faith for faith

To those who know me, it is scarcely a secret that I have been in a valley of sorts, spiritually speaking. And lest it be misunderstood as of what I am speaking, my communion with God has been lacking, my desire for the things of the God has been quelled, and my life has been consumed with things that are passing instead of with things that are everlasting. And there is little mystery behind why these things have been so (namely arising from and perpetuated by a lack of beholding Christ in his Word and communing with his people), and yet I have done little to remedy my state. I have been till recently content to feed myself with the fleeting things of this age instead of feasting upon riches of God and his glory in his Son.

Yet to be honest, content is much too strong a word. For I have found little contentment in the those things which deterred me from beholding Christ, and I have found no rest for my soul in those fleeting things. And despite this, the Adversary had convinced me that the things of God were laborious and that there was little reward for chasing after them. And so he (being the slick devil that he is) convinced me, figuratively speaking, again and again, meal after meal, that it was better for me to drive across the street to eat off the Wendy’s value menu than to drive a few miles down the road to dine at the Ruth’s Chris.

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I wish that there were some righteous reason as to why I have not posted on Faith for Faith since January 15, but I am afraid there is not. I wish that I could say that I was so engaged with activities of greater significance that I had not found the time to write, but that is simply not true. The reality is that my spiritual life has become so smothered by the minutiae of day-to-day living that I have lost sight of the greater Picture of Christ and his Kingdom. I feel that I have been slowly groping my way through a dense fog of busyness and labor and have slowly realized, like a man in a drunken stupor, that somewhere along the way I dropped my faith and have had difficulty tracing back my steps to where I lost it. I have fallen, much as Christian did in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, into the Slough of Despond, and in it I have become thoroughly reacquainted with the man who I am capable of being apart from Christ.

And it is not as though in this time I have become slothful and have ceased to work, but quite the contrary, I have been working as hard as I ever have. And that, it seems, has been my problem. I began our present journey with a righteous course–to free ourselves of debt for sake of the Kingdom–and yet have, through my labor, lost the chief goal of righteousness. I have forgotten in practice, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and these things will be added to you,” and have adopted a “work now, ask questions later” attitude with regard to achieving that which I believe God has laid on our hearts to accomplish instead of waiting on him to provide as only he can provide. Therefore, since September of last year, I have been practically working seven days a week to fill the gaps in our needs, rather than seeking provision from God so that he, not I, would receive the glory.

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I do not know about you, but one of the scariest things for me is to sit through a Sunday school class where an Old Testament narrative is being studied. It is not because I do not esteem biblical narrative as I do the rest of the Scriptures or that I do not believe that its lessons are any less applicable to Christians today, but it is because there seem to be few teachers who understand how to read and how to teach biblical narrative. For instead of reading the text and searching for the intent of a particular author, many who teach biblical narrative treat them as nice little stories about a particular aspect of morality and apply Western moral concepts to its application.

For this reason, we have erected unbiblical conclusions and teachings about biblical stories and characters. Thus we teach that Abraham wavered in faith when he took Hagar as his wife and through her bore a son, though Moses does not make that judgment of him, and though Paul writes later of Abraham, “No distrust made him waver concerning the Promise of God, but he grew strong in faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised” (Rm. 4:20,21), and though Paul teaches that the birth of Ishmael happened to demonstrate God’s sovereign choice in election (cf. Rm. 9:7-13). From the misinterpretation of biblical narrative we also have created other false teachings as “listening to small, still voice of God” from the narrative of Elijah in the storm (cf. 1Kngs. 19:12), and have falsely judged other characters such as Rahab and the Hebrew midwives who, out of fear of God, told untruths to save the lives of God’s people, who were then not condemned but commended by God for their actions (cf. Josh. 2; Ex. 1:15-22).

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For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me” (Rm. 15:3).

When it comes to those to whom Christians are to look for guidance and inspiration to live their lives, their focus should be Singular. For there is only one Man who lived perfectly for the sake of God and his glory, and that man is Jesus Christ. And though there are others to whom we can look to as a godly examples, their example is only good insofar as it accords with the example of Jesus Christ. For while there have always been, by God’s grace, godly men on this earth, those men, at the end of day, were still men and being such were still sinners till the day they died.

