systematic theology

The Gifts of Salvation, Part 4: Regeneration

March 28, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Introduction
Our relationship to sin: Conviction / Repentance / Regeneration / Forgiveness / Redemption / Justification
Our relationship to God:
Before conversion: Election / Drawing / Faith
At conversion: Reconciliation / Positional sanctification / Adoption / Union with Christ / Spirit Baptism / Sealing / Indwelling / Assurance
After conversion: Progressive sanctification / Filling / Glorification
Conclusion

Our repentance is the spiritual equivalent of an atomic bomb. It blows up everything, setting off multiple chain reactions that change everything about us—the way we feel, the way we think, the way we live out our thinking, the course of our life, and the course of eternity.

Everything.

A whole bunch of stuff happens in the instant of our repentance. The most significant of those things, and the one that makes all the others possible, is simply unbelievable.

We rise from the dead.

Oh, we didn’t feel dead before we repented. We were thinking, and feeling, and doing things. But we were alive in only the physical sense—and we are much more than just a physical body, just a collection of about a buck’s worth of chemicals. As I’ve noted before, God created us in his image, with a physical body, of course, but with much more than that—with a non-physical part that survives the death of the body (2Co 5.1-8) and that is in fact the most important part of us (Lk 12.4). And that part of us—the part that really lives, the part that can know God—that part of us was dead.

Like a doornail.

Paul puts it this way:

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest (Eph 2.1-3).

Dead. Not kinda dead, not sorta dead, not even mostly dead.

Dead.

Now if someone is truly dead, he’s going to need help—divine help—to change his state. People talk about their having “died” on the operating table, but what they mean is that their heart stopped—perhaps because of sudden cardiac arrest that was quickly reversed, or perhaps intentionally, during open-heart surgery. But these people weren’t really dead—they were full of cellular life, and their brains were still producing waves. A few years ago medics were stunned to find that cold-water “drowning” victims could be resuscitated after they had been immersed for astonishing lengths of time. None of these people were really dead.

Now, Lazarus—he was dead. He’d been in the tomb for 4 days, and as his sister Martha so indelicately put it, “by this time he stinketh” (Jn 11.39). And he was not coming back without divine assistance.

That was our state. We were dead and decomposed, and we stankethed.

And in an instant, He made us alive.

We call that regeneration. Rebirth. Being “born again,” or born from above, as Jesus put it to Nicodemus (Jn 3.3).

Now that has a lot of implications for the days ahead. We’ll explore those in the second phase of the series, when we discuss the changes that salvation brings to our relationship with God. For now, though, I want to think about what it means for our relationship to sin.

Paul says that when we became alive to Christ, we died to sin (Rom 6.2). It’s an odd picture: we were dead, but now we’re alive, which means that we’re dead to what we were before. But that’s precisely the language that Paul uses.

What does it mean to be dead to sin?

Well, it doesn’t mean that we don’t sin anymore; Paul makes that clear in Romans 7, and John makes the same point in 1John 1.8-10. But it does mean that we’re now disconnected from our old lifestyle—that we have options now that we never had before.

We don’t have to sin. We can say no.

I’ll say more about this idea when we get to the gift of redemption, but for now let’s just revel in that thought for a moment.

You’re alive. You can do things. You have choices. And among those choices is the ability to tell your old life and your old slave-driver to just get lost.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 3: Repentance

March 25, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

With the kind help of the Holy Spirit, we sinners—declared, dug-in, smug, and satisfied enemies of God—have begun to see our sin differently—realistically—and to see our evil master, the man behind the curtain, as he really is. We have begun to feel conviction about our sin as the light comes on in our heads, by God’s grace and the Spirit’s tender attentiveness.

And what happens next?

Something we never would have expected.

Our attitude toward our sin changes. To our surprise, we don’t like it anymore.

