This is part 3 of a 3 part series. You can find part 1 and part 2 here: Part 1 Part 2

(Originally published on March 7, 2016)

Practicing Priesthood

In the previous posts in this series, we looked at the need to set the culture in regards to depression, as well as provide training for the church. Now we come to the third aspect to consider, namely, we are a royal priesthood and are called to act as priests toward one another (1 Pet. 2:9). These are the trenches of one-anothering. Our maturing and training is lived out within a culture for the purpose of aiding one another in growth. A person struggling with depression feels isolated and alone. They scream out into the darkness, “Why?!” not, “How?!” He or she is not looking for steps but for meaning. We can easily err in this priestly role and try to be engineers—dealing symptomatically to restore normalcy. In walking with someone who suffers with depression, the priest seeks to help with the deeper struggle.

Recently Jennifer (not her real name), who battles depression, told me that, “It feels like I can’t live, but I can’t die either. My heart is continually ripped out over and over again.” Such words echo Bunyan’s Giant Despair in The Pilgrim’s Progress, “Why should you choose life, seeing it is accompanied by so much bitterness?” The Proverbs tell us that, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Pro. 13:12). Such hearts need voices of hope, to speak into their pain. In endeavoring to impart hope, we must ensure that the hope we impart is Gospel hope.

We can easily impart false or trite hopes in an effort to lighten spirits. Gospel hope, however, is the sustaining wind that carries us through the storm to our desired haven (Psalm 107:30).

Below are four different ways we can seek to unveil this hope:

Befriending

Just this week, I spoke with Edward (not his real name) whose neighbour committed suicide. Edward, oblivious to his neighbour’s depression, assumed his neighbour was simply avoiding relationship. While he may have been avoiding relationship, it was expressive of his isolation. But the greater our suffering, the greater will be our sense of feeling alone. Hope says, “You are not alone.” “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity” (Pro 17:17). Befriending one who suffers, brings Christ near to them through his Body. God said he would never leave us nor forsake us (Deut 31:6). He declares us His friends (John 15:15). We can model the hope of God’s presence in befriending those struggling with depression.

Remembering

Second, when we remember people, it tells them that, even though we are out of sight, they are still in mind. In Ed Welch’s book, Side by Side, he says, “If we are affected by someone’s suffering, we will remember it, which is one of the great gifts that we give to each other” (pg. 103). The Apostle Paul certainly communicated this in his prayers for the church, “I always remember you in my prayers” (I Tim 1:3, see also Eph 1:16; Phil 1:4). Remembering communicates,“You matter.” It is certainly true that we are created for a purpose, and we are meant to be shaped by one another (Pro 27:17). Remembering brings solidarity, and there is beauty in solidarity, “Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them… since you also are in the body” (Heb 13:3).

Sufferers of depression often feel that they are incapable of expressing their anguish. Our remembering their anguish says that at some level, “I feel your pain.” Knowing another feels their pain helps unbolt the doors of solitude. This too is a reminder that we have a high priest who can, “Sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb 4:15). The fact that weaknesses is plural means we cannot exclude a category of weakness (such as depression), from Christ’s sympathies.

Grace Hunting

Third, as we enter into their pain, we obtain a new vantage point. Our first response tends to be going on an idol hunt. We want to find the sin or the idol that is at the heart. Whilst there is a place for this, the depressed person is likely heavily engaged in morbid introspection and thus would be greatly helped seeing signs of God’s grace at work in them. Saying something like, “You are so courageous. God has given you grace this week to get out of bed and get the kids to school.” We want to commend manifested grace where we see it. For those who feel hopeless and alone, this is a reminder that God is near and working even in the mundane.

Jesus’ Suffering

Fourth, the suffering of Jesus is both our example and help. We may want to speak of the glories of heaven obtained by Jesus’ suffering. But there is also consolation in Christ’s suffering itself. Spurgeon, who suffered from depression, said, “It is an unspeakable consolation that our Lord Jesus knows this experience.” Zack Eswine, in his book Spurgeon’s Sorrows writes, “To feel in our being that the God to whom we cry has Himself suffered as we do enables us to feel that we are not alone and that God is not cruel.” Here we can begin to see our burden as belonging to him.

When Amy Carmichael struggled with an unbearable burden in India, she considered Christ and his burden bearing in the Garden, “Under one of those trees our Lord Jesus knelt, and He knelt alone. And I knew that this was His burden not mine. It was He who was asking me to share it with Him, not I who was asking Him to share it with me.” She found great comfort knowing that she was partaking in the sufferings of Christ. Jesus not only knows our pain, he endured it, and we kneel beside him in it.

Continuing Work

God is a redeeming God, who continually works his redemption into us. As we walk with depression sufferers, God is not only continuing to work in them, he is continuing to work in us. We mutually grow, building one another up in our most holy faith, as we await the day when all sin, sickness, and death gives way to the glorious liberty of the children of God (Rom 8:21).

This is Part 2 of a 3 part series. You can find Part 1 here:

The Church & Victims Of Depression

Providing Training

In our last post in this series, we looked at promoting culture. This is almost like saying, “Imagine what could be,” and then making steps in the direction of what could be. However, such things will never be without those of us in church leadership providing training for the saints. This is Paul’s call to the Ephesian church, so every joint is outfitted with the training they need for redemptive up-building in love (Eph. 4:11-16). These verses teach us that ministry is a participation sport.

In my experience with Anita, I began to think that people who suffer with things like depression could only be helped by highly skilled professionals. Whilst professional involvement may be needed, this should not relegate the body of Christ to the sideline. The leadership of the church can empower the church to help and not harm people further. We harm them further when we toss out trite sayings like “Let go and let God,” or “If you were trusting Jesus, you wouldn’t be depressed.” Many of these types of responses see depression merely through the lens of sin rather than the lens of both sin and suffering.

If we as pastors are going to shepherd well, we need to think about how we can help our congregations incarnate into people’s sufferings.

We must help them to think biblically about the role of suffering in a Christian’s life. In some cases, such as my own, I had to begin studying these things at a deeper level in order to aid my congregation. Much of this training will boil down to helping the church walk in humility, preferring one another, and walking alongside one another. One way I have learned to help train my congregation is to apply the sermons with the understanding that 1 in 5 of my congregation will suffer from depression, and the other 4 in 5 will have the opportunity to walk with someone who suffers from depression.

If we bring this struggle out of darkness into light, the sufferer is better enabled to run to Christ, and the church can help point the way. This helps give the body of Christ something to grab hold of. And since we are more alike than different, the church will learn more about ourselves as well in addition to truths we already know, just applied more deeply.

Originally published on February 29, 2016

The phone rang at 2am again. I knew who it was before answering. In recent weeks, Anita (not her real name) often called in the middle of the night.

She claimed to feel the fires of hell all over her body with no desire to live.

My wife or I would drive to her home and sit down and pray with her. We would speak to Anita and rally the church to pray for her. After a couple suicide attempts through overdoses, she was hospitalized for several months. We rallied around Anita as best we could. We would encourage her and read her Scripture, but it felt like talking to a wall. It was a discouraging time, but also a time when my wife and I felt utterly helpless. We were frustrated with Anita for not listening, and yet, grieved for her inability to listen. We felt defeated as if we had let Anita down.

Anita is not a unique case.

Although her depression was severe, 1 in 5 people in the UK will suffer depression. This highlights the importance of the role of the local church in helping sufferers of depression. But how do we help? Should we feel as helpless as my wife and I felt with Anita several years ago? There are many ways the church can approach depression.

In this three-part series, I would like to briefly look at three things we can do as the church by: Promoting Culture, Providing Training, and Practicing Priesthood.

Promoting Culture

A culture is the way in which groups of people live and think.

Everyone brings their culture into the church, and as the church, we have developed an Evangelical culture that is more based on moral excellence and stoicism than on the realities of our humanity. On Sundays, it is not uncommon for a family to be falling to pieces, yelling at one another in the car, and then walking into the church building with smiles, hugs, and handshakes. Typical church culture relegates life’s hardships and sufferings to behind closed doors. The emperor’s new clothes are “I’m ok, you’re ok.”

Any sufferer in that context can scream on the inside, but fear being viewed as inferior for having a quivering upper lip. In many ways we have an anti-suffering (and anti-depression) theology within the church.

The purpose of suffering is often not considered, and so when suffering strikes (and it will), many find difficulty weathering the storm. Suffering seems an obscure stranger, and our legalistic bent suggests that intense suffering comes upon those who are not trusting God. David Murray is right when he says in his book Christians Get Depressed Too that, “There is still a stigma attached to mental illness and to depression in particular.” Sometimes that stigma is not just that a person does not seem to be coping well, but that he/she fails to trust God.

In promoting a biblical culture, the local church must promote a culture of progressive sanctification. In other words, we are all in process.

We put on a sanctified show for others to see whilst ignoring the fact that we are not as together as we portray. Truly, we make sure the scaffolds of sanctification are erected on the inside of the building rather than the observable outside. This is why D.A. Carson wrote his book on suffering, How Long, O Lord? Carson begins by saying, “This is a book of preventative medicine. One of the major causes of devastating grief and confusion among Christians is that our expectations are false.” Suffering is a human problem, and depression is a form of suffering. People suffer from depression because of others (abuse, expectations, etc.), Adam (the curse, physiological factors, misery in work, death, etc.), and Satan (conspiring with the curse, spinning lies, etc.). These contributors work along the grain of our sinful hearts.

There is no single cause for depression.

Every one of us finds him/herself living amongst the same brokenness vulnerable to its effects. When Paul speaks of overcoming temptations, he points out that they are common to all (1 Cor. 10:13). Thus we must promote a new culture in the church—a culture that recognizes our likeness to one another. Truly, our struggles and temptations are more alike than different. That means that we are not a church that loves to help people with problems, but a church of people with problems.

In other words, we need a church culture that locates ourselves in the community of sufferers, rather than the community of the perfected.

Practicing such a culture would help invite openness about struggles, including depression, so that the sufferer receives care. In many cases, it may provide a preventative dynamic as the community can help hear and carry one another’s burdens before they break an individual’s spirit! This allows us to see ourselves included as sufferers; thus, we can enter into the world of the depressed without excluding them from our world.

“We repeat the mistake continuously in this country of trying to address our racial animus and the violence it fosters as though it were a virus that occasionally attacks our social body, rather than seeing the truth: that racial animus is a constituting reality of our social body.”

—Willie James Jennings, Theologian “Overcoming Racial Faith.”

Did Jesus really rebuke James and John, two of his disciples, for their blatant bigoted behavior (Luke 9:52-56)? Did the Apostle Paul rebuke Peter, the very disciple whom Jesus gave the “keys of the church,” for hindering Gospel change to the ethnic status quo (Galatians 2:11-14)? So we see that even Peter, James, and John—the pillars of the early Church, and among the most “anointed” men in church history—needed correction to address their blind spots.

I write this article as one blowing a trumpet, but not to make music or even a call to arms. I write as one sounding the shofar. I write as the blast of the ram’s horns of old that brought down the mighty walls of Jericho. Indeed, in today’s racially-turbulent climate, our society has some age-old walls that need toppling. The “American Church” (meaning the Church as it originated with the European colonizers and extending to this present day) has some of these same old walls. To fully understand the implications of Ahmaud Arbery’s cold-blooded murder by two white men in Georgia, we as the Church must first reconcile with the Church’s seeming indifference to racial inequalities.

A Modern Parable

If a picture is worth a thousand words and a story is worth a thousand images, perhaps a modern-day parable will be helpful (but as a spoiler-alert, you will need to see Christ and the Bible in every word and action of this parable). Let us begin with a sweet, sage elderly white brother in the faith, and he’s sharing with a bright and eager, young black brother. He’s expositing the Scriptures—but wait!—upon closer examination, he’s actually expositing the Scriptures on the real Old-Testament economy of indentured servitude, which condemns (not justifies) American slavery and its blasphemous atrocities. He explains how the Bible declared such horrors to be a capital offense, from “men-stealing”—kidnapping, buying and selling human life (Exodus 21:16)—to the torture and murder of blacks and natives. He explains how God forbade the Israelites from entering into the capture and sale of human life, contrasting the Philistines and Phoenicians of their day.

The elder tells the younger that, for love’s sake, he’d rather him hear such a correct exegesis from him as a white man. Because by doing so, he is redeeming truth from century-old lies. Further, he is demonstrating (faith without works being dead) how as Christians, God commands us to put ourselves in others’ shoes (Leviticus 19:34)— experientially, culturally, and even racially—to “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15) while always going the “extra mile.” (Matthew 5:41) He tells him that biblical Christianity is hardly for the lazy in heart, but that when it comes to this day’s race issues and evils of the past, the Church has been more than just lazy. He tells him, “Failure to acknowledge and learn from the past creates blind spots in the present—and the thing about a blind spot is that you don’t even realize you have one.”

