Christ ChurchLoving Little Ones #1
Introduction
The duties of a godly parent are profound and challenging. This is particularly the case when you are dealing with little ones who cannot explain anything to you. They don’t know their own heart, and they could not tell you about if they did. We have to get our guidance from Scripture. And like everything else, parenting is completely dependent on the grace of God—but on this subject, it should be immediately obvious to us that we are dependent on the grace of God. But when that grace is operative, what does it look like?
The Texts
“If ye fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, ye do well” (James 2:8). “Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones” (Luke 17:1-2).
Overview
The context of James’ injunction is interesting. He has just been talking about a biblical refusal to show partiality between rich and poor. And after this statement in our text, he moves on to give a general statement about heart attitudes. “For he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath shewed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment” (v. 13). My particular point here is not the larger social point that James is making, but rather the attitudes that drive it, and what those attitudes look like in the microcosm of the home. In the home, who are the rich and who are the poor? Who is the establishment, and who are the ruled? Who has control of the courts and who does not? And can it be said of parents generally that they love mercy, and that mercy triumphs over judgment? In the passage from Luke, Jesus warns against stumbling or offending little ones. He attaches one of the most dire warnings in the Bible to this caution (v. 2). Jesus said a lot of things about children that are routinely ignored today, just as the first disciples tended to ignore them. When we stumble or offend little ones, we are not letting mercy triumph over judgment.
Delight
Parents should always desire to be like God in their relationship to their children. But when we think this, we gravitate to what we think or assume God is like instead of gravitating to what God reveals Himself to be like. Here is the fundamental attitude. “The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing” (Zep. 3:17). “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” (Luke 11:13). Parents who are “evil” frequently are better to their kids than parents who think they are being good by imitating a Cosmic Slavedriver. Delight in your children. Be crazy about them. Don’t hold back. They are cuter than everybody else’s. Parents should always desire to be like God in their relationship to their children.
The Structure of the Garden
But you must take care to structure your delight. When God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden, He gave them, in principle, the run of the world. There was one thing, and one thing only, that was off limits, and that was one tree in the middle of the Garden. What does this tell you about God’s sense of proportion? Which way does He lean?
You are trying to imitate God, not some federal regulatory agency. Keep life simple. Keep the rules simple and easy to memorize. Don’t keep changing them, and don’t multiply opportunities for disobedience. God had one rule in the Garden, and ten rules at Sinai. The rest of the Old Testament are commentary on those ten rules, which can actually be reduced to two—love God and love your neighbor. I recall vividly the three rules in my father’s house when I was growing up—no disobedience, no lying, and no disrespecting your mother. This is the spirit of Scripture.
Make sure there is always a boundary (delight is not indulgence; delight has a backbone), and carefully police that boundary. But don’t multiply boundaries. Don’t multiply opportunities for disobedience. “Come here. Put on your coat. Put that down. Find your boots. I thought I said to come here!” Reduce the number of commands you issue by about 90%, and then enforce all those commands. Don’t exasperate your children (Eph. 6:4; Col. 3:21). Remember their frame. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust” (Ps. 103:13-14).
Discipline That Delights
Yeah, but when does the hammer fall? Doesn’t there have to be moral order in the home? Don’t we have to have the rule of law around here? Depending on what you mean by putting it this way, probably not. A parent who disciplines effectively is refusing to allow his child to make himself unlovely. “I love you too much to let you do that to yourself.” Discipline is corrective, and it is applied for the sake of the one receiving it. It is not punitive, and it is not rendered for the sake of the one giving it.
When you are spanking a child, you are either being selfish or you are being selfless—one or the other. You are doing it because you are exasperated, frustrated, beside yourself, and frazzled, or you are doing it as a fragrant offering to the God of your fathers. An ungodly sentiment can be roughly categorized as, “Take that, you little swine,” and a godly sentiment as, “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” What does Scripture say? “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Gal. 6:1). When you are highly motivated to discipline your kids, you are not qualified. When you are qualified, you don’t feel like it.
Discipline, rightly understood, is not an exception to the rule of delight mentioned earlier, it is a principal expression of it. “If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for what son is he whom the father chasteneth not? But if ye be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons” (Heb. 12:7-8). Refusal to discipline (with the right attitude) is a form of disowning a child. Refusal to discipline (again, with the right attitude) is a form of hatred. “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (Prov. 13:24).
All who love, discipline. But it does not follow from this that all who discipline, love. A child must grow up in, be surrounded by, and be nourished in, the love of God revealed for His people in the Word Incarnate and the Word revealed. This is the context in which godly child-rearing occurs, and, outside of which it cannot occur.
