Imagine two  scenarios: In the first, there is a pastor who preaches Jesus. His sermons focus around Christ and his work on the cross. They focus on what he did to save us and redeem us. This preacher looks for Jesus in every text, even the Old Testament ones. The primary application to every one of his sermons is “Trust in Christ” or some derivation of that particular point. He does not normally exhort men to be obedient. He thinks this will lead them to trust in themselves instead of Christ.  He does not preach against gossip or lying. He sticks to what Jesus has done and assumes that this is enough.

The second man also preaches Jesus. But he believes preaching Christ does not mean preaching only what Jesus has done upon the cross, but how we should live because of what Jesus has done. He does not believe calling his flock to live obediently will necessarily lead to legalism.  So he preaches the crucifixion as the only hope of mankind. But also preaches against gossip, lying, sexual immorality, pride, wrath, laziness and a host of other sins. He reminds his people that Christ has conquered these sins and that because they trust in him they are to be a new kind of people who are killing sin in their lives by the power of the Spirit.

Under which man’s preaching is a Christian more likely to gain assurance? Under which man’s preaching is a man who does not have true faith, most likely to recognize his need for evangelical repentance? We automatically assume the first. The man who points us to Jesus is the man most likely to provide assurance and the motivation for true repentance. However, I want to argue that this is not the case.

A Christian, who really wants to follow Christ, will be hounded by doubts under the first man’s preaching. He constantly be asking himself, “Do I really trust in Christ? Do I have true faith? Am I really saved?  Yes, there is the inward testimony of the Spirit. But what if I don’t really have Him? Under the first man’s preaching there is no objective way to assess one’s salvation.

This is also why a man who is part of a  church, but not truly converted can sit under the first man’s ministry for years and never know he is not a Christian. Why? He believes he is a Christian. He believes he trusts in Christ. And there is no objective way to prove otherwise. He can sit there week after week and say, “Yes, I really do trust in Christ.”

Under the second type of preaching both of these men go the opposite direction. The true believer, the one with evangelical faith, begins to put off sins like pride and lust and gossip. He messes up and repents and then gets back in the fight. But he is not fighting in his own strength. He is fighting with the Spirit. He knows he will not be perfect, but because objective ways of evaluating growth are put before him, he can see where he is at.  He can look back and see the Spirit’s work in his life. This together with Christ’s work, the sacraments, the witness of his fellow believers, and the internal testimony of the Spirit give him assurance that he is saved.

What about the false believer, the one who thinks he belongs but really does not have true faith? How will he respond under the second man’s preaching? Let’s say the man is a liar. When the second preacher says, “Men whose lives are characterized by lying do not have true faith,” the line will be clearly drawn in the sand. This false convert has three choices:

He may go out and try to improve his life, but devoid of the Spirit he will fail.

He may realize he does not have true faith and cry out to Christ to forgive his sins and give him strength to overcome them.

Or he may realize he does not have true faith and leave the church.

But the one thing he cannot do is pretend like he can trust in Christ and yet keep lying. The second preacher has made it clear that these two things are incompatible.

Every time the shalls and shall nots are preached correctly they bring proper motivation to the Christian’s obedience and give him a chance for assurance. They also pull out of hiding hypocrites and put them in front of a mirror so they can see who they really are. Assurance does not come from simply pointing to the objective work of  Jesus, but it also comes from seeing the subjective work of Jesus in our lives. The evangelical preacher puts both of these before his congregation.<>рассылка на доски объявленийпроверить по запросам

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by Marc Hays

Growing up in a Southern Baptist church, I became accustomed to eating from the Lord’s Table once a quarter. The words of institution were read from 1 Corinthians 11, and the organ droned “Have Thine Own Way,” until everyone had been served. While the organ hummed we examined ourselves to see whether or not we should have been partaking at all. Most of us sat with heads bowed and eyes closed. (I know because I often got tired of examining myself and looked around hoping someone was doing something interesting.) Afterwards we left the auditorium in silence, not talking or fellowshipping until we had made our way into the outer hall. It was very respectful, for which I am thankful, and very somber, for which I am not.

