Little By Little
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.
Last week we talked about revivalism of a certain brand. Today we’re going to talk about how that’s not really normal. Normally the pattern of God’s work in history is little by little, and that’s exactly what he said to the Israelites as they were going to conquer Canaan. It was “Little by little I will drive out the people before you,” for the sake of the land. He didn’t want the land to be desolate.
When we look at history, often we get this idea that it’s big thing after big thing after big thing, because let’s face it, there’s a lot to cover and you can’t cover everything. We’re telling a story, so we have to hit the high points, the things that had a big impact that we can see and make some beginning of understanding.
And that seemed to make a huge difference then or, at least from our perspective, now.
But that’s not all that history is in the sense of things that happen. Everything that happens is history, but it’s not the telling of history.
So as we look back over our lives we are often tempted to say, “My life doesn’t matter. I would never go down in a history book.” Other people are, “If my name will just go down in history then it will all be worth it.” Really?
As we bring this to the Christian life, the reality is that most of our life is, “What, more dishes to wash again? Diapers again?”
We can think here of the book of Ecclesiastes. I spoke in staff devotions this morning about that part of the wise man’s message. The winds go around and around and around. The oceans get evaporated and become water that goes back in the ocean, and that goes around and around and around. People are born and people die. The cycle seems endless. Where’s the meaning in all of this?
As Christians we want there to be more, and we trust there is more. We know that one day we’ll go home to meet Jesus. That’s more. One day Jesus will come back. That’s really more. But when God steps into our mundane existence, our ordinary pattern of life, and does something really, really cool from our point of view, really extravagant, really huge like a Great Awakening or a Reformation, we get all excited about that and understandably so. Those are great times to live in – at least they seem like they would be from our point of view.
Maybe if you asked Martin Luther he’d have a different opinion. There was a lot of plague, a lot of…
Yeah. George Whitfield didn’t live very long. It just can seem that when you balance out the ordinary Christian life of doing dishes, doing diapers, going to church, reading your Bible, having children, going to work, and then going to work, and then going to work, and then going to work, go to church, go to church, go to church, hear a sermon, hear a sermon, hear a sermon – it can seem that that isn’t as spiritual.
It certainly isn’t as exciting as when God just pours out his Spirit suddenly and people are tripping over themselves to come to Christ. Hundreds and thousands profess faith. Some of the worst people in town are bemoaning their sins and calling on the name of Jesus, and it just goes on and on sometimes.
Even civil governments are transformed. New missionary societies are created. Missionaries are funded and sent to the ends of the earth, and church attendance skyrockets. We say, “That’s what we want! That’s what we’ve been waiting for!”
I’ve used the words analog and digital. Maybe they make sense here. Things that are analog just kind of follow a slow wavy pattern. If I was at 3.5 yesterday, I’ll probably rise up to 3.6 today, or maybe drop to 3.2, but I’m not going to be a 12. That’s digital. From 3 to 12 to 100, those kinds of spikes where we go from something small to something huge just like that – at least that’s what I’m labeling as digital. It’s the changes that seem to come out of nowhere.
That seems very apt because what is the digital but an approximation of the analog? The reality that’s going on underneath – there are far more layers of precision than we measure with our digital clock or our digital altimeter or whatever we’re doing. It’s an approximation of what’s really going on.
We can use this analogy to look at life and say, “All right, so is the Christian life analog or is it digital?” or more to the point perhaps, the coming of the kingdom – is it analog or digital? Does the kingdom advance by huge revival after huge revival, separated sometimes by decades or centuries, if not millennia, or is it a slow grinding process that doesn’t ever really seem to have been of any great change?
It’s basically people living out their dull repetitive lives in the fear of God. It’s families that get up in the morning and have breakfast, maybe read the Bible and say a prayer, then go off and do their work and come home and have dinner and maybe have family devotions and pray together for their church and their family and maybe their nation, and then go to bed and do it all over again the next day. And at the end of the week, they go to church and they worship God and they tithe and they are sanctified a little bit at a time here and there over the course of a lifetime.
That seems to be what most of us would call normal. It’s just what most of us would not call exciting. Beginning with the great revivals in early America, the Great Awakening and Second Awakening, we see what becomes almost an assumption of or an addiction to the next big thing, the next great revival.
[laughing] Yeah, there’s much to be said for that actually, because we tend to see it through rose-colored glasses. We hear all of the reports of the people who were there, or close to being there, and tell us all the wonderful changes that were wrought, and it’s only when you’re 20, 30, or 40 years older that you actually begin to read the history books and find out the rest of the story. You find out there were some problems, most of them doctrinal, some of them practical.
There was this phenomenon that I think you both know about called camp meeting babies. People would come to the revival meetings, the camp meetings on the frontier, and everybody would come from all over the place, hundreds and thousands of people, and they’d get really excited about Jesus. Some of the young people would get really excited about Jesus and, being really excited, they’d go into the bushes and get real excited, and nine months later babies would show up. It was a pretty common thing.