Perverting the Gospel

But wait—this elderly brother is hardly finished. Because not only does he want the young man to interpret Scripture adeptly, but he also wants him to adeptly apply Scripture to all of American Church history. “Let God be true and every man a liar,” he reverently quotes from the book of Romans. So he moves on to share another grave error of the American Church in regards to race: When sharing Christ with the Native-Americans (or, First Nation’s people), the Church gave natives an “accursed and perverted” Galatians-based Gospel (Galatians 1:6-7). The only difference was that instead of teaching the heresy of “Christ and circumcision,” they taught natives the heresy of “Christ and whiteness.” I.e., that true Christian sanctification and spiritual growth looked like becoming a white person in worldview, customs, and culture. Thus, long hair, drums, regalia, and native languages—ironically, even the very Navajo language that was later used by our government to “save the day” against Japan during World War II—was automatically considered pagan.

The elderly brother impresses upon the young brother the importance of sharing these truths. Because despite the assertions of some that “the past is the past” or “that was then, this is now,” the fact remains that countless blacks and natives (and even some whites) still reject the Church because of these major misrepresentations of Christ and His kingdom. He says that “if the Church doesn’t try to reconcile and repair these gross failings from the past, and doesn’t take the time to listen and learn moving forward, we will always continue operating from a position of blind ‘whiteness.’”

Concluding their fellowship, the two brothers hug and pray together. The young brother thanks the elderly brother for his love, time, and especially his humility, promising that he’ll never forget how much he saw the face of Jesus in his heart and example. The elderly brother gives all the credit to the Scriptures, knowing that sharing such things is necessary. He also recognizes that he is still very much a student himself when it comes to navigating race issues (even though he’s been on many missions trips to Africa and has multiracial grandkids). That being said, before they part, the elder asks the young brother how he can do better when it comes to dealing with race in America—both for his own personal growth as well as the growth of the local Church where he serves on leadership.

Agents of Change

“Well, since you asked…,” the young brother smiles and begins. “I would say that if the mainstream Church, and especially its church leadership, truly want to progress in racial awareness, it must make engaged-listening a lifestyle, not just something you occasionally do. Simply having that one deep race conversation you had last year, or reading that one good book, or watching that one piercing documentary about race isn’t enough. It requires being taught on an ongoing basis because most people would be embarrassed to realize how little they know about real American history. It also requires asking lots of hard questions—and even asking oneself lots of hard questions.”

With that, the elder brother nods in grateful agreement. Finally, both men walk away, more equipped than ever to be “salty” agents of change in today’s volatile, racial climate. Soli Deo Gloria, as this type of honest, humble, and loving interaction fulfills one of the last requests of a sweat-and-blood-soaked Savior in a garden as He prayed for the “oneness” of His beloved Church (John 17:20-22).

A Major Disparity

Now, at this point, if I were to ask the readers—by a showing of hands—how many feel that the interaction in this parable must become a vital reality across the American Church, there would no doubt be myriads of raised hands. Conversely, if I were to ask if any felt that, while the parable might be touching, its subject isn’t an urgent action item (of comparable priority to preaching the Gospel, theological accuracy, or teaching the full counsel of God), the raised hands would be innumerous. But alas, therein lies the heart of the problem! While there would be countless hands raised for both questions, sadly, the overwhelming majority of “vital reality” hands would be from the minority folks, and the vast majority of “not an urgent action item” hands would be from the white folks.

This disparity explains why much of the mainstream Church is silent from its pulpits (and innumerable published books) when it comes to race and modern-day injustices. Whether this silence is the result of passivity, procrastination, indifference, or neglect, the silence of the Church perpetuates the age-old status quo—and its age-old walls. It leads to the continued bolstering of the “racial architecture” of the American Church, as described by theologian Willie James Jennings, in his article, “Overcoming Racial Faith.” In the article, Jennings discusses what he refers to as a “Principality of Whiteness” in the Church, and defines it as, “Whiteness [that] instigates patterns of thinking and ways of being that invite multiple people(s) to imagine their worlds through white bodies.” He shares how this “principality” is the subconscious ideal in the American Church, going all the way back to its Renaissance-inspired inception. And to this day, it is this idea that makes the final decision on what it means to be ethnically diverse, what it means to be racially sensitive, and even what it means to have multiracial-expression at a church conference. As a result, this “Principality of Whiteness” continues to leave scores of voiceless, heavy-hearted Christian minorities feeling neglected by the mainstream Christian status quo. Is it any wonder that The New York Times recently wrote a story on the growing number of disgruntled African-Americans joining the “exodus” from the mainstream American Church? This is also hardly a “good witness” to the onlooking world.

A Racial Architecture

When we say the American Church has inherited a racial architecture, this is precisely the way “leaven” (or yeast) works—quietly working beneath the surface and ever “rising” as if without permission. From slaves being required to pledge that they would never seek their personal freedom as a condition to being water baptized, to one of America’s greatest evangelists, George Whitefield, personally owning slaves, to Billy Graham preaching to segregated audiences without a word about it from the pulpit. Most Christians don’t know the atrocious witness of these facts because they’re never mentioned or researched, and they’re never redressed with the healing “balm of Gilead.” The Church continues to act as if it’s just another “normal day” in the American saga.

Saying that the American Church has a racial architecture is not an insult. Rather, it’s an observation based on an objective view of the past to furnish an informed, unbiased view of the present. For in the words of sociologist Dr. Robin DiAngelo in her book White Fragility, “White people in North America live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality. As a result, we are insulated from racial stress.”

Historic Leadership

The Church was pivotal in the creation of many systems that form the backbone of our American culture: from educational, health care, and social services; the Church has led the way for centuries. At present, however, on matters of racial inequities, the Church has not been leading. In fact, rather than dissecting and confronting America’s race issues and its accompanying present-day systemic ills and injustices (i.e., institutional racism), the Church seems to run from them. Issues such as employment discrimination and wage inequalities, educational discrimination, biased laws and policing practices, mass incarceration, the “school to prison pipeline,” historical omissions, media bias, and more, continue to exist.

Today’s American Church needs a real “Reformation” of its Gospel position and practice on race and inequality. And I’m not talking about a “social Gospel.” Instead, I am talking about the “Jude 3,” old-school faith that was once delivered to the saints. I am talking about the very marrow of Ephesians 2. Most of all, the same beauty and brawn which Jesus proclaimed from scrolls of Isaiah in that Capernaum synagogue at the beginning of His public ministry. More so, along with this needed reformation, we also need white brothers and sisters to start emerging with prophetic voices on this topic—one that’s been ignored long enough (to our own hurt).

Finding A Prophetic Voice

Imagine if the Church’s minority brothers and sisters didn’t even need to publish articles on the next unjust killing of a minority person, because a white brother or sister already responded. And not just a response from a place of sincere empathy, but one that prophetically challenged and enjoined the Body of Christ—and the onlooking world—so powerfully, that a minority brother or sister could rejoice and exclaim, “Wow, it’s like the words were taken right from my mouth!” You see, I believe that type of blessed scenario would encapsulate the very kind of love Jesus was referring to when He shared how the world would know that we are His true followers (John 13:35).

• • •

Loaded Phrases

In 21st century America, we have acquired a new batch of “loaded phrases.” While it may come as a surprise to some, many are the names of deceased, unarmed black people: Staten Island’s “Eric Garner” (e.g., “I can’t breathe”); Cleveland’s twelve-year-old “Tamir Rice” (e.g., toy gun in the park); Miami Gardens’ “Trayvon Martin”; Dallas’ “Botham Jean” (e.g., the “mistaken apartment”); Baltimore’s “Freddie Gray”; Texas’ “Sandra Bland”, and others. Then, of course, there is “Ahmaud Arbery.”

You see, “Ahmaud Arbery,” being a loaded phrase explains why two people can be talking about his murder, but have two totally different ideas of what constitutes a “fruitful discussion” about it. It explains why his murder can make someone so unspeakably irate about why people need to know what Arbery was doing in that new construction home before he was killed: as if there is any justification for two armed civilians stalking an unarmed man for four minutes before shooting him dead! The reality is, it doesn’t matter what he was doing— nothing granted those men the right to be judge, jury, and executioner. “Ahmaud Arbery,” being a loaded phrase is why it grieves minority Christians when they have to explain to other Christians that there is a real, biblical place for righteous, un-sinful anger (Ephesian 4:26)—the very anger Jesus exemplified when necessary (Mark 3:5).

Revisiting the Past

“Arbery,” being a loaded phrase, is why I suddenly find myself forced to reflect on the times when my own hands have been placed on the hood of a police car, strictly due to racial profiling. This is why I am forced to reflect on the racism I have faced throughout my life. It causes me to revisit the racist backlash I once received from both classmates and the administration at my predominantly-white prep school when I was one of the first people of color (if not the first) in the school’s long and cherished history to be admitted into an Ivy-League university.

Picturing those white men plotting against Arbery even makes me reflect on “Old Man Chauncey,” the white slave master who raped and impregnated one of my native great-grandmothers who was his indentured servant—only for his own son to later on rape the offspring from that first rape (yes, his very own “half-sister.”) To this day, the main road that cuts through my family’s North Carolina community is called “Chauncey Town Road.”

Arbery makes me revisit my own father’s life growing up as a poor farm boy in the South, attending substandard, “separate but equal” Jim Crow schools until he moved North for college. As the valedictorian of his class, my Dad’s dream was to be a nuclear physicist; that is, until he wrote his “A+” paper on the subject in high school. His efforts resulted in an “F”. When he asked his white science teacher why, the teacher told him, “I gave you an ‘F’ because a person of color has no business wanting to be a nuclear physicist.”

“Arbery,” being a loaded phrase, is why minorities begin “unloading” (seemingly all over again) their own racist experiences; countless day-to-day stories like mine, and countless generational histories like mine that society continues to turn a blind eye toward. All of this combined is why Christian minorities are growing more frustrated with the mainstream Church’s deafening silence (e.g., the aforementioned New York Times article).

Against the Grain

Personally, I believe that I am called to the “mainstream” Church because, despite these issues, we are still one in Christ. And we have been called to “endeavor” for true unity at all costs (Ephesians 4:2; Psalm 133). However, I remain keenly aware that when I wear my native regalia to other churches or conferences, or when I wear my most comfortable “urban” clothing (Timberland boots, a hoodie, and a black skully hat) I am “going against the grain.” But the questions that we should ask are, “What is the grain?” And “Who made the grain?” And “Why is everything still seemingly subjected to the grain?”

I even recall a time when I observed a white teacher at a Christian school use a horrendously racist statement toward a minority student. When I gently urged the man who ran the school, a fellow (albeit white) pastor, to challenge her about her remark, he responded that I was “out of place.” But what about the student? What did Jesus say about causing any of his children to stumble in the faith? Again, why is everything still seemingly subjected to “the grain?”

Seeking Racial Understanding

Here is something to consider: If the mainstream Protestant Church took all the effort it puts into studying leadership skills and growth models, Sunday school curriculums, and eschatology, and put 50% of said effort into researching Gospel love, repentance, and redemption with regard to race—we might actually begin to look like the Church in the book of Acts. Or what if the Church started taking even 50% of the budget that it puts into its Resurrection Sunday services and men’s and women’s conferences and putting it into “Gospel and Race” symposiums and workshops? Or if the Church began including America’s neglected minority-based, low-income neighborhoods and native reservations among their church mission trips—with mandatory cultural workshops beforehand (instead of always traveling to every other corner of the planet)? Who knows? Our blood-soiled land might see the type of revival everyone has been praying for.

However, addressing these things will come with a price. You may do so at the risk of losing your popularity, or not being invited to speak at certain churches or conferences. Are we willing to make that sacrifice? It’s time we start asking ourselves what it looks like to be a true disciple of Jesus when it comes to the Gospel and race matters. Isn’t thinking and acting more like Jesus what this is all about? Ultimately, there really is only one voice from God on this matter, as the Holy Spirit never contradicts Himself.

Conclusion

Ahmaud Arbery’s tragic death should not be glossed over by the Church. We must remember that we have been given “the two greatest commandments” by our Lord: to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Based on Christ’s further teaching, Ahmaud Arbery’s mother is our “neighbor.” His father is our “neighbor.” His close friends and family and community are our “neighbors.” When these tragedies happen, we need to care about people—not just doctrinal positions, as that is the very Pharisee-ism that Jesus found repugnant. We need to ask God to give us tears. We need to weep alongside a sonless mother, weep alongside a bereaved family. We need to weep for a calloused nation that not only permits institutional racism but also profits from it in many sectors. Let us care enough to speak out against injustice and begin educating those who look to us, the Church, for answers. It’s what God has called us to do. It’s what the Bible spells out clearly.

