Christ Church

State of the Church 2015

Joe Harby on

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Introduction

One of the things that characterizes the writings of the apostle Paul is his regular practice of giving thanks to God for the saints of various churches he was writing to. Not only does he thank God for them, but he insists on telling them that he thanks God for them.

The Text

“Cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers;” (Eph. 1:16). “We give thanks to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you” (Col. 1:3). Also see 1 Thess. 1:2, 3:9, and 2 Thess. 2:13.

Summary of the Text

God gives us gifts in one another, and through one another. We are the body of Christ to one another. The recognition that God is behind all of it is central. When Paul gives thanks, he gives thanks to God. All the good works that we do for one another are repurposed gifts, redirected gifts. God first gives, and then as a consequence of this, we are able to give. But we can only give biblically if we ourselves are a gift. When we give, we are imitating God who always gives Himself in the gift. So this is why we render a two-fold thanks. When we say thank you, we say thank you first to God, and secondly to the instrument in God’s hand. We do good works because we are God’s workmanship (Eph. 2:10)—we render gratitude and glory to Him, but this in no way takes away from the gratitude we render to our fellow servants. Rather, it recognizes the true source of all good gifts. No true Christian wants to be an autonomous gift; we should all want to be the gift of one to another.

Gratitude by Name

The apostle is also not shy about naming names. There are many places where we know only two things about someone—his or her name, and the fact that the apostle Paul was grateful for him or her. From Epaphroditus to Junias, we know that Paul was grateful to individuals by name. We also know that his gratitude did not always result in giving us that name. “And I intreat thee also, true yokefellow, help those women which laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellowlabourers, whose names are in the book of life” (Phil. 4:3).

Giving Thanks for You

And so, in what ways has this congregation been a cause for gratitude?

This congregation has been a “family-integrated church” for many years, and you were doing it before it was “a thing.” Our service is an hour and a half long, and we all worship together—from the seniors down to the littles. So we are grateful

to God for you, and for all the hard work that goes into keeping some sort of moral order in your row. Don’t be discouraged—we are coming up to the time of harvest. A child born when we first went to weekly communion is around fourteen now. Another fourteen years and he will have a four-year-old on his lap, explaining the wine and the bread to him.

Community is as community does. You are an extraordinary congregation of helping hands—whether we are talking about unloading moving vans, or preparing meals for families in need, or giving to those who are less fortunate. When help has been needed, the wordoutpouring would be a good way to describe what frequently happens.

We want to believe what the Bible teaches us to believe, and we want to behave the way the Bible says to behave. In the providence of God, this means that we often find ourselves off the beaten path. You have been taught some “odd” things, and I am grateful that you have been such good sports about it. God is God, and grace is grace. Everything else follows, and the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

You are musically adventurous. We are very grateful to God for the music He has given us to sing, but for you old-timers, we have occasion to be even more grateful to God for the music we used to sing. We have a lot to do, and a long way to go, but we are very grateful for what we get to sing on the way.

You are committed, in a way that few North American congregations are, to providing our covenant children with a thoroughly Christian education. Learning to think like a Christian is not something that can be managed with one message on Sundays only. Our task is to learn how to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. This is our task every hour of every day.

Hard to Satisfy

God is a perfect Father. The humblest effort to please Him does in fact please Him. He is very easy to please. At the same time, He is perfect, and therefore very hard to satisfy. Easy to please, hard to satisfy. He will not be satisfied until the work of His Spirit in us is final and complete. “Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus: Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily” (Col. 1:28–29).

We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that any expression of gratitude will make the one we are praising think that they have nothing else to do, that they have arrived. Since we don’t want that to happen, we withhold our gratitude because we don’t want anything going to anybody’s head. On the other hand, going the other way is thought of as discouraging. What we need is to know that we are already accepted in Christ, completely and finally. We are accepted in the Beloved, which means that there is no condemnation. We are set free to grow, without a gun to our heads. Grace is the only soil in which a true Christian can grow.

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State of the Church 2014

Christ Church on

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Introduction

It is our custom to have a “state of the church” message every year around this time. Sometimes the message has to do with the church nationally, and other times the point is more local, pertaining to our own congregation. This year I want to focus on this congregation, and the point of this message is to reiterate some of our basic distinctives. What are we about? What are we trying to emphasize?