Within the last couple years, I found out that it was also kind of a regular thing during the original Great Awakening too, because when religious impulse or religious excitement isn’t bound by the Word of God and by the structures that God has appointed, religious fervor and emotion can do what emotion and fervor do all the time. It can just run amuck, and it all seems wonderful.
There’s a section you may remember in Huck Finn where Huck and the Duke and – what was the other guy?
To answer that question I would have to have read Huck Finn. And yes, I am teaching that this fall, so stay tuned.
The two con men – one who claims to be a duke, and the other I forget what he claims to be – they stop by a little riverside town and there’s a revival meeting going on. Twain obviously had been at these because he describes them very accurately. There’s the long-winded preaching, the excitement, and there’s a lot of young ladies who are getting religiously sentimental, and there are some boys kind of hanging back and they see, “Wow, these girls are just giving hugs to everybody who comes to Jesus,” so they decide to go “come to Jesus” so they can go over to the girls and start getting hugs.
It goes from there, but Mark Twain turns it into something rather humorous rather than to the horrible thing it could be. But even Twain was familiar with this kind of phenomena late in the 1840s or 50s, whenever Huck Finn was written.
There are a number of dangers in waiting for the next great thing, because for one thing it begins to shift our faith, our attention, our commitment away from Jesus, away from the preaching of the gospel and the normal means of grace, to something big, and we’re not content until the big thing comes.
“I sit here day after day reading the Bible to my children, but what good is that doing? Oh, that God would send revival,” and we have in mind those kinds of revivals where the Holy Spirit sweeps in and does incredible things, and he has on occasion, no doubt about it. They’re [mixed works? 10:24] because that’s God’s will. He doesn’t perform instantaneous sanctification in anybody in this life, but lots and lots of people come to Christ. Lots and lots of people draw nearer to him. The gospel goes out to people who’ve never heard it, and wonderful things.
Having been through that, first is the temptation to just say, “Oh, will it ever come?” When it comes, “Yes! This is what it’s all about. This is the kind of Christianity I signed on for.”
You go home from summer camp, and I’ve had lots of students over the years who have had exactly these experiences. Summer camp was so great. They come back and they’re talking about it and they’re so excited for a day or two or three, and little by little it grinds down.
On the one hand they try to stir up those same feelings again by artificial means, or they start to get a little depressed and wonder if it really happened, if it was really real. Some of them come back down and understand, “Okay, it was a mountaintop experience. I’m now off the mountain and that’s the way it’s going to be,” but it’s the thing of trying to stir it up on your own.
That’s what has marked the history of American evangelism, American revivalism. When these awakenings came, they produced great emotion; therefore, great emotion and the Holy Spirit go together. So if God isn’t really doing anything, maybe we can prime the pump by introducing the great emotion, getting people excited about God, and then the Holy Spirit will just kind of kick in at some point and we’ll have this wonderful revival meeting.
I assume that you have, like I have, driven past churches with banners outside declaring, “Revival Coming Next Week.”
Yeah, it has to be in a tent. We couldn’t just have it during a normal church service. Some guy has to come in from outside, usually. It’s rarely just our regular pastor, because he’s pretty ordinary.
Like the means of grace, yeah. So in American history, to step back in that direction for a second, after Finney and after the Second Awakening we see an ongoing tradition in American evangelicalism of trying to prime the pump, of announcing revivals, of praying better, praying for revivals, and not really being content until they come, and expecting them to look like the last one. That’s something I don’t address in the article, but I think it’s something we could talk about.
From where I stand, the Christian school movement, the homeschool movement, and the pro-life movement were part of one huge revival. Now, they didn’t look like any of the revivals we’d seen before, but what did you get? You got people dedicating themselves to teaching their children the Bible, in fact seeing all of life through the Bible, and then risking a lot to go and stand for that in public.
Now, the flaw here was it didn’t always reach back into the churches. We did not see a great deal of doctrinal revival. Of course, we didn’t in the Second Awakening, either. Actually, we saw the opposite. We saw more and more of a common ground, lowest common denominator approach to theology because this is catholic in the worst possible sense.
It’s not, “Well, we all believe X number of things that are true. We can put them into a confession and we can all preach this.” It’s like, “Okay, it’s all about Jesus and loving the sinner and bringing him down the aisle, right? Okay, go! You stand over there. You stand over there. You stand over there. You preach from the stump, you preach from the log, and I’ll preach from the top of the wagon, and we’ll count up how many people came to Christ at the end.”
There’s a reason we refer to big tent evangelicalism or big tent conservatism. This was the original big tent.
And then, of course, the other danger is that eventually your orthopraxy starts to affect your view of what church is supposed to do and what it’s supposed to be, so now you have people going around, “Well, you know, your church isn’t doing enough to spread the gospel.”
“What do you mean? We’ve been preaching the gospel for 85 years every Sunday here, and we’re all part of the community. We all help each other out and we do X and Y, and we give to foreign missions, or some of us have gone out and done foreign missions.”