Honestly, this would be the same type of biblical relevance that made this once anti-Christian, militant-minded, hyper-racially-charged agnostic finally bow my heart to the wisdom of Scripture and the soul-saving Gospel of Christ. Let’s not waste this chance to be used by God for change.

• • •

Afterword

As I write this article, I am surrounded by a pile of books on my desk that I have either read, critiqued, reread, or am working through reading: “White Fragility,” by Robin DiAngelo (lecture by author on YouTube); “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” by James Loewen; “The New Jim Crow”, by Michelle Alexander; “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein (lecture by author on YouTube); “The Christian Imagination: Theology And Origins of Race,” by Willie James Jennings; “Let Justice Roll Down,” by John Perkins; “Mañana: Christian Theology From A Hispanic Perspective,” by Justo Gonzalez; “Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian,” by John Piper.

As I write this article, I am also surrounded by many close brothers and sisters—white, black, Hispanic, and native—who have listened to my heart, added to this article their insightful feedback, and prayed for me along the way. They have also prayed for those who would read this piece. So let us begin the conversation. I make myself available for discussion, along with the leadership of Calvary Global Network—a multiracial band of men who have started discussing such topics. A group who listens to one another, who sighs together, and who prays together into the midnight hours.

My grandfather hated mayonnaise. So when my dad and grandfather would get burgers after a hard day’s work in their Unicurve valve factory, the person taking the order always knew to hold the mayo. But as a Holocaust survivor, life wasn’t always this grandiose.

My grandfather, David Tibor Szloboda, was a man of many talents.

Originally a blacksmith from Eastern Europe, he became an inventor and held certifications in mechanical and chemical engineering. His most prized patent, the Unicurve valve, made a legendary entrance, boasting the ability to power a car on mere vapor! Hearing stories of my grandfather gave me a powerful zeal to understand my roots and where I came from…

My grandfather, David, was born in Hungary to humble beginnings. As a young Jewish blacksmith in Eastern Europe, he spent his early years learning the trade; long exhausting hours and measly pay was his reward. Those things didn’t matter; I was so fascinated by this man! I read pages of his patents. He published things like “the destructive distillation of garbage” and “a new method of energy: substitute for fossil and atomic.”¹ He spoke many different languages: Hebrew, German, Hungarian, English, to name a few in his arsenal. He had blonde hair, blue eyes and broad shoulders! Shoulders so broad that when Nazi Germany came rolling in, they thought he would be a great fit for their slave labor camp.

The Nazis had him watch as they brutally murdered his whole family.

Then they imprisoned him. Day after day, slaving away to survive, sometimes shoveling bodies of those who worked to death. They burned the bodies. There wasn’t enough time to bury them, nor did the Nazis care. He survived a year and a half of these atrocities. When it was over, he moved back to Hungary, then to Israel when it became a nation again, and finally, to Canada (so that my dad and aunt would not have to face the hardships of war).

“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Writer and philosopher, George Santayana, most likely wrote this quote.² In its original form, it read: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Though 75 years is only a relatively short amount of time, have we as a society already moved on and all-but-forgotten one of the world’s most execrable atrocities? Have we instead chosen as a people to turn a blind eye?

Far be it from the Christian who knows God’s Word! Did the apostle Paul not write to the church in Rome: “They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen” (Romans 9:4-5). If by ignorance you are still not convinced that God has a plan for the Jews, Paul continues, “For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree” (Romans 11:24).

What would it be to allow ourselves to feel the weight of this burden, and at some level, take ownership of the past? It is all too easy to say, “God has this handled. If He wanted to change the outcome, He would have changed it,” or like Pontius Pilate, “wash our hands of the situation.”³ I believe God has chosen to use the mechanism known as the Church in His divine mission to renew all things.⁴ It is to this end that God will cause change.

We were wrong. We failed.

Where were we as the Church? Why wasn’t every Christian involved in the prevention of the Holocaust? Why wasn’t every Christian involved in saving Jews from impending death?⁵ These failures started early on in our history. We allowed for our theology to become so vile that we said, “God has replaced Israel with the Church,” in a heinous viewpoint known as replacement theology.⁶ This view was prominent amongst one of our great reformers, Martin Luther. Near the end of his life, he had such a disdain for the Jew that he wrote, “Jews are a serpent’s brood, and one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them.”⁷ I believe the church allowed the magnitude of how God used Martin Luther to completely eclipse his sinful, increasingly anti-Semitic doctrines. Such anti-Semitic theology is completely unacceptable. But we allowed this to happen. And regardless of how much good was done, without condemning this view as the Church, and by remaining silent about this man’s actions, we partake in the great failure.

Never forget.

When we submit our weakness and failure to the Lord, we are able to usher in His strength. Consider the Apostle Paul when dealing with the thorn in his side.

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). Pastor David Guzik said it best:

“Think about this man Paul. Was he a weak or strong man? The man who traveled the ancient world spreading the gospel of Jesus despite the fiercest persecutions, who endured shipwrecks and imprisonment, who preached to kings and slaves, who established strong churches and trained up their leaders was not a weak man. In light of his life and accomplishments, we would say that Paul was a very strong man. But he was only strong because he knew his weaknesses and looked outside himself for the strength of God’s grace. If we want lives of such strength, we also must understand and admit our weakness and look to God alone for the grace that will strengthen us for any task.”⁸

Our weakness reminds us that we are not ultimately in control. Our weakness reminds us that our own strength fails. Our weakness reminds us of how powerful our God is.

What will be the next great challenge for the Church to overcome? What great evil will arise that will need to be opposed or addressed? World War III? Death by refugee encampment? The seemingly endless abortions? Will we find in our weakness the strength of the Lord to do the unthinkable; to reach the unlovable and play our role in God’s plan to renew all things?

My grandfather hated mayonnaise. He hated it because the scent reminded him of the odor of burning Jews in the Holocaust. The smell was a constant reminder of atrocities that he could never forget. He was not allowed to forget. We are not allowed to forget. Never forget our great failure of allowing the tragedies of the Holocaust.

Oh, that we would remember the painful past long enough to eradicate its atrocities for a flourishing future!

_Notes:

_{¹ Szloboda, David T. “Patent Search.” Espacenet. Accessed January 29, 2020.
² Clairmont, Nicholas. “‘Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.’ Really?” Big Think. Big Think, July 31, 2013.
³ “Matthew 27.” ESV Bible. Accessed January 29, 2020.
⁴ Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 62.
⁵ While there were some prominent Christians who took action, the majority of the Church remained silent
⁶ GotQuestions.org. “What Is Replacement Theology / Supersessionism?” GotQuestions.org, January 15, 2010.
⁷ Howard, Bernard N. “Luther’s Jewish Problem.” The Gospel Coalition, October 19, 2017.
⁸ “2 Corinthians Chapter 12.” Enduring Word, May 9, 2019.}

In our last installment of Ecclesiology 101, we began to look at how the local church lives and breathes in relationship to prayer.

We laid the foundation by noting that prayer in its essence is man talking with God. It is using words to express to God what we sense and feel. It is using words to express our needs to God. It’s the use of words in responding to who God is, what God is doing or what God has done.

If that is what prayer is, then the book of Psalms is God’s textbook on prayer. Though the psalms have much to say about God — each author prays (talks to God) in response to what they know about God. That is the prerequisite of prayer. What we know about God is the soil in which prayer grows.

The prayers of David are a great example of this.

“Psalm 3 A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.

O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, “There is no salvation for him in God.” Selah But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around. Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God! For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked. Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be on your people!” (Psalm 3:1-8).

“Psalm 34 Of David, when he changed his behavior before Abimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went away.

I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together! I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed. This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him! (Psalm 34:1-8).

“Psalm 51 A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

They held back nothing from their intense, personal, in the moment prayers. They even made sure to write down the wrong attitudes and flawed passions that they spoke openly to God for us to see.

We ended by noting that what they PRAYED ALONE was also intended to be PRAYED TOGETHER.

David clearly intended Psalm 3 to be read and prayed in community:

“I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill. Selah Salvation belongs to the Lord; your blessing be on your people! Selah” (Psalm 3:4).

David intended Psalm 34 to be prayed in community:

“Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack! Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. What man is there who desires life and loves many days, that he may see good?” (Psalm 34:9-12).

David intended that radical, intensely personal and brutally honest prayer of Psalm 51 to be sung in community. The full title of Psalm 51 is “To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

The book of Psalms became the prayer book of Israel. These prayers were prayed collectively when they gathered in the synagogue. They prayed these psalms as a community — knowing the needs of individuals in the synagogue — knowing who those prayers hit home with and knowing how those prayers resonated with the heart and spiritual state of the community as a whole.

Many of these prayers were put to music so they could be committed to memory. The Book of Psalms was the prayer book of Jesus — the Song Book of Jesus.

This “gathered” form of prayer continued in the newborn church.

“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

“Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour” (Acts 3:1).

Peter and John were on their way to seek God in prayer with other believers. They did this together on a regular basis — at a regular time.

AGAIN — For a community of believers to live and breathe in connection with prayer presumes the individuals that comprise that community pray.

Prayer is an incredibly personal and privileged vertical conversation between an individual child of God and his or her heavenly Father. Prayer does have a necessary private context. Jesus modeled this in His own prayer life. He would get up before it was light and find a deserted place to be alone in prayer with His Father. He would come forth from those times of prayer with marching orders (“No, I can’t stay and preach to the crowds in Capernaum; I have to go to the unwalled towns and villages” — He chose the 12 after spending the night alone with His Father in prayer.)

Jesus taught about praying privately.

In Matthew 6:6, He taught about going into your own room and shutting the door behind you to pray. But the main point was not to encourage isolated prayer. That instruction was a warning against the temptation to pray publicly for the wrong reasons.

YES — prayer often begins when we’re alone. We pray our guilt, our pain, our joy. We pray on our bed at night (as the psalmist did). We even pray privately when surrounded by unbelievers in our neighborhood, or at work, or in the classroom. But we can never be with others non-stop. And by the way — we should never be with others non-stop. But we should always be aware of the fact that we are always with God.

God wants His children to have personal conversations with Him. Sometimes He demands them, right? But He also wants to have family conversations with His children. He wants us to call our friends into prayer. He knows that our prayers and our prayer life mature when they are integrated with the community of believers God has placed us in.

I really like how Eugene Peterson puts it: “By ourselves, we are not ourselves.” There is a very real way in which we are not fully ourselves until we are a part of a community of believers.

There is something extraordinary that happens when we pray with others who have prayed. There is something amazing when we put our knees on the ground together with others — we have the sense that we are on the same ground — our knees are level with their knees. By the way, It’s okay to get on our knees when we worship and pray together. I become more fully me when my hands are raised with your hands in praise and adoration, when my voice joins with your voices in praise and prayer, rejoicing or weeping. The point of worshiping and praying with all of you is not to express myself — but to become the person God saved me to be. By myself, I’m not really myself. By myself, I am not really myself — I am not the man Jesus redeemed me to be!

We are NOT naturally good at this.

It goes against the individualism of culture. It goes against the grain of how we are so very self-conscious about what others think or feel about us. It goes against the grain of how we would rather not be known. We would not have the psalms if that were the case. The psalms were self-disclosing! Those prayers made known the deepest needs, greatest failures and personal fears of the writer to the community of God’s people.

And as they were prayed in community, people owned those same needs, those same failures and those same fears as their own. As individuals, we are wonderfully and beyond comprehension of the objects of God’s grace and love. But when we pray in community — grace and love suddenly have objects outside of ourselves. And as we pray with others — praying about our needs and failures and fears — we also become the object of God’s grace and love through His other children.

We do pray in song today. Sometimes we sing the lyrics of the psalms.

When we sing the psalms, are we singing them as OURS?

DO we sing the words as OUR prayers? Are we self-disclosing? When we do, we experience community! When we do, we actually become more of who Jesus saved us to be.

This is why I struggle so much with so much of what is called worship today. It is more about musicality — more about performance — more about vibe and production than praying together.

“We call our worship ‘dynamic’ or ‘exciting’ or ‘engaging.’ The unintended message is that worship is not for God — but really for the worshiper. Which raises the question – who are we worshiping?” –Jared C. Wilson, Prodigal Church

“Between 1995 and 2000 I’d traveled to a host of worship-driven churches — On the good occasions, the worship experience was transporting… Too many times, I came away with an unnamed, uneasy feeling. Something was not quite right. The worship felt disconnected from real life. Then there were the services when the pathology… came right over the platform and hit me in the face. It was unabashed self-absorption, a worship culture that screamed, ‘It’s all about us…'”– Sally Morgenthaler

If prayer is an integral part of how the local church lives and breathes, how do we get past our natural inclination toward individualism and self-consciousness?

I believe it’s crucial to remember why we find ourselves in a specific gathering of believers.