The Text

“Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe” (Phil. 3:1).

Summary of the Text

The church at Philippi had particular challenges, and Paul addressed them all by urging them to rejoice. This is a response that is always appropriate because God is always sovereign and God is always good. Not only is it appropriate for Christians to rejoice all the time, it is appropriate to bring repeated reminders to them to do so. To repeat the same exhortations should not be a grief to ministers, and it should be received as a means of keeping us all safe.

Two Kinds of Distinctives

One kind of distinctive arises from what we believe the Scripture teaches and requires of all believers. We focus on it because we believe that all believers should focus on it. This would be a principled distinctive, coupled with an ecumenical invitation.

A second kind of distinctive would arise from our particular circumstances. These are tactical circumstances, tailored to the life and situation of each congregation. Are we in an urban setting or in a small town? Should we build this kind of building or that kind? Should we build a Christian school or is there already a good Christian school? These are tactical questions.

A third kind of distinctive is sinful. This is what happens when a group tries to separate itself from other Christians through various kinds of doctrinal vainglory or ministry showboating. This is what the disciples were arguing about on the road (Mk. 9:34). We are not immune to this temptation (why would we be?), and so we want to resist it everywhere we find it. The place to look is under your breastbone.

That said, what are our principled distinctives?

Corporate Worship

We worship God because He is worthy. We do not do it for any of the results that might come about from it. Rather, we do everything else for the results it might have in helping us to glorify God. “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing” (Rev. 5:12).

Worshiping God is not a means to another end. Worshiping God is the highest calling that a human being has, or that the entire human race has. It requires no other justification. Whatever you do, it should drive you to this great end. Whatever you do, it should culminate here, in the glorification of God. There is great wisdom in the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism here. This is our chief end.

Dangers: one danger is that you make something you call worship into a great big deal, but it is not spiritual worship at all. Another danger is that of trying to get worship to “do” other things, like evangelism. But this is backwards.

Components: Learning the structure of covenant renewal worship, growing in our musical wisdom and literacy, teaching your families the importance of worship, weekly communion, and practical Bible teaching.

Basic Discipleship in Community

We want to emphasize basic and foundational issues in our teaching—personal piety as measured by relational piety (1 John 4:20). We want our doctrine to revolve around practical Christianity, Christian living that is meant to be lived. This is why there are recurring themes in the teachings, conferences, books published, and so on. We emphasize things like confession of sin, dealing with bitterness, maintaining relationships, how to read your Bible, the importance of Christian education, and so on.

Dangers: the danger here is that of reducing everything to a moralistic or legalistic approach. But the biblical approach is always credenda before agenda.

Components: Understanding the Apostles Creed, true Christian education for Christian kids, parish studies, having our lives intertwined in koinonia fellowship, and being driven by an eschatological optimism.

Worldview Evangelism, Outreach, Cultural Engagement

Jesus is Lord, and this means that He is relevant to all things. No area of human endeavor lies outside His authority. Our evangelism is not an attempt to helicopter victims out of a disaster area, but rather is the work of rebuilding a disaster area. Everything is relevant, and everything is related to Jesus.

The Christian faith has cultural ramifications. The Christian faith is political. The Christian faith is public. We have no business taking this light of His and putting it under our own bushel.

Dangers: one danger is the obvious one of calling it cultural engagement when we just drift along with whatever it is the world is dishing up. Another is the cowardice of shutting up because of the pc police. Or that of using a Jesus stamp on all of your personal prejudices.

Components: real Christian education (again), and a willingness to get out of our comfy little ghetto. In order to learn cultural engagement, we have to engage. We must not capitulate, and we must not run away. We must engage. This means knowing, loving, and praying for non-believers—without trying to become like them.

Conclusion

In the coming year, and in the time after that, there will no doubt be a number of times when we have practical and tactical decisions to make. A good example would be the issues surrounding the building of our new sanctuary. We have been without one since this congregation was established in 1975. We have a church that we planted just ten years ago that has its own building now, and we still don’t, which is the coolest thing in the world.

But when we come to build our own building (or if we do anything else), make sure that everything is brought back to these three areas. How will this help us do that? Unless we make a point of doing it this way, we will be like a crotchety bachelor deciding to get married in his late forties. What could go wrong?