“Well yeah, but you’re not doing a big tent revival every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks. That’s just how you’ve got to do it. That’s the gospel. You’re not spreading the gospel.”
Yeah, altar calls – see our last episode. You used a word that we haven’t yet used on the podcast. Bryan, what is orthopraxy?
Two Greek words – ortho and praxis. Ortho means correct and praxis meaning action. In other words, you’re living a right way. You are acting in a right way. Often in the Reformed world we use a phrase like, “Orthodoxy implies orthopraxy,” or at least we express the concept of that phrase.
I saw a banner or meme in the back of the church building the school used to use. It said, “Your theology ought to be your reality.” I thought that was pretty good, not only in the sense of how you discern things, but if you believe that “That’s a wall,” you’re not going to try to walk through it without first finding the door that goes through the wall. If this is the ledge of a 5-story building, you’re not going to walk over it, because your sense of reality will keep you from doing anything so stupid.
Reality is not simply a state of mind. It ultimately is how you conform to that state of mind, your perception of what’s there and what isn’t there and what’s possible and what’s not possible and what’s likely to happen. If I do X, will Y in fact happen?
Theology describes the knowledge of God. It describes for us what the world is like and how it works. We need to not just have that be something we believe bookishly, but something that actually shapes the choices we make, how we live and what we do.
Let me finish off with the whole revival thing, because this is what’s happened in the church, but we have to understand that something similar was happening in the broader culture at the same time. We talked about this last week. While the church gave us revivalism, the world gave us, with the cooperation of the church sometimes, reform movement after reform movement.
Yeah, and with a lot of these things it was getting people together, getting them excited, pushing the emotion. It wasn’t just writing tracts and pamphlets. It wasn’t just conducting logical arguments or attempting to push through legislation, though all of those things happened, but there was a lot of emotional excitement of a religious nature.
You can think here of the Civil War and abolition. What more emotionally moving song is there than The Battle Hymn of the Republic?
“Glory, glory, hallelujah!” We’ve sung it so long. It sounds so grand and proud and driven and marching and all that. How often do we stop and actually look at the words and realize what this came out of and what it alludes back to? “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave. His truth is marching on.” These things became matters of religious fervor.
I was doing some notes for my Econ class and I found that this thing extended up into the Free Silver movement of the late 1800s, and we should have figured this out. When William Jennings Bryan said, “You shall not press down this crown of thorns upon the brow of labor. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” he did not say that simply to reach for an obscure religious image. The whole meeting was conducted like a revival meeting, and people saw themselves as moved by the Spirit of God in the cause of God’s kingdom. It was still that. The country had not yet apostatized so far, but that they thought in terms of the Christianity they knew, but the Christianity they knew was revivalistic.
One more big push and we can change the world. We can change the government. We’ll use the power of the government to bring about goodness and light and life and the millennium will be ushered in, or Utopia or whatever you want to call it, and everything will be better. Maybe it is one last war to end all wars.
As late as World War I, it was still that same kind of thought process and language. “A war to make the world safe for democracy. We can save the world. Yes, it’s messy and it’s going to cost lives. We’re sorry. We really don’t want to do it, but one last push to save Christian civilization.” They still used that kind of language as late as World War I.
Yeah, as late as today. We still are suckers for it. No American president has ever become president without using that kind of language. Now, no appeal to Jesus or the gospel or more than a passing mention of the Bible or some verse yanked out of context, but those kinds of images that go with revivalism – the language of liberty and freedom and peace and love for all mankind and universalism that the gospel has have been very common.
If you got up and tried to run for office and said, “My goal is simply to change nothing, do nothing, maybe step back a few steps on every front, and let people be,” you will get zero votes.
I think you’d actually get a fair chunk of them, at least the non-Libertarian party ones. They’d be like, “Finally, someone gets it!”
You even see that kind of attitude reflected in certain sectors of Reformed-dom, if you will, where it’s not this little by little expanding of the kingdom. It’s, “Maybe if we can get the right person into office in our district, and we can get this person to enact this law that’s based on a biblical principle – maybe soon, maybe next year in Washington DC the bombs drop and society has to be rebuilt from the ground up. We can finally build a foolproof Christian government and God will enact the Golden Age, and everyone gets a puppy and a water buffalo etc etc.
Well, let’s bring this back to the concrete example that scripture gives us, which brings us to Judges, which is kind of where we are. We just left Joshua with his farewell speech and we’re coming to Judges. It was Exodus where Jehovah said, “You’ll drive them out little by little so the beasts don’t multiply against you and the land become desolate.”
So we come to Judges, and Judges begins by recounting the early victories, but the early victories are kind of so-so. They’re not altogether horrible. Judah goes first and does pretty well. Simeon goes with him, and that seems to be working well. We have the story of Caleb and Achsah and Othniel repeated, and that’s good. Then things begin to change just a little. I’m going to read and skim here a little bit. This is from Judges beginning at 1:22 -
And the house of Joseph, they also went up against Bethel and the Lord was with them. And the house of Joseph sent to decry Bethel.
