State of the Church Archives - Page 6 of 6

Introduction

This is a season for personal inventories, and for resolutions. This is appropriate and fitting . . . unless one of your resolutions needs to be to rely less on resolutions and more on actually doing something. Assuming your resolutions help you get things done, you don’t want to lose ground here in order to gain ground there. Sanctification is accumulative—one virtue should not displace another.

The Texts

“Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God” (Rev. 3:2).
“Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule, let us mind the same thing” (Phil. 3:16).

Summary of the Text

Our first text is taken from the admonition given to the church at Sardis, and it is a pretty stern rebuke. The church there had a reputation for being alive, but was dead (v. 1). It become apparent in the next verse that they were not completely dead (v. 2), but the remaining life there was about to die. There were just a few embers in what had been a roaring fire, and those needed to be blown back into a blaze. “Strengthen the things that remain” means that they needed to get back to first principles, they needed to go back to the word they had first received (v. 3). In the words of the admonition to the church at Ephesus, they needed to return to their first love.

The second text assumes that those reading the exhortation have been faithful, and the call is not to repentance. At the same time, there is no sense of “having arrived.” Paul does not consider himself as having “apprehended” but he continues to press on toward the goal (v. 13). The mark that he strives for is the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus (v. 14). Anyone who is mature should think the same way, which shows us that maturity is not complacency (v. 15). Let us continue to do what got us here (v. 16). Let us live up to what we have already attained.
If we have wandered off the path, let us return to it. If we have stayed on the path, by the grace of God, let us keep on.

Time and Obedience

In this world, time is not an automatic friend. We have just passed one of our culture’s milestones for time, going from the year 2009 to the year 2010. This is good . . . or it is not. Time deepens wisdom, but it also hardens folly. Time is given so that we might have time to repent, but it also given so that we might be without excuse. Time allows the grain to ripen, and it allows the weeds to grow. Time allows the meat to roast in the oven, and is also what causes it to burn.

Keeping the Gospel

God is triune, and reveals Himself to us as triune. The principle way He chose to do this is through the Incarnation of Jesus. In other words, the doctrine of the Trinity was made necessary by God’s complete identification with us—which seems counterintuitive. How can the fact that the eternal Logos became a human being forever and ever lead us to the a complex doctrinal formulation that makes our heads hurt? Well, if it makes our heads hurt, then perhaps we are not as Trinitarian as we might like to believe. It is a given that the infinite God cannot be comprehended by finite minds. That much even unbelievers can know. But our glory is that this infinite God who cannot be comprehended took on human flesh forever, and has assumed a dwelling place among us. The relationship we have with Emmanuel, God with us, is not a relationship with a figure of speech. This is gospel; this is what God has done—a perfect man, living a perfect life on our behalf, and then offering up that life in blood sacrifice, so that we might be put right on the basis of His resurrection from the dead. Put right? Put right with what? With everything . . . put right with ourselves, put right with the creation, put right with our neighbor, and put right with our God.

Keeping the Gospel Fresh

This gospel, in its experienced reality, is transformative. It changes things, and, as it happens, it often changes things that didn’t want to be changed. Over time, one of two things will happen. The first is that we persevere in staying on the path, just as we ought to have done. If this is the case, then we need to be encouraged to “keep on keeping on,” as we used to say. The other option is that we slide back into the ways of death, as the saints at Sardis did, all while keeping relics of the gospel around. We revert to the sin while keeping this very fine catechism. As time progresses, that catechism becomes a large pebble in our shoe, one that makes us walk funny.

The way we deal with this is that we objectify the truth, putting it “out there,” giving credence to it “in its place.” Thinking that we have created a safe house for the truth to live in, we are actually killing it. The truth is meant to be lived, and if it isn’t lived it isn’t our truth. The truth is meant to be loved, and if it isn’t loved it isn’t our truth. Now truth is objective, but we must not objectify it. That is what Paul is talking about when he says that the letter kills but the Spirit gives life. Paul is not hostile to letters—he wrote “the letter kills” with letters. His words are objectively true, and by this we mean that they are not made true by our applause, and they are not falsified when we withhold our applause. But we objectify truth when we say, “Yeah, uh huh, I heard that before.” Or “I knew that once.” For those in this position, they must either come to their first love, or they must return to it.

Keeping It Simple

This year our congregation will be 35 years old. During that time, children born in the first years have grown up, married, and are bringing up children of their own in this same congregation. Things we knew and learned have been successfully passed on—let us continue to live up to what we have already attained. Some have joined the conversation part way, and feel like they are always catching up. Some other things we have drifted away from, and so let us return to the basic things, the simple things—love God and hate sin. Love His Word, despise the world, and learn to love the world.

A fitting conclusion is provided by a couple songs—the old gospel song Sweet Jesus says, “Everybody talking about heaven ain’t goin’ there.” And as the song Denomination Blues puts it, “Ya gotta have Jesus, and that’s all.”

Introduction
As we consider God’s ongoing kindnesses to us as a congregation, we need to be sure to grasp more than just the “facts.” We need also to have a biblical paradigm for processing those facts—otherwise we will radically misinterpret what is happening to us.

