Friday Recap

Here are several stories and links I found interesting this week and wanted to pass along.

• “Happy Child = EasyLife”: Paul Tripp on the need for perseverance in the daily discipline of our children. 
• “Interview: Inside the Mind of One of the Top Pro-Abortion Activists”  
•  Tortured in the Sinai: 'I Was Hanged for Days' | CBN.com
•  Tullian Tchividjian, Voddie Baucham, and Russell Moore discuss “TheBiggest Mistakes Young Preachers Make” 
•  Video: DARPAS 6 ft, 330 lb Humanoid Robot (Seriously!? Did i-Robot teach us nothing?) 

False Dilemma: Urgency vs Faithfulness

Every church and every disciple of Jesus Christ bears the privilege and responsibility of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ to our neighbors and the nations. This task of proclamation is known as "evangelism." Among the many qualities that should characterize Christian evangelism, in practice, two often stand in tension with one another: urgency and faithfulness.

On the one hand, evangelism should be done urgently. As believers we have been taught (or should be taught) to look eagerly for our Savior's appearing (Titus 2:11–14). This urgency is expressed succinctly in the prayer "Maranatha!" which means "Come quickly, Lord Jesus!" (Rev 22:20). The entirety of the Christian life including evangelism must be done in light of this expectation. Jesus is coming again to judge the living and the dead. People need to be prepared for his coming and should be urged to respond in repentance of their sins against God and in faith that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of the world (John 14:6).

On the other hand, evangelism should be done faithfully, that is in faithfulness to the content of the Gospel message. The Gospel has a definite content (cf. 1 Cor 15:1–9); the Scriptures define this content, not the evangelists and not the recipients. As we share Christ we must be faithful to proclaim the person and work of Jesus Christ as they are revealed in the Scriptures. 

Unfortunately, the two qualities of urgency and faithfulness may be pitted against one another in our daily practice. Sometimes urgency trumps faithfulness, leading to incomplete presentations of the Gospel in all its fundamental elements. Sometimes faithfulness trumps urgency, leading us to neglect evangelism unless (a) conditions are absolutely perfect for a robust Gospel presentation or (b) we have confidence that we will be able to disciple the person indefinitely. Recently, I read a quote by Francis Schaeffer that put the first half of this tension in a helpful light.

Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) was an outspoken evangelical pastor, missionary, philosopher, and apologist. He authored numerous books, including Escape from Reason (1968), God Who Is There (1968), and He Is There and He Is Not Silent (1972).  In a short pamphlet, 2 Contents, 2 Realities (1974), Schaffer argues that the content of the Christian message is a system of doctrine. He is careful to clarify that it is more than a system, but he maintains that it is not less. Schaeffer identifies several core doctrinal minimums of the content of Christian evangelism:

“[I]t is a system in that the person who accepts Christ as his Savior must do so in the midst of the understanding that prior to the creation of the world a personal God on the high level of trinity existed. And if they ‘accept Christ as their Savior’ and do not understand that God exists as an infinite-personal God and do not understand that man has been made in the image of God and has value, and do not understand that man’s dilemma is not metaphysical because he is small but moral because man revolted against God in a space-time Fall, in all probability they are not saved” (9–10; emphasis added).

Evangelism devoid of its proper doctrinal content, argues Schaffer, risks hardening the heart of the hearer. In the end, the aim is not comprehensive knowledge and understanding, but rather it is the communication of the content of the Gospel: “Not everybody must know everything—nobody knows everything; if we waited to be saved until we knew everything, nobody would ever be saved—but that is a very different thing from deliberately or thoughtlessly diminishing the content.”

Schaeffer’s words offer a helpful corrective to evangelistic practices that emphasize the urgency of the task to the exclusion of faithfulness to the content of the Gospel. We must, however, hold these twin characteristics together, avoiding the temptation to resolve the tension in one direction or the other.  May God give us grace to share the Gospel with both the urgency and faithfulness to which we've been called and our glorious, risen Lord deserves.

J

Two Lessons from the Giglio Dis-Invitation

Recently Louie Giglio, a prominent evangelical pastor, speaker, and founder of the Passion Movement, was invited to speak at President Obama's inauguration only to be dis-invited this week. The dis-invitation followed on the heels of the discovery by a homosexual activist group that Giglio had preached a sermon nearly two decades ago in which he said homosexuality was a sin.

