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See how many of these questions you can answer.
Anthony Esolen teaches Renaissance English Literature and the Development of Western Civilization at Providence College. He’s also the author of Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. I just finished listening to it, and then enjoyed it so much I bought a print version. I don’t typically read book-length cultural criticism, but I recommend this one highly. Like all works of the sort, you need to mull it over and pray over what conclusions to take to yourself and run with, but over all, Professor Esolen writes at such a shockingly honest, biblical level about so many pressing matters of our day that you can’t go wrong with having him challenge you on just about every point he brings up. It’s a very refreshing thing to have someone so well-informed say the very things you’ve been thinking all along about a lot of the “big issues.” The book is full of insights like this:
The lie rushes in to fill up the void left by truth in retreat. When people lose their faith in God, for example they do not then believe in nothing. It is as Chesterton said. They commence believing in anything, usually the nearest and biggest thing, the gross power of the state to solve all human problems. Or they begin to worship their own most powerful physical and emotional drives. Or they worship what they wish would be the biggest thing in the world, themselves. Self, sex, and the state, the three most obvious substitutes, or the three together, the three-poisoned god.
Since we’ve lived through the last 10 years or so, that’s hard to argue with, right? But this section, from early in the book, really got my mind going. And I wonder how it hits you:
The point here is that the lie cannot be defeated by a vacuity. It has to be defeated by truth. But since we are embodied souls, the truth we are seeking must not be merely abstract. An ax cannot compete against a Sherman tank, unless the Sherman tank is an abstract tank, an idea of a tank; the ax can smash that sort of tank all the time. Therefore we have to immerse ourselves in things: trees, stars, mud, grouse, hay, stones, brooks, rain, dogs, fire; and the man made things closest to the human hand and its work: hammer, shovel, paintbrush, wrench, wheel…
It is hard to go completely mad if you spend your free time being free and accepting the free bounties of the world round about. Consider the conversation of human beings before the advent of mass media. A boy could grow up and never see anything obscene at all; where would it come from?… Meanwhile, the boy would roam the village or the woods and learn things, learn about things, every day…
I can illustrate with a series of questions. You are on a bench on Cape Cod.
- The wind is coming from the southwest. What does that mean? How can you tell that it is the southwest and not the southeast when you don’t have a compass?
- The tide is in. How can you tell that?
- Tomorrow there will be a full moon. How do you know that? What does that have to do with the tide?
- Where are you likely to find clams? Will it be better in about twelve hours, when the tide is out? How do you know that?
- You want to loaf about the shore in a canoe. The canoe is leaking a little. What can you use to stop up the leak? Where can you find it?
- The man in the house on the point has been catching eels. How do you do that? Where are you likely to find them? What bait do you use? When you catch one…how do you cook it?
- Next week you want to go somewhere that is ten miles away rather than five, so you won’t be able to walk there; you’ll have to take a horse or mule. Whats the difference in how they ride? How do you curry a horse when you bring him in for the night?
- There’s a male horse in the stables named Joey. What did they have to do to him yo make him tame enough for children? When would you do that? How would you keep him from bleeding to death?
- How do you butcher a pig? How do you build a smokehouse for the bacon? What kind of wood do you use for the fire, and why? How thick should you cut the flinches of the bacon? Where would you find the wood?
- How can you tell a maple from an oak? What can you do with quince, angelica root, sassafras, chokecherries, bilberries, hazelnuts, beechnuts, birch bark, willow bark, willow bark, and the resin from pine trees? How do you tap a maple tree for syrup?
- How do you graft sweet apples on a hardier trunk?
- How do you keep a beehive? What does the honeycomb taste like?
- When do you gather cranberries? Are they still good if they are on the ground the next spring?
- What are those birds that descend upon berry bushes in big flocks, nibbling the berries and passing them along to one another? What is the bird they call a yellowhammer? When do the warblers pass through on their way north or south?
- How do you clean trees and stumps from a field?
- How do you handle a mattock?
- What is an ice saw? How do you know if the ice on a pond is thick enough for skating? How do you cut blocks of ice for use in the summer? How do you keep it from melting?
- What do you do with the eye of potatoes if you want to plant them?
- How do you make sourdough bread?
- Is that mushroom growing out of the side of a tree, looking like breakfast, good to eat?
- What is that bright red star in the night sky that does not keep the same place among the constellations? If you wanted to find Jupiter in the sky, where would you generally look?
- Why, on Cape Cod, is the sun never directly over your head?
- What makes the days so short in winter?
- If you want to make bricks, where would you be likely to find a good clay pit?
- What kind of stone is marble? What is soapstone, feldspar, mica, obsidian, jasper?
I have asked my freshman honors students at college where in the sky the sun will be, in the middle of the afternoon in September, here in Rhode Island. They don’t know. They are strangers to the world, but they certainly are not strangers to the lies and folly that are the stock in trade, as I have said, of mass entertainment, mass education, and mass politics.
Things, in their beautiful and imposing integrity, do not easily bend to lies. A bull and not a cow. Grass is food for cattle but not for man. A warble is alive but a rock is not. The three-hundred-pound stone will not move for a little child or a boy or a feminist professor. Water expands when it freezes and will break anything unless you allow for that. Things are what hey are. They know no slogans, and they don’t lie.
And they give witness to the glory of God.
He’s really piling on there. It’s good for all of us to read. But for the purposes of this post, one thing seems pressing. One of the foundational lies of our time, one of the lies that drags people away from following Christ, is that we, as a society, and as individuals, are just simply more advanced than people were in the past. We’re smarter and wiser than our parents. If you ask people why, they will almost certainly point to our technology. If you ask a young person why, he or she might just hold up their smart phone. There you go–here’s our superiority, connected to WiFi, and right in the palm of my hand.