How does that happen? It’s true that conviction and illumination have given us both a factual and an emotional basis to see our sin differently, but we’re deeply invested in it. It’s literally part of our nature; it’s who we are. We’ve been sinning since we were born, and maybe longer (Ps 51.5); babies can lie before they can talk. With that much experience, we’re really good at the evil we do. We hide it expertly, thinking carefully through how we’ll keep it hidden even from those closest to us. And we justify it with astonishing sophistry. That guy over there is reprehensible when he does what I’m doing, of course, but I’m different; in this case it’s OK, because of this or that or the other.

We’re good at sin, we’re heavily invested in it, and we’re not inclined to give it up, even when we don’t like the consequences it brings—damaged relationships, lost opportunities, lack of freedom in our choices.

So why, all of a sudden, do we start disliking it?

Again, it’s the gracious work of God, who is Truth, helping us to see the truth. Conviction and illumination aren’t just natural regrets or disappointments; they are works of the Spirit, divinely and thus infinitely empowered, and they are simply overpowering.

And in the blazing clarity of that heavenly light, our thinking changes, because God gives us the ability to think differently about our sin.

There’s a place in the Bible that talks about that. Peter has been divinely sent to present the gospel to the first Gentile to seek to believe. His name is Cornelius; he’s a Roman centurion (Ac 10.1; think of a “company commander” in the modern Army), and he’s been attending a Jewish synagogue in his town of Joppa for some time (Ac 10.2; a “God-fearer” was a Gentile considering converting to Judaism). After God appears to him in a vision and tells him that Peter can give him the information he needs to know Him (Ac 10.3-6), he sends for Peter, who has similarly been prepared by a vision (Ac 10.9-20). Peter preaches the gospel to Cornelius’s household, and before he has even finished his sermon, a second Pentecost breaks out (Ac 10.44). Peter draws the obvious conclusion that apparently Gentiles can believe on Christ (Ac 10.47-48). And then he reports back to the church at Jerusalem, where the Jewish Christians respond with these words:

“Well then, God has granted to the Gentiles also the repentance that leads to life” (Ac 11.18).

Repentance, apparently, is something that God “grants.” Paul says later that it is something that God “gives” (2Ti 2.25). Interestingly, there are both Calvinists and Arminians who agree on this point. When you repented of your sin, that action was something that a kind and gracious God was enabling you to do.

What is repentance, exactly?

Well, most simply, it’s turning away from your sin. Your thinking or attitude changes: what you had regarded as your friend and constant life companion you now see as an enemy.

But repentance goes beyond that. More than just your thinking changes. Because “from [the heart] flow the springs of life” (Prov 4.23), because “as [someone] thinks in his heart, so is he” (Prov 23.7), your thinking has an effect on your actions: you begin to live differently. Repentance is a change of thinking, yes, but it leads inevitably to a change of lifestyle (Ezk 14.6; Mt 3.8; Ac 26.20).

Having said that, though, I should note that turning from your sin doesn’t mean that you have to stop sinning altogether. God doesn’t expect you to stop sinning before you can come to him for salvation (Eph 2.8-9), and he doesn’t expect you to stop sinning in order to “stay saved” (Rom 7.14ff; IJn 1.9). He’ll help you with your ongoing sin problem as you walk with him through life—but more on that in a later post.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 2: Conviction

March 21, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

The best way to understand the generosity and the delight of all that God has given us in salvation is to start with where we were to begin with. What were we like before he found us?

Well, to be precise, from his perspective, there was no “before he found us”—but we’ll get to that a few posts down the road. From our perspective, though, we started out poorly, and it just got worse until, it appears to us, he “found” us.

The Apostle John once wrote that before God bestowed his gifts on us, we were lying in the wicked one (1Jn 5.19). That could be a sexual metaphor, reinforced by God’s stark earlier language in Ezekiel 16, and it’s a powerful picture of where we came from.

It wasn’t pretty.