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State of the Church 2013

Joe Harby on

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Introduction

Near the beginning of every calendar year, it has been our custom for some years now to have a message that addresses the “state of the church.” Sometimes we have addressed the state of the national church, and sometimes of this local congregation. It all varies . . . depending on the state of the church.

The Text

“Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matt. 16:24-26)

Summary of the Text

The fundamental call to discipleship is one at a time. Jesus says that if any man wants to follow Him, he must deny himself (v. 24). He must take up his cross, and follow Christ. A cross fits one at a time—it is not an instrument of mass execution. Jesus then teaches that if we are clingy with our own lives, then we will lose what we are clinging to. But if we lose it for the sake of Christ, then we will gain what we have given up (v. 25). What is the point, what is the profit, in gaining anything if we lose our own soul in the transaction? What would be a good price to put on your own soul (v. 26)? Jesus teaches us to value our own soul over anything else we might gain or accomplish.

The Individual and Individualism

We go to Heaven or to Hell by ones. The Lord Jesus was the one who established the importance of the individual, over against every secular collective. A man or a woman will live forever, in a way that corporations and empires will not. But if we live forever in glory, we will do so as part of the Body of Christ, and we will find ourselves in union with Him, and with all the rest of the redeemed. We are all members of one body. But we are not melted down in some sort of cosmic unity—the more Christ is formed in each of us, the more like ourselves we will become.

A Holy Sanctuary

Pascal once said that “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” This has often and unfortunately been the case in the building of sanctuaries. Holy places have often been assembled with unholy hands. I say this because it now seems possible, Lord willing (Jas. 4:15), that we will allowed to begin construction on a sanctuary for worship in this calendar year. We have architects working on the initial drawings now. But when we are done, we don’t want a sanctuary that is holier than all the people who built it.

A Thought Experiment

We want to build, but we want to build with gold and silver, and with costly stones—and not with wood, hay, and stubble (1 Cor. 3:12). But we are talking about materials from God’s supply houses, not from ours. What does He call gold and silver? What does He call stubble?

It all lies in the adverbs. How we build is going to govern how we occupy, and whether God receives it. If we build in a spirit of love and mutual submission, and a meteorite destroys the whole thing before the first service, we are still that much ahead of the game. This is because building the external building is just a device that God is using for building us—we are the true Temple. We are the living stones, and we ought never to privilege the dead stones over the living ones.

And if we build a glorious building for future tourists and sightseers in Moscow to ooh and ahh over, and to comment on how majestic our spiritual vision must have been, but we did it while quarreling, fussing, and complaining, then we were trashing the real sanctuary for the sake of our picture of it. This is like a man yelling at his wife for damaging a precious picture he had of her.

Many of you have been on glorious tours of glorious churches, both here and in Europe. Don’t be the guy who carves his last scrollwork—soli Deo Gloria, or something equally lofty—and then dies and goes to the devil. What does it profit a man, Jesus asks, if he crafted something as glorious as the Rose Window at Chartes, but loses his own soul?

A Generation on the Move

Since this congregation was first planted in 1975, it has met in many locations. We have met in East City Park, St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, the Hawthorne Village common room, the American Legion cabin, a garage, Greene’s body and paint shop (both locations), the Paradise Hills Church of God, Moscow High School, the Logos auditorium, and now the Logos field house. I will say this—you all are good sports. During the body and paint shop days, I remember joking once that we were the only church I knew of where you could come to worship, find a Rainier beer truck in the sanctuary, and not think anything of it.

But all this was preparation time, not “get lazy” time. God intended the time in the wilderness as a time to shape and mold Israel. Those forty years had a point for them, and they have had a similar point for us. This means I would deliver a charge to the generation following us—my children’s generation, and those coming up after them. You must be like the men who served with Joshua, and who kept Israel faithful as long as they lived (Judges 2:7). You must teach your children to do the same (2 Tim. 2:2). You must not be like the odious woman who finally gets married and is insufferable as a result (Prov. 30:23).

Never Forget the Lord

When you come into a land full of good things, take special care not to forget the Lord (Dt. 6:12). And if your response is something like “oh, we could never do that,” you have already started to do it. The one who thinks he stands is the one who needs to take heed lest he fall (1 Cor. 10:12). The Old Testament was given as something that New Testament saints constantly need.