But that list of questions from Professor Esolen exposes that whole way of thinking for the total fraud that it is. How many of us could survive without the electricity pumping and the phone glowing? And if the answer is (say) 1% or so, how can we possibly think we’re more advanced?
Of course, the consequences of our pride in our sophistication go beyond merely preventing us from learning and knowing the world around us. In 2017, they prevent us from hearing the wisdom of the ages, and most importantly, the ancient, always present wisdom of God in the scriptures. So if we decide, this very decade, to undo and ignore things people have understood about humanity for all of recorded history, well then, why should we listen to any voices from the past? We’re better! Because, Candy Crush!
Honestly, as followers of Christ, we need to disconnect our minds from these deceptions. The truth is that we are no more advanced than any other people who have come before us. Sure, in some ways we may have thinking that sees some of God’s truth more clearly (even if we don’t recognize it as such), and then, in other ways we’re far behind those who lived even just a couple generations ago.
So what does this call for? Humility. A willingness to listen. And especially, humility and open ears towards God. He’s never out of date. His wisdom never changes. He’s never left behind. In fact, he’s way out ahead of us, pulling us towards his future.
Yes, God Died on the Cross
Here’s an excellent post from Fred Sanders on what Christians mean when they say, “God died on the cross.” It almost sounds wrong to say, right? But no, Sanders unpacks what we mean when we say it. It may rub our Muslim friends, or agnostics who want things simple, the wrong way. But it does represent what really happened. But then…that doesn’t mean that it means what people might initially think it means. It doesn’t mean, for instance, “God ceased to exist.” So what does it mean? Sanders:
In one of his hymns, Charles Wesley wrote: “O Love divine, what has thou done! The immortal God hath died for me!” This is a bold thing to say, because it claims so much: “God . . . died.” The Bible itself says it that bluntly in a few places, such as Acts 20:28, “God purchased the church with his own blood.” This is how the voice of faith speaks when it confesses what God has done. This is a good Christian sentence. When theologians get hold of stark, paradoxical statements like “God died,” they have an instinct to clarify what is being said. They do not want to remove the shock or the force (that would be very bad theology), but they do want to make sure that the true paradox rather than something else is being communicated. They want to rule out misunderstandings that either take away the shock, or substitute for it the fake shock of logical incoherence.
For example, it is possible to think “God died” means something like, “just as there is a human death for humans to die, there is apparently a divine death for God to die, and that is what happened at Calvary.” But the analogy is nonsense. Death is a concept that only works inside of the context of a creation. You need finite, contingent existence to have its eclipse or dissolution in death. “Divine death” as the analogue of “human death” is probably not even a coherent idea. It seems to belong to the category of “neat tricks you can do with language,” by combining any adjective with any noun: square circle, blue height, quiet toddler, cold heat, divine death. When you remove the chimera of a properly divine death, you can see that “God died” means that God experienced the only kind of death there is to experience, and that is creaturely death. How could that have happened?
This is precisely where Chalcedonian categories come into play, and rather than stripping away the poetic power of Wesley’s words, the incarnational theology of Chalcedon, so to speak, put the poetry into the poetry. According to the Chalcedonian explication of the incarnation, the Son of God took into personal union with himself a complete human nature, and thus existed as one theanthropic (divine and human) person. He did not cease to be God, but he took up human nature into hypostatic (personal) union with himself. He made that humanity his own, and in that appropriated humanity he appropriated real human death. He died the only death there is to die, our death.
It is worth noticing, by the way, that in stating the incarnation in this way we have implied one of its presuppositions, the doctrine of the Trinity. In the sentence “God died,” the subject, “God,” has to mean “the second person of the Trinity, God the Son.” Each of the three persons is God, but they are distinct persons standing in interpersonal relationship to one another. The Son is not one third of God, or the Son part of God, or the nice version of God, but just God. God (the Father) so loved the world that he gave his only Son, and thus God (the Son, one of the Trinity) died on the cross. Chalcedon already provides us with Christology in trinitarian perspective, and makes no sense without presupposing the Trinity.
So with all the elaborate distinctions in place, the sentence “God died” can also be said in this longer form: “The eternal second person of the Trinity, God the Son, took into personal union with himself, without confusing it, changing it, dividing it or separating it from his eternal divine nature, a complete human nature through which he experienced death.” It is no surprise that Charles Wesley did not set that longer sentence to music. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the longer sentence is precisely what he meant by the shorter one. To the suggestion that he could have meant anything else by it, Charles Wesley would have replied that, being an orthodox Christian and no heretic, he could not possibly have intended anything else. Furthermore, there is no trickery and no sleight of hand in that expanded paraphrase of “God died.” The longer sentence is what the shorter sentence means, and both sentences are true precisely insofar as they mean each other.
Still, a temptation does lurk here. The temptation is to feel disappointed by the longer, Chalcedonian sentence, as if something has been taken away, dissolved into too many distinctions, or spun into insubstantial refinement. The danger lies in hearing the longer sentence as if it meant, “Half of a third of God had a bad weekend.” But that is not what it means. It means that God died, and it means it in the only way that Christian theology can possibly mean it. The trick is to hear the longer sentence as meaning the same thing as the shorter sentence, and not to feel cheated by it. The trick is never to hear that third sentence (“half of a third of God . . .”) echoing behind the others in your mind. Only the conceptual categories of Chalcedonianism, taken together with their proper trinitarian context, can banish such unworthy notions from Christian theology and doxology. This set of distinctions have always functioned within Christian thought to enable it to retain the power and precision of the longer and shorter sentences, the immediate utterance of the believing heart and the accuracy of the catechized understanding.
God did not take the easy way out, or save us in a way that leaves him untouched by the depth of human suffering. We can be confident that the Almighty One went to the uttermost limits to accomplish our rescue.