I’ve written before on the depth of our initial relationship to sin—that we were guilty of Adam’s sin, that we were naturally inclined to sin, and that we followed our inclinations without hesitation and without regret. Even as we saw clear evidence of God’s existence and his greatness (Rom 1.20), we suppressed that evidence (Rom 1.18) and turned intentionally from the light to the darkness (Rom 1.21), following a path that would end, if we continued, in an explosion of all sorts of unrighteousness, an orgy of abandonment to depravity (Rom 1.28-31) that not only would destroy us but would prompt us to destroy everyone around us as well (Rom 1.32).

But that’s not the whole story.

You see, the evil one may have held us lasciviously in his arms, but we did not originate with him. We have a Creator who is in fact nothing like our abuser. He is all that the abuser is not—good, most obviously, but also great, and infinite, and eternal. And when he made us, he placed in us an indescribable gift.

He made us, he says, in his image (Gen 1.26-28). And, as I’ve noted before, he delighted in doing that. He planned, he said, to make us different from everything else, in a completely separate class from even the most intelligent animals. Like him, in significant ways.

And God, the Creator of heaven and earth, the Almighty, the Eternal, is not going to allow his image to lie where it is—in the arms of the wicked one. He’s jealous, in the most positive and proper of senses. He’s going to rescue his beloved. He’s going to win his wife back.

He’s going to retrieve, and cleanse, and polish, and display his image.

Whatever it takes.

And so begins a process—a really long and complex one—of retrieving us from our sin, of wooing us back into a relationship with him, the relationship for which we were created, and the only one in which we can be truly satisfied.

How does that process begin?

Well, it begins with election, but I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet; it’s coming in a later post, when we begin to think about how God nurtures our relationship with him. For now we’re meditating on how he changes our default relationship, our devoted companionship with sin.

And how does he begin that?

He begins with conviction. In the person of his Spirit (Jn 16.8), he gently, tenderly leads us to feel differently about our sin. That includes what we call illumination—he helps us see things that we didn’t notice before, because love is blind, as they say, and there are all kinds of terrible things about our lover that we just haven’t noticed—little things, you know, like the fact that he beats us, and abuses us, and despises the gifts we give him, and plans to throw us away when he’s done with us.

Little things like that.

God the Spirit kindly turns the light on in our heads, and we begin to see things. We see the flaws of our evil master, and we see our own flaws, our own selfishness, our own stupidity, our own blindness.

We don’t usually like conviction when it comes; it makes us sad, and frustrated, and angry. But it’s a generous gift from a kind Father whom we have always treated as our enemy.

And it’s just the beginning.

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The Gifts of Salvation, Part 1: Abundance

March 18, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

We’re often told that salvation is a gift. I beg to differ, just a little bit.

When we say it that way, we want to emphasize that salvation is free, that we can’t do anything to earn it. And that, of course, is entirely true. If you grew up conservative evangelical, you probably memorized more than one verse about that—

⁸For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: ⁹Not of works, lest any man should boast (Eph 2.8-9).
Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost (Titus 3.5).
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 6.23).

It’s free. You don’t have to pay for it. It’s a gift.

So far, so good.

But the great emphasis of the New Testament is not on the idea that God has given us a gift. God is generous, gracious, lavish; he gives abundantly, pressed down and running over (Lk 6.38). He gives gifts. Plural.

And salvation is presented not as one thing, but as a bundle of a great many things, given to us over time.

Salvation isn’t a gift. It’s a whole pile of gifts, a pile that will take us a lifetime to open.

I’d like to take a few posts to rummage through the pile. So the next several weeks will be Christmas, and we’ll open 2 presents a week until the whole house is knee deep in crumpled wrapping paper.

How to proceed?

There are several ways to organize all these gifts. In Ephesians 1, Paul runs through a list of about a dozen of the gifts, and he organizes them around the Trinity: what the Father has given us (Eph 1.3-6), what the Son has given us (Eph 1.4-7), then more from the Father (Eph 1.8-10), then more from the Son (Eph 1.11-12), then some from the Spirit (Eph 1.13-14). That approach helps us notice that the Godhead is working together, deftly interacting in the common goal of rescuing and enriching us. That’s a delightful approach.

