a good minister from one who really is no minister at all. Now, I will put it to you, on what principle and for what reason did you choose your present minister, if, indeed, you did choose him? Was it because you wee assured by people you could trus that he was a minister of knowledge and knew his own business? Or was it that when you went to worship with him for yourself you have not been able ever since to tear yourself away from him, nor has any one else been able to tear you away, though some have tried? When you first came to the city, did you give, can you remember, some real anxiety, rising sometimes in prayer, as to who your minister among so many ministers was to be? Or did you choose him and your present seat in his church because of some real or supposed worldly interest of yours you thought you could further by taking your letter of introduction to him? Had you heard while yet at home, had your father and mother talked of such things to you, that rich men, and men of place and power, political men and men high in society, sat in that church and took notice of who attended it and who did not? Do you, down to this day, know one church from another so far as spiritual and soul-saving knowledge is concerned? Do you know that two big buildings called churches may stand in the same street and have men called ministers carrying on certain services in them from week to week, and yet, for all the purposes for which Christ came and died and rose again and gave ministers to his church, these two churches and their ministers are farther asunder than the two poles?

Do you understand what I am saying? Do you understand what I have been saying all night, or are you one of those of whom the prophet speaks in blame and in pity as being destroyed for lack of knowledge? Well, that is your first danger, that you are so ignorant, and as a consequence, so careless, as not to know one minister from another.

2. And your second danger in conection with your minister is that you have, and may have long had, a good minister, but that you still remain yourself a bad man. My brethren, be you all sure of it, there is a special and a fearful danger in havnig a specially good minister. Think twice and make up your mind well before you call a specially good minister, or become a communicant or even an adherent, under a specially good minister. If two bad men go down together to the pit, and the one has had a good minster as sometimes happens, and the other has only had one who had thename of a minister, the evangelized reprobate will lie in a deeper bed in hell and will spend a more remorseful eternity on it than will the other. No man among you, minister or no minister, good minister or bad, will be able to sin with impunity. But he who sins on and on after good preaching will be beaten with many stripes.

"Thou that hast knowledge," says a powerful old preacher, "canst not sin so cheap as another that is ignorant. Places of much knowledge"--he was preching in the university pulpit of Oxford--"and plentiful in the means of grace are dear places for a man to sin in. To be drunken or unclean after a powerful sermon, and after the Holy Ghost has enlightened thee, is more than to have so sinned twenty times before. Thou mightest have sinned ten times more and been damned less. For does not Jesus Christ the Judge say to thee, 'This is thy condemnation, that so much light has come to thee'?" And, taking the then way of execution as a sufficiently awful illustration, the old Oxford Puritan goes on to say that to sin against light is the highest step of the ladder before turning off. And, again, tht if there ae worms in hell that die not, it is surely gospel light that breeds them.

Michael A.G. Haykin has done the world a great favor with the Profiles in Reformed Spirituality series. It's a series of small books that provide an introduction to a pastor/theologian in the Reformed tradition, surfaces lesons for us from their person piety, and provides a series of short selections from their writings. I'm currently reading A Consuming Fire: The Piety of Alexander Whyte in my quiet times. Here is the short selection I read this morning:

Ashamed of the Gospel
There is an inwardness, and there is an absoluteness, and there is an abidingness, and there is an exclusiveness inn the cross of Christ, that is neither easily preached, nor easily believed, nor easily practised. To keep our own hearts shut up to the cross, and thatnot only at our first conversion, but to the end of our best sanctification, and to preach the cross always and to every one as the one and the alone ground of peace with God amid all the ups and downs of the spiritual life: that staggers many, and offends many, and it becomes, sometimes, a casue of shame and pain even to those who have succeeded Paul best in his revelation of Christ that God made to him, and who have also succeeded him best in his experience of all that....

Now, my brethren, you will go to so-called Christian churches, both in town and country, where you would never discover that Paul's Epistle to the Romans had ever been written, and where you will never be put to shame with such old-fashioned doctrines as the imputed righteousness of Christ of which Paul is full. Christ's suretyship, and his substitution, and his finished work are not known in those churches. The imputation of your sin to the Lamb of God, and the imputation of his righteousness to you; no such offensive things are ever uttered there. Speak for yourselves, my brethren: speak for yourselves and make your choice. As for me, the longer I live--the longer I really live--these things, and the things they represent, are becoming every day more and more necessary and more and more precious to me.

Last night's Bible study in Galatians 2:11-13 focused on Paul's correction of Peter for his hypocrisy. It was a good study with good reflections on the need to have in our lives and in the church people willing to lovingly confront us when we are wrong. We focused a little on Paul's statement that Peter "was clearly in the wrong," and emphasized our need to be certain of a person's wrong when confronting them the way Paul did and to have a standard against which to judge right and wrong, a standard more enduring, objective, and universal than our own opinions and perceptions, the Word of God.

It reminded me of the fact that the thing that most frees us in the local church and the Christian life is the Word of God. If our preferences and opinions and traditions and wisdom are our guide rather than the Word, then our preferences and opinions and traditions and wisdom will inevitably choke out someone's freedom in Christ and exalt reason above revelation. But if we would all be genuinely free, genuinely able to exercise our liberty in Christ and simultaneously able to restrain one another when in the wrong, we must chain ourselves to the Word of God as the authority for faith and conduct. Interestingly it's when we chain ourselves to the Word that we're set free--all of us.

Here's how Ligon Dunan expressed it in Give God Praise:

The biblical doctrine of Christian freedom is vital to our doctrine of worship and can be protected only by the regulative principle. The Westminster Confession makes the bold declaration that "God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to his word, or beside it in matters of fairth or worship. So that to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also" (20.2). This manifesto of Christian freedom is based on Pauline principles found in Romans 14:1-4, Galatians 4:8-11, and Colossians 2:16-23. The regulative principle is designed to secure the believer's freedom from the dominion of human opinion in worship. But some people view the regulative principle as legalistic and constraining. They rightly note that it forbids a variety of activities and restrains others; but this is simply to say that it helps enforce biblical norms that are, upon reflection, freeing! Freedom from human opinions can be found only in the rule of God's good and graceious and wise law. If humans can dictate how we may worship, apart from the word or in addition to the word, then we are captive to their command. The only way we can really experience one of the key blessings of Christian freedom in the context of corporate worship--freedom from human doctrines and commandments--is if corporate worship is directed only according to the word of God, and that means following the regulative principle. Furthermore "God requires us to worship Him only as He has revealed. Therefore, to require a person in corporate worship, to do something that God has not required, forces the person to sin against his/her conscience, by making them do what they do not believe God has called them to do." (pp. 57-58).

And speaking of Lig', here's an interview with Lig on preparing to preach from Preaching Today.