God died on the cross! Charles Wesley certainly knew the value of the incarnational and trinitarian conceptual framework, because when he sang “O Love divine, what has thou done! The immortal God hath died for me!” he immediately paraphrased it in terms of the second person of the Trinity’s vicarious action on our behalf: “The Father’s coeternal Son bore all my sins upon the tree.”
There’s a lot to think about there, but it’s food worth chewing for while.
I’ve found one more way of framing this discussion to be pretty helpful for my own thinking. It goes like this:
Did Jesus die on the cross? Yes.
Is Jesus God? Yes. In that he is God the Son (as Sanders says).
So God died on the cross? Yes.
But how could God, who lives forever, ever die? Isn’t that a contradiction? No, because Jesus as God did not cease to live or exist when he died, anymore than any human ceases to exist when they die. What happens when a human dies is not the cessation of existence, or even the cessation of experience or consciousness, but the separation of the soul (the immaterial) from the body (the material). Again, death is not cessation, but separation. Since a human being is only considered fully “alive” when he is a fully enfleshed spirit (with the immaterial and material aspects in union), any human who has experienced the separation of the two is in the category of “dead.” And when Jesus died, the immaterial aspect of who he was was separated from his material aspect (his body). In other words, Jesus experienced human death. (As Sanders says, creaturely death is the only kind of death there is.)
That’s it. God experienced the separating of the material and immaterial aspects of human nature. In other words, God died.
And, as Wesley knew, that is something to sing about.
So let’s do it. See you on Friday.
Practical Spirituality: How to Work
Last night we continued our series in Practical Spirituality, this time looking at How to Work. If someone were to think, wait, I thought this was about spirituality? Like, Church and Bible reading and praying and stuff… not ordinary things like work–they’d be wrong. Of course, “spiritual” really just means “having to do with the Spirit,” and the Spirit is God, and God is… everywhere. In everything. In other words, everything is Spiritual–at least, everything that the Spirit makes and sustains and invigorates and loves. The only things that are not S/spiritual are things that the Spirit of God does not make or love or empower–things like sin and destruction and hatred and attempting to live as if God is not good and everywhere.
This means that, for the follower of Christ, all of life is Spiritual. And since our work will necessarily take up a large portion of our time and energy, we must see that work, too, is Spiritual. And so, here’s what we saw in the word last night…
First, we read Acts 20:32-35 and noted that, as Paul signed off in his final speech to the elders of the Ephesian church he had planted and loved, he spoke about the way he worked:
“So now, brethren, I commend you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified. I have coveted no one’s silver or gold or apparel. Yes, you yourselves know that these hands have provided for my necessities, and for those who were with me. I have shown you in every way, by laboring like this, that you must support the weak. And remember the words of the Lord Jesus, that He said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.'”
And we just noted it…it’s pretty interesting that Paul would choose that subject as the final part of his final send off. But then we read his letters to the Thessalonian church he had founded, and saw the same concern.
His teaching to the church in Thessalonica:
1 Thessalonians 2:9-12 – His Example:
- Constant manual labor to earn a living
- Not burdening the church by requiring them to fulfill his physical needs—while he was spending his non-work time ministering to them.
He calls this “behaving devoutly and blamelessly” and he tells them they too should walk “worthy” of the gospel in this way.
1 Thessalonians 4:9-12 – His General Life Directions to them:
- Desire to lead a quiet life
- Busy themselves with their own work (not with other people’s affairs) (“mind your own…”)
- Work with their own hands
The point: So that your daily life shows the good things about the Gospel, and so that you may lack nothing (…and not to be an unnecessary burden to others).
2 Thessalonians 3:6-15 – His specific Instructions to the church:
v.10 If you don’t work, you don’t eat.
v.11 Working will keep you from being “busy” in other people’s business
v.12 So…work in quietness. The idea seems to be, settle down, and don’t disrupt the peace of the community by “sponging off others” (Gordon Fee). In other words, eat your own bread.
v.13 Resist the temptation to get tired of a life of patient hard work that does good in the world
v.14 Notice this problem, and withdraw from people in the church who are “out of order.” In this instance, this word refers to those who insist on being “lazy” (see v.6, 11, 14-15), and refuse to work. In other words—don’t treat them like enemies, but don’t act like everything’s cool, either. Let them feel the awkwardness, and realize that something’s wrong—and honestly, it will probably prompt some conversation.
Two General Takeaways from Paul’s letters to the Thessalonian church:
- Work is a big deal. If you see it as something optional, you’re wrong.
- In the church an individual’s attitude towards work is important because of how it impacts the entire church community. The church has always been focused on caring for poor members—especially widows and others who can’t take care of themselves…But, in that kind of environment—where there’s a lot of generosity being practiced and everyone is getting taken care of—it can be easy for some people to think that work doesn’t matter, and that the church just takes care of anyone who needs anything at that moment. But Paul says, no, everyone in the church who can be working needs to be working—and that’s most people in the church. So the point of work here is so that the church can be freed up to take care of people who can’t work.
Points for Us Today—How Should the Christian Work?
1. Assume that work is a necessary part of life that God designed. It’s not evil. We see this in Paul’s teaching to the church. He didn’t view work as a punishment, but just a basic part of life. And in Genesis 2 we see that work was part of God’s original plan for Adam and Even—It was part of his plan for humanity to spread out and cultivate the entire world. The language of “ruling” and “subduing” is used there in the beginning—it was going to take work for the humans to cultivate the earth and get to the place where it served God and Humanity’s aims. That’s important. The situation was not that Adam and Eve were laying around on long couches eating grapes in the Garden of Eden, and then work was some kind of punishment later on for their sin.
