Free to Serve

Why no church discipline?

On Sunday, during our Members Meeting, we had the grave responsiblity of voting a member out of the church as a matter of church discipline. That is to say that we could no longer, with integrity, vouch for this man's profession of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. It took months to get to this point, but we finally did, and we continue to pray for genuine repentance.

After the meeting, a man walked up to me and said something like this: "I've been going to church for sixty years, but I've never seen this happen. Though it was sad to see, I'm grateful the church loved that man enough to practice church discipline."

He has been attending churches his entire life. Why has he never seen a church practice discipline? We know that 150 years ago it was common practice in America. What happened?

Gregory Wills in his book, Democratic Religion, offered a suggestion. He argued that churches became so preocuppied with changing the culture (fighting for Prohibition, for example) that they stopped caring about making sure their own congregations were pure. Wills put it this way, "The more evangelicals purified the society, the less they felt the urgency of a discipline that separated the church from the world."

But things only got worse. When we entered the latter part of the twentieth century, many churches stopped caring about theology. They cared, instead, about growing churches bigger. Pastors became practicioners of church growth.

David Wells, in his book, God in the Wasteland, said that in the 1970s a dramatic shift took place in church life: "This was a time when the confessional and theological character of evangelicalism began to fade, leaving the churches wide open to the intrustions of raw pragmatism. As theology moved from the center to the periphery of evangelical faith, technique moved from the periphery to the center. The one gained at the cost of the other." In other words, churches began to sacrifice theological integrity at the altar of church growth. Pastors focused so much on doing whatever they could do get people in the door that they devoted less of their attention to discipling those inside.

I am so thankful that a growing number of churches are taking passages like Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5 seriously. We believe that our witness in the world will actually be better and brighter if we stand by those truths that we profess. We believe that church discipline is not simply the act of removing someone from membership for unrepentant sin (though it may be that!) but it is the act of discipling a brother or sister in Christ, lovingly applying the gospel to his or her life for his or her good. Church discipline is, in that sense, living the Christian life togther, holding one another accountable to walk the walk. 

May God give us the grace to exercise church discipline well.

The Necessity of Community

I just put the finishing touches on the first in a series of six sessions of Covenant Group training for MVBC. As announced on Sunday, we are launching small groups for members in January. Now the preparation begins. The first session, which I'm teaching Sunday at 4pm, is called, "The Necessity of Community." In preparing, I came across this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together:

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ.

While I don't think we can hinder God, I do think that we dishonor him with the way we treat the church which is Christ's body. It is so easy to value the church in terms of what we can receive instead of who she is--the bride of Christ, purchased with his own blood. If we keep that truth in mind, we will be thankful and rejoice for the fellowship that he does give us, instead of the fellowship that we lack.

If you are at Mount Vernon, come and spend a few hours over the next few Sunday afternoons, thinking together about how the Lord could use you to help others grow in their faith. 

Köstenberger and Excellence

Andreas Köstenberger grew up in Austria. He had only known the Roman Catholic Church where he had little exposure to the Word and Gospel of God. But in his early 20s God brought people into his life who impressed upon Köstenberger his need for a relationship with Jesus Christ. God gave him a hunger for Scripture, and he read through the Bible twice in six months. In his latest book, Excellence, he described the moment that his "intellectual resistance" melted:

The floodgates opened, and God's bright light of salvation entered my soul as I prayed, asking him to forgive my sins and pleading with Christ to be my Savior. And so I gave my life to Christ, to paraphrase one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, 'the most dejected convert in all of Austria.' A few Sundays later, sitting in the pews in Vienna International Chapel, I suddenly felt almost physically as if an enormous load had been lifted from my shoulders—my sins, which I no longer needed to bear on my own but which my Savior had borne for me. And as I wept uncontrollably in my seat, the congregation sang the familiar hymn [“And Can It Be”] . . .

By the time the congregational singing had reached the line “No condemnation now I dread,” an overwhelming peace had come over me, and I knew that God’s judgment for sin had fallen on Christ. Even though I had sinned against God in many ways, his judicial verdict regarding me was “not guilty” because of what Christ had done for me. I had blessed assurance of my salvation, and though I had no idea of what God might have in store for me, at that moment it did not matter. Having been justified with God, I had peace with him in the Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. 5:1).

His newfound repentance and faith cost him his family. They rejected him. “As far as my family was concerned,” he writes, “for all practical purposes I had died—died as the person they knew.”

God had years of academic training in mind for Köstenberger who now teaches seminary students to study and apply God’s Word. In Excellence he pleads with those students to pursue their studies and their callings with integrity. The God who so marvelously saved us deserves our commitment to honor him in everything we do. But his book is for more than seminary students—it is for all of us who are tempted to “go through the motions” instead of actively pursuing God. We are all to live in light of his excellence: 

As we have seen, God truly excels in the sense that he stands out from all the rest. His excellence is evident in his unmatched superiority to everyone and everything else. Because God is the proper standard of excellence, we should not measure our achievements by comparing ourselves with others. Our pursuit of excellence should not take place in the kind of competitive spirit according to which only few can participate and where in the end there is only one winner. Since we are all created in God’s image, everyone can be truly excellent. God is unique, and we are made uniquely in his image as distinct creatures. We can each achieve excellence as we are increasingly fulfilling the potential God has built into us.

