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July 15, 2010

Part V: Why Bother?

OK, Pastor Paul here with my next to last blog post on God’s Sovereignty.  I am in eager anticipation that the rightful owner of this domain will appear on the scene shortly, updating us on his three month tour of Europe, Scandinavia, and the Sub-Continent.

The reality is that in our day and time, even among Christians, these sorts of literary missives regarding the truth or untruth of God’s sovereignty is more likely to be met with a yawn versus a debate.  This is because we think that such arguments and discussions are obtuse, irrelevant, divisive, and disconnected from the realities of our lives.  However, nothing could be further from the truth.  As the evangelical church has increasingly embraced a lowest common denominator sort of theology over the last 40 years, there has been a corresponding increase in the church of shallowness, public scandal, false teaching, diminished influence, and a water-downed gospel that has lost its power.  I will talk next week about why embracing a fully-orbed worldview of God’s sovereignty is so crucial to holding on to missions, evangelism, prayer, assurance of salvation, and the gospel itself.  For now, let me say two things to motivate you to jump into the theological fray.

First, there might be a temptation for us to say that we need to “major on the majors and minor on the minors”, meaning that our beliefs about election and predestination are not “major” issues and thus should be benignly neglected because they aren’t affirmed by all Christians.  This is a tragic mistake, because we see election and predestination on almost every page of Scripture, from Abraham’s call to follow God from his pagan ways in Ur to Moses’ rescue as a murderer tending sheep in the wilderness to Paul’s sovereign and dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus.  Election is clearly NOT a minor doctrine in Scripture; Paul, Peter, and the other apostles write extensively about it because election is the heart of the gospel.  “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”; the gospel is the story of God seeking out and saving sinners who otherwise would have nothing to do with but by His sovereign grace. 

When we neglect pursuing a robust view of God’s sovereignty, there is something in our worldview and psyche that suffers as a result.  Over time we come to perceive of ourselves as in control of our lives, masters of our domains, autonomous, free, and pursuing our own destinies.  This works fine as long as life is good, but when life is hard, difficult, and full of suffering (which it is and will be), the worldview we have constructed for ourselves comes crashing down.  This happens to churches when they rely on powerful people or personalities to hold these things together, but when those people fail, get sick, leave, or die, which they will, there has to be a center upon which we stand, and that center better be God.  We lose that center when we lose God’s sovereignty.

The second thing that should motivate us to engage theologically regards a refrain we often hear today: we don’t need creeds, statements of faith, propositions, or anything else to know God; we just need to love Jesus.  The problem with this line of thinking is, “which Jesus?”  Who is He; what’s He like; what has He done; why should we love Him?  Here’s an illustration: if you are married, and assuming that you did not get married on a blind date, you most certainly did a careful study on your future spouse.  Think of all the things, ladies, your future man had to answer before you made that momentous decision to roll with him. You studied him: Who is this man? What is he like? What are his values? Does he have a job that makes money? These are all part of the study that takes place in the adventure of love, and it is good.

The Apostle Paul’s confidence in God comes after HIS careful study of God: He knows Him, he knows what He is like, he knows how He works, he knows what God’s highest priority and purpose is.  Paul studies him; that’s what theology IS. Josh Harris, pastor of Covenant Life Church, says that all of us are constantly doing theology.  And he asks and answers this question: do you need doctrine to know God?  “It is absolutely true that information and facts about my daughter can never take the place of actually loving her. But this doesn’t mean I should avoid knowing about her: her character, personality, likes, dislikes, details about her, her gifts, fears, dreams – all are important to me because she is important to me. Facts can never take her place, but I can’t know her without them.”  Is this not the same with Jesus and God?  Doctrine doesn’t take His place, but we can’t know God and relate to Him the right way without it.

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posted by Joshua Hughes

July 04, 2010

Part IV: What God’s Sovereignty Means for My Sovereignty

Pastor Paul here for the 4th installment of our follow up blog posts to the Romans 9 sermon series.  As we have been discussing providence, sovereignty, God being “in control” over everything, etc. we have been mainly camped out in the arena of salvation, because when people think “sovereignty”, they often think “predestination” or “election.”  However, discussions about predestination really just focus on one particular aspect of God’s sovereignty, when in reality there are a whole slew of implications and applications for other venues where God’s sovereignty comes into play.  One of these venues is YOUR sovereignty; what do I mean?

It’s easy, particularly in our mobile, affluent, materialistic, individualized, autonomous culture to think that our lives are our own.  This allusion of being sovereign over ourselves is the air you and I breathe all of the time.  This of course runs counter to the very essence of who we are and who God is, as we have to be reminded that “the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Ps. 24), “in him we live, move, and have our being” (Acts 17), and “you are not your own, for you were bought with a price” (I Cor. 6). In short, we are not the sovereign; God is the sovereign, which has vast implications for our life.