When they sin in Genesis 3, God doesn’t say, “Now you’ll have to work,” He says that now their work will always be messed up with futility, and that their work will be necessary to stave off immediate death, and even then it won’t work forever, eventually they’ll die anyway. In other words, the awesome reality of the good things God gave humanity to do were now bent—there would be sweat and tears in it all, and ultimately it would go back to dust. But then, as we look forward, the good future God’s bringing us seems to restore the original situation—and we can only imagine that there will be things to do in the New Earth.
2. Think about how to do your work in a way that will glorify God. (1 Corinthians 10:31) When the bible talks about our lives, we see that God thinks of our whole life as significant. He talks about things like, “Every word out of your mouth” matters. Sometimes we see people like public officials who have a lot of power, but they use their words and actions really carelessly. And we think, don’t they understand that what they do matters because of who they are? And this is the point of the bible’s teaching about humanity. Because of who we are—made in God’s image, appointed to be rulers over his creation, and created to be in friendship with God himself—everything we do matters. This means that nothing we do is outside of all that significance. Even jobs we might think we hate—even these matter—because we’re the ones doing them. And a Christian man or woman is someone who is having these ideas restored to them. We’re learning to live and work in ways that make sense based on how much we matter. King Solomon wrote, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might..”. (Ecclesiastes 9:10)
So when you work, remember—your job’s significance doesn’t come from how glamorous or exciting or fulfilling it is—it comes from the fact that you’re made in God’s image, and this is something God gave you to do. And so practically living this out is going to include all kinds of things like doing our work with excellence and skill, and working with honesty and integrity, and caring for people we work with and the people we serve as we work.
3. Work in a way that glorifies God–do it “from your soul.” (Colossians 3:23) So half-hearted work is sub-Christian. We all get tempted to slack and cut corners, but when a Christian lives that way it shows they’re giving in to the feelings of meaninglessness that pervade our society. And part of the message of Jesus includes the good news that life matters. And not just some lives. Or famous or exciting lives (why would we ever make those distinctions? They’re total nonsense!) No every human life matters—because it’s a human life. So when you watch a follower of Jesus work—you’ll just see a visual message, and the message is, this really matters. And then you’ll talk to that person and you’ll find out, he thinks everything matters!
4. Do your work in the name of Jesus. (Colossians 3:17) Remember, everything we do as followers of Christ reflects on him. So when we work “in his name,” we do our work in ways that point to him and honor him. And then when people find out we’re Christians, they think better of Jesus because of the way we work. And then whenever it makes sense, we explicitly point to Jesus as we work.
5. Give thanks to God while you work. (Colossians 3:17) Isn’t there a lot of negativity and bitterness in the world? Aren’t most work places like totally permeated with that? When you watch a Christian work, you’re supposed to see someone who is thankful. And that’s just a totally different flavor than the one most people are bringing to the table.
6. Work with the aim of being able to help meet other people’s needs. (Ephesians 4:28) Paul said this to both the Thessalonians and the Ephesians—one of the reasons for Christians to work is so that we can have something to give to others. And collectively, work, and the giving of Christians to a general fund, enables the church to be able to care for members of the community who are struggling financially, and other struggling people as a way to promote the gospel. People who don’t follow Christ can work to make their own lives richer or easier, but a Christian works to promote God’s work and God’s people.
7. While you work, think: I’m doing this for God, and to God. (Ephesians 5:5)This is worship! Every kind of honest work can be offered up to God in worship. Or if that seems hard, because a job is repetitive or something like that, at least we can say… we can offer worship to God while we work. Along these lines, I love this quote from A.W. Tozer:
“It is my experience that the totality of our Christian lives—our entire attitude as persons—must be towards the worship of God! If you do not know the presence of God in your office, your factory, your home—then God is not in the church you attend, either! I became a Christian when I was a young man working in a tire factory in Akron, Ohio. I remember my work there—but I remember my worship there, too! I had plenty of worshipful tears in my eyes. No one ever asked me about them, but I would not have hesitated to explain them. You can learn to use certain skills until they are automatic. I became so skillful that I could do my work and then I could worship God even while my hands were busy. If the love of God is in us and the Spirit of God is breathing praise within us, all the musical instruments in heaven are suddenly playing in full support! Even our thoughts become a sanctuary in which God can dwell.”
But there’s one really big point to address in all this. As I started to say a minute ago, one of the big ideas about work in our culture is this idea that life is basically boring and meaningless, so you should try to live your life by finding your excitement and meaning in your work. So—discover your passion, and then try to figure out how to get paid to do that, and that’s how to find fulfillment in life. Otherwise you’ll be stuck in some dumb job and you’ll hate your life. Sometimes Christians get into telling each other we should think this way too.
But that kind of thinking is really not found in the teachings of scripture. First of all, it totally misses the fact that work isn’t meaningful because of our passion, or because of itself—work takes its meaning from the larger world God created. Its meaning doesn’t come from it, or from us, it comes from outside both it and us. It comes from God. God makes work meaningful because God made the world meaningful and gave us a meaningful role to play in the world. So when we get that backwards, and we grow up being told that we and our world are basically meaningless, we’ll try to make our jobs be containers for all this passion and meaning—and jobs can’t carry that kind of weight.
Not only that, but when we talk like that, especially to young people, let’s be honest—everyone will look into their hearts and find a passion for being artists or skaters or musicians or travel writers—everything fun and famous—but there’s like 98 percent of all other jobs that a society needs to run. The fact is only a very small percentage of people will get to do those “really cool jobs.” Everyone else has to do the normal jobs—the jobs everyone’s saying they hate right now. This is a recipe for a sick society. And it’s not real anyway. What happens is that 98 percent of people end up miserable with their actual lives, and then they spend their free time looking at pictures of people getting to do the fun jobs, and wishing and scheming to get a cooler life. There’s got to be a better way… And there is.