In college, I was a member of a Primitive Baptist church, which I considered a much better experience. There was no organ, which I considered an improvement – though its absence was based on bad exegesis. Replacing the organ was robust, congregational singing in four-part, shape-noted harmony. The service of the Lord’s Supper was always followed by a foot-washing and a congregational meal. Both of which were high points in the first two decades of my life.

Compared to the Southern Baptists, the Primitives had some things going in their favor, but the thrust of the Lord’s Supper service was still focused on internal, self-scrutinizing assessment, which resulted in the feeling that this crust of bread and thimble of wine could put you on your death bed. The Primitive Baptists are working very diligently to be a “New Testament church,” employing a positivist, regulative principle of worship ^a that incorporates what God has said from Acts all the way to Jude. Unfortunately, this leaves out all of that revelation where God described in detail how He wants to be worshiped.

Here’s the rub. Christians should be careful to hear and to heed the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians 11. He actually did say, “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.” (11:28) Next, Paul really did say, “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. This is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.” (11:29-30) This type of talk could push a rational person toward the Scottish church and the whole “once a year communion” practice. That would radically decrease ones chances of “death-by-Eucharist,” but is that what this is really about? Did Paul really intend to turn a meal with Jesus into a time of inner turmoil and fear?

I propose that a meal with Jesus should be a happy time. Happy. Happy. Happy. Why so happy when this is a time to remember that Jesus has died? Well, I maintain that this time should be happy because upon every remembrance of Jesus’ death, we remember that He is not still in His tomb. We remember that Jesus was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Rom 4:25). Christ is no longer present on the cross. He is no longer present in the grave. He reigns.

Why so happy when this is supposed to be a time of self-examination? We have examined ourselves already; earlier in the same service actually. The whole body present in that room ascended the hill of the Lord, corporately confessed our sin and then heard the assurance proclaimed from God’s under-shepherd that we have been forgiven in Christ. We weighed ourselves in the scales of the law and found want; we confessed this lack of conformity to God’s Word, and He was faithful and just, just like He said He’d be, to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9); and we heard that our sins are forgiven in Christ proclaimed loudly and joyously by our pastor.

When self-examination is over, and at some point it is supposed to be over, it is time to feast. If the feast is your time of self-examination, then it may not be a feast with Jesus. He wants your head on his breast while you hoist your glass of wine; not your eyes on your belly button, while you wonder if you’ll make it out of the room alive.

Once, Nehemiah was interrogated by a king for being sad in his presence. Nehemiah knew better than to pull that kind of stunt, but he couldn’t help it. His heart was heavy because the place of his fathers’ graves was in ruins and the gates destroyed by fire. The king understood because Nehemiah had a good reason to be sad. Christian, your King is far more understanding than Artaxerxes could ever have been, but you have no reason to be sad. The gates are no longer in ruins. Jesus’ kingdom has come, is coming, and will come on earth as it is in heaven. What reason have you to be sad? Does your heart condemn you? God is greater than your heart, he knows everything. (1 John 3:20) Do you have sin to be confessed? Confess it. (1 John 1:9) Examine yourself, and then joyfully come. (1Cor 11:29)

Every week, my seven-year-old son, Seth, lifts his plastic, wine-filled thimble in my direction and waits for the toast. We toast and bless one another with a hearty “L’Chaim!” and then we drain it. We drink to life, because Jesus is life, and we are alive in Him. We drink to life because the grave has been conquered. We drink to life because the wages of sin have been paid, but not by us. We drink to life. We drink to Jesus.