The Text
“But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets” (Acts 24:14).

Summary of the Text
In this place, the apostle Paul is giving a defense of his behavior before the Roman governor Felix. I want to draw our attention to one phrase that Paul uses in passing. He says that he is a follower of the Way, which they call a heresy. A better translation here would be sect.
In the early uses of the term in Scripture, the connotations of the word emphasized the distinctiveness of the group, and its separation from the mainliners. As the early history of the Church unfolded, the word came to include the damnable doctrines that “heretics” would use in order to bring about that kind of separation (2 Pet. 2:1). Certain men want to draw off disciples after themselves (Acts 20: 29-30), and what better way to do this than to emphasize “your distinctives”?

Sects and Churches
Assuming basic orthodoxy, and an absence of false teaching, we can still have a proplem with sectarianism. There is a fundamental difference between the concept of a sect and the concept of a church. The sect has tighter discipline, and is of necessity smaller. In fact, in many cases, the point is to stay small (and pure). The church has a tendency to take people as they come, and work with them there. The church therefore functions more as a people, while a sect functions more like a volunteer organization or a military unit.

Keeping Us Honest
A sect has a natural tendency to veer into various kinds of perfectionism, and the first thing you know, folks are being excommunicated for taking the pastor’s parking spot. A church has a natural tendency to give up on the demands of Christian discipleship that baptism confers, and the first thing you know, they are ordaining homosexuals. Sects struggle with rigorism; churches struggle with laxity. But as you have been reminded many times, God draws straight with crooked lines. God uses “heresies” or “sects” in order to establish who is actually approved by Him (1 Cor. 11:19). One of the ways He does this is by allowing the challenge of a rigorist group with fruitcake theology apparently living at a higher level of moral discipline than is present in an orthodox church. God is not above using a wingnut group as a goad.

Ideas and Children
Sects tend to cluster around rules and ideologies. A church, a people, are defined by generations, by children. In order to police his boundaries properly, sects usually have to limit their membership to those who voluntarily joined them as adults. In a church, people grow up in the church, and cannot remember a time when it was not “their” church. In a sect, everything depends on what you know. In a church, everything depends on who you know. When a sect is not around the bend, what you need to know is the gospel. When a church is not around the bend, who you know is Jesus . . . and the God of your parents. But obviously, temptations to gross sin are present no matter which way you go.

The Halfway Covenant
When the New England Puritans settled here in America, one of their great desires was to establish a pure church, and it has to be said that they began with a strong sectarian bias. They had a very clear set of criteria to determine who was converted (and who could therefore come to the Lord’s Supper). But they also baptized infants, which meant that children growing up in the church felt that they had some stake in it, even if they were not converted. They grew up, got married, and started having kids, without ever being admitted to the Table. But they believed the truth of the Christian faith, and they wanted to have their children baptized. Now, do you baptize the children of folks who are not communicant members because they haven’t been “converted,” but who have never been excommunicated? They are willing to make a statement before the congregation that they believe in the truth of the gospel, will bring their kids up in the faith, and so on. The Halfway Covenant said okay, and reveals as few other things could, the tension between sects and churches.

Without using either term pejoratively here, baptist theology tends to be sectarian, and paedobaptist theology creates all the pressures that a church undergoes. And paedocommunion takes all those pressures, calls, and raises them ten.

Christ Church
We have been practicing infant baptism for about sixteen years now. We have a congregation with many hundreds of members. Stated in bald terms, this means that children I baptized as infants are now old enough to drive drunk, use drugs, get pregnant, get somebody pregnant, refuse to do their schoolwork, run away from home, and so on. They get old enough to meltdown at some point. They are also old enough to be honoring their parents, learning a trade, progressing well in their studies, and so on. This is what the great majority are doing. But in the early years of our congregation, we didn’t have to deal with any of this—this was because we were much more like a sect than a church, and secondly, ninety percent of the children were under three feet tall. When children grow up in a church, as the next generation grows up in a people, it can create very interesting pastoral roblems. Churches have to deal with the problem of generational faithfulness.

As we are dealing with this stage in our congregational sanctification, keep certain principles in mind. The first is that while we do not want to be on a sectarian hair trigger for discipline, we do practice church discipline, and this discipline must include the next generation growing up in our midst. Secondly, be aware of the fact that God is not mocked, and that a man reaps what he sows. This is no less true within his household than it is out in his barley field. Many times it is not possible to address the spiritual needs of a troubled young covenant member without addressing the state of the family. Third, the sowing is often visible to others at the time of sowing, but some just won’t listen. And fourth, be grateful that the church, even with all these troubles, is a profound engine of social and cultural change. When we contend with our enemies in the gate, we want our sons to stand there with us, and not just random volunteers.

We have spent a good bit of time considering the applications of the prophet’s words to his original audience, to the Israelites in the northern kingdom of Israel. Lord willing, we will spend two weeks considering how those words may legitimately be applied to us as Americans. This is not a topical sermon so much as it as a topical application.

State of the Church 2010