I think a biblical way to talk about jobs, and work in general would be something more like this:
“Everyone needs to work, because it’s what humans are meant to do, and also because we live in a fallen world, and right now, work is necessary to our survival. Christians have been freed up from idolizing their work, or finding their meaning in their work, but they’re also delivered from feelings of meaninglessness or laziness.
“So every believer should think honestly about a couple basic questions when it comes to work. Questions like, “What skills do I have, or what kind of raw abilities do I have that I could reasonable get training for—so that I can have a skill someone will pay me for?” God has made everyone with different skills and aptitudes. After we’ve honestly appraised these in ourselves, or even ask others in the church community to help us appraise them, we can next ask, “what actual opportunities do I have for training or work?” Then, we can pray, and use our circumstances to take the opportunities in front of us to find honest work to do—work that will actually pay our bills, so we can “eat our own bread,” and work that will put us in the position to have something to give to those in need, and support the church’s work to do the same.
“But we don’t need to burden ourselves, and our work, and the decisions we’re making for the future, with the idea that we have to find personal fulfillment in the work we do to make a living. We don’t. We just have to make a living. And as followers of Jesus we find our fulfillment from God, and from communion with His Spirit, and from doing his work in the world—often outside of our career. Work doesn’t fulfill us, work provides what we need to live so we can be freed up to pursue God’s work in the world however we have opportunity.”
Beyond the Personal and Introspective
Still thinking about communion, since Monday night. Gordon Fee has these great thoughts on 1 Corinthians 11:26–“For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.”
It’s a little “academic” sounding, but very worth working through. He says:
The focus of Paul’s concern is on the meal as a means of proclaiming Christ’s death, a point the Corinthian’s action is obviously bypassing, Despite the arguments of some to the contrary, the verb “to proclaim” probably does not mean that the meal in itself in the proclamation, but during the meal there is a verbal proclamation of Christ’s death. That seems to be exactly how Paul now understands the two sayings over the bread and cup, and thus why he has repeated the words of institution. With the word over the bread, they “proclaim” that this bread is “Christ’s body for you (us). ” It points to his death, whereby he gave himself freely for the sake of others. Likewise the cup; it signifies Chris’s blood poured out in death, whereby he ratified the New Covenant between God and his people.
It seems certain that their vision of the meal is less than satisfactory right at this point, probably not so much because they were not “thinking on Christ” properly, or failing to be in right communion with him, but because by their abuse of one another they were negating the very point of that death – to create a new people for his name, in which old distinctions based on human fallenness no longer obtain.
Because the words of institution [i.e. the words we say during communion] are so well known to most of us, and because in reading those words we also include Paul’s final comment in verse 26, it is easy for us to miss Paul’s concern in the argument for our own concern in “actualizing” the Lord’s Supper for ourselves. The latter [our own individual thinking about and concentrating on Jesus] is certainly legitimate if for no other reason than that the whole paragraph serves as a kind of paradigm of such actualizing for the Corinthian community. The Lord’s Supper is not simply a memorial of the Last Supper nor of Christ’s death per se. It is a constant, repeated reminder–and experience–of the efficacy of that death for us.
But for Paul, as he will now go on to point out, the concern is not simply personal or introspective. Salvation through Christ’s death has created a new community of people who bear his name. We ourselves rather miss the point of this paragraph if we think of the Table only in terms of our needs and not also in terms of those of others.
Yes. And hence, our great time together in the Lord’s presence, around the Lord’s table, on Monday night.
Peace, friends.
Practical Spirituality: How to Take Communion
Last night we looked at another very common part of Christian life–celebrating the Lord’s Supper (or, as we also call it, “taking communion”). Here are the notes:
First, read 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. This is a passage in a letter Paul wrote to one of the early Christian communities which Paul had founded. This church, in the Greek city of Corinth, was experiencing a lot of problems, and Paul uses the letter to correct the issues. One of the places they were having problems was in the way they were taking communion. Listening in to the corrections
1. Understand what you’re doing. (v.23-26)
Jesus told us to do this. We are doing it to remember him (v.24)
We are remembering that his body was broken and his blood was shed. (v.24-25) The bread “signifies” his body. The wine or juice in the cup “signifies” his blood. When we do this, what we’re supposed to be thinking about is him—and specifically, his death.
We are proclaiming that Jesus died. (v.26) Even more than simply remembering it in our own minds, it is to be a kind of memorial or a monument—not a monument built in stone, but one that’s carried all around the world, one that crosses all human borders, and lasts for all history, because it’s a practice—it’s something his people do whenever they’re together. “They declare the good news of their salvation that makes them all one.” (That’s from Gordon Fee’s commentary on this verse.)
We are sharing the bread and the cup to show that we share in a common life and family. (See 1 Corinthians 10:16-17). It is the blood of Jesus, and his broken body, which enabled this koinonia—this fellowship, this sharing, this common life. When he died, he gave us a share in his body by inviting us to “participate in the meaning and benefits of his death.” (Gordon Fee)
2. Let the understanding of what you’re doing when you take this bread and the cup impact the way you think about your participation in church life, in general.
3. Don’t be ok with bringing the old divisions that exist outside of new life in Christ into the remembrance of the Lord’s body and blood. (v.17-22). In the time Paul was writing, most churches met in large houses—the houses of rich people. Taking communion was part of their regular worship gathering, and they typically did it as part of a larger meal. What Paul is addressing seems to be a situation where rich people would bring more and better food, and poor people might only have the bread and wine. Paul says this situation, brought right into middle the time of remembering that Lord, was a major flaw in their gatherings.