God saved you — quarried you out to be a building block — a living stone built on the foundation of Jesus — related to the cornerstone and fitted alongside other living stones. All that you are in Jesus, all that He is desiring to do in and through you is inextricably tied to the fact that He places us next to a very specific collection of other living stones.

You will never be the living stone Jesus saved you to be until you do life with the other living stones around you — and a huge part of that life means that you move from PRAYING ALONE to PRAYING TOGETHER with and for these other living stones.

Of the eight studio records that Kanye West has previously released, seven have gone “platinum.” Over the course of his career, he has been nominated for 68 Grammy Awards, leading to 21 wins. From publicly criticizing President George W. Bush’s relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina, to interrupting Taylor Swift’s Grammy acceptance speech, to scores of controversial tweets and comments, Kanye West’s public life has been less-than-subtle, to say the least. True to form, a new development in his life has been announced with equal subtlety: This past Friday, Kanye West released his ninth studio album, titled “Jesus is King.” Note, there is no irony here, no sacrilegious double-entendre or mockery. The contents of the album support that simple, powerful, title statement: “Jesus is King.” By releasing this album, Kanye is presenting the most controversial subject ever to the world, the media and the culture: the preeminence of Jesus Christ. And by tapping into such explosively divisive and uncomfortable subject matter (to this secular age), he has exposed himself to the suspicion, contempt and rejection of the people that he needs most right now: the Church. The question we need to ask ourselves is, “Should the Church embrace Kanye West?”

What follows are a series of questions to develop a helpful framework as we consider our next move as “the Church.” Following that are key, objective evidences to consider, namely, verbatim excerpts of songs from “Jesus is King.” Finally, as we consider Kanye West’s blatant professions, thoughts and confessions, I present my conclusive thoughts. You may find yourself in total disagreement with my resulting thoughts on the matter. However, my desire isn’t to attack what I consider wrong-thinking or un-Christ-like perspectives with a corrective scriptural apologetic. My hope is to ask some basic questions, pressing into a deeper philosophy of love. I want to call the Church to prayerful thought and meditation about Kanye’s statements, and thereby, develop a healthy framework and a compassionate ethic that we could apply to similar “high profile conversions.”

The Questions We Should Ask

Can the Church embrace Kanye West? Should it? Should we keep him at “arm’s length?” How long do we have to keep him outside before we invite him into “the family?” Is “our family” of our own making? Did we establish it? Do we maintain it? Who is the one who invites outsiders into our intimate family fellowship? Who invited us in when we were outsiders? Do we have the right to exclude anyone from it? Or to deny their status before Jesus? On what grounds can we make judgments about their status?

Does Kanye need to prove his devotion to Christ any more than he has? Are we waiting for “time to tell” about his professions? Are we waiting for “time to tell” about ours?

Is it “time” that validates the legitimacy of a conversion? How long did Jesus wait before bringing Matthew “the tax collector” into the camp? What did Zacchaeus have to do to get Jesus, the Son of God, to validate his conversion?

What proofs are given in Scripture to test if one is genuinely saved? Are those verses good enough to satisfy ourselves in our own moments of doubt? Are those verses sufficient to meet our doubts about Kanye? What does it take to convince us that someone has fallen before the cross in repentance? Are their words enough? Will it also require actions? What would those actions need to look like? Are those actions enough to prove the changed condition of the heart? Is it valid for Christians to be suspicious of a person’s clear profession of faith in Jesus? Are those suspicions helpful? Or fruitful? Is suspicion of conversion something we’re called to? Is this how we cultivate disciples? Does it draw seekers in? Does it drive them away?

Do we misrepresent the common grace we’ve received by denying acceptance, fellowship or love to one who has confessed Jesus as Lord?

The Evidence to Consider

The following quotations are sections of lyrics taken directly from Kanye West’s new album, “Jesus is King.”

Excerpt from “Every Hour:”

“Sing every hour (Every hour, ’til the power)
Every minute (Every minute, of the Lord)
Every second (Every second, comes)
Sing each and every millisecond (Down)
We need you (We need you, sing ’til the power)
We need you (We need you, of the Lord)
We need you (Comes)
Oh, we need you (Down)”

Excerpt from “Selah:”

“Before the flood, people judge
They did the same thing to Noah
Everybody wanted Yandhi
Then Jesus Christ did the laundry
They say the week start on Monday
But the strong start on Sunday
Won’t be in bondage to any man
John 8:33
We the descendants of Abraham
We should be made free
John 8:36
To whom the son set free is free indeed
He saved a wretch like me
Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah…”

Excerpt from “Follow God:”

“Tell me what your life like, turn it down, a bright light
Drivin’ with my dad, and he told me, ‘It ain’t Christ-like’ (Stretch my hands to you)
I’m just tryna find, l’ve been lookin’ for a new way
I’m just really tryin’ not to really do the fool way
I don’t have a cool way, bein’ on my best, though
Block ’em on the text though, nothin’ else next though
Not another word, letter, picture, or a decimal (Father, I stretch)
Wrestlin’ with God, I don’t really want to wrestle
Man, it’s really lifelike, everything in my life (Stretch my hands to you)
Arguing with my dad, and he said, ‘It ain’t Christ-like'”

Excerpt from “Closed on Sunday:”

“…Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave
Stand up for my home
Even if I take this walk alone
I bow down to the King upon the throne
My life is His, I’m no longer my own
I pray to God that He’ll strengthen my hand
They will think twice steppin’ onto my land
I draw the line, it’s written in the sand
Try me and you will see that I ain’t playin’
Now, back up off my family, move your hands
I got my weapons in the spirit’s land
I, Jezebel don’t even stand a chance
Jezebel don’t even stand a chance”

Complete lyrics from “God Is:”

“God is
My light in darkness, oh
God, God is
He, He is my all and all (And I’ll never turn back)
God is
Everything that I felt, praise the Lord
Worship Christ with the best of your portions
I know I won’t forget all He’s done
He’s the strength in this race that I run
Every time I look up, I see God’s faithfulness
And it shows just how much He is miraculous
I can’t keep it to myself, I can’t sit here and be still
Everybody, I will tell ’til the whole world is healed
King of Kings, Lord of Lords, all the things He has in store
From the rich to the poor, all are welcome through the door
You won’t ever be the same when you call on Jesus’ name
Listen to the words I’m sayin’, Jesus saved me, now I’m sane
And I know, I know God is the force that picked me up
I know Christ is the fountain that filled my cup
I know God is alive, yeah
He has opened up my vision
Giving me a revelation
This ain’t ’bout a damn religion
Jesus brought a revolution
All the captives are forgiven
Time to break down all the prisons
Every man, every woman
There is freedom from addiction
Jesus, You have my soul
Sunday Service on a roll
All my idols, let ’em go
All the demons, let ’em know
This a mission, not a show
This is my eternal soul
This my kids, this the crib
This my wife, this my life
This my God-given right
Thank you, Jesus, won the fight

Excerpt from “Hands On:”

“Told the devil that I’m going on a strike
I’ve been working for you my whole life
Nothing worse than a hypocrite
Change, he ain’t really different
He ain’t even try to get permission
Ask for advice and they dissed him
Said I’m finna do a gospel album
What have you been hearin’ from the Christians?
They’ll be the first one to judge me
Make it feel like nobody love me
They’ll be the first one to judge me
Feelin’ like nobody love me
Told people God was my mission…
…Make you feel alone in the dark and you’ll never see the light
Man, you’re never seein’ home and you never see the domes
I can feel it when I write, point of livin’ in the right.”

Complete lyrics from “Jesus Is Lord:”

“Every knee shall bow
Every tongue confess
Jesus is Lord
Jesus is Lord
Every knee shall bow
Every tongue confess
Jesus is Lord
Jesus is Lord”

A Few Closing Questions

Many within “the Church” remain skeptical of the legitimacy of Kanye’s repentance and of genuine reconciliation with Jesus. Do Kanye’s songs reflect enough? Is it even possible for someone to make the declarations that he makes without having experienced spiritual rebirth and regeneration? Can we move forward and embrace Kanye West as a brother in Christ, as a fellow disciple and as a fellow seeker? Do these lyrics declare Jesus boldly enough for Jesus to declare Kanye? Do his lyrics declare enough for me to accept Kanye? Should the Church embrace Kanye West?

The Bible has an opinion on this matter:

“…If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. For ‘whoever calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved'” (Romans 10:9-13, NKJV).

“…Whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32).

“…No one speaking by the Spirit of God calls Jesus accursed, and no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3).

Has Kanye said enough? Scripture makes it simple: Yes, he has. The Church should embrace Kanye West. The Church MUST embrace Kanye West. At this point, with as much as has been declared, it would be sinful, even shameful, to do anything less than rejoice with the Angels of God that a sinner has repented, and as the Church, to extend our most heartfelt welcome to him. Will he make mistakes in his sanctification process? Sure. Will the road ahead be ugly at times? Absolutely. He is going to need the same patience, compassion and love that we all need as we progress through our own sanctification.

My Conclusion

I would be happy to fellowship with Kanye West. I would be grateful to be a part of his community of faith and would be happy to accept him into mine. I would be honored to spend time with him as a fellow disciple. I pray the Church gives him the welcome embrace that he needs to continue down this new path. I pray that the Church supports him in the same ways that I need support. I pray for a lifetime of growth, maturity, fruitfulness and joy, in and through Jesus, for him just as for myself. I invite him to warm himself by the same fire that warms me, which is nothing short of Jesus Christ Himself. I want to welcome him into my family, the family of Jesus.

“For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God?” (1 Peter 4:17).

If the church of Pergamum is an example of the compromising church that is taking the first kiss toward sin, then the church of Thyatira is the church that has completely gone to bed with idolatry and is suffering the life-threatening side effects of immorality. The longest letter written by Jesus to the seven churches was necessary to correct what could very well be the most corrupt of all the churches.

We are studying the seven churches of Revelation chapters two and three. In chapter one, we saw John the Apostle, exiled to the island of Patmos, in which he turned around to see Jesus in His unveiled, resplendent glory, with a message to seven distinct churches in the region of Asia Minor. These were seven literal churches, who needed to heed the words Jesus brought to them. But these words also apply to every church in history and to the greater body of Christ at large.

We’ve already heard Jesus speak to the churches of Ephesus, Smyrna and Pergamum. And now we are going to hear Him speak to the church of Thyatira.

If you are taking note, there is a very helpful outline to follow along and better understand each of the seven churches. In each letter, we have been learning more about each distinct city, along with a characteristic of Christ from Revelation one. Jesus gives almost every church a commendation, a criticism and a correction, as well as a crown for the one who overcomes.

CITY

A few things about Thyatira are very important. First, it was the headquarters for many ancient guilds: the potters, tanners, weavers, robe makers and dyers guilds. It was actually the center of the dyeing industry (no pun intended). Remember Lydia, the seller of purple, in Philippi? She became Paul’s first convert in Europe. Acts 16:14 tells us that Lydia was from Thyatira. Apollo, the sun god, was primarily worshiped here.

It sounds pretty significant, but actually, it was the smallest and most unimportant city Jesus spoke to. The elder Pliny dismissed Thyatira with the almost contemptuous phrase, “Thyatira and other unimportant cities.” It is interesting that this is seemingly the most insignificant church of all the seven churches, but Jesus had the most to say to them.

How does Jesus address them? Look at the characteristic of Christ in verse 18.

CHARACTERISTIC OF CHRIST

“These things says the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and His feet like fine brass.”

This is not the introduction the Thyatirans were hoping for. Jesus says He is the SON OF GOD, giving His authoritative place in the Trinity. Then, He refers to His eyes, which are like blazing fire, seeing all things we think are unseen. His feet are like burnished bronze, like a refining fire melting brass. When Jesus says there is fire in His eyes, He isn’t talking about a romantic stare with eyes of deep passion. It means eyes that see through the pretenses, eyes of judgment. Our culture doesn’t particularly like the idea of someone looking at us with judgment, but Jesus’ penetrating gaze is ultimately to heal, not condemn. He also has feet of brass or bronze. Bronze is always Biblically symbolic of judgment. It’s like when your parents used to call you by your first, middle and last name; you don’t know what is coming, but whatever it is, it’s gonna be bad, right?

So why is Jesus coming to judge this church? Look at the commendation of Jesus in verse 19.

COMMENDATION

“I know your works, love, service, faith, and your patience; and as for your works, the last are more than the first.”

1) Works:
This fellowship had hard workers that were known for their actions, not just their beliefs.

2) Love:
The church at Thyatira, in contrast to Ephesus, had love for many people. In fact, they are the only church that Jesus commended for having love. But this could prove to be a downfall.

3) Faith:
Their deeds and love were motivated by their faith in Christ.

4) Service:
This church was heavily involved in ministry and in serving others.

5) Patience:
They had patient endurance/steadfastness.