One of the things I used to ask students when I was a youth pastor was whether their lives were more like a pie or more like a bicycle wheel (stay with me here).  When we view our lives as a pie, each slice of the pie represents a different area of our life: relationships, family, school, job, recreation, friends, money, media, church, etc.  One slice of pie doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with any other slice, and in fact who we are in one area of our lives may be completely different than who we are in another area.  Living life like this, though, is not to be confused with Christianity, because as Abraham Kuyper famously said over 100 years ago: In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, ‘That is mine!’.

However, when we view our life instead as a bicycle wheel, we now see that the spokes (i.e. pieces of the pie) all orbit and are connected to the hub, which is Jesus Christ.  Jesus is sovereign over every area of our lives, which means He has authority to “speak into” the way we live.  All of our lives, not just our church attendance or worship on Sunday mornings, are to be lived to God’s glory, and who we are and how we relate to our jobs, families, relationships, and money are all a part of our worship to God.

One of the great truths reclaimed in the Reformation is that it is not simply the guilded class of priests and bishops that have a high and holy calling.  Rather, if you are a Christian, YOU have a high and holy calling to glorify God in whatever you are doing, because everything He made and everything we are called to do is part of our worship of Him.  We are a priesthood of believers, Peter reminds us, and God is our sovereign king who leads us in everything that we do.  Not my sovereign will be done, but HIS sovereign will!

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posted by Joshua Hughes

June 14, 2010

Part III: If God is Sovereign, Why Share My Faith?

Pastor Paul here for Part Tres of our follow up blog posts to the Romans 9 series.  Probably one of the most asked “practical” questions as it relates to the bible’s teaching on election and predestination relates to the issue of evangelism.  The question is oftentimes framed something like this: “If God is sovereign over salvation, electing and predestining according to the counsel of His will, what’s the point in me sharing my faith? If God is going to save whoever he wills and pleases, why should I evangelize at all?”  Some people take this objection a step further by asserting that the doctrines of grace (i.e. Calvinism, belief in predestination, etc.) are actually a deterrent to evangelism, and thus should be avoided and taught against at all costs.

The first observation is that while we may have intellectual struggles in piecing and weaving together these doctrines of sovereignty, salvation, and evangelism, all of us instinctively know that God’s sovereignty is a non-negotiable when it comes to people coming to know Him.  J.I. Packer, in his most helpful little book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, says this in regards to praying for someone’s conversion:

“Do you limit yourself to asking that God will bring them to a point where they can save themselves, independently of Him? I do not think you do.  [Rather, we will pray] that He will open the eyes of their understanding, soften their hard hearts, renew their natures, and move their wills to receive the Savior…When you pray for unconverted people, you do so on the assumption that it is in God’s power to bring them to faith.”

What is Packer saying?  Basically, that all of us instinctively know that God is sovereign over salvation and that unless He gets involved and opens the eyes of a person’s heart to see Christ, that they will not turn to Him.  The problem comes in that while we know this, we struggle with how to reconcile God’s sovereignty with God’s clear command to evangelize the nations.  While this may present a philosophical challenge to us, it is not a problem to God, and thus we have to accept the fact that God’s sovereignty over salvation AND His clear call to fulfill the Great Commission (Mt. 28: 18-20) are both clearly taught in Scripture. Thus, we need to accept both truths as equally valid; let us not make ourselves wiser than God and discount one or the other of these truths at the expense of the other.

Secondly, we have to note that for millions of folk, Calvinism has not been a deterrent to evangelism, but actually a great motivator.  The First and Second Great Awakenings, which spawned the massive missionary movements of the next 250 years, were built upon the Calvinistic teachings of God’s sovereignty and man’s helpless and lost estate apart from the gospel.  Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, David Brainerd, George Mueller, William Carrey and countless others were propelled by their firm conviction in God’s sovereignty.  After all, why evangelize at all if God is not sovereign?  They knew they could go forth in the power of the Holy Spirit, evangelizing in confidence, knowing that their responsibility was to evangelize and that it was God’s responsibility to bring forth the results of saving men and women through the power of the gospel.

Thirdly, the greatest missionary and church planter the world has ever know, the Apostle Paul, clearly saw no contradiction between God’s sovereignty and evangelism.  In fact, he taught both doctrines with equal fervor.  We find in Romans 9 Paul’s clear teaching that salvation is not dependent upon “human will or effort” but upon God.  At the same time, Paul clearly affirms in Romans 10: 14-15 that evangelism is absolutely necessary for someone to be saved: “How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”  Paul understood that God most often accomplishes His will through human agency and action; evangelism is the means by which God accomplishes His sovereign will.

Finally, what does this conviction in God’s sovereignty in salvation do for us? When we say things like, “I won’t evangelize because God will save whom He wants anyway”, we have to understand that not only are we being disobedient to the clear commands of Scripture, we are also missing the great spiritual blessing that comes in being used by God to accomplish His will.  However, ff we understand God’s sovereignty rightly, it will launch us with confidence into evangelism.  The Apostle Paul evangelized like no one else has ever evangelized, precisely BECAUSE he believed in God’s sovereignty.  Let us do the same!

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posted by Joshua Hughes

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