His point wasn’t that all Christians had to have the same kind of houses, or eat the same food all the time (you see this in verse 22) but that when they came together to worship they were celebrating their new oneness that they found in Jesus—one family no longer defined by the old boundaries. As it was, the way they were handling their gatherings didn’t celebrate that unity, instead it created divisions based on the old, economic categories—divisions that were right out in the open when they were together, with some people filling themselves up on food and drink during the meal time and some people staying hungry.
We might stop and think here—whenever we’re together as Christians, do we ever let old boundaries and divisions—the divisions that exist out in the world outside of the family of the church—do we ever let those old boundaries creep into the times and things that should express our unity with every other believer?
4. Before you eat (when you eat)… check yourself. (v.27-28)
“Unworthy” refers to the problems Paul has been discussing—the fact that they weren’t thinking about each other, and weren’t expressing the real unity that Jesus’ death created. So Paul says, stop and think first about what you’re doing and what it expresses, and bring yourself into line with the meaning of the bread and the cup.
5. Understand that the Lord takes this seriously. (v.29-32) In verse 27 he said that to deny the power of Jesus’ death while you eat and drink something meant to display how powerful his death was—is to bring yourself into line with the people who killed him. The point of that verse and verses 29-32 is to remind believers to be spiritually aware, and to understand that God is present with us when we gather (Jesus said, “Where two or more are gathered together in my name, I will be there in their midst.”) This is big. We need to understand the fact that this simple thing we do points to Jesus’ massive act of sacrifice on our behalf, and we need to understand the hugeness of the fact that by that sacrifice, God has created a new family in Christ—that’s what Paul means by “discerning the Lord’s body.” If we’re careless or willfully ignorant of these truths, then God may decide to bring discipline into our lives to get our attention. In Corinth, that’s what was happening, and Paul had special insight from the Spirit to understand their situation and let them know what was really going on.
Now, should all of this scare us, or make us hesitant to take the Lord’s supper? No!
But it should wake us up. When someone starts to follow Jesus they don’t start a small thing or a light thing. When you get saved, a big thing happens. It’s not all about—“now we can be chill with God.” It’s about getting introduced to reality. And the thing about reality is, you have to respect it, or you collide with it. That’s true of every reality. When that reality is a person, if you don’t respect the reality of that person’s existence, you mess up your relationship with them. And if that person is your creator, and the one who gave his life to die for you—then it really matters how you relate to him.
And as I was thinking about these things, I came to a point when I realized—all God is asking of us is what we really want and need anyway. Don’t we want God to be real? Don’t we want him to be close? Don’t we want to know that Jesus is with us, and that it matters when we get together as a church? Don’t we want church to be powerful?
So through Paul here, the Holy Spirit is speaking to us and saying—it’s all true! I’m there with you. Jesus is with you! The things you do matter! And that simple ritual Jesus gave you to do, it’s hugely significant. So act like it. Admit it. And if we want to experience meaning and significance, then I guess we need to get really serious about the things God says are serious. We can’t just wait for the experience—we have to pursue the things that are within our power—especially the things Paul says to think about here. And then—we don’t have to make God come to us—he’s with us! It’s awesome.
In a world where money is spent and power is flexed to say that things don’t matter, I think we should feel excited and refreshed to run into something so significant, so important, that God himself tells us to wake up and be serious about it. Humans can’t live in a world with no meaning. We don’t work right. We get depressed and aimless and useless and anxious and sick. But then, sometimes when we run in to meaning—we get scared or we feel like it’s too big. Or sometimes, we just get lazy. Or sometimes it’s worse—sometimes there’s some sin we like that we don’t want to let go of, and so we shrink from reality instead of embracing it.
But here it’s like God is saying—drop all that. Come to the table. Commune. Participate in the fellowship, the sharing in the body of Christ, by shedding of the blood and breaking of the body of Jesus. He did the dying. We do the eating. He suffered so we can be in the family. Receive it. Proclaim it.
Enjoy the fact that you’re in! And celebrate it by loving and enacting and guarding that oneness with people of all different kinds.
And…if you aren’t someone who follows Christ, please feel free, when you’re with Christians, not to participate in the eating and drinking. You don’t have to feel weird about abstaining. It’s not really something applies to you. Paul was correcting the church in Corinth because they were already followers of Jesus—and their actions didn’t line up with what was true about them.
But if you’re not a believer in Christ, then this isn’t for you to take—but it is for you to see.
If and when you’re with a group of believers who do this, we want you to watch for a moment. There’s nothing special about the little bit of food we eat or the way we eat. But something unique and powerful is happening when we do this. What you’re witnessing is that in 2017, a group of people are saying, all together—Jesus died, and his death saved us. Jesus rose again, he’s alive and he’s coming back. We’re saying that he’s changing lives and restoring humanity. We’re saying there’s no one else who can do that and that there’s no other hope to restore humanity. He’s making a new family all over the world—the people of God. It’s a family that transcends all these divisions that are tearing the world apart. We’re part of that family. Right here, right now, we’re the expression of that family.
And we’re saying that you’re invited in. You can join this family. Believe the message that Jesus died for your sins and rose again. Believe that he’s the Lord. Receive his new life. And start to follow him.
“We’ve all been redefined…”
College students! This would make an excellent article to write a paper on:
The created truth manifest in sexed bodies cannot endure in law as “one among many” incompatible human identity markers. It can only either be (1) the norm, or (2) subservient to some other norm. There is no sharing of power in these precincts. Once male or female embodiment no longer legally anchors human identity, the venerable practices and policies dependent on the identity-profundity of male and female bodies only survive as fugitives, or in a tentative position of contingent state permission, ever vulnerable to the in-fact erasure already accomplished in principle. So, for instance, draining legal meaning from body and its natural functions correspondingly drains legal weight from the body-concepts of motherhood, fatherhood, kinship, and ancestry—from family itself. All to say, this trip doesn’t terminate at the bathroom.