6) Doing More:
Their latter works exceeded the first. That means they were growing in their faith, not just resting in something God did for them in the past.

I look at the church today, and I wonder if the same commendation could be said of us: We have great deeds, love, faith, service, persevere. We are doing more now than ever. Someone may read Jesus’ words up until this point and stop there and think, “Ok, wow, that church should get a straight A!

But sadly, there is a criticism, and it is a scathing rebuke by Jesus that basically flunks this church.

CRITICISM

“Nevertheless I have a few things against you, because you allow that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, to teach and seduce My servants to commit sexual immorality and eat things sacrificed to idols. And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent. Indeed I will cast her into a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of their deeds. I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts. And I will give to each one of you according to your works (Revelation 2:20-23).

Wow, that’s heavy. Sadly, the church in Thyatira had (if you can believe this!) too much love. (That is actually an incorrect statement, and I’ll clarify what I mean in a moment!) Ephesus was strong in doctrine but lacked love. Thyatira was strong in love but weak in doctrine. They weren’t willing to disagree with anyone about doctrinal heresies.

One person has said:

“It’s common for churches to be polarized in one of these two extremes. Either they will have full heads and empty hearts, or full hearts and empty minds. Either polarization is deadly. God demands both love and sound doctrine” (see 1 Timothy 1:5).

Table salt is a compound, a mixture of two elements: sodium and chloride. Both of these elements are poisonous by themselves. Sodium, an alkali metal, can be explosive if added to water, and chlorine is by itself a highly poisonous gas. If you ingest either sodium or chloride alone, you will die. But if you put them together properly, they become sodium chloride: common table salt.

So too, doctrine and love must be found together. One without the other can lead to a dangerous imbalance. But combined they provide flavor and health to the body of Christ.

Some would say this church was strong on love and weak on doctrine. But I question that exact definition. Because if we understand love correctly, would we really say they loved too much? I believe they bought into the lie that says you can love someone without truth. But love without truth isn’t love. It’s infatuation. It’s concession. It’s masqueraded hatred. Because if I truly love someone, I’m not going to withhold truth from them which would lead to their destruction. If I do, that means I’m indeed loving: I’m loving myself and my comfort, but I’m not truly loving the other person.

Jesus said the church in Thyatira TOLERATED Jezebel. Now obviously no one would name their daughter Jezebel (that’s like naming your kid Pilgrim or something:). No, Jezebel here is a symbolic name. She represents the despicable woman from 1 Kings. If you remember, king Ahab was basically the most evil and dirty and demonic king that ever reigned in Israel, and he married this evil woman Jezebel.

And as soon as he married her, Ahab began to serve and worship Baal, the false god that was constantly a thorn to Israel. Jezebel led people to commit sexual immorality and to offer their food to idols. And Ahab, toward the end of his life, developed a sudden thread of a conscience, after he heard what God had to say. You can read about it in 1 Kings 21. But as long as he was with Jezebel, he was tempted to sin gravely against the Lord.

Jesus said that Jezebel was committing sexual immorality and was teaching and seducing people to do the same. Someone reading this blog post may say, “Well I don’t struggle with that, so I’m good!” But before we think we are off the hook, Scripture calls idolatry the same thing as spiritual adultery, like an unfaithful wife leaving her husband. So Jezebel in a sense represents things in our life that lead to idolatry–to worshiping things instead of God.

Jesus says He is graciously giving her time to repent–like He gives all of us–like Ahab had time and actually DID repent. Yet this Jezebel in Thyatira didn’t change her ways, so He would cast her onto a sickbed. Notice that He says that people who commit adultery with her will also face consequences, in this case–dead children–meaning more consequences of their sin.

Jesus said that if they did not repent, they would eventually die. And notice He says all will know that, “I am He who searches the minds and hearts.” Literally that means the hearts and kidneys. To the ancient Jews, the heart was the seat of the intellect, and the kidneys were the centerpiece of emotion. He’s saying, “I know every thought and feeling you have” (Psalm 139:23-24)

Note with me that the perennial problem with the church of Thyatira was that they tolerated Jezebel’s doctrine. Ephesus was commended, back in verse two, for not “tolerating wicked men, but testing those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false.” Here Thyatira is criticized for allowing sinful heresy into the body of Christ.

Though Thyatira would get an A+ on a lot of areas, there was one area that made them flunk the exam.

In a word, the church was tolerant. First, there is:

1. A desire to fit in with the culture

How does a church that is solid suddenly become tolerant of heresy and sin? It isn’t always sudden, actually. We are growing up in a culture that embraces POSTMODERNISM. What is postmodernism? It is a whole system that basically teaches that we can’t really know anything for sure, that truth changes, and as long as you believe it personally enough, it is true for you. In other words, there is no absolute right and wrong, and if you can’t allow me to believe what I believe, you are racist or a bigot, and you are intolerant.

Allan Bloom said:

“Openness – and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings — is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.”

I’ve heard this same idea echoed in a million and one college dorms, Starbucks, news reports and community groups. It is the issue of absolute truth and tolerance. So we have to desire to please Jesus, not just fit in with the culture around us.

2. A failure to rightly define sin

We no longer call sin what it is: lawlessness, rebellion, treason, spiritual adultery, breaking God’s laws and commands. We start wanting to use new words that don’t sound so offensive. So we stop saying, “sin” and start saying “struggle,” or “disease,” or “disorder.” While we’re at it, we start coming up with new definitions of other words, even the word “tolerance.”

In D.A. Carson’s book The Intolerance of Tolerance, he brings us back to the original word “tolerance” as it was defined in the dictionary. You could say we now have “Old Tolerance and New Tolerance.”

“The traditional/modernist use of tolerance: ‘I may disagree with you, but I insist on your right to articulate your opinion, no matter how stupid or ignorant I think it is.'”

But New Tolerance is very different. The United Nations Declaration of Principles of Tolerance in 1995 asserts: “Tolerance involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism.”

Does this mean that we have no right to hold conflicting things to be dogmatically true? The national Lambda Chi Alpha position says,“The definition of the new tolerance is that every individual’s beliefs, lifestyle, and perception of truth claims are equal. There is no hierarchy of truth; your beliefs, and my beliefs are equal and all truth is relative.”

Hint: by definition that means that “tolerant” people are intolerant of Christians.

3. Forsaking absolute truth for relativism

Thankfully Christians still believe in absolute truth, right? Actually, I was discouraged to see these sad statistics that were just released recently by the Barna Research group:

Only 44 percent of born again adults are certain that absolute, moral truth exists. Barna also discovered that only 9 percent of born again teenagers believe in absolute, moral truth.

D.A. Carson, again, explains that:

“Now tolerance means that you must not say that anybody is wrong. You have to say that all positions are equally valid.”

4. Moving close handed issues into open handed ones

The Christian believes there are open handed issues and close handed. And we must never, EVER begin to open the close handed issues for debate.

This begins with questioning a foundational, Biblical doctrine. Then the questions get considered, and suppositions get formed. Then those turn into arguments to defend. And before you know it, we have a full blown heresy. I like what C.S. Lewis said,

“An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or Practical reason is idiocy. If a man’s mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut.”

Many scholars believe Jezebel was encouraging the church to join the trade guilds of Thyatira, even though that would mean giving honor to the guild god or goddess which included participating in the festivals where they sacrificed food to idols. She wanted the church to embrace the world even if that meant fully compromising your beliefs to reach people with “love.”

5. Failing to take a stand for truth

What does the Bible say about how we should react to heresy?

Here are a few verses:

“Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith” (1 Timothy 6:20-21, NIV).

“Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly” (1 Timothy 4:7, NIV).

“For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced…rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith” (Titus 1:10-13, NIV).

“But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless” (Titus 3:9, NIV).

Did you catch how Paul instructs us to do with heretic doctrine and those who teach it? Turn away, have nothing to do with, silence them, rebuke them, avoid their teaching. Kind of the opposite of what the word “tolerate” means, doesn’t it?

I believe we are in danger of doing the same thing: tolerating a bunch of ridiculous beliefs, because, like Thyatira, we are too scared or too “loving” to speak the truth. We are afraid we will lose our friends or the argument, so we sit idly by and allow ignorance and even heresy to infiltrate the church.

Martin Luther King Jr. said it best when he said:

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal…Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

I believe we live in a day when the church tolerates Jezebel.

May we boldly stand for truth: absolute truth. Keeping the close hand closed. Rightly defining tolerance. Standing up for truth even when we stand out compared to our culture.

CORRECTION

“Now to you I say, and to the rest in Thyatira, as many as do not have this doctrine, who have not known the depths of Satan, as they say, I will put on you no other burden.”

Jesus called Jezebel’s practice a “doctrine.” He described it as “the depths of Satan.” What does that mean?

Smyrna was attacked by a synagogue of Satan. Pergamum dwelt where the throne of Satan existed, but those churches had resisted Satan. Thyatira, on the other hand, had fallen into the deep things of Satan. Notice in verse 24 that Jesus said this to “the rest.” There were some in the church that wouldn’t put up with false teaching, and Jesus said,”I put on you no other burden.” That should be our response. Don’t put up with heresy.

“But hold fast what you have till I come.”

I love that! Jesus doesn’t give us any big command or burden; He just says, “Whatever you already have, just hang onto it; I won’t lay some big heavy command on you.” I think sometimes we think God has this huge laundry list of DO’s and DON’Ts for us, and we just have to barely hang on by a thread, trying to impress Him. He says to the weary soldier, “just hold the line, don’t let go; I’m not laying more weight on you than what you already have.”

Some reading this blog may barely be hanging on. You feel like giving up or giving in. And Jesus says, “Just hold fast what you have. Don’t let go. I’m coming quickly.”

For those in Thyatira with sound theology and robust doxology; nothing more is needed! Just hang on to truth and your love of Jesus! Now notice the reward.

CROWN

“And he who overcomes, and keeps My works until the end, to him I will give power over the nations—‘He shall rule them with a rod of iron; they shall be dashed to pieces like the potter’s vessels—as I also have received from My Father.”

Here Jesus references Psalm 2, another reference to judgment. In Thyatira there was a big pottery guild, and Jesus is saying He will give us authority, like He was given from the Father to rule over the nations. We don’t need to be afraid that we are some minority that is on the losing team. We have been given authority, and truth will win in the end! Jesus has all authority, and those who oppose His authority will be crushed in judgment.

“And I will give him the morning star.”

Satan is known as the morning star in one reference, and Jesus is saying, “This world might think it has the brightness and the beauty, but I will give the overcomers the true morning star, the judgment AND the illumination, MYSELF.” Jesus is referring to Himself, as a bright star of the morning.

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”’

The name “Thyatira” means sacrifice or sacrificial offering. Isn’t that interesting? They as a church were willing to sacrifice their faith on the altar of compromise. And what began as a small compromise into a little false doctrine quickly became them sacrificing truth in order to accept others. Abandoning what is true for what is convenient.

In 1979 Arthur Leff, a Yale law professor spoke at Duke University and expressed how torn human beings are over this issue of absolute truth and the desire for it and the hatred we feel for it.

Here’s what HE said:

“I want to believe—and so do you—in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe—and so do you—in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.”

The reality is, truth is found not in a principle but in a person. Jesus said, “I am the Way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Just minutes before being crucified, Jesus said to Pilate in John 18:37-38:

“‘For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate said to him, ‘What is truth?’”

Imagine that: The One who had the words of truth, better than that, was filled with the Spirit of truth, better than that, embodied the belt of truth, the One, unlike Moses through whom the law came, who was incarnate in the world bearing grace and truth, better than that, He WAS the Truth, was standing right in front of Pilate, who in a single question dismissed the discussion with a wave of his hand.

There aren’t multiple ways to God. There is only one way, and His name is Jesus. He is the door. He is the bright morning star. Rather than sacrifice truth on the altar of acceptance like this church, Jesus was instead betrayed, cast out and nailed to a tree. He made the ultimate sacrifice, so that we could know the truth.

Do you know Him? Do you have ears to hear Him?

Underneath this large oak tree in my yard there is not much grass growing because of the leaves that fall in the autumn, but for the last few years, a large percentage of weeds would grow quickly and provide green ground cover during the spring and summer. And thankfully, they were green. They appeared to the naked eye as grass. But in actuality, they were weeds.

Some friends of ours happened to have some extra sod, and they offered it to us. We found a patch by our porch that would work perfect with some sod, so we laid a bunch of new grass down and began watering it and maintaining it. It was green, healthy and beautiful. At the same time, these ground cover weeds under the oak tree were spreading everywhere. Eventually, they found their way into our sod–the good grass.

At that point, I had a decision to make. Do I take the time to pull up the weeds and protect the grass? Do I put the effort and attention needed into removing what is unhealthy in order to preserve what is healthy? The answer was yes and no. Yes, I began to remove weeds, but no, not fast enough and not long enough. The weeds eventually took over and snuffed out the good grass.