Click on the book covers for resources for further study:

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1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulative_principle_of_worship  (back)

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Yesterday I posted some quotes from Hughes Oliphant Old’s book, The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century.  Old’s book is one of the best I have read on the history of baptism during the sixteenth century among Reformed churches. One of the great feats of the book is to show how the Anabaptist threat shaped the way the Reformers thought about baptism. Old shows how initially there were certain ideas among the Reformers that were wrong. However, they did not realize their errors until they ran into the Anabaptists. Being confronted by the encrusted rituals of Rome on one side and the flaming revolution of Anabaptism on the other side forced the Reformers to dig deeper into the Scriptures. Old’s chapter on Anabaptism is an excellent resource. He explains the differences among the Anabaptists themselves and then draws some basic conclusions about their theology. What I think is most important is that Old shows how Anabaptism was not  one limb on the Reformation tree, but was  a different tree altogether. And while I know you cannot draw a straight line from Anabaptists to modern-day Baptistic thinking there are enough similarities that should give Baptists, compromised Presbyterians, and general evangelicals pause before they claim reformed soteriology, but reject reformed sacramentology.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Old on the Anabaptists.

“At issue in this question of believers’ baptism was an attempt to found a new church for the spiritually elite.”

“What happened in the social revolution was for Muntzer an exact parallel to the crisis of the conversion experience. It is the same dramatic reversal whether on the objective plane of history or in the subjective experience of the soul. Premillenarianism [as understood by Muntzer] and Anabaptism are logical twins.”

Proto-Anabaptists in Zurich “wanted to move out and form a new church made up of those who were fully committed Christians.”

“One notices that it [baptism] is not a sign of what God will do in the life of the baptized, as Zwingli had understood it, but rather it is a sign of what the baptized has done already and will do in the future. It would appear that for Grebel baptism is not so much an act of God as an act of the one baptized.”

“For the circle of Conrad Grebel, as for Muntzer, believer’s baptism was the one key to the reform of the Church. If only those who gave evidence of a firm and mature faith were baptized, then the church would be free from impurities. Believer’s baptism would be the effective sword used to separate the true Christian from Christendom”

“The Anabaptists found it difficult to believe that Christendom was really Christian. As the Anabaptists saw it, there was only a very small number of real Christians in the world.”

For the Anabaptist, “the first responsibility of truly apostolic preaching was to bring people into the crisis experience.”

“For the Anabaptist, salvation was gained neither by the medieval sacramental system nor by faith, but rather by the conversion experience…baptism of children before they had this crisis experience would tend to prevent the development of the crisis experience.”

“The Anabaptists were, to be sure, not so much rationalists as they were voluntarists.”

The study of Hubmaier’s On the Christian Baptism of Believers “shows most clearly that the opposition to infant baptism arose primarily from an understanding of salvation radically different from that of classical Protestantism.”

“Several things should be apparent from even this brief study of these Anabaptist leaders. Anabaptism was not simply the ‘The Radical Reformation.’ Certainly it was not a radical reformation in the sense that it took the principles of the Protestant Reformation to their logical conclusions. It is far more a reaction against the Protestant Reformation. It is a very different approach to reformation than anything the classical Protestant Reformers had in mind. It was a taking  of a different road than the Reformers, not simply going further along the same road.”

As I read Old’s account of Anabaptism one thought kept creeping into my mind: We are all Anabaptists. Even in Presbyterian circles, the themes of crisis conversion experiences for all including children, wanting a pure church full of pure Christians, rejection of anything like Christendom, and a voluntary approach to the Christian faith are dominant.  The question Old’s book forces us to ask is “How Reformed are we really?”  The answer would probably come as a surprise to a lot of  us who believe that we walk in the footsteps of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox.<>оптимизация овкак дать рекламу на гугле

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The title of scholar in the church is not easily come by.  It requires years and years of gathering information,  digesting that information, and then dispensing it so God’s people can benefit from it . That is why Hughes Oliphant Old is such a treasure to the church, but especially the reformed church. He is a scholar of the highest caliber and has done his work in an area that for years was ignored by the church, liturgical worship. I do not know of any author who has written so many helpful works on reformed worship. He has written some very practical works, such as Leading in Prayer  where he gives example after example of prayers he wrote for various parts of worship. He has written a popular, but learned book on reformed worship that traces the different facets of worship to their biblical origins and through their historical development. He has written a seven volume set on the history of the reading and preaching of God’s Word in worship. Finally, he has written numerous academic works  on various aspects of worship, such as, The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century.  