Or we could organize them chronologically. God was working on us and in us before we even realized it. Then in an instant, the moment we call “getting saved,” he did a whole bunch of things simultaneously. Then he began a lifelong process of conforming us to the image of his Son, a process that will culminate in another instant, one of perfect conformity. That’s a great approach too, but there’s a difficulty: because a bunch of items in the list happen simultaneously, we have trouble deciding what order to put them in.

A third approach is to organize the whole list around its central idea. In that one instant, we are “converted.” What does that mean? Converting is simply turning, changing, exchanging. In physical terms, we are facing in one direction—toward our sin, which we love—when our attitude changes, and we no longer see our sin with the delight that we once did. We turn away from it in rejection, and in doing so, we turn simultaneously toward something—someone—else: Christ. Conversion, then, is two actions in one: turning from our sin (repentance) and turning toward Christ (faith). It makes sense, I think, to organize the gifts, or the elements of salvation, around these two ideas: the change in our relationship to sin, and the change in our relationship to Christ.

That’s the approach I’m going to take in this series.

We’ll start where our experience started—our relationship with sin. Next time, we’ll consider how the Spirit of God began working in us even while we were still his enemies, dead in sin and yet loving it.

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On Church, Part 6: Changing Churches

March 14, 2019 by Dan Olinger 4 Comments

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

There’s one more thing we ought to take a look at in this series. Sometimes you need to change churches. The census bureau tells us that on average, 1 in 10 Americans change residences in any given year, and many of those moves will necessitate changing churches. Sometimes a church closes. Sometimes an opportunity arises, one you feel compelled to take. Sometimes you just have to leave.

How to proceed?

First, when do you leave?

Most of the examples I’ve listed above are pretty straightforward—your boss transfers you to Poughkeepsie, or your church closes its doors. But sometimes people feel that they need to leave their church and go somewhere else. What are the appropriate reasons to do so? Others have written on this, I think with varying degrees of accuracy, but I’d like to suggest a few:

False teaching. The church embraces denials of
the fundamentals
of the faith and will not change their thinking. Get out. Now.
Unrepentant, unaddressed sin. If that’s going
on, you confront, you call for repentance, and if they won’t listen, repent,
and clean up the mess, you move on. And shake the dust off your feet.
Violations of conscience. Paul says you have to
listen to your conscience (1Co 8.7-13); I’ve written on that before.
If you and your church leadership disagree about a matter, and you can’t come
to a compromise or accommodation, and your conscience won’t give you freedom to
follow their leadership, then for the sake of your conscience you need to be
elsewhere. You wish them well, you don’t make a scene, and you most certainly don’t shake the dust off your feet. But
you leave, for the sake of your conscience.
Ministry need. Maybe there’s a church plant in
your town that could really use the help. Your church can absorb your
departure, and you talk it over with leadership, and they send you with their
blessing. The Antioch church did that with Barnabas and Saul (Acts 13). The
Spirit pulled Philip out of a highly successful evangelistic campaign and took
him out into the boonies to find one guy who was looking for Jesus (Acts 8). My
former
pastor did that, and it involved moving cross-country. I’ll confess
that when he first told me what he was thinking, I said I thought it was a bad
idea; but I eventually came around. :-)

What now? How do you decide where to find your next church family?

Well, you start with the non-negotiables. The Reformers spoke of three marks of a true church: the Bible rightly preached, the sacraments rightly administered, and discipline rightly applied. Here’s my list:

Doctrinal fidelity. Read their doctrinal statement (they do have one, right?), determine that you can subscribe to it, and see whether the preaching and practice support it.
Biblical preaching. Probably it’s expositional, but topical and other forms are defensible if it’s solidly based on the Bible. Jesus used story-telling. :-)
Discipleship. Believers are being encouraged and helped to grow in the faith.
Discipline. If you’re joining so you can get kicked out, then that has to be an actual possibility.

Then there are the preferences. These are important, but I’d be willing to join a church that wasn’t there yet but seemed to be on the way, or at least willing to move in that direction.