That’s what happened to the church in Thyatira. Church history records that by the second century, they were no longer in existence. They didn’t repent. They didn’t heed these words.

Is there an area in your life–which seems maybe small or insignificant–perhaps it is doctrinal or practical, or on the border of sinful–and you aren’t paying attention to it? Like Pergamum, are you beginning to compromise your beliefs or your behavior?

We can keep tolerating sin, but one day, its destructive effects will take hold of us. Like carcinogenic toxins, sin will slowly kill us, one day at a time, one bad decision after another. My prayer is that we will stand for truth, keep His word to the end and be the church that is known for speaking the truth in love.

^{Enjoy the complete #modernchurch series!}

“Is there one key conviction or one fundamental ingredient that local churches who send well have in common?”

Due to the scope of the ministry the Lord has bestowed on me and the number of relationships I have with leaders of local churches and many of the missionaries from those churches, I’ve been asked that question in one form or another dozens of times over the past few years.

Yes, there is one key ingredient: conviction or mindset that I’ve observed is almost always present in every church I know that sends and actively cares for their own members that God calls to be missionaries.

Although I’ve answered the question in a variety of ways over the years, these days my default answer makes use of an illustration that I first heard many years ago from a friend whose heart beats in unison with mine for God’s glory among the nations.

AN EIGHT-SLICE PIE OF MINISTRY

Think of a local church as an uneaten pie cut into eight equal slices, sitting snugly in the pan it was baked in. The leaders of the church have determined how many slices there are and what ministries each slice represents.

In most churches, the eight-slice pie of ministries looks something like this:

Slice one: Nursery, toddler and children’s ministry through the fifth or sixth grade

Slice two: Junior and senior high school ministry

Slice three: College/young adult ministry

Slice four: Women’s and men’s ministry

Slice five: Small group ministry

Slice six: Outreach (local, domestic, international)

SUNDAY MORNING ADULT SERVICES-TWO OF THE SLICES

Slices seven and eight: Two slices are dedicated to the Sunday morning ministry to adults because the energy and resources committed to make it the best experience possible is substantial.

. From the thoroughly studied and powerfully presented message by the pastor

. To the diligently prayed through song selection and the prepared and rehearsed worship team

. To the faithful, behind the scenes efforts of the audio and visual crew

. To the greeters, ushers and parking lot attendants

The reason why this is true is easy to understand; the Sunday morning adult services receive much more attention than the other ministries because they are usually the first slice of the church’s ministry pie that most visitors will taste.

This reality, coupled with the fact that each of the single-slice ministries are promoted a few times each year from the pulpit during the Sunday morning services, provides a fairly clear declaration that Sunday morning is actually two slices of the church’s ministry pie.

WHEN GLOBAL MISSIONS IS A PART OF ONE OF THE SLICES

In a church where the leaders view the ministry pie in this way, global missions is viewed as part of the “outreach” ministry slice-not significant enough to warrant having a whole slice dedicated to it. And the frequency and number of references to global missions during the Sunday morning adult services reflects the importance the leaders have assigned to it.

Although there are always exceptions, when a local church views global missions as just one part of one of its ministry slices-or even if one whole slice is dedicated to it, the odds are that the missionaries that go to the mission field from that church will be sent, but usually not cared for in a manner worthy of God.

WHEN GLOBAL MISSIONS ISN’T A SLICE, BUT THE PAN THE PIE SITS IN

Keeping the pie illustration in mind, the key conviction or ingredient that churches that send well have in common, isn’t a larger slice or even more slices of the ministry pie dedicated to global missions.

Instead, it’s their view that global missions isn’t a slice of the ministry pie at all; it’s actually the pan the whole ministry pie sits in.

These church leaders and all the members of the church are convinced that participation in God’s global purposes is a foundational reason for their existence and should therefore permeate and give meaning to all of the slices that make up their ministry pie.

All slices of the ministry pie in this kind of church are continually reminded that the church as a whole and their specific ministry serves an important role in what God is doing around the world, and they are also kept aware of the progress God’s kingdom is making among the variety of ethnicities and languages He’s created.

Every ministry slice, including the children’s ministry, knows who the missionaries are that the church supports, especially the church’s own members that have been sent to the field; they are kept updated regularly, and they are praying for them.

When God’s heart for the nations is in the DNA of a local church and global missions isn’t a slice of the ministry pie, but the pan that holds the whole ministry pie together and that every slice rests upon, missionaries will be sent well.

THE BOOK

A few months ago, I decided to reread Spurgeon’s classic work, The Soul Winner. Like most people, my view is that anything Spurgeon writes is worth the time and effort to read. This book of course is no exception. While many Christian books can be tedious and dry, the only thing I found to be dry in rereading this classic was my highlighter. Paragraph after paragraph, one liner after one liner, jumped off the page as I found God calibrating my focus for the gospel needy souls in my life.

From the time I gave my life to Christ, evangelism has always been a focus for me. Maybe it’s because I came to Christ on a Monday night at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa where the gospel was always faithfully preached by Greg Laurie. Maybe it’s because, like many of you, I realize that the foundation of Calvary Chapel is in the hope that Jesus Christ provides to any heart, no matter how dark the sin or how lost the soul.

It’s not the machinery of ministry that has built this movement. It’s the power of Christ’s cross and resurrection; a truth we can never afford to forget. With that in mind, let me share three amazing quotes from this book and some brief thoughts.

IT’S THE GOSPEL

“Beloved teachers, may you never be content with aiming at secondary benefits, or even with realizing them; may you strive for the grandest of all ends, the salvation of immortal souls! Your business is not merely to teach the children in your classes to read the Bible, not barely to inculcate the duties of morality, or even to instruct them in the mere letter of the gospel, but your high calling is to be the means, in the hand of God, of bringing life from heaven to dead souls. Your teaching on the Lord’s Day will have been a failure if your children remain dead in sin…. Resurrection, then, is our aim! To raise the dead is our mission!” (Spurgeon, The Soul Winner, 1895, p. 64)

There should be nothing more precious to us and primary in our preaching than the gospel of Jesus Christ. For the soul winner, everything springs forth from the gospel. It is the seed that brings forth the root, the trunk, the branch and the fruit. It’s not only precious because of the fruit it produces but because of what it has done and continues to do in us personally. But make no mistake, the power of the gospel alone brings forth fruit for God’s glory (John 15:8).

Our message isn’t encouraging moral reform or church going; it’s for people to be resurrected by the power of the gospel. We beckon people to come to a Person not a religion; to the one name that can save them, the name of Jesus.

A CHURCH ON FIRE TO SEE LOST PEOPLE SAVED

“I like to burn churches rather than houses, because they do not burn down, they burn up and keep on burning when the fire is of the right sort. When a bush is nothing but a bush, it is soon consumed when it is set on fire; but when it is a bush that burns on and is not consumed, we may know that God is there. So is it with a church that is flaming with holy zeal. Your work, brethren, is to set your church on fire. You may do it by speaking to the whole of the members, or you may do it by speaking to the few choice spirits, but you must do it somehow. Have a secret society for this sacred purpose, turn yourselves into a band of celestial Fenians whose aim it is to set the whole church on fire” (Spurgeon, The Soul Winner,1895, p. 56).

If God’s people are spiritually on fire for anything, it should be to see the lost saved. There’s a battle for the very soul of God’s church in America. We are a nation of consumers, and that influence is beginning to consume Christians. Gatherings are geared to satisfy the most superficial impulses, and the thought that “it’s not all about us” is gone with the wind.

May God send a fresh wind into the hearts of our pastors and churches that stokes an unquenchable fire for the lost to be saved. John Wesley once said, “I set myself on fire and people come and watch me burn.” May that fire be lit in our lives first.

BELIEVE THAT GOD WILL DO THE WORK

“The most likely instrument to do the Lord’s work is the man who expects that God will use him, and who goes forth to labor in the strength of that conviction. When success comes, he is not surprised, for he was looking for it. He sowed living seed, and he expected to reap a harvest from it; he cast his bread upon the waters, and he means to search and watch till he finds it again” (Spurgeon, The Soul Winner, 1895, p. 22).

At every church gathering we preach the gospel and extend an invitation for people to respond. By God’s grace we see many come forward to receive Christ weekly. On the other hand, when I was church planting in New Hampshire, saved souls seemed harder to come by. Nevertheless, we never gave up believing in the power of the gospel to save.

No matter where God has planted you, His purpose for your life is to proclaim the gospel, to hold it up as the light in the midst of darkness, believing that it is powerful enough to save ANY soul. God is the one who does the saving; we are the ones who do the proclaiming.
One of Satan’s most powerful tools to silence the preacher is discouragement. Keep praying, keep preaching and keep believing, whether in the workplace, in your home, at the ballfield or in the pulpit! As Paul said, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

As I’m writing this article, one of the greatest soul winners, Billy Graham, has at last heard Christ say, “Well done good and faithful servant!” Billy has personally experienced, in the fullest sense, the power of his preaching. His life has left us so much to emulate and to pray for. His preaching and its impact is unsurpassed, and his integrity is unchallenged. While Billy Graham’s ministry was unique, let’s ask God to give us what He gave Billy; an unsurpassed love for the gospel of Jesus Christ, a deep and genuine burden for lost souls, a lifelong commitment to Biblical integrity, and above all, a desire for God’s glory to be magnified in the greatest way possible through our lives.

May God make soul winners of us all!

I’ve been processing the tragedy that occurred Sunday morning. I was about to wrap up my teaching about 300 miles north of Sutherland Springs in the same state of Texas. I remember looking at the clock in the back, hanging on the wall of our sanctuary, to make sure I was on time in my sermon and saw that it was 11:30am.

I had no idea that at that very moment a gunman was shooting up a church, killing 26 people.

It was weird to think that at the very moment of me looking at the clock, not far away, people were being killed in their own service similar to ours.

I thought of what they must have experienced and what it must have been like for them. I guess you could say it hit home for me in a way. I feel so sick for those precious people.

I thought about the pastor and his wife, and how they must have felt hearing the news as they were away. I thought about what it would be like to lose so many in our own congregation in an instant like that.

There is a special connection a congregation has with one another, like family. A congregation goes through life together, shares one another’s burdens, triumphs and griefs. The pastor lost half of his spiritual family, half of his flock, as well as his own daughter. I can’t imagine. This is not something a human can absorb I thought, but by the grace of God.

I remember thinking as I was teaching about heaven that I was glad this world is not all there is.

How sad it must be to have no hope beyond this evil world. I remember looking at the clock, and feeling pressed because the Lord was moving so heavily on my heart, I felt this heavy burden about what I was talking about and wanted to get it all in. I was way off “the script” at the time and felt the Lord was speaking through me, and I was spectating.

We were having communion that morning as well, so time was even more precious. The topic that morning was “Home,” a teaching about where the Christian’s real home is, and how a heavenly obsession has a profound effect on our earthly existence.

I challenged our congregation to take this week and think about, meditate upon, pray, read and apply the fact of our eternal home to everyday life. I challenged them to apply eternity to the present and to live their life in light of eternity.

As I looked at the clock, 11:30, and then looked at the faces in the congregation, I felt myself looking into eyes and not just faces. I’m not sure why, but it was different than normal. I felt like God wanted me to see them like He does.

I remember thinking how badly I wanted everyone of them to be right with God and to be sure that they will go to heaven. I remember thinking how much I loved and cared for each one so much, and yet that was only a drop of how much God loves them.

I remember thinking how important it was to be sure of our eternity now.

That morning it was like God wanted me to know how deeply He loves each one, emphasis on each, and He wanted them to know how deeply He loves each of them. I’m not sure what they saw or felt in me at the time, but God was moving in a certain way that morning.

The message about the Christians real “Home,” which I don’t think was by accident, was taken from Revelation chapter 21. As we looked at some of the aspects of the Christian’s eternity, the Lord was speaking to us and encouraging us as to how short life is, and how this life is merely a preparation for how we will spend eternity.

Like a “mud room,” this life is not a place for comfort, rest and ease but a transition and preparation for our eternal home where there will be eternal comfort, rest and ease, not to mention love, joy and peace. The Lord showed us how death for a believer in Christ is a release into our heavenly existence, and how it is the beginning and not the end.

We looked at some of the aspects of what it will be like in eternity, and how we are to see this life now always in light of eternity; or that we are to keep eternity in view as we live this life. We talked about how, for a Christian, heaven overshadows everything we do; it is our future hope, our present motivation and our freedom from our past.

I saw some tears as I looked into the eyes of the precious people there that day, as well as smiles, nods and a few “amens.” Now in hindsight I know why the Lord was burdening my heart that morning with this particular message, as it was at the same exact time some of our brothers and sisters down south were going home to be with the Lord, that the Lord wanted our congregation to be ready at anytime.