Transgenderism public policy advocates are not proposing a compromise at the margins, and indeed they cannot. Their program is totalistic, as its ambition is to redefine humanity writ large. If the law governing us all says Gavin is a boy and not a girl, then “boy” and “girl” no longer mean for anyone what they always meant before. We’ve then all been redefined.
That’s from Jeff Shafer’s article in First Things, entitled Transgender Ideology and the End of Law. Seriously, someone in our group, please write a paper on this for…well, any of your classes. If you want I’ll discuss it with you.
He finishes with this important paragraph, keeping love for our friends in the center:
There is therefore a vital difference between our charitable concern and compassion for the exceptional individual who suffers from dysphoria, and the revolution of making that person’s confusion a reason to overthrow the universe in order that dysphoria itself cannot endure as a sensible category. While individuals suffering from transgender confusion desire a different body, the gender ideologues exploiting the condition of those individuals desire a different cosmos. The dysphoric student, then, should be treated quite differently than her handlers. Transgenderism is not a matter for policy compromise or compatible addition to our sex discrimination laws. It is a form of total negation. And law, already besieged, cannot survive its triumph.
Kevin DeYoung has recently said this same thing, more simply:
The challenge with the transgender debate is that Christians must say two very different things at the same time…
The Christian response to the transgender debate depends on whether we are talking about the debate or about a transgender person. I understand the two cannot be completely divorced, but they are not the same thing either. The ideas bandied about in the public square are often ridiculous. The people struggling with gender identity are not. This is what makes the controversy especially difficult for Christians. As a pastor, I need to shepherd a flock that faces pressures from a world that is trying every day to remake them in its image (Rom. 12:2). But I also need to shepherd a flock that likely has sheep in it who wonder how they can live a holy and acceptable life to God when they don’t feel like (or simply don’t like) the person they see in the mirror (Rom 12:1).
That means while we do not have patience for secular agendas, we must have patience for struggling people. We may be quick with rebuttals in the public square, but we must be quick with a listening ear in the neighbor’s kitchen. It means we must show private care in a way that is not confused with public indifference, and make known our public concern in a way that is not confused with private disdain. We have two different things to say depending on the context—not contradictory things, but complementary things the world is eager to confuse.
The agenda ought to be lampooned. The people ought to be loved.
True and good. You should read that whole post too. It’s short and will stick in your brain.
Can I be totally free from lust?
Young men…young women? Did the title of this post grab you? For many of us, the battle with lust is a front and center battle in our Christian life. Our non-believing friends would never understand it. They don’t battle lust–they love it. They revel in it. To someone who doesn’t know the joy and power of knowing Jesus Christ, maybe the best thing out there is porn or sex or just feeding mental fantasies. But those of us who have communed with the Spirit of God know how small, fading, and ultimately breaking those things are, especially when compared to the things men and women were meant for. Sex is awesome, but outside of the world of a marriage covenant, it’s not awesome at all.
So, if you want help in the battle against those thoughts and feelings that try to tell you otherwise, check out this great video from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:
P.S. Did you catch their series title? It’s unfortunate, because it’s the exact one we were using for our series of answers at Truth on Campus. Oh well…
Practical Spirituality: How to Share Your Faith
Last night we continued our study in Practical Spirituality, this time considering how to share the gospel:
Why does it matter? Because Jesus commanded us to preach the gospel. Mark 16:15-16
What should we say?
First, see 1 Corinthians 15:1-8. When Paul summarizes the message he says this: the “Christ” has come. This means that “the King God promised, who will fix all the problems with the world” has come. And that King died, on our behalf, as a sacrifice for our sins, and he rose again. There were witnesses. It’s real. The message of Jesus, the gospel, always includes the essential elements of Jesus’ death on our behalf and his resurrection. It’s basically saying: “Good news, God took care of everything that separates you and him when Jesus died, and Jesus rose again to prove it.”
So this is the first key. When we obey Jesus’ command to tell the world the good news, what we’re doing is telling people about Jesus. Specifically, we’re telling people who he was, what he did, and why it matters.
Now, what does this mean? Well right off the bat, it means that we have to know some things about Jesus, at least some basic truths. You have to know that he was a real, historical man. That he did some amazing things, that he was killed, and that when he died he didn’t deserve to die, because he never sinned. He died in our place. And you have to know that he came back to life again—he rose, and so he’s still alive. You have to know these things to understand why faith in him would be a big deal—so you can communicate that to others.
So, if you know those things, and Jesus has changed your life—tell people. God will do the rest. He loves the people you’re talking to. Don’t worry about knowing everything. It’s better to get the basics out there, and let people grapple with it, then to not say anything at all.
In that sense—every believer is someone who should be sharing the gospel.
Should we “tell our story”?
A lot of times when we’re trying to encourage each other to be spreading the message, Christians tell each other things like: “if you don’t know what to say, just tell your story.” Of course, there’s going to be times when it might be better to say something rather than nothing. And, in our culture people might really benefit from hearing your story about how you came to know Jesus, or things about your personal experience with Jesus—especially because it lets them know that you’re authentic, in other words, this isn’t just some religious marketing program with some lines you’re getting paid to say or something. So that’s a strength to telling our stories.
But… I think we need to remember that our stories are simply stories about how powerful and beautiful Jesus and His message are. But our stories are not the message. Not to belabor this, but my story is not the story Jesus commanded his followers, even me, to share. If I never told my story, I could still be a totally faithful follower of Jesus spreading the message he told me to spread. I don’t necessarily ever need to talk about myself to spread the gospel—because the gospel is about Jesus. So our stories are great if they actually are helpful in getting a certain person to listen to or think about the message of Jesus.