I agree with Köstenberger. As believers who have not only been made in the image of God but are being conformed into the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29) we have the joyful responsibility of living excellent lives. This should not be seen as a burden to bear; it is now part of our Christian stewardship.

 

Got Anxiety? Part V

It is a sin to worry. Jesus commanded us not to be anxious about our life. We are tempted to doubt that our needs will be met. When work is going poorly, when sales are slow, when the bank account is closing in on zero, when the grades aren't up to snuff, when our health or the health of our kids or the health of our grandkids is failing -- in all these circumstances we are tempted to doubt that God will provide. And in just such a circumstance, Jesus asks, "Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?" 

The Christian's life cannot be summed up by material matters. Our life is in Christ. He is our Lord. His glory is our goal. Our job is to trust not only that God will meet our basic needs (as Jesus goes on to say in Matthew 6) but that our troubles will be used by God to bring him glory.

So far in battling anxiety, I've laid out four parts in the plan of attack:

Part One: Remember the gospel

Part Two: Confess unbelief

Part Three: Take your emotions in hand

Part Four: Express thanksgiving

That leaves me with one more related point to make. Part Five: Trust God's plan.

Got Anxiety? Part IV

In most every human heart, a battle wages against worry. It is, as I've already mentioned, a battle against unbelief. I think the clearest Scripture on the issue is found in Hebrews 3. The author refers to the wilderness years of Israel. Their hearts were hard. They rebelled against God. And then judgment came. Verse 11, "They shall not enter my rest." A generation was prohibited from entering the promised land. For rebellion? Yes, for rebellion. But at the heart of their rebellion was a failure to trust the Lord. Verse 12, "Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God."

How should we fight this spectre of anxiety that is rooted in unbelief? 

First, remember the gospel.

Second, confess unbelief.

Third, take your emotions in hand.

Fourth, express thanksgiving.

I am convinced that anxiety is fought with thanksgiving. “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Phil. 4:6). Are we to pray for relief? Yes. Are we to pray for joy? Of course. But we are to pray with thanksgiving. If we are Christians, we have much to be thankful for.

If we listen to our sin very long, we will soon come to the conclusion we shouldn’t be thankful. We will forget that God has given us everlasting life. We will not care that God has adopted us into his family. Our hearts will not be moved at the thought that God will present us before him blameless. Our minds will fail to reflect upon and be thankful for the amazing provision God has made for us in Christ.

For most of us there are 1,001 reasons to be thankful. Most of us have plenty of food, durable clothes, and warm shelter. We are blessed with friends and family who love us and a church that feeds us with spiritual truth. Most importantly, for those who have come to Christ and received everlasting life, we have tasted and seen that the Lord is good! But again, in the face of anxiety, we are prone to ignore the good things God has given us. We are prone to ignore the good God.

But if we would defeat anxiety, after we remember the gospel, as we confess our unbelief, as we take our emotions in hand, we should thank the Lord that he is good and good to us.

Today, express thanksgiving to our glorious God.

 

Got Anxiety? Part III

We've been thinking about anxiety. It is something, at some level, that we all struggle with. In Part I, I encouraged us to start the fight by remembering the gospel. In Part II, I challenged us to confess unbelief. Our faith in the gospel is undermined by our doubt that God cares, that he loves us, that he wants what is best for us, etc. So we should confess these doubts for God, pursue forgiveness, and throw ourselves at his mercy, confident that we will receive his grace. 

But the fight is not over. Our emotions can take over. They strain to control us. Emotions like fear and anger and even sadness can be hard to overcome. So what can we do? Take our emotions in hand. 

I am indebted to pastor Martyn Lloyd-Jones and his classic work, Spiritual Depression, for this point. He understood that the battle against anxiety is a battle against unbelief. He said that the man who is depressed has forgotten God. He urged him to go to war to apply the gospel to his heart.

Lloyd-Jones said that to win the battle we must “take ourselves in hand,” and he pointed to the writer of Psalm 42 as a perfect example. The psalmist asked himself, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God” (Psalm 42:5). His actions are chock full of wisdom for the anxious. Lloyd-Jones put it this way:

We must learn to take ourselves in hand. This man [of Psalm 42] was not content just to lie down and commiserate with himself. He does something about it, he takes himself in hand. But he does something which is more important still, that is he talks to himself. This man turns to himself and says: ‘Why are thou cast down O my soul, why are thou disquieted within me?’ He is talking to himself, addressing himself.

The Psalmist sees the battle going on inside. He sees anxiety welling up. He knows that his heart is troubled. His emotions are spinning and they are nearly out of control. It is into this hurricane of doubt and distress that he cries out: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise him.” He took his emotions in hand by reminding himself of what he should do (hope in God) and what is true (I shall again praise him). 

Our thoughts will often lie to us. They will tell us that God has forgotten us. He doesn’t care. He is uninterested and unconcerned. Our soul is cast down. The sky is gray and gloomy. What then? Take those thoughts captive. Apply the truth of the gospel to your life with vigor. Take those emotions in hand. 

Part IV: Express thanksgiving.