There was a feeling of urgency as I explained that it is by God’s grace that we are saved and not of ourselves.

That no amount of good works, religious activity or whatever else can save us except the precious sacrifice of Jesus Christ that we put our faith in.

I remember looking in those eyes like I was seeing their souls and urging them that one must repent and ask God to forgive them of their sins, that Jesus came into this world to pay the price for their sins on the cross, and that He rose again on the third day just as scriptures said.

Just a couple weeks before this message in Revelation 20, we learned about the Great White Throne Judgment, and how all those who aren’t written in the book of life will appear there to be judged by God and sent to the lake of fire (hell) for all eternity. That after this life there are no more chances, and now is our time to determine our eternity; that all our eternity hinges on putting our faith in Jesus Christ.

As I finished the sermon I felt this assurance in my own heart that God was ministering to me more than I was to them, that heaven is so near, and that to live is Christ and to die is gain. I remember thinking that the best gift a person can have in this world is knowing where they will spend the next.

Our brothers and sisters in Sutherland Springs are now experiencing their home, the place where their Lord and Savior is, the place where there are no more tears, no more sorrow, no more pain. They are home.

Like all of us, we don’t know when our time is up, but we can know where we will be when that time comes.

We want you to know, Sutherland Springs, we love you. We are so sorry for your loss. We are heartbroken. We are grieving with you and praying for you. May the Lord pour out His love and peace in this horrible, unimaginable time, and for those of you who went home Sunday, we can’t wait to meet you when our time comes to go home.

May God bless each and every one of you with the assurance of eternity.

Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also there was no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.” Then He who sat on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” And He said to me,“Write, for these words are true and faithful.” And He said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts. He who overcomes shall inherit all things, and I will be his God and he shall be My son. But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death” (Revelation 21:1-8).

In many ways, the reign of Constantine over the Roman Empire was one of the most far reaching and influential in western history. One of the most significant aspects of his influence was his perspective of Church and State. When Constantine brought the Church and State together in society, he was simply applying his Roman worldview to the situation, since religion—specifically emperor worship—operated in connection with the government. Therefore it is no surprise that the emperors who followed him continued and even expanded on this policy—and not necessarily for the spiritual good of the Church!

While Constantine did legalize and promote Christianity, paganism was still prolific in the Roman Empire. That all changed when Emperor Theodosius I (347-395 A.D.) made Christianity the official religion of the Empire in 380 A.D. This was the moment in which the Church-State union was truly established.

Essentially, it could be said that the Church and State were “dating” under Constantine and were now “married” under Theodosius.

Theodosius’ decision had some interesting and unexpected ramifications.

As has been noted concerning Theodosius, “He used his power to officially enforce orthodox Christianity, but ended up placing his power under that of the church, setting a standard for more than a millennium.”¹Unexpected indeed!

Theodosius was crowned co-emperor in the East in 379 A.D., and accepted Christian baptism soon after this during a serious illness. The following year, he proclaimed himself a Christian and proceeded to issue the edict declaring orthodox Christianity the official state religion. Around 391 A.D. Theodosius went a step further and made paganism a crime, closing down all temples and forbidding pagan worship. By asserting his authority to establish Christianity in this way, Theodosius believed he was aligning his will with the will of God; in essence, he claimed to be God’s representative on earth, presiding over the Church as he would the government.

Unfortunately, Theodosius could be rather high-handed and aggressive. The epitome of this aggression was his handling of a riot in Thessalonica around 387 A.D. When a favorite charioteer was imprisoned on accusations of homosexuality, the people revolted, murdering the governor and freeing the charioteer. When Theodosius heard about this incident, he ordered his soldiers to trap the people in the arena during a chariot race and fall upon the crowd. Seven thousand defenseless Thessalonians were murdered in cold blood, arousing the indignation of not only the citizens, but the Church!

Bishop Ambrose of Milan, a leading church figure and spiritual advisor to Theodosius, took a bold stance, refusing to give Theodosius communion until he humbled himself, took off his royal robes and publicly repented. Since Theodosius claimed to be God’s representative and the leader of Church and State, he really had no choice but to comply with Ambrose’s request. The implications of this were enormous. As historians have stated, “It marked a new chapter in the history of church and state. For the first time, a secular ruler submitted to the Church. Less than a century earlier, emperors were trying to wipe out the Church.”² A mind boggling shift indeed when put in that context!

This turn of events suggested that the Church had authority even over the Emperor to some degree.

From this time on, the Church began to grow in its authority and influence. The marriage of Church and State had initially created a tug of war, which led to a power struggle that would prevail for centuries.

Another step in the development of the Church-State relationship came about during the reign of one of the greatest Emperors in history, Justinian I (483-565 A.D.). Although Justinian maintained the upper hand in Church-State relations more effectively than Theodosius, he did much to solidify the concept of the Church and State ruling together in society.

When Justinian came to power, the western half of the Roman Empire had recently dissolved; yet he succeeded in establishing a strong empire in the East. His goal was not just to try to put band aids on the old empire, but remake it, and by the end of his reign, he and his wife Theodora had largely succeeded!

These two were quite a sociopolitical force and introduced many progressive policies.

Theodora in particular influenced legislation that prohibited sex trafficking and infanticide, as well as instituting the death penalty for rape. For his part, Justinian supported these measures while fighting to retrieve many of the Western Empire’s lands and peoples.

Much of Justinian’s desire to reunite and rebuild the empire came from his views concerning Church and State. He wrote, “There are two great gifts which God, in His love for man, has granted from on high: the priesthood and the imperial dignity. The first serves divine things, while the latter directs and administers human affairs; both, however, proceed from the same origin and adorn the life of mankind.”³ He felt that if these God-ordained functions were being carried out properly, then the world would have general harmony—which he believed was signified by a united empire!

It was such views that were spelled out in his legal code, the Corpus Iuris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), more commonly known as the Code of Justinian. The ideals expressed in this code eventually were assimilated throughout Europe as the Law of Church and State. It was strongly Christian and anti-unbeliever; in fact, Justinian made apostasy punishable by death, closed down famous schools in Athens because of their pagan teaching, established churches (the most famous being the Hagia Sophia, considered one of the greatest architectural feats in history) and enforced laws in support of Christian morals and teaching (more legal rights for women, laws discouraging divorce, etc.). As Jennings puts it, “Justinian’s religion was of an active kind.”⁴ However, like Constantine, Justinian believed the emperor should reign supreme in church affairs, which had its drawbacks! In fact, the eastern branch of the Church in particular never really came out from under the emperor’s authority.

So in effect, Justinian made even more concrete that which Constantine and Theodosius had laid a foundation for concerning the empire and the Church.

We could say that Constantine legalized Christianity, Theodosius made it the official religion, and Justinian articulated the Church-State relationship, a relationship that would prevail in Europe for the next 1,000 years until the Protestant Reformation.

In order to attain a proper understanding of any historic event, concept or movement, it is of paramount importance to appreciate its context. It is in understanding the concept of the Church-State alliance, and its formation that we come to realize why it was so pervasive in the centuries that followed; and why it became so difficult to uproot from Western civilization. As we can see, church history reveals how easily well intentioned decisions can have unseen negative repercussions for future generations.

¹ Mark Galli and Ted Olsen, 131 Christians Everyone Should Know
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ A.C. Jennings, A Manual of Church History

Enjoy the first part of this two part series!

While having the wrong expectations from our church can stifle spiritual growth, having the right expectations will give us discernment that will lead us to a healthy church body where we can grow in our faith, maximizing all that God has for us. Here are some things we should expect from a church.

Things I should expect from my church:

1. The Bible

Front and center of any church should be the teaching of God’s Word. This is how we grow; how we distinguish between good and evil; how we are spiritually nourished; how we are equipped to battle Satan; what we base our lives upon, and what the church is to proclaim. Expect your church to teach the Word of God.

2. Unconditional love

Love is the primary characteristic of God working in a Christian’s life and in our church fellowships. This is how non-believers know we are followers of Christ, and this is what we will need in a church to nourish our lives and our relationship with Christ. We won’t always love perfectly, but that’s what a church should strive for, and what we should be willing to give. Expect your church to love you or at least strive to love you unconditionally.

3. Integrity in leadership

I should expect my leadership to exemplify Christ’s teaching morally. I should be able to trust that church leadership is following the Lord, making every effort to be holy and pleasing to the Lord, just as every follower of Christ. Leaders should not be looked at as perfect, but should want to exemplify Christ’s teachings, being careful not to misrepresent the gospel, especially in the areas of finances and sexual morality. Expect your church to value integrity in leadership.

4. Jesus-centric

I should expect my church to have Jesus front and center of all that goes on. Jesus should be the star of the church, the famous One, and the One the church magnifies. All should revolve around Jesus, as He is the head of the church. Expect your church to be centered on Jesus.

5. Gospel preached and lived out

I should expect my church to be a place where the message of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done to save mankind from sin is proclaimed and lived out. I should expect the gospel to be clear so that people will know the message of salvation, and so I can live by this message. I should expect my church to be clear about elements of the gospel like sin: How sin effects me. What God did about my sin. How to receive what God did about my sin, that only Jesus can take away my sin and why, about heaven and hell, grace, mercy, forgiveness and resurrection. Expect your church to preach and live out the gospel.

6. Dependence on the Holy Spirit

I should expect my church to follow, not lead God. This means that my church should make it clear by teaching and demonstrating that it is not by human abilities and strength but by the Spirit working in and through the church. I should expect my church to not rely on human means to accomplish God’s work, but that God’s work would be accomplished by God’s Spirit. Expect your church to depend on the Holy Spirit.

7. Support of the needy

I should expect my church to be compassionate and to help support those within the body who are needy and those without where the Spirit leads and provides. The church should always have the great commission in mind to make disciples by preaching the gospel and teaching people to obey Christ’s teaching as we reach out to help those in need. Expect your church to support the needy.

8. Unity in the Spirit

I should expect the church to strive for unity within the church body, which means that I will have to do that as well. The unity we will experience is in the Spirit and is focused on glorifying Christ in our actions. This means that we will have to often yield to others, consider others as more important than ourselves and to put others ahead of ourselves, so that Christ is glorified. This may mean that I will have to put my personal desires and wants behind the greater good of God’s glory. In other words, unity is more important than getting what we want. Expect your church to strive for unity.

9. Opportunities to serve

Considering that every Christian has a spiritual gift, and that gift is to be primarily used within the body of Christ, I should expect my church to give me opportunities and even encourage the use of my gift. I shouldn’t expect to be placed in certain positions or offices within the church right away or at my choosing, but I should expect to be able to serve in the church and let my gifts and calling come to the surface as I do. Expect your church to give you opportunities to serve.

10. Spiritual growth

I should expect to grow spiritually in my church with my participation. With healthy doctrine, teaching of the Word, opportunities to serve, using my spiritual gifts, accountably, encouragement, support, unconditional love and prayer, I will find that my church is the best instrument for my spiritual growth. Part of our growth is following the two prescribed “sacraments,” which are baptism and communion. These sacraments are outward signs of inward grace. Expect your church to help you grow spiritually.

11. Spiritual Attacks

Jesus said to His disciples that if they hated Him, they would hate them too. I should expect that a church that is following Jesus will encounter often and repeated attacks from Satan on the work of God. We aren’t to think it strange that we have these attacks but to think they are normal. The attacks are directly to stop the work of God. The most effective churches are the most spiritually attacked churches. Expect your church to be attacked spiritually.

12. Prayer

I should expect prayer to be a major focus and emphasis in my church. Jesus said that His house should be a house of prayer. I should expect there to be opportunities to pray corporately with the whole church, individually with others in the church, and with pastors and elders at the church. I should expect that my church knows the power of prayer and the gift of prayer, and that all that is done in the church is bathed in prayer. This means that I too should be praying with the body, with others and in my personal life. Expect your church to be a church of prayer.

13. Spiritual family

I should expect my church to be close like a spiritual family. I shouldn’t see my church as something I attend, but something I am. A church family should be a place that all are welcome to join, where there is mutual love for Jesus and for each other, where I can be connected with others, where I can be open and honest with others, where I can feel safe, valued, built up and where I can experience close fellowship. Expect your church to be a spiritual family.

14. Equipping for ministry

I should expect that involvement in my church would help me be better at serving the Lord and serving others. I should be more loving, more passionate about God, more understanding of His Word, more intimate in my relationship with Him, more grounded in His truth and a better instrument for God to use. If this is not happening in my church, then either you are in the wrong church or you are not participating in what the church is doing as part of the body of Christ. Expect your church to equip you for ministry.

15. Church Discipline

On occasion, I should expect my church to have to deal with those in the church who are causing division, or who are living in sin and won’t repent. These are those who are serving in the church and not mere attendants or guests of the church. Expect your church to exercise church discipline when necessary.