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State of the Church 2012

Joe Harby on

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Introduction

Our duties toward God and man are concrete duties. All of our duties are attached to names, and faces, and places. We have no duties in isolation; all duties occur in the context of relationships. But in order to love as we ought in each particular instance of a relationship we need to understand how important abstract generalizations are. God gives us generalities, not so that we might hide in them, but so that we will know what to do when the particular time comes (as it always does). The proof is in the pudding, which is particular and concrete. But the recipe for the pudding need not be particular—in fact it really shouldn’t be.

The Text

“Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another.  And ye shall not swear by my name falsely, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD. Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning. Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD. Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour. Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour: I am the LORD. Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD” (Lev. 19:11-18).

Summary of the Text

This passage contains the commandment that Jesus identified as the second greatest commandment in all of Scripture (Matt. 22:39). I began at verse 11 because it is important for us to see what kind of neighborhood this commandment lives in. When we discover that the greatest commandment comes from a passage on covenant education of children, we gain a great deal (Dt. 6:4-9). So also we see here what love for our neighbor is supposed to look like.

Reject every form of fraud and ungodly deceit (v. 11). Honor the name of God (v. 12). Stop it with the sharp-edged business practices (v. 13). Do not abuse the handicapped (v. 14). Judge every case on the merits; pay no attention whatever to the wealth or poverty of the disputants (v. 15). Don’t be a tale-bearer; don’t jeopardize your neighbor’s life (v. 16). Don’t hate your brother by refusing to tell him what he clearly needs to hear (v. 17). Don’t take vengeance; don’t bear a grudge. So love your neighbor as yourself (v. 18).

Abstractions

If I were to ask you all to think about the idea of dog, all of you could summon up that idea up in your mind. And if you found yourself imagining your own pet, I could ask you to make it more general and nebulous. You could do that as well, and the result would be no dog in particular, but still recognizably canine.

If the house next door to you sells, before the new owner moves in, you can do the same thing to your new “neighbor.” You can know your neighbor before you know him. This ability to think in abstractions is a gift of God. In the passage from Leviticus, a number of general principles are stated, without any local color added. Blind man is more specific than man, but we are not yet talking about an individual.

Neighborism

If you think like a Christian about culture and society, it will not be long before you are accused of holding to some sort of “individualism,” and with that abstraction dismissed with a sneer. But the Christian form of this is not individualism at all. If we must label it, let us call it neighborism. We must be committed to the rights of our neighbor, and we must be committed to them before we know his name, before we know his identity. If a collectivist taunts us with being dedicated to the bloodless abstraction called “the rights of the individual,” and we don’t even know his name, let us answer by saying that we are actually motivated by “love of our neighbor,” even though we might not know his name either. When the scribe asked Jesus for the name of his neighbor, he was trying to justify himself.

What Love Looks Like

The law of God gives shape to love. The law of God teaches us what love is supposed to look like before we get into the details. The law of God cuts up the pie for us before we know which piece we are going to get. And when we let God define love for us, we are frequently surprised . . . but not always.

In this passage, we see that love means not tripping a blind man. We like to think we would have guessed that. But we also see that we must decide against that same blind man in a dispute if the facts demand it. We might not have guessed that. And paying a 30-day note after 60 days is out, even if it is industry standard. And to refuse to speak frankly to your brother about his fault is a way of hating him (Gal. 6:1).

Moving Constantly Back and Forth

If you live in the particular only, you remember Smith, but you don’t remember “your neighbor.” You have become narrow and provincial. But if you live in the abstraction, you fall prey to the observation that Linus once made—that he loved mankind; it was people he couldn’t stand. The obedient life moves constantly back and forth. The adept cook moves back and forth between the recipe and the pudding.

Life Together

As you consider our culture, our nation, our society, and all the lunatic follies that beset us in it, it is tempting to despair, thinking that there is nothing really that we can do. You find yourself asking, “Where are we going, and why are we in this hand-basket?” In that situation, what sort of resolutions should you make for 2012?

The resolution should in fact be this: live in koinonia-community. Love one another. Love the neighbors you know, and love the neighbor whose van is not yet unloaded. Talk about our community—it is not bragging. We didn’t do anything except get in the way. Ask God to have His Spirit get us out of the way. If we want reformation-fire to spread, it doesn’t much matter where it first ignites. Why not here?

