In his "Lectures on Justification" (1838), J.H. Newman includes an essay entitled "The Spiritual Malady of the Age." Consider this excerpt:
"A system of doctrine has risen up... in which faith or spiritual-mindedness is contemplated and rested on as the end of religion instead of Christ. Stress is laid rather on the believing than on the Object of belief, on the comfort and persuasiveness of the doctrine rather than on the doctrine itself. And in this way, religion is made to consist in contemplating ourselves instead of Christ."
"The true preaching of the Gospel is to preach Christ. But the fashion of the day has been, instead of this, to preach conversion; to attempt to convert by insisting on conversion; to exhort men to undergo a change; to tell them to be sure they look to Christ, instead of simply holding up Christ to them; to tell them to have faith, rather than to supply its Object; to lead them to stir up and work up their minds, instead of impressing on them the thought of Him who can savingly work in them; to bid them take care that their faith is justifying, not dead, formal, self-righteous, and merely moral, whereas the image of Christ fully delineated of itself destroys deadness, formality and self-righteousness; to rely on words, vehemence, eloquence, and the like, rather than to aim at conveying the one great evangelical idea whether in words or not."
Sunday's message was not an effort to insist, to persuade, or to cajole. Scott's goal was to reveal Christ in the text of Philippians 2:9-11. True worship can only take place where there is this kind of anchoring in the "indicatives" rather than the "imperatives" of our faith (Michael Horton: "A Better Way", 2002).
I'd like to say thank you to all of the pastors at Trinity, who work hard to keep clear doctrine before us, in a day when doctrine is being put aside in favor of more "exciting" techniques. We need God's word clearly exposited, and we need to have Jesus Christ "fully delineated." Thank you!
Brother, let me express gratitude for your gratitude but also add that the joy is ours who get to serve in ministering the Word at TFC.
ReplyDeleteIt's ours because we have such a sure and certain Word to preach and such great and good Savior to proclaim. The joy is ours too because we have a congregation full of people eager to hear the glories of Christ and the truth of God.
Speaking of Christ and truth, is it not a marvelous thing that God has given us His wondrous indicatives--all those truths that indicate His great glory and grace; facts and realities on which all of life is built. Our faith is God and His truth first, and only second, does it have to do with us and our duty.
We do have imperatives (and they do need to be preached with all conviction and urgency), but as you say, they must be heard in the context of the indicatives. God is real. His grace is real. His promises are real. His Son is real and great. His gospel is real and true. His forgiveness is real and sure. His justification is real and final. His atoning work is real and irreversible. His glory is real and simply beyond all telling.
Now let us go out and live lives worthy of God and His truth.
Why do I keep forgetting, when I use Gayline's computer, to indicate who's commenting; that was Tim on the last comment.
ReplyDeleteGayline's going to get blamed for things I say if I'm not careful.
Tim
Gayline, "blamed" for that excellent response? A homemaker and mother who can express herself theologically like that would be worthy of praise, not blame! (Not that Gayline doesn't express herself well, mind you).
ReplyDeleteI think we know your style well enough by now to realize (usually in the first paragraph), who is doing the writing. (Not that it's necessarily better than Gayline's stuff, just different).
I do confess there have been a couple of times when, as I was reading I thought, "...Wow, Gayline is a woman of many talents." (Not that she isn't, of course!)
Wow, if I don't quit now, I'll be sure to offend Gayline (Not that I haven't done so already, mind you)!
By the way, that Newman quote in the Sunday entry is one of my all-time favorites. Written BEFORE he became "Cardinal" Newman.
Wow! you got in deeper with every word there I think!
ReplyDeleteRe the Newman quote it reminded me of one by Sinclair Ferguson:
“The great gospel imperatives to holiness are ever rooted in indicatives of grace that are able to sustain the weight of those imperatives. The Apostles do not make the mistake that’s often made in Christian ministry. [For the Apostles] the indicatives are more powerful than the imperatives in gospel preaching. So often in our preaching our indicatives are not strong enough, great enough, holy enough, or gracious enough to sustain the power of the imperatives. And so our teaching on holiness becomes a whip or a rod to beat our people’s backs because we’ve looked at the New Testament and that’s all we ourselves have seen. We’ve seen our own failure and we’ve seen the imperatives to holiness and we’ve lost sight of the great indicatives of the gospel that sustain those imperatives. … Woven into the warp and woof of the New Testament’s exposition of what it means for us to be holy is the great groundwork that the self-existent, thrice holy, triune God has — in Himself, by Himself and for Himself — committed Himself and all three Persons of His being to bringing about the holiness of His own people. This is the Father’s purpose, the Son’s purchase and the Spirit’s ministry.”
Tim, (or is it Gayline) thanks for posting the Ferguson comments on the relationship of the Biblical indicatives to the imperitives that you first shared with us in the Truth Walk class recently---they were so wonderful I was going to post them myself, but you saved me the trouble.
ReplyDelete