Giglio writes,

Due to a message of mine that has surfaced from 15–20 years ago, it is likely that my participation, and the prayer I would offer, will be dwarfed by those seeking to make their agenda the focal point of the inauguration. Clearly, speaking on this issue has not been in the range of my priorities in the past fifteen years. Instead, my aim has been to call people to ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ.

Albert Mohler, as usual, has written an insightful post, "The Giglio Imbroglio--The Public Inauguration of a New Moral McCarthyism."[1] I encourage you to read the post in its entirety, but Mohler raises two points that I want to highlight.

First, the situation reveals the depth of the left's intolerance for historic, biblical Christianity. Giglio's sermon was about the power of the Gospel for change, not about homosexuality per se. He called both homosexuals and heterosexuals to repentance. Nonetheless, simply calling homosexuality a sin is out of bounds in the "New Moral McCarthyism" as Mohler aptly terms it. He rightly concludes, that the new litmus test for political acceptance is "Do you now or have you ever believed that homosexuality is a sin?"

 

Second, the situation reveals how futile it is for a Christian minister to attempt to articulate faithfully the doctrine of sin with any particularity and remain unoffensive. As his statement makes clear, Giglio has not preached on this issue for more than a decade (possibly two). Mohler's observations are spot on here:

A fair-minded reading of [his] statement indicates that Pastor Giglio has strategically avoided any confrontation with the issue of homosexuality for at least fifteen years. The issue "has not been in the range of my priorities," he said. Given the Bible’s insistance that sexual morality is inseparable from our "ultimate significance as we make much of Jesus Christ," this must have been a difficult strategy. It is also a strategy that is very attractive to those who want to avoid being castigated as intolerant or homophobic. As this controversy makes abundantly clear, it is a failed strategy. Louie Giglio was cast out of the circle of the acceptable simply because a liberal watchdog group found one sermon he preached almost twenty years ago. If a preacher has ever taken a stand on biblical conviction, he risks being exposed decades after the fact. Anyone who teaches at any time, to any degree, that homosexual behavior is a sin is now to be cast out.

Christians must recognize that faithfulness to invite persons to confess and repent from their sins (as defined by the Scriptures) to follow Christ will be met more and more with dis-invitations to the public square.

The Giglio dis-invitation only helps bring into greater clarity a growing divide in our public discourse. As we consider how best to respond personally to this situation like this, here are two suggestions:

1. Pray for our nation and its leaders and continued freedom of speech. This may sound pithy, but it is biblical. The Apostle Paul writes,

   First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim 2:1-4 ESV).

   The freedom of speech we enjoy is an aid to our fulfillment of the Great Commission. In his letter to his church, Giglio rightly notes, "[I]ndividuals’ rights of freedom, and the collective right to hold differing views on any subject is a critical balance we, as a people, must recover and preserve." Among the many things we should pray for our nation's leadership is that they will preserve this precious freedom.
2. Preach the full Gospel to all persons, calling them to repent of all sins. The Gospel call to repent and believe is not limited to those in a homosexual lifestyle; it extends to all persons. Further, the message of the Gospel is not focused on any particular sin, but rather, it focuses on God's holiness and its incompatibility with any sin ("Be holy for I am holy"; cf. 1 Pet 1:16). The Scriptures are clear: all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory (Rom 3:23). Homosexuality is merely one sin among many that must be confessed and repented of if one is to confess Jesus as Lord (cf. Gal 5:19–21).

   In the midst of public controversy we must be careful not to isolate this sin or ignore it.

   The Apostle John makes clear, "Whoever believes in [Jesus Christ] is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:18 ESV). Thus, "whoever" is outside of Christ, homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, are under the condemnation of God and in desperate need of hearing and receiving the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ.

I pray that our churches will respond with truth, grace, and faithfulness to the Gospel in the face of growing hostility and opposition.

J

 

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[1]Much has been written about this in the blogosphere about this situation and the underlying societal issues it reveals. I would recommend reading Giglio's letter to his church and Russell Moore's post on the implications of this in addition to Mohler's post.