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State of the Church 2011

Joe Harby on

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Introduction

One of the customs we have in this congregation is that of having a “state of the church” message around the first of the year. Sometimes the message focuses on the local state of the church, and sometimes on the state of the national church. And sometimes, like today, it focuses on both.

The Text

“Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: 10 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; 11 And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil. 2:9-11).

Summary of the Text

The Jesus submitted Himself fully to the will of His Father in heaven. He did this even to the point of a humiliating death on the cross. God honors the story, and most of all in the central story that He writes. Because Jesus submitted Himself to death on a cross—for the sins of the world—God has therefore exalted Him highly (v. 9). He has given Him a name that is above every name (v. 9). This is not isolated off in some “spiritual zone.” The name of Jesus has been established such that every knee should bow—in heaven, on earth, and in the subterranean places (v. 10). Knees will bend everywhere. And every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (v. 11).

What Lordship Means

We do not confess that Jesus is the Silent Lord. When we confess His lordship, we then wait upon Him. The next thing that happens is that He tells us what to do, and how to live. He does not just tell us what to do or how to live in a very own personal lives. He tells all the knees that bowed, and all the tongues that confessed, what He wants them to do now. This is what He meant by “teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28: 20). We don’t just confess. He speaks also . . . authoritatively.

Inescapable Discipline

Before the final culmination of all things, in this fallen world, we always have to deal with competing words from competing lords. Because a man cannot serve two masters, these competing words will always be on a collision course. We have, in this past year, seen one such collision in principle. When the Congress repealed the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy for the military, they were not just lifting discipline, they were imposing it.

The public debate over this issue reveals that virtually no one understands what is going on. The absence of discipline is impossible in any society, still less in the military. This means that this question is a “not whether but which” question. It means that it is not whether we will discipline servicemen in terms of a sexual ethic, but rather which servicemen we will discipline in terms of a sexual ethic. In other words, it is not whether we will have a set of imposed sexual standards for the military, but rather which standards they will be. As Lenin once put it, with much more insight than our current rulers, “Who? Whom?”

The public discussion of all this, in its sophomoric talking points way, addressed whether straight servicemen are willing to “serve alongside” their openly homosexual peers. This question would obviously include evangelical Christians. But this is not the question at all. Anybody who has spent any time in the military knows that it is not a bastion of righteous behavior. If you join, you will serve alongside fornicators and drunks, and you will learn how to work together with them. Adding patriotic poofters to the mix is a non-issue, and barely worth discussing.

The issue is this. Homosexual behavior in the ranks is now being considered as a protected and honorable lifestyle choice. This means that if an evangelical Christian witnesses to his crewmates, and he says that Jesus died to liberate them from their sins, and somebody says, “Like what, fer instance,” he can still say “drunkenness, cocaine use, gambling away your family’s paycheck, sleeping with hookers, laziness, stealing, adultery, and so on.”

But if he now includes sodomy, then if someone complains about him (and someone most certainly will), the witnessing Christian will be subject to the discipline of the service. The fact that he was witnessing on his own time will be as irrelevant as the fact that the homosexuals used to cruise the bars on their own time.

What This Means

We have many in our congregation who have served in the military, and we have others who are currently serving. The evangelical contingent in the American military is large, and not insignificant. And so we must understand what has happened.

All militaries have to have oaths of allegiance. This too is inescapable. It matters to the Christian whether false gods are attached to that oath. The presence of false gods can be detected through the presence of false law. That is what we have here. Now the ancient Christians in Rome faced a greater obstacle to military service in the idolatrous oath of allegiance than in the question of fighting and killing. Look at the Old Testament—what was the bigger problem, idols or fighting? Right.

But in our case, the problem is not the oath itself, but what the handlers of the oath have now determined that it must mean. This means that what you think “defending the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic” means, and what they think it means, will be two entirely differently things. Bottom line, this means that Christians who decide to serve must be prepared to wreck their careers over this issue. This has always been true, but the odds were long. Now it will be present in every unit. Rather than put up with this, staying away from that Hobson’s choice is an honorable thing to do. But if you sign up with every intent of keeping your head down, with an “ain’t gonna witness to anybody” mentality, then you are timid little creature. And you shouldn’t join the military in order to become a moral coward.

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