God uses the local church as a powerful instrument for a believer’s spiritual growth and maturity. The early church was a simple model where believers came together to hear the Word taught, to pray together, to take communion and to fellowship. The early church was an exciting place of love, power, fruitfulness and where Jesus was all-sufficient.

Like the early church, our local churches today should be a place where we can grow in our relationship with the Lord. However, today, especially in western culture, where we have a lot of things in the church that may or may not be wrong in and of themselves, but when we expect them to be a part of our church or use them as a premise and motivation in choosing a church, these expectations can actually be sabotaging our own spiritual growth.

Here are some things to think about if you have been expecting too much from your church and thus sabotaging your spiritual growth.

Things I shouldn’t expect from my church:

1. Perfection

A church is a body of imperfect people worshiping a perfect God. No one has arrived, and we are all at different places in our walks. We fight against the flesh and our selfish desires constantly; therefore imperfection is the norm not perfection. We won’t always be treated as we’d like to be, and the Bible gives us ways to deal with those things. It’s more about direction than it is perfection. Don’t expect your church to be perfect.

2. Status quo

The church is a living organism. It is always changing, and we shouldn’t expect to hold on to “the way it used to be” or “the way things were.” Change is good and keeps us from worshiping “relicts to the past” or making idols of things that are not of God. Change can flush out some of our false motives and old “wineskin” tendencies. Don’t expect your church to stay the same.

3. Getting my way

At the root of our sin nature is selfishness. This can manifest itself in a church when we have our own agenda, when we don’t get to do what we want to do or when things are different than what we like. One of the great benefits of a church is that it teaches us to submit our way to the Lord’s way and to trust the Lord. When we don’t get our way, it’s a chance to exercise our faith and die to ourselves, which helps us grow in God’s ways. Don’t expect to always get your way in church.

4. Not be offended

A church body is like a family. We live in close connection with each other, and we serve the Lord together. It’s inevitable that we will be offended or get our feelings hurt as well, as there is a good probability we will also hurt someone else’s feelings. Not to mention, we may and at times should be offended by the pastor’s sermon as Jesus offended many people by proclaiming truth. This is a great opportunity to exercise grace toward others. Don’t expect to not be offended in your church.

5. Entertainment

It’s not the job of the church to entertain us. The job of the church is to feed us (spiritually). When I expect the church to be an entertainment center, I may have missed what my real need is as a spiritually bankrupt sinner. There is nothing wrong with having fun and having a good time, of course, but I shouldn’t expect my church to provide that nor should I evaluate the church on how well they entertain me. Don’t expect your church to entertain you.

6. Wealthy

I shouldn’t gauge spiritual prosperity with material prosperity. Jesus wasn’t rich; the disciples weren’t rich, and the early church wasn’t rich. If God blesses the church with riches, then those riches can be used to further God’s kingdom, not to build a gaudy empire on earth. When we equate all the “bells and whistles” with the legitimacy of a church, we are left missing the immeasurable realization in the power of the Holy Spirit. Don’t expect your church to be wealthy.

7. Programs

The church is to be driven by and empowered by the Holy Spirit. When I expect my church to have programs to meet all my needs, it can often be a substitute for the Holy Spirit. The early church focused on prayer, doctrine, breaking of bread and fellowship. It was a simple model. They had all they needed to change the world, and we do too. Don’t expect your church to have all the programs you want.

8. Politics

The church is not a political institution but a spiritual one that is to preach the gospel and make disciples of all men and women and then teach them to follow the Lord. When I expect my church to push political agendas and be involved politically beyond clear biblical issues and with a clear biblical approach, then my expectations aren’t right. As individuals we can pray and follow the Lord as He leads us in politics, but that is not the role of the church. Don’t expect your church to push your political agenda.

9. Comfort/Ease

A church is to be a place of sanctification, not comfort and ease. We have peace in the Holy Spirit always, but we should not expect the church to be a place where we value comfort and ease. The church should be a place where we value being stretched in our faith and a place where we will be able to go beyond the boundaries of our comfort. Don’t expect your church to be comfortable or easy.

10. Absence of conflict

The church that is honoring the Lord, led by the Spirit, filled with love, proclaiming the gospel and standing on truth is a place where Satan will attack. We are to use our spiritual weapons of warfare and engage in this conflict, understanding that when the Lord opens a door, there are many adversaries. Don’t expect your church to be conflict free.

11. A place to watch

The church is not a place where I should expect the “professionals” to do the ministry as I watch them. A church is a “body of believers” like the human body, made up of many parts, and all parts are to be involved. All believers have been given spiritual gifts to be used within the body of Christ to build the body. My expectation as a believer is to participate in the church, not spectate. Each Christian must be personally responsible for their own relationship with Jesus. No one can substitute for that. Don’t expect your church to be a place where you merely watch others exercise their gifts.

12. Have all my needs met

Jesus is the only one that can meet all our needs. I should not expect the church to do that. When I feel something lacking, I can go to Jesus Himself. The church is not a substitute for Jesus Himself. Don’t expect your church to meet all your needs.

13. “Cool”

It’s not the job of the church to be “cool;” it’s the job of the church to be “salt “ and “light.” That doesn’t mean the church shouldn’t recognize the things that are going on in the world and culture in trying to best orient people to the gospel. It is not more spiritual to be outdated and out of sync with culture. However, when a church is judged by how “cool” it is and when we value “cool” over “Godly,” we might really be judging a church by how “worldly it is.” Don’t expect your church to be “cool.”

For the first three hundred years of its existence, the Christian Church was generally viewed by the Roman Empire as either an enigma, a fringe group or as a legitimate threat. Therefore, Christians did not consistently enjoy the rights and privileges of other people in the Empire; in fact, on many occasions they were stripped of any rights at all! Never was the Church fully accepted or given complete freedom of worship.

But what would happen if all of that changed? What if Christians were not only accepted as legitimate, but were given favor and support by the Emperor himself? It must have seemed unthinkable, but that is exactly what happened when a man named Constantine became the Emperor of Rome in 312 A.D.

Constantine’s rise to power was gradual.

In 293 A.D. Emperor Diocletian had created a tetrarchy of four rulers (including himself) to share control of the Roman Empire. When he and his co-Emperor, Maximian, abdicated the throne in 305 A.D., a general named Constantius became Emperor of the western half of the Empire. However, Constantius died the following year, leaving this major responsibility to his son, Constantine.

In 312 A.D., the year after the Edict of Toleration was issued to end the persecution of Christians, conflict broke out between the different factions of the tetrarchy. Constantine decided to take care of this problem by stomping out the rivalry and taking supreme control of the entire Empire for himself. It was a risky proposition, considering his main rival’s army was four times bigger than his; but as he prepared for battle, he saw a vision of the Cross and the phrase, “In this sign conquer.” He was convinced that this was a sign from the God of the Christians that he should attack, and after it resulted in victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he declared himself a Christian.

Although many historians consider this a mere political conversion, noting that Constantine knew nothing of religion without politics, it seems that Constantine genuinely considered himself a Christian on some level. As a result, he supported Christianity openly, and in 313 A.D. issued the Edict of Milan, granting official freedom of worship to the Church. Latourette adds, “Beginning with Constantine, Christianity seems to have had some influence upon the laws of the realm. Constantine appears to have endeavored to rule as a Christian, to make the Empire safe for Christianity, and to create a world fit for Christians to live in….

Constantine’s legislation against gladiatorial combats seems to have been inspired by the Christian faith. So do his edicts in behalf of widows, orphans, and the poor, and against immorality…infanticide, the selling of children into slavery, prostitution….”¹

In fact, Constantine and his mother, Helena, were at the forefront in funding new church building projects (called basilicas) and spreading Christianity around the Empire. Constantine’s personal devotion was questionable—he didn’t fully do away with paganism, and he was a conspirator and murderer, having killed his own wife and son—but his actions clearly bolstered the position of the Church during his reign. After facing nearly 300 years of sporadic persecution and hostility, the Christians found themselves enjoying rights and privileges that had been denied them since the Church began!

Although many Christian contemporaries considered Constantine the “man of the hour” whom God had raised up, his conversion was both a blessing and a curse to the Church. As Shelley puts it, “The advantages for the Church were real enough, but there was a price to pay.”²One historian noted that Constantine “proceeded to create the conditions we call ‘state church’ and bequeathed the ideal to Christians for over a thousand years.”³

Essentially, the Church and State were now made one under Constantine.

And the long-term ramifications of this were monumental, as seen in terms of the following:

CHURCH BODY: Constantine’s conversion and connection with the Church instantly made Christianity a popular, trendy religion in the Empire; people certainly did not have to count the cost to follow Christ as they once did! This allowed the infiltration into the body of Christ by many who had no genuine understanding or interest in the Gospel, but were flocking to the churches simply in order to obtain favor with their newly Christian Emperor. Never before was it as attractive a proposition to become a Christian as it was now, especially in terms of sociopolitical advancement! As Shelley notes, “Prior to Constantine’s conversion, the Church consisted of convinced believers. Now many came who were politically ambitious, religiously disinterested, and still half-rooted in paganism.”⁴ It was a situation remarkably akin to Jesus’ parable about the wheat and tares in Matthew 13:24-30.

While this was clearly a great opportunity for the Church to bring the Gospel of Christ to the Roman masses, it unfortunately opened the door for paganism and secularization within the Church as well. In fact, over the next few centuries, the Church incorporated practices like the veneration of saints and angels, the use of statues and icons in worship and an unbiblical reverence for the Virgin Mary, all of which were an indirect result of pagan views brought into the Church since the reign of Constantine.

CHURCH GOVERNMENT: For the Romans, state religion was perfectly normal, and so Constantine believed that as Head of State he was also Head of the Church to some degree. Therefore, he had the right to be involved and even exert authority in church affairs; as a result, he presided over major Church councils, a precedent which future emperors would follow even when they did not fully understand the theological issues at stake. Shelley notes, “Constantine ruled Christian bishops as he did his civil servants and demanded unconditional obedience to official pronouncements, even when they interfered with purely church matters.”⁵

Because in his mind the Church and State worked together in society, Constantine also gave many bishops judicial and legal authority in addition to their spiritual authority. Not surprisingly, by the end of the fourth century, many bishops and church leaders became corrupted by their political power. The results were profoundly detrimental to the spirituality of the Church.

CHURCH DIVISION: One political decision that made an enormous impact on the Church was Constantine’s choice to move the capital city of the Empire. Because he was facing many foreign attacks in the East, Constantine felt he needed a stronger, strategic presence there. As a result, he established the city of Constantinople in 330 A.D. as his new capital, so that suddenly Rome was no longer the preeminent city that it had always been. This would eventually create a huge rift between East and West.

As the Church and State were by now so intertwined, the Church could not escape being influenced by this decision, and the political divide soon led to a religious divide as well. As time went on, the two great political cities, Rome and Constantinople, also became the home of the two great branches of the Church—the Roman Catholic in the West and the Eastern Orthodox in the East. Tragically, because of growing theological and cultural differences, the two sides continued to drift apart; never again would the Church be truly catholic (universal) as in the Early Church Era.

Clearly Constantine’s decisions and policies had a massive impact, not just on the Roman world, but on the Christian world as well!

In some ways his rule seemed to be a blessing, and in his day he was greatly appreciated by the Christians. Bennett notes, “Certainly there can be no question that Constantine was a great blessing to the church. Scarcely in history have we observed such a complete and rapid transformation of a state’s values as the one that occurred in the age of Diocletian to Constantine. In one generation, the church went from suffering its greatest interference to enjoying its greatest patronage.”⁶

However, it is also clear that Constantine’s marriage of the Church and State had detrimental ramifications that would create enormous controversies and problems for the Church in future generations. Alvin Schmidt points out just a few of these issues: “Even worse were the many contradictions that surfaced in some of the teachings and life of the organized church: tolerating clergy corruption, often on the highest level; condoning slavery; burning false teachers at the stake; and incorporating secular theories into doctrines and then defending them as biblically correct.”⁷

It is easy as Christians to sometimes wish that the government were fully on the side of the Church. Yet as we clearly see in the example of Constantine, perhaps we should be careful what we wish for.

Anything that distracts the Church from its true purpose—obeying the Great Commission and preaching the Gospel—will eventually do more harm than good. As Schmidt summarizes, “The mere outward conforming to the Christian faith, rather than being spiritually transformed, became all too frequent in the life of the church. It often impeded the spiritual transformations that were, for the most part, so vibrant and effective during the church’s first three hundred years.”⁸ Be careful what we wish for, indeed!

¹ Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity
² Bruce Shelley, Church History in Plain Language
³ Mark Galli & Ted Olsen, 131 Christians You Should Know
⁴ Shelley, Church History in Plain Language
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ William Bennett, Tried By Fire: The Story of Christianity’s First Thousand Years
⁷ Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World
⁸ Ibid.