Whenever I read a book that influences the way I think and live I like to introduce people to it, like introducing them to a new friend. So without further delay I would like to introduce you to the last book I mentioned above. Very few books have clarified my thinking on an issue like this one. In The Shaping of the Baptismal Rite Hughes Old traces the reformers thinking on baptism by looking at how they changed the baptismal rites and liturgies from the Middle Ages, as well as how those rites and liturgies changed throughout the years of the Reformation itself, especially as the Reformers interacted with the Anabaptists.  The book is a wonderful combination of history, theology, liturgy, and Bible. There are so many great quotes in the book. One of Old’s strengths is clearing the mud away from an issue and helping the reader see exactly what is at stake and why a certain practice developed the way it did. Today I would like to pull out a few quotes,which show how the Reformers viewed baptism. Tomorrow I will post some quotes from the Anabaptist perspective to show the contrast.

“The early Reformed theologians were all in agreement that even before the children of believers made a confession of faith, even before they were old enough to make a decision, the Holy Spirit was at work within them applying the benefits of redemption in Christ. As Oecolampadius puts it, ‘Christ washed us from our sins by his blood and in this grace our children also participate.'”

Old spends a lot of time on Oecolampadius who seems to have influenced the Reformers quite a bit. I had heard his name, but was not familiar with his theology or contribution to the Reformation until I read this book.

“At the very heart of the Protestant Reformation was the revival of Augustinian theology with its strong emphasis on the primacy of grace. The Reformers believed that God took the initiative for humankind’s salvation. In the light of such a strong doctrine of grace the baptism of infants was quite understandable. In fact, the baptism of infants demonstrated very powerfully that our salvation rests not on any knowledge or work or experience or decision of our own, but entirely on the grace of God.”

“Baptism is a divine action because of the divine institution of the sacrament, the divine promises behind the sacrament, and the divine empowering of the ministry.

“Another matter which should be equally clear from this study is that the position of the Reformers in regard to infant baptism was an integral part of their whole theology.”

“Covenant theology is in fact the sacramental theology of the Reformed Churches.”

The two quotes above make me wonder whether reformed soteriology can be maintained where there is a loss of reformed sacramentology? Can a reformed view of God’s grace and sovereignty in salvation be kept if there is a low or wrong view of the sacraments?

“The confession of the daily sins of the already baptized Christian, the forgiveness of these sins, growth in grace, the spiritual gifts of understanding and enlightenment, the daily increase in faith, hope, and love, and the sanctifying of the Christian life are understood as the fruit of baptism. While baptism stands at the beginning of the Christian life, its fruit is born throughout the whole of the Christian life. The earliest Reformed theologians saw in baptism a sign not of a one-time-only repentance and cleansing of sin, but rather as a sign of a continual cleansing of sin.

“The Reformers came to the conclusion that the central sacramental action [in baptism] was washing, not a dramatization of the death and resurrection of Jesus in and out of a grave of water. “

In the quote above, Old is explaining why some Reformers used immersion, but it never became the dominant mode of baptism.

“Reformed Churches should not in their liturgical practice give ground to a separation of the baptism with water and the baptism of the Spirit.

“The final, and perhaps the paramount, goal of this reshaping of the rite of baptism was the concern that this sacrament should be clearly a sacrament of grace.”

“The Reformers continued to baptize the children of Christians because the practice was consistent with the revelation of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.”

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