The spies found a man, and the man agrees to show them what’s going on, and that works, but the man escapes. He goes into another country and builds another city after the same name. It’s a little leak. It’s not a big thing, but the Bible thinks it’s worth mentioning.
Neither did Manasseh drive out the inhabitants of Bethshean and her towns, nor Taanach and her towns, nor the inhabitants of Dor and her towns, nor the inhabitants of Ibleam and her towns, nor the inhabitants of Megiddo and her towns: but the Canaanites would dwell in that land.
And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out.
Oops. That wasn’t anywhere in the playbook. God did not say, “Kill them, but if that doesn’t work then tribute is the second-best alternative.”
Neither did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites that dwelt in Gezer; but the Canaanites dwelt in Gezer among them.
Neither did Zebulun drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, nor the inhabitants of Nahalol, but the Canaanites dwelt among them and became tributaries. Neither did Asher drive out the inhabitants of Accho, nor the inhabitants of Zidon, nor of Ahlab, nor of Achzib, nor of Helbah, nor of Aphik, nor of Rehob, but the Asherites dwelt among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land, for they did not drive them out.
So far the Canaanites had been there dwelling in the midst of Israel in their little towns. Now Israel is dwelling in the midst of the Canaanites. They don’t have the consensus anymore. They’ve lost it. They’re there, but there’s no talk of making them tributes. Now they’re the ones being tolerated.
Neither did Naphtali drive out the inhabitants of Bethshemesh, nor the inhabitants of Bethanath; but he dwelt among the Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land; nevertheless the inhabitants of Bethshemesh and of Bethanath became tributaries unto them.
And the Amorites forced the children of Dan into the mountain, for they would not suffer them to come down to the valley. But the Amorites would dwell in mount Heres in Aijalon, and in Shaalbim. Yet the hand of the house of Joseph prevailed, so that they became tributaries.
So the Danites don’t even manage to kick them out or reach détente. The Canaanites drive them up into the forest and won’t let them come down the mountain, which is one reason that they go for that little, “Hey, let’s go up north and see if there’s anything up there.”
In Chapter 2 God passes verdict on this. He comes to them and he says this –
I made you to go up out of Egypt and have brought you unto the land which I sware unto your fathers, and I said, I will never break my covenant with you. And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land. Ye shall throw down their altars. But ye have not obeyed my voice. Why have ye done this? Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them out from before you but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.
Israel weeps over that one. So God has now added a different reason for why they’re not going to do this overnight, because they didn’t. God had told them it would be little by little, but their littler by littler was slower than God’s little by little.
They started compromising. They didn’t push the claims of their God. They didn’t fight the wars of the Lord. They pushed so far and then they got lazy. They got tired. They decided to back down. They figured détente was an acceptable solution, until the bad guys started pushing back on them and then they started complaining that they didn’t have enough territory – talking about Dan here.
God finally steps in and says, “Wait. This was not the arrangement. So you don’t want to drive them out? Then I’m not going to drive them out. They’re going to be thorns in your side.”
Paul will later use this language to speak of a thorn in the flesh that he had. God leaves us with temptations and trials and difficult things so that we learn to rely on him. And here God now officially is leaving the next generation enemies to fight, because it’s tough enough to live the godly life when you have no enemies. When everything is fine and there’s an overabundance of material blessing and you have stuff that you didn’t fight for and didn’t work for and didn’t save for and it’s just all delivered into your hand, it can be really hard to be a Christian under those circumstances.
When everyone’s a Christian in my own Christian college, there were a lot of jokes – and I don’t know if that’s even the word, but sarcasm – about “there are too many covenant kids here.” These are college students. If anyone went up on the roof of the guys’ hall at the end of the weekend they would find there were an awful lot of beer bottles and beer cans on the roof, because people on the third floor, when they finished they would just kind of reach out and throw them up in back. There was a lot of drunkenness going on in this Christian college.
I remember that our RA, when he was running through the rules for incoming freshmen, although I was a junior at the time, he said, “Here’s the thing about posters of women. What that means for now, guys, is that all the women have to have their clothes on.” That was as much of a stand as the school was going to take on this, tolerating drunkenness and lust.
Are these things issues for Christian kids? Yeah, they really are, and therefore they need to be addressed and dealt with very seriously, with much love and tenderness and prayer, but they need to be dealt with. To just kind of say, “Well, ya know, it’s a problem and we’re not going to face it” is exactly what these people were doing in the days of the judges.
You haven’t taken it seriously, so being covenant kids didn’t work so well. Having your own little enclave where everybody in town goes to church – they did in that little community – every morning you could see them trooping off to their respective Reformed churches in town. There was like one atheist in town and everyone knew who he was. There was one Baptist church. Everything else was Reformed churches, and yet there was a coldness in the next generation.