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The life of a Christian must be to the world an odd existence. For the Christian life, when lived properly, is a life that is lived backwards rather than forwards. For while the rest of the world attempts to live life to its fullest at the present time (or as the old Latin phrase puts it, carpe diem), the Christian lives his life in the light of his future Hope, namely that Day when his faith shall become sight and when he receives his glorified body and lives forever in the splendor and the joy of the glory of his God. It is what Mark Driscoll labeled it, reverse engineering, for our lives here on this earth are to be “engineered” in such a fashion that our blessed Hope is demonstrated and fulfilled by our lives.

The apostle Paul puts it this way: “In this hope [viz. the redemption of our bodies] we were saved” (Rm. 8:24). For the salvation of our Gospel is laid in store for us in Eternity, when we who bear the curse of Adam shall be ridden of our dead bodies and rise as Christ rose by the glory of the Father (cf. Rm. 6:4). This is the glorious Promise and Hope that our God has granted to us, and it is a Promise and Hope that transforms our lives here upon this planet.

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After the apostle Paul encourages the church at Rome to love their neighbors and thereby fulfill the second table of the Law, he draws a glorious picture of the life of Christian by depicting it as a single day on this earth.

He begins by writing, “Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed” (v. 13:11). The picture that the apostle is giving is that of person who is lying in bed at dawn, and the light of the day is breaking over the horizon. The person, prior to the dawn, was ever asleep and his life was characterized by the darkness of night. But now, he has seen his salvation and has believed, and for him, “the night is far gone; the day is at hand” (v. 13:12a).

For those to whom the apostle is speaking, the darkness of their former existence is far gone, and the light of day is now their only existence. For this reason, the apostle exhorts them to throw off the works of darkness that formerly characterized their lives, and encourages them instead to put on the armor of light. And when the Christian wakes to God in this life, he wakes into enemy territory, and he therefore must do two things: one, cast off works of darkness, and, two, put on the armor of light.

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There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do, by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit (Rm. 8:1-4).

In some ways, the Roman Road basis of evangelism has been both a blessing and curse to American Christianity. For on the one hand, the Romans Road has taken verses that are fundamental to the Faith and has made them well known to many, and yet, on the other hand, it has taken those same verses and ripped them from their contexts and has in the process watered down the Gospel.

For while it is indeed true that, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus” (v. 6:23), the verse taken from its context removes the very foundation of eternal life, namely regeneration and sanctification. For v. 6:23 is the apex of the apostle’s chain of salvific events that begins with identification with Christ in his crucifixion by baptism (v. 6:2), the freedom afforded by Christ’s death from the body of sin (v. 6:6; cf. v. 7:23) and thus from slavery to sin (v. 6:6; cf. v. 7:14, 25), and ends with the Christian’s being brought into slavery to obedience, to righteousness, and to sanctification, and sanctification’s end–eternal life (v. 6:16, 18, 19, 22). For the gift of God indeed is eternal life in Christ Jesus, however eternal life never comes apart from obedience, righteousness, and sanctification.

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We, the Church, find ourselves in dangerous territory when we have to use unbiblical definitions and analogies to describe our doctrines. This is especially true when we speak concerning the doctrine of the Gospel, for error on this doctrine places us and those whom we teach on precarious ground concerning our salvation. Other branches of doctrine, like the Particular Redemption of Christ, though weighty and magnificent in their own right, their imperativeness for orthodoxy pales in comparison to that for the Gospel.

In spite of this, there is great confusion concerning the Gospel. Evidence of this is seen in the disconnect between biblical uses of the Gospel and the Church�s use of the Gospel. For example, when Christ is said to be preaching the Gospel of Kingdom, “Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” we are confused, because we certainly do not mention the Kingdom of God when we preach our gospel, and we scarcely preach repentance. Also, we know well that the first four books of the New Testament are labeled by Church history, “the Gospels,” but few in the Church could tell you why they are labeled this way save that they contain the Gospel events.

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