There’s two reasons I think this can be good to remember. First: because as a culture we are each taught to assume that we are the center of our own stories. And the Gospel is all about learning that Jesus is the center of the story. If we’re not careful, we’ll never really get around to telling people all the great things about him, and we’ll kind of miss the main point.
Second, in our culture, when you tell people your story, even though that can earn you cred for being authentic, it’ll also mean that they’ll hear something that applies to you, but not to them. That’s like a cardinal rule in our culture, think about it—experience makes something real for the person who experienced it, but not for anybody else. So if they hear you talk about how good your experience with Jesus is, there’s a real danger today that they’ll hear it as being authentic, and so not intrinsically negative (which is good), but subjective.
Let me say that again. They’ll hear you saying something authentic, but subjective. They’ll hear it as being real, but only real “for you.” Our culture thinks truth is something that each person has for themselves, we don’t tend to think of truth as being anything that would have to do with everyone. I think sometimes, Christians, we get frustrated trying tell people about Jesus at just this point.
What’s the solution? It’s fact that Jesus’ message is universal. It’s for everyone, everywhere. People don’t see that right away, but it’s true. I might think I don’t have to file my tax return, but April 15th is coming either way.
But since that’s like the hardest thing to actually communicate to people today, one of the things we need to do as Christians is be constantly learning—we want to be learning more about who Jesus is and what he did. We want to get clear on what was happening in his life and death. We want to work out issues that might be confusing.
Here’s the awesome secret—The message of Jesus is as simple to learn as the basic sentence, “Jesus died for your sins and rose again so you can be forgiven,” and simultaneously as huge and complex as everything He is and everything he does. A little kid can know it, and the world’s smartest people can’t exhaust it. So basically, the more we know about it, the better sharers we’ll be.
Four aspects of the Gospel, from the Four Gospels…
Luke 4:14-21, 24:44-48
Here in Luke’s account of Jesus’ life, at the beginning and end of his public ministry, we have passages we could sum up as saying something like this: “You have sin. You need forgiveness. Jesus is the one who provides it.” Or we could hear Jesus as saying, “You have sin. I have good news: release from what makes you poor, brokenhearted, captive, blind, oppressed.” The Message?: You need forgiveness, Jesus is the one who gives it. Whether you know it or not, you have an issue. This issue robs you of what you were meant to be—spiritually rich, whole, free, able to see. The issue is what Jesus calls sin. He is the one who provides forgiveness.
John 1:1-4, 3:3-6, 20:30-31
John brings out this aspect of Jesus’ message: You don’t have life. Jesus is the one who gives new eternal life. And it’s significant that this is how he spoke to someone who probably wouldn’t have seen his need for Jesus’ message, if the message had been framed in terms of sin, or of needing to be helped or fixed.
Matthew 4:17, 28:18-20
Matthew highlighted the fact that Jesus is the true king. His kingdom is in the process of coming to rule the whole earth. We might paraphrase the message from this perspective as something like, “You are in opposition to this kingdom, and must completely reorient yourself by bringing yourself under Jesus’ authority, and trusting and obeying him alone as your king.”
Mark 3:22-27
In this passage in Mark’s account of the teaching of Jesus we see the part of the message that proclaims: “You are under the power of a spiritual strongman. You need someone stronger to rescue you. Jesus is the Son of God–so he can do it.”
…and that’s just the beginning. There’s so many benefits to committing to being a lifelong learner in this area. For instance, the more we learn, the more we’ll be able share the gospel with all different kinds of people. We’ll be able to reach people who aren’t like us, because we won’t have to rely on having things in common—we’ll just be able to talk about Jesus. We’ll be able to answer questions. The more aspects and different angles we see, the more approaches we’ll be able to use. We’ll be able to go into all different situations and pray for God to guide us and the Holy Spirit will be bringing all these different things to our memory that we spent time learning.
Some Practical Points from 1 Peter 3:8-17
We are to share the message of Jesus…
v.8-9 …from within a loving community.
v.13-14 …without fear (of people)
v.16 …with a clean conscience
v.17 …wanting to do God’s will
…with a willingness to suffer
v.15 …with God is His rightful place in our hearts
…with “readiness” (Preparation and Eagerness)
…in ways they people can understand (“reason”)
…with meekness and fear of God
Watching the Apostles Preach the Gospel
Tonight we’ll continue our study of practical spirituality with a look at how to share our faith. In the mean time, here’s a little Bible study you can do on your own in the book of Acts.
Look up each of these passages, where someone is preaching the gospel: Acts 2:1-41; 3:11-26; 8:26-38; 9:20; 10:24-48; 13:15-49; 14:11-23; 17:16-34; (Also 4:23-31)
For each of these passages, notice:
- What is the setting of this event?
- Why did this conversation happen?
- Who is speaking and who is being spoken to?
- How does what the way the gospel is preached relate to the audience?
- What things does the speaker include in his message?
- What kind of response is called for?
- What is the “spirit” or “flavor” of the message?
- What were the results of the message?
In the heart of everyone who thinks of me…
I was looking for this to post on friday, couldn’t find it, and then stumbled onto an old post on this blog…it had already been posted here back in 2012. Oh well. here it is. So good…
The Prayer of Saint Patrick
Through the strength of heaven;
Light of the sun,
Splendor of fire,
Speed of lightning,
Swiftness of the wind,
Depth of the sea,
Stability of the earth,
Firmness of the rock.
I arise today
Through God’s strength to pilot me;
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before me,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak for me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me,
God’s hosts to save me
Afar and anear,
Alone or in a mulitude.
Christ shield me today
Against wounding
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in the eye that sees me,
Christ in the ear that hears me.
I arise today
Through the mighty strength
Of the Lord of creation.
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