God’s solution is, “You need to fight the battles of the Lord. You need to see what it costs to be a Christian, when things are tough and hard and people get in your face, and eventually where there may even be real persecution, and even possibly some of you may have to die for your loyalty to Jesus.”
So God says that he’s going to leave these nations to prove Israel, to test her so that they can fight the battles of the Lord. So what happens for the next 300 years? This is the book of Judges and it’s depressing to read, and anyone who reads it intelligently eventually comes back and says, “What was that all about?” because here’s what happens.
A generation will stand up and serve God. At the end of that generation, the next generation apostasizes and goes after the false gods of sex and power – Baal and Astaroth. They adopt a foreign lifestyle, a pagan culture. God says, “You want to live in a pagan world? Fine. I’ll send you pagans to rule you,” and he sends in a nation that will conquer them and subdue them and will tyrannize them and oppress them politically and economically for X number of years – and each X gets bigger and bigger as we go through the book. It gets longer and longer. Then finally, in most cases, Israel repents and calls to God.
There’s once or twice where God just says, “Okay, you’re not doing anything. Enough of this. Let’s try a different approach,” but normally God pushes them to repentance. So when they repent then God raises up a judge who uses often very odd strategies and tactics, things that don’t make sense from a human point of view to show that this is the battle of the Lord. This is God at work here. He’ll drive out the enemies and then he will judge Israel and they will serve the Lord for that generation, and then the next generation will fall away.
One of the questions – and this is something we’ll come to eventually – is why? What was their big hang-up about passing on the faith to the next generation? Why couldn’t the next generation ever seem to take hold of the covenant and get serious about walking with God, about fighting the battles of the Lord?
God never gave them flowery beds of ease. He kept throwing at them the Moabites and the Philistines and the Ammonites and the Amorites and Canaanites and everybody after them, and yet they couldn’t spiritually get their act together. They kept choosing not to.
That’s Judges, and people ask, “Is this what the gospel does? It just loses generation after generation?”
One of our elders, many years ago now, was teaching through this and people said, “How do you square this with post-millennialism?” and he apparently didn’t have an immediate answer because he asked me about that. I said, “It’s really easy. The judges weren’t Jesus.” They didn’t have the spiritual power, and even as judges they failed a lot. Gideon? Samson?
Just as the kings afterward. A big message of the book of Kings is, “These kings failed. You need a better king,” and in the same way we need a better judge.
We need a better judge. We need a better war leader who fights on different terms, and that’s where Judges pretty much leaves us. We’ll look at two sections later on, probably several episodes from now, but at the end of Judges there are two stories, both concerning Levites.
We see that one Levite sells his spiritual birthright for a mess of pottage. Basically it’s, “Come be my priest and help me worship my idols, and I’ll give you money, food, and clothes.”
Another Levite, when challenged to defend his wife, runs away and hides. And yet these are supposed to be shepherds who image Jesus, the divine bridegroom, who always gives himself for his bride. These are men who would sell out their faith for money, who lack commitment not only to Christ, but to their own wives.
Then when we get into the next book of Samuel we see that it was not only the Levites, it was the priests. We run into Hophni and Phinehas, who are actually raping the nuns at the tabernacle door, as well as stealing from the sacrifices.
God at the end of this has just about had enough and deserts the tabernacle. The glory departs. The ark goes into captivity.
To bring this back to our theme, each generation had it’s ‘next big thing,’ and none of them lasted because the next big thing did not carry on to the next generation. That requires the hard duty of nurturing your children in the faith, living it out in life day by day, being faithful to your wife each day, each week, each month, going to church Sunday after Sunday, making use of the normal standard means of grace.
If God wants to do something spectacular, great for God and we’ll be there. We’ll jump on-board. But in the meantime, line upon line, precept upon precept. In the meantime we keep praying, “Thy kingdom come.” We’ve been doing that for 2,000 years and it’s not all here yet.
We have victory in principle. I mean Jesus is coming. He’s on the throne of the universe. We’re children of God reigning in heavenly places with Christ Jesus and all of that, but aren’t there more souls to save? Isn’t the Word of God to have greater effect? Aren’t there more nations that need to be discipled?
We still have indwelling sin that needs to be challenged. One writer said, “You know, with all that Jesus has done, there’s literally nothing else that has to happen before Jesus comes back.” This is a Reformed guy. So in other words, no one else out there needs to be saved. The church doesn’t need to grow. I don’t need to grow. Literally nothing else needs to happen? The way it’s said doesn’t ring true.
I have an inkling of what he may have meant by it that is not as egregious, but still it’s slightly odd.
I think I know what he meant too, and I think it was just a really bad way of saying it. I think what he’s saying is the Bible has not prophesied anything else of significance. God may or may not send something that we consider significant, but all the prophecies have been fulfilled, so on that level God would not be breaking his word if Jesus came back tomorrow.
Then I look at the Great Commission and say, “Really? Really? He was joking when he told us to do that. The command does not imply any sort of promise. And even him saying he would be with us to the end of the world – don’t put too much on that.”