Vitality. I judge this from the congregational
singing. Is there worship? Is there joy?
Prayer. Do they pray? Do they mean it? Is there
broad participation?
Evangelism and outreach. Are believers being
encouraged and equipped to win the lost? Are they doing so? What does their
neighborhood think of them? Is there an active missions program?
Care. Do members care about and for one another?
Is somebody looking after the widows? Will there be a place for you to serve where
they need some help? (They all need help; the question is whether they
recognize that or not.)
Giving. Do the members support the church
financially? Or does the church lurch from financial crisis to financial
crisis?

Church life is really, really important. It’s one of the main reasons you’re on this earth. Find a good church, and embrace it. It’s part of the way God grows you in Christ and gives you victory.

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On Church, Part 5: How You Doin’?

March 11, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

We’ve looked at the need for you be an active part of your local assembly. We’ve toyed with some ideas, based on your gifts and abilities. Now we could use some help in thinking of things we haven’t thought of yet, and in evaluating the thoroughness of what we’re doing.

I’ll start by passing along an observation I first came across in a book by Charles Ryrie.

Many gifts are commanded of all believers, even those who don’t have that gift. We’re not supposed to confine ourselves to our specialties. You should expand beyond the scope of your spiritual gifts.

We’re all supposed to show mercy (Eph 4.32)—even those of us—like me—who aren’t inclined that way. We’re all supposed to teach one another (Mt 28.19). We’re all supposed to have faith, and to be faithful. And on it goes. I can never say, “That’s not my gift” as an excuse for not doing something.

So run down that list of spiritual gifts again; it’s time to get really creative. For each one, ask yourself, “How can I take a tiny step in that direction, even though it’s outside of my comfort zone?”

Yeah, I know I’ve already said that we don’t know for sure what some of the gifts are. Maybe you’re not sure what “word of wisdom” is. That’s OK; we do know we’re supposed to exercise wisdom, right? What areas of your life in the body show a lack of wisdom? How can you improve in that area? You don’t know? Ask somebody in your church who knows you well. Maybe he can help.

So go down the list. I’ll wait. …

How about another measurement device? This one isn’t original—a lot of people have looked into it, and a former pastor of mine did a whole (really excellent) series on it.

One anothering.

The New Testament mentions a lot of ways that we’re supposed to interact with one another. It starts with Jesus’ “new commandment” in John 13.34 (and often elsewhere), that we “love one another,” as he has loved us. I suppose we could consider that one the umbrella commandment, the one that defines and assimilates all the others. It’s the second great commandment, that we love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

And how do we do that, specifically? Pull out your concordance, or fire up your Bible app, and survey the list—

Prefer one another in honor (Rom 12.10)
Receive one another (Rom 15.7)
Admonish one another (Rom 15.14; Col 3.16)
Greet one another (Rom 16.16; 1Co 16.20; 2Co 13.12; 1P 5.14)
Serve one another (Gal 5.13)
Bear one another’s burdens (Gal 6.2)
Forbear one another (Eph 4.2; Col 3.13)
Forgive one another (Eph 4.32; Col 3.13)
Teach one another (Col 3.16)
Comfort one another (1Th 4.18)
Edify one another (1Th 5.11)
Exhort one another (Heb 3.13; 10.25)
Consider one another—to provoke one another to love and good works (Heb 10.24)

And there are some prohibitions—

Don’t judge one another (Rom 14.13)
Don’t bite and devour one another (Gal 5.15)
Don’t provoke one another (Gal 5.26)
Don’t envy one another (Gal 5.26)
Don’t hate one another (Ti 3.3)

There. That should keep us busy for a day or two.

Do you see how this works? We can spend a lifetime learning how to serve one another in the church, making mistakes and learning from them, getting better at what we do, expanding our horizons, finding new skills and abilities and gifts, ever growing as a body in Christ toward the mature people we need to be—the people that the Spirit himself is patiently molding into the very image of Christ.

What a great way to spend—no, to invest—your life!

A word of caution.