Friendship Evangelism
Introduction:
For various reasons, evangelism is a difficult subject for many Reformed Christians. Some die-hard Calvinists may have glanced at the title of this message—friendship evangelism—and asked, “What’s evangelism?” Or, if they are really die-hard Calvinists, perhaps they asked, “What’s friendship?” But this attitude is not what the Bible teaches, not what the tradition of the Reformed faith teaches, and it is not what we have sought to practice in this congregation.
The Text:
“No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light. The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness. If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light. And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine with him: and he went in, and sat down to meat” (Luke 11:33-37).
Overview:
Jesus teaches us that when we turn on the lights, we do not do this in order to hide it away (v. 33). You don’t keep a light bulb burning in a back room of the basement—not on purpose anyway. Now Jesus says that we do this so that “they which come in may see the light” (v. 33). Now there are many places in Scripture where a “shining of the light” refers to what we call contact evangelism, but this is not one of them. When someone stands up in the town square and preaches the gospel, he is shining the light, but by a different means than is in view here. Jesus moves from a mention of lighting a candle to the cryptic statement that “the light of the body is the eye” (v. 34). If your eye is single, your whole body is full of light. If your eye is evil, your whole body is full of darkness. This business about the eye was a Jewish idiom, referring to generosity and stinginess respectively. But be careful—there are people in darkness who think they are in light (v. 35). They think they are hanging from the ceiling when they are in fact under a bushel. All of these are connected—eye, body, room. Jesus then was invited to share a meal with a Pharisee, and He did so (v. 37).
Clearing Some Debris:
Contact evangelism is the equivalent of an evangelistic cold call. If a person is gifted and called to this, it is wonderful. Friendship evangelism is far more organic and does not depend in any way on anything like calling, ordination, or giftedness—Jesus is presupposing here that this experience will be shared by all His faithful followers. It is commonly called friendship evangelism, but we could call it light of the eye evangelism.
But not all that calls itself friendship evangelism is. Friendship evangelism is something other than friendly evangelism. Scripture say to let your love be without hypocrisy. You don’t want to invite a nonbeliever over because you have a product line you’d like to show him. Under such circumstances, the nonbeliever would right feel abused. This is not friendship evangelism, but rather pretence evangelism. Friendly marketing evangelism is not friendship evangelism.
At the same time, be aware that true friendship with nonbelievers will always hit a sticking point. If you had the best relationship in the world with your mother, how could you be complete friends with someone who despised her? But the impediment needs to be that problem, and not your personal grievance that he is not letting you “complete a sale.”
Also remember a few common pitfalls — take heed to your own walk with God. First, evangelism is a two-way street, and sometimes the world recruits people from the Church better than we recruit people from the world. So you want to be an evangelist to the rich, evangelist to the bar crowd, evangelist to attractive, single women on campus? You can only export what you have, and if your spiritual life is a mess, then that is what you will take on the road. Second, evangelism is not what many assume. Many Christians really don’t want to be struggling spiritually, and they view evangelism as a means of grace. They feel like “real Christians” if they are sharing their faith. But sharing your faith is not an assigned means for propping up your faith. And last, evangelism is not so that you can become an ecclesiastical Billy the Kid, just another gunslinger with notches on your Bible.
A Woven Life:
Our postmodern world wants you to think of everything as a collage, with everything arranged by juxtaposition only. The juxtaposition does get an “effect”—you have your church people, biology class people, work people, and so on. Your life and your worldview is a pastiche, a hodge-podge, and not a Charles Hodge-Podge either. Owen Barfield said that what C.S. Lewis thought about everything was implicit in what he said about anything. The biblical worldview is woven. An integrated Christian life should be woven together in who you are. This means that when talking with anybody about anything, you will find yourself talking about Christ—and you will get to Christ without changing the subject.
What do I mean by juxtaposition? “What’s your major? Who do you think is going to take the Super Bowl?” And then you grab the spiritual discussion by the ears and haul it in. “Aaa! Too soon, too soon!” There is an old blues song—“never make your move too soon.” Don’t lug it in unless it is part of who you are. If everything is connected, soon is fine. If everything is disconnected, two years of friendship won’t make it any easier. If we really understand the Godness of God in everything, we can’t answer five honest questions in a row without it all coming down to Christ naturally.
Now for the Surprise:
What is the common theme that ties everything together? What is the integrative tie? It is your relationship to your material possessions, to your money. “And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations” (Luke 16:9). Use ungodly mammon to make friends for yourselves, friends who will then receive you in heaven.
We see the same thing in our text. Jesus said that if your eye is light (if you are generous), your whole body will be full of light. He then said if your whole body is full of light, then it will be the candle that should give light to the room. And the well-lit room is the one where people can see well enough to ask questions. The room is lit so that those who come in might see it.
Now everything rides on this. Friendship evangelism rests upon generosity, sacrifice, kindness, openness, hospitality, goodness, and open-handedness. That is to be the texture of your life, and non-believers are welcome to come along with you. In short, is your evangelism giving or taking? Are you a benefactor or a salesman?