I can’t buy that. The whole New Testament is alive with victory, not simply the victory that Jesus has already accomplished, but the outworking of that victory in earth and history and in the real lives of his people.
My own tiny little denomination has struggled with this particular heresy. I’m hoping you two have never even heard of it, but it’s basically a denial of progressive sanctification. “I’ve come to Christ. I’m in Christ. Christ is perfect, and therefore that’s sanctification. I’m positionally sanctified in him, and that’s all that God ever required. I mean I can’t really grow or change or do anything.”
Our denomination struggled with that for decades. Some of the old guard may still cling to it secretly.
That’s kind of interesting because I just finished listening to an episode about a cult in the 19th century that was a Christian perfectionism cult, where the leader basically said, “I am without sin and so are all of you, and anything we do is fine, so just do whatever weird stuff you want.”
Yeah. The theologian’s name was [39:43 Kolbreke?] I think, a nice German name. He was basically not saying we don’t sin, but that it doesn’t matter because there’s nothing you can do about it. Jesus has already paid for it, and you already are united to him, and God sees you in him.
It’s not really! It’s just trying to justify it through justification. “I’ve been justified by faith, so I don’t need to do anything else.” And more to the point, “I really can’t do anything else.”
I was in my first or second year of teaching and I went to a missions conference in the Bakersfield area and there was one pastor who still kind of held onto this, and he was debating with my pastor, the man who would one day be my pastor, about this.
I asked him, “So what would you say if someone comes to you and confesses a deep sin?”
“Well, I would tell him that he needs to look at who he is in Christ and what Christ has done for him,” which in itself is not a bad answer but it’s only the beginning of an answer.
I said, “Is it impossible that somebody could have substantial victory over sin and become a better Christian, more faithful in particular areas than others?” and he thought about it and said – and I remember his voice pattern – “Well, it’s possible, I guess.”
No, it’s more than just possible. It’s kind of what sanctification demands – progressive sanctification.
He sounds so sad that you can’t even look back at your own life and say, “Wow, the Lord grew me in that particular experience or in this way.”
Yeah. It’s not that we’re claiming entire sanctification. “After 50 years I’m free from sin.” It’s, “After 50 years I know my sins…” – in fact, I had this conversation with the guy, too. “You think after 50 years you’re going to know your sins so much better?”
Yes, this is so. However, that doesn’t mean you haven’t beat some of them along the way, and in some areas you have overcome. Yes, you now know that they’re worse than you thought they were, but that’s not the same thing. Even that’s a sanctification. Your understanding and your conscience has become sharper than it was. That’s a good thing, although it hurts.
You can still look back and say, “In so many ways I’m not who I was back then.”
Yes, and what is true for the individual is true for the church as a whole. We don’t have to believe that the church is somehow going to be perfect to believe that there is room for substantial growth, substantial collective sanctification, until we all come to unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God as perfect man, until we make up a body worthy of our head, as Paul describes in Ephesians 4.
We also don’t have to think of the church as being so denigrated and so horrible that there’s only room for improvement. We can recognize that the church has made strides, and even if at some point in the future it’s more perfect than it is now, that there will still be room.
Yeah, there’s always going to be room for growth, but if you can’t look at, let’s say, the Apostle’s Creed and compare it to the Nicaean Creed, then the Chalcedon, then skip a few generations and look at the Three Forms of Unity or the Westminster Confession of Faith and say, “Has there been growth here? Do we understand God better than we did?” – at least some of us seem to.
Maybe you haven’t read the Confessions lately. Maybe there’s more to study now than we ever thought there was. That’s one thing that annoys me. Just when I think, “Okay, I think I’ve got these areas of theology under control, at least I haven’t I haven’t missed anything too major, I think,” then someone will write a book and I’m like, “Oh no.”
I’m reading the book you recommended on simplicity, and I thought, “I pretty well understand what’s going on here, but Bryan says this is a great book so I’m going to read this,” and wow, it’s a hard book, it’s a dense book, and wow, there’s stuff going on there that I missed.
It was nice to find out that, “Yes, got that, yes, I’ve been saying that, yeah, that’s good. I’m not quite sure what that means,” and honestly his appeal to Aquinas and Aristotelian categories was kind of meh at times, but still fundamentally…
But then I found out, “Oh, and here are all these people who are opposing this doctrine of the unity of God and the simplicity of God, because they don’t get it and it’s hard and they want God to be different.” No, you can’t…
The more we understand scripture even, the more we understand where we have failed to understand scripture, and the more we understand how many people around us don’t get it, that doesn’t mean we give up or we say, “Okay, we’re done” or there’s no more work to do. There’s always more work to do. There’s always room to grow.
Now, cutting to the chase, in the original article I suggested three things. I think we’ve probably talked about these, but I see one I want to make sure that we get to.