This is an infinite task. You can’t do it in a day, or a week—or even your entire lifetime. Don’t exhaust yourself trying to do everything. Pick an opportunity and devote some time and effort to it. Add others as you have opportunity or as the Spirit directs you down unexpected paths. Slow and steady wins the race.

Maybe you won’t be at church every time the doors are open. Others can fill in those slots. God isn’t impressed by obsessive, detail-oriented frenzy to do everything. He loves you, and he loves your love for him. Live with joy, grow with patience, focus on the goal, do what you can.

In all things, Christ.

Part 6

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On Church, Part 4: Doing What You Can

March 7, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I’ve suggested that you ought to be part of a local church assembly, and that you ought to be active, not passive, in your membership there. So what does that look like?

I’ll tell you what it doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like feeling obligated to “be there every time the doors are open” and feeling guilty if you aren’t. For starters, not every church activity is your business; obviously, I don’t go to the ladies’ Bible studies or the practice sessions for the children’s choir. In my previous post I noted, almost in passing, that all of us are gifted by the Spirit with particular aptitudes that he intends for us to use for the benefit of others in the body. We can start with that, and focus on the activities of the church for which we seem suitably fitted.

But before we start, let’s be sure we’re understanding what the Bible actually teaches about the gifts, and not the mythology that seems to have accumulated around them over the last few decades. I’ve posted on that before, and I’d encourage you to read that post now, before we proceed.

OK. If you’ve read the linked post, you know that you have one or more spiritual gifts, but that you might not know for sure what they are, and that you might not even be able to know for sure what they are. You also have natural abilities, latent or obvious; and your spiritual gifts might tie in nicely with those, or they might be distinct.

So how to proceed?

I’d suggest that you ask yourself a few simple questions:

What do I like?
What am I good at?
What have other people said I’m good at?

Sure, scan down the list of spiritual gifts linked in the earlier post, but don’t limit your thinking to those terms. Lay everything out on the table.

I like people.
I don’t like people—or at least, they make me really uncomfortable.
I like to stay out of the spotlight.
I like to solve problems.
I like to hug people who are crying.
I like old people.
I like one-on-one relationships more than speaking in public.
My best subject in school was math.
I like to fix things. Physical, mechanical things.

Keep writing things down. Take inventory. Be honest with yourself.

Now, go down the list, one item at a time, and ask yourself, “How can I use this for the kingdom?” And since it’s typically easier to start small, ask, “How can I use this for the benefit of someone in my local assembly?”

You like old people? Visit the old people in your church, especially the ones whose physical health may limit them in some way. Just sit and talk. Or take them grocery shopping. Or bring them to church, if they can get out but would rather not drive and don’t want to sit alone. Ask them what they need, and pick the things you can help with.

You like to fix things? Ask the pastor, or the facilities manager, what needs fixing, and help out with something—something you can actually fix. I know a church that had several members who were good at working on cars. One Saturday they gathered at the church, and the widows brought their cars in for a free inspection and recommendations from people they could trust.

You’re good at math? Help tutor the kids in your church who are struggling with it. Ask the homeschoolers in your church if they could use some help teaching math to their middle- or high-schooler. Especially calculus.

Like babies? Work in the nursery. Please.

Not queasy? Get certified in CPR, or get EMT certification.

And beyond all these things, just interact. Talk to others. Listen to them. Share their joys, their sorrows, their struggles. Pray for them. And with them. Meet them for coffee. Be there.

You don’t have to “be there every time the doors are open” to have a really active part in the body life of your church.

And it doesn’t have to be limited to church. You can use the gifts and abilities God has given you to advance the kingdom outside the walls of your church as well.

Like radio-controlled airplanes? Join a local club, make friends, and live out grace, mercy, and peace before them. Be a friend. One of these days one of them is going to need help, and if you’ve done that, chances are he’ll come to you.

Gospel. Grace. Life.

For the Kingdom.

Next time, one more thought on how we relate in the body.

Part 5 Part 6

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On Church, Part 3: What’s the Point?

