The Spiritual Malady of the Age

Our family is fairly new to Trinity Fellowship. We have chosen to make our home at Trinity because of the preaching-- and Sunday's message by Scott is yet another confirmation of our decision. Jesus Christ was preached!

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!

Get Ready to Work Hard

Worship is really hard work. That’s one reason why God tells us to love Him with all of our strength. And as we’ve thought on in our church quite a bit of late: listening is hard work too. Here’s a comment well worth pondering as you prepare for tomorrow:

“Preaching is thus a very solemn and momentous enterprise. Both minister and congregation should recognize that their Sunday sermons are the most important and significant events of the week, Whatever else is neglected, sermons must not be…The ministry of the word [is] a co-operative activity, in which the laity [are] to labor to learn just as hard as the minister labor[s] to teach” (J.I. Packer).

I’m not preaching tomorrow. That means that I won’t have the duo role of preacher/listener which I normally have (for before, during and after all my sermons I’m listening too). Tomorrow I will just have the listener role. Then I’ll have the leader role in helping my family do the work of real hearing of what God has said.

I’m planning to worship God with great strength by praying for those preaching and then by working hard to hear the voice of God for the transformation of my and my family’s life. How about you?

Let’s all remember that when the sermon is done tomorrow, our real listening work will have only just begun. That’s when we’ll have to take it home, review it, test it, and then think of how we’re going to apply and obey it. Let’s start praying now that both the one who preaches and the ones who hear will have the strength to work hard at it all for the glory of God and joy of each heart.