What shall we say to these things? God works through human weakness so that the glory of his victory may be more self-evidently his own. If God poured out his Spirit like he did in the Reformation or at Pentecost every other week, we’d get lazy and cranky and full of ourselves and wouldn’t take God seriously and wouldn’t have to wrestle with him or with our own sins. We would forget how good God is, because we’d forget how wicked we are. We wouldn’t see his profound wisdom. We’d just take it as a matter of course.
You watch the last Avenger movie where Captain Marvel suddenly steps in – mega power to blast things away, and everyone says, “So why didn’t she just use [inaudible 45:49] She had superpower beyond measure, so where was the big struggle here?”
DC has been struggling with that with Superman for decades. You give somebody this much power, then where’s the interest? Well, of course he’s going to win and we’re just going to see what he’s going to do a little different this time.
God keeps the game interesting so that we will see more than just his bare power, so that we’ll see his wisdom, his creativity, his subtlety, his sense of humor.
Secondly, God deliberately lets the wicked prosper for a time so he can deliver their wealth, knowledge, and technology into our hands. Proverbs says the wealth of the sinners laid up for the just. Israel inherited a great many things that they didn’t build, they didn’t plant, they didn’t construct – the wells of water, the vineyards, the homes.
God lets the wicked do lots of stuff so that in a generation or two we can turn around, grab them, inherit them, and use them for the kingdom of God – phones, computers, the internet, the microchip, airplanes. By and large we didn’t invent that stuff. We backed off and the world invented them and the world developed them and the world perfected them, and then suddenly we are here using computer technology built on microchip technology and we’re talking to, we hope, maybe hundreds of people in the name of Jesus, telling them things they might not hear otherwise. God has long-range plans and sometimes they’re not obvious.
Then lastly – and this is what I really wanted to touch on – there’s a kind of spiritual growth that can only take place as God’s people wrestle with temptation and indwelling sin. There’s a maturity in faith that must grow without emotional support or encouragement. I’m thinking here of The Screwtape Letters, Letter 8, where Screwtape is talking to his nephew Wormwood and trying to convince him what the best way to go about tempting humans is.
He says, “It’s great when the human feels completely deserted by God. That’s great – despair, which may lead to a suicide or just a rejection of faith – but be careful because there’s another possibility. Some of the greatest possibilities for growth come in those deep troughs, those deep valleys.”
He says this. “Be not deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human no longer desiring but still intending to do the Enemy’s will…” that is, you’re at the point of saying, “I don’t even care anymore. Why am I a Christian? I’m not sure I believe any of this stuff. I don’t even want to serve God, but I guess I will do this thing because what else am I going to do? God says it, I guess I’m going to do it, but boy, this sure stinks.”
He says, “…no longer desiring but still intending to do the Enemy’s will looks around upon the universe from which every trace of him seems to have vanished, and asked why he’s been forsaken, and still obeys.”
That’s faith. That’s the faith we see in the psalmist on occasion where he cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” and yet does not turn back, does not let go, does not give in. He keeps doing what God wants. That’s the kind of faith and growth that is most precious to God.
Now, Jesus, of course, did not have to deal with indwelling sin, but we’re told that though he were a son, yet learned he obedience by the things that he suffered. In Gethsemane he came to terms with what it means to face God when the obedience costs you everything, when it hurts, literally, like hell and everyone deserts you, and yet you do it because it is the Father’s will and because in your mind there is no choice. It’s not fun, it’s not joy, it’s not peace, it is simply obedience to the God to whom you’ve committed your life.
So another reason why God does not flood us with spiritual revival every day is we wouldn’t grow. He gives us Canaanites, thorns in the flesh, so that we may learn his grace is sufficient, his strength is made perfect in our weakness, again so the glory may be both [inaudible 50:25]
Maybe there’s a revival around the corner. I’ve got no problem with that. I have no problem if the Spirit sweeps through Washington and New York and LA and the little hinterlands of America, and everybody goes to church and everyone hears the preaching of the gospel, and they go out and they tear down all of the various idols – I won’t even list what comes to my mind – and they all set out to raise their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord and to tell everybody, “Know the Lord.”
If that happens, I am there. I am relieved. I will praise God. But if not, and I have to get up tomorrow and go to school again and get ready for a new school year and photocopy a million things and set up gradebooks for the 40th time, okay. We’ve got this. Let’s do this by God’s grace one more time, and then trust him for what the outcome may be.
Once more, feeling optional. That’s great. Do we have any recommendations for this evening?
Actually, since I happened to reach over and touch it where I left it the other day, I’m going to recommend singing psalms.
I have an exclusive psalmodist friend who I think listens to this podcast. Sorry, James. I’m not EP, but I highly recommend singing psalms.
That’s what I am. I didn’t know that was really a thing. I thought it was a joke. It’s a real term.
It’s the [pity? 52:10] response when everyone is like, “Oh, you’re not EP?” and I’m like, “No, I’m IP.” [inaudible] jokes online.
I’ll also double up on this recommendation. There is an app for a split-leaf psalter. Split-leaf, for those who don’t know, is a psalter book that has a line cut through the center of all the pages, so on the top is the sheet music, and on the bottom are the metrical psalms, and you can flip around and decide which tune to sing with which psalm.