The Gospel as Jubilee
Dealing with Sexual Guilt
Introduction:
The gospel changes lives. Not only does it do this, but it has this impact on every aspect of our lives, which includes our sexual identity, our sexual lives. This fixes a number of problems, but if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit it also creates some new problems, some new temptations.
The Text:
“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:9-11).
Overview:
The unrighteous—continuing unrepentant—will not inherit the kingdom of God. This is basic; Paul addresses it in the form of a question. Don’t you know this? It was a good question to raise at Corinth, which was renowned in the ancient world for its immorality, and in the ancient world that was no small achievement. But the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom (v. 9). The entire first half of the illustrative list that he works through consisted of sexual sin in various forms. First was fornication, which was a broad term covering all kinds of sexual uncleanness. Second was idolatry, which was closely identified with sexual sin. Third was adultery. Fourth was passive homosexuality, the sin of being a catamite. Fifth was sodomy (v. 10). The second half of the list branches out— thieves, covetous men, drunks, revilers and extortioners will not inherit the kingdom either (v. 11). Don’t think that sin is only sexual sin. And then comes the word of hope. “And such were some of you” (v. 11). What made the difference? You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Holy Spirit.
So here’s the problem:
In the first century, sexual purity (in the Christian sense, with the biblical definitions) was virtually unknown. As a lifestyle, to the average pagan it was beyond comprehension. This meant that the new Corinthian believer, who had been baptized and had joined this new fledgling movement, did not need to be embarrassed about his past. If anything, in terms of peer pressure, he was going to be embarrassed about his future sexual purity, not his past immorality. Our situation is quite different—even with the deterioration of standards since the sexual revolution of the sixties, the unbelieving world still has an active memory of how things used to be. You don’t shake off a millennium or more of Christian civilization in a couple of decades. And within the evangelical subculture, sexual standards are still clearly taught and generally understood (with the problem compounded by biblical standards gone to seed).
Of course, we are not faulting Scripture for doing this, but this does create a new problem for us. Whenever standards of any kind come to a fallen race, it creates the problem of hypocrisy and/or hidden guilt. The more serious the standards are (Heb. 13:4), the greater the temptation. Overt hypocrisy is a problem to address another time. For now, let’s consider the problem of hidden guilt for two kinds of people. The first is the person converted to Christ, or put right with Christ, later in life. But she comes to this point with a good deal of sexual baggage, and whenever she comes to church, all she can see are squeaky clean people who would chase her out of the church “if they only knew.” The second kind of person is the person who grew up in the church, with sturdy sexual standards extending in every direction and disappearing over the horizon. But knowing the standard and having the resources to fight temptation are two very different things, and the appearances make it look like no one else you know is struggling with this temptation—whatever it is.
Forgiveness is complete:
In our text, the apostle Paul says of the Corinthians (a pretty raggedy bunch) that “such were some of you.” That past tense was made possible by God’s washing, God’s sanctifying, and God’s justification. This cleansing and the judicial imputation of Christ’s righteousness means that a whore can become a virgin, the pervert can be enabled to stand upright. As far as God is concerned, all your sexual sins are washed away. Nothing is out of His reach. Christ’s blood does not falter before certain sins.
Consequences and accountability:
There are two other relevant issues. The first is that complete forgiveness (which really is complete) does not necessarily erase all consequences. A woman can receive total forgiveness for her fornication, and after she has received that forgiveness, still be pregnant. A teacher of small children who is caught with a stash of child porn should be fired, but that does not mean that he is beyond forgiveness. Of course not. And a man can divorce an unfaithful wife without displaying an unforgiving spirit. These are consequences. Forgiveness means liberation from certain consequences, not from every possible consequence.
Accountability is a little different. Our practice of sexual behavior is and ought to be private, but the reality of our sexual expression is not to be private. We are connected to others. Fathers are responsible for the sexual purity of their daughters (Deut. 22:13-21). Husbands and wives have authority over one another’s bodies (1 Cor. 7: 4). So real accountability is found in the God-given places, and not in a “small accountability group” of drowning swimmers, all clutching each other going down. At the same time, remember what we have emphasized before—no human authority is absolute. For example, if a father has been guilty of sexual abuse, it doesn’t make any sense to demand that his daughter have to confess anything to him.
Another example of necessary confession is when a couple get to the “tipping point” in a courtship. Simply apply the Golden Rule, but don’t kid yourself.
Why we need to be reminded:
There is no sin that a human being can commit that Christ cannot forgive, and forgive readily. That is why He came to die. But we struggle with this kind of sin more than with other sins. Why? Part of it is the set of cultural expectations we have developed, and which we should have developed (Heb. 13:4). But the second reason is that sexual sin is like getting pine pitch on your hands (1 Cor. 6:18-19). Just like other dirt, it can be washed off, but you have to know how to do it.