There is a split-leaf psalter app. I think it’s just called the 1650 Psalter, because that was the year the Church of Scotland, I believe, put together the psalms of David in meter. It lets you choose your psalm text, your desired tune for it, although it will give you suggestions based on what has been printed in the past, and it even includes little tiny MIDI files of the tune itself if you’re not familiar with it. So I will recommend that, which I love.
When I remember to do evening devotions, I like to sing something from the split-leaf psalter app and I listen to it first with the MIDI so that I know I’m singing it right. I know how to sight-read occasionally, but not every day.
I don’t know how to sight-read at all, so that’s great. That’s wonderful, Bryan. Therefore, I’m going to – and this is going to make Emily go last, sorry Emily – but while the spirit is on me I’m going to follow that up. My recommendation is family devotions. We were talking about personal devotions, and I’m going to recommend family devotions.
This is one area where I can say God blessed us for many, many, many years, about 20 really, maybe a little longer, but it requires making things a priority. If after school you’re taking your kids in all kinds of different directions to all kinds of different commitments, it’s hard to get everybody home and at the dinner table at the same time.
I guess the alternative would be the breakfast table – we always did the dinner table – but then that means getting everybody up a little bit earlier, and that means everybody, and have them in a cheerful mindset. I think the evening is better for that.
The Bible doesn’t specify. Find a time. Get your family there. Read the Bible. Dad, or mom as the case may be if there’s no dad around, explain the text, even if it’s just a little. Ask a few questions, even if it’s just a little. Answer the kids’ questions, and then pray together. Pray for people you know, for people they know, and watch for the answers.
You could keep a little prayer journal. “Here’s what we prayed for. Oh look, that one’s been answered. Let’s cross that off. Let’s remember to give God thanks.” We would do this and then we would end with the Lord’s prayer, so every day we prayed the Lord’s prayer.
This together with making dinner together and eating dinner together took up a lot of time, but it really helped us solidify our family values in terms of the Word of God. This was what we did. This was it. It wasn’t until the girls all started getting jobs and other commitments that tore them all sorts of ways that it suffered, but up until their first or second year of college it was something, by and large, that we did consistently, with a few exceptions now and then.
It was a wonderful time together, but it does require that you have to make the Word of God a priority for your family and not say, “Well, yeah, we’re trying. Room for improvement. We’re not doing so well.”
I’m an elder, as many of you know, and when we do elder visitation one of the questions that one of the elders will always ask is, “So how are your personal devotions? How are your family devotions?” and it is very rare to get someone who says, “Oh, they are robust and on target!”
I did appreciate one that we got not too long ago. It was like, “Well, they’re not very good. I mean I do read the Bible every single day, and usually do some kind of prayer afterward,” and we were like, “I’m glad for your humility.”
And then as Bryan says – we did this when the children were very little and they couldn’t tell that I couldn’t sing – we would add songs in and try to match the songs to whatever we were reading, which was fun to find a hymn or psalm or even a praise chorus that would relate to the words we had actually read in the text.
This is what we’re talking about. Are we going to really make the kingdom of God a priority every single day in a way that’s visible and that will change us little by little? There’s no guarantee that after the first week or two or three or ten that your family is going to be on fire for the Lord. We don’t know God’s time schedule, but as one character in a sci-fi show was asked, “So you don’t want to learn that language because it will take you 10 years? And where will you be in 10 years if you don’t learn it?”
“10 years older and still not knowing the language. Okay, maybe I should start then.”
Maybe your sanctification should begin now, and it doesn’t have to be perfect, but begin.
Steve Martin said about playing the banjo that he figured if he kept on playing the banjo, at a certain point he’d have been playing the banjo for a good long time, so he kept on playing the banjo, and look where he is today – Steve Martin, the foremost funny man with a banjo.
That also reminds me. I read something earlier this week about somebody said, “I’ve been studying for a year of this foreign language and I can only speak it as well as an 8-year-old.” It was like, “How long do you think it took the 8-year-old?”
I’m going to stay on theme with my recommendation. It’s a little bit vague, but I’ll include some examples. That was very convicting. In our house, family devotions, especially this summer, have really suffered. I could make all the excuses that there’s a lot going on right now, but it’s an excuse. But we have really appreciated in this time before we have children taking our after-dinner family devotions for some more challenging works. We read The Christ of the Covenants by O. Palmer Robertson. Our current work is Isaiah, the commentary by Motyer.
I was kind of skeptical at first. I was like, “Am I really going to remember from day to day what we talked about? Are we going to be with it after a full day enough to really get this dense material?” and the Lord really blessed it. You can understand so much more than you think you can. We say that about kids all the time, but I think it’s true of ourselves as well. So I recommend – especially if you’re in a position where your kids are older or you don’t have kids yet – pick something challenging to get you deeper in the Word of God. That’s my recommendation.
Thank you, guys, both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can reach us at [email protected].
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