March 2, 2019 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Part 1 Part 2

I’ve suggested in the earlier posts in this series that you ought to be part of a local church, an assembly of (admittedly broken) believers—that reasons for not doing that are invalid, and that those same reasons actually call for serious commitment, for becoming an active, registered member.

OK, now that you’re a member, what’s next? What’s the point of belonging to a church?

I’ve written on that question in a stand-alone post a couple of years ago. Go read that post; it’s The Point. When you get back, I’ll tell you a story.

Welcome back.

Let me tell you how I applied this concept in my own thinking.

I think my spiritual gift is teaching. (Might be wrong. My students, I suppose, sometimes wonder. And more on the whole spiritual gifts thing in the next post.) For most of my church life, I’ve taught in Sunday school or something similar, usually adults, with whom I’m far more comfortable than the Little Ones.

Well, several years ago the principle in the linked post (You did go read it, didn’t you? No? Well, go read it. I’ll still be here when you get back.) hit me like a ton of bricks. Church isn’t about getting blessed; it’s about giving, ministering to others by actively exercising the gifts God has given you for that purpose. There are no bleachers, and there are no spectators. Quit sittin’ around, and carry your end of the log.

So I thought about that.

I can teach. And I’m teaching Sunday school, so I guess I’m good, right? There. Pangs of conscience go away.

Wait a minute. Maybe I’m overthinking this here, but it seems to me that just showing up and teaching every week isn’t really the same thing as interacting substantively with individual fellow believers. The assembly is about interaction, not just action.

So I decided I’d see if I could step it up a notch. Look for personal interaction based on teaching.

There are lots of ways to do that—accountability partners, one-on-one Bible studies, and so on. In those days, I decided to make just a simple, incremental change: I’d talk to a lot of people between Sunday school and church, and probe a little to see whether they had any questions about the Bible. So during those few minutes I’d walk around where the people were, trying to make myself as visible as an absurdly short person can, and just greet people and look for openings.

And it worked. Pretty much every week somebody would say, “Hey, Dan! Got a question for you!”

Awesome.

One time someone asked me, “What’s a dugong?”

“What?!”

“A dugong. It’s in the Bible.”

“No, it’s not. I’ve read the Bible, and I’ve never heard of it.”

“Sure it is. Right here.” And he showed me Exodus 25.5 (he was apparently using the Revised English Bible, or a more common version that had the word in the marginal notes; I don’t recall), and there it was. Dugong hides in the tabernacle. I was carrying a KJV at the time, and mine said “badgers’ skins.”

Well, whaddaya know. I have some studying to do.

“I don’t know,” I told him, “but I’ll chase that down this afternoon. You going to be here tonight?”

“Yup.”

“OK, I’ll tell you then.”

And that afternoon I learned that a dugong is something like a manatee, and that it lives, among other places, in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba, right next to the Sinai Peninsula.

Wouldn’t it make sense for God to specify a local marine mammal to provide the outer covering of the Holy Place in the Tabernacle?

And so I learned something, and my friend learned something, and I’ve never forgotten that something since.

I was hooked.

So every Sunday, I’m on a mission. Walk around, greet everybody I see, talk for as long as they want. Maybe they’ll have a question that I can answer. Maybe they’ll have one that I can’t answer, and I can get back to them. Maybe they’ll tell me something I don’t know, and I can check it out and then use it to teach other people. So many opportunities, so little time.

Oh! Is it time for lunch already? Hate to leave church so soon. So much good stuff to do.

Try it. It’ll change your church life—and probably the rest of it too.

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On Church, Part 2: What’s in It for You

February 28, 2019 by Dan Olinger Leave a Comment

Part 1

We’ve noted that some people resist committing to a local church, and I think we’ve demonstrated that their reasons for doing so are short-sighted. Even in a broken world with broken institutions full of broken people, surrounding yourself with your fellow travelers—and committing to them—is not only worth it, but it’s a mark of personal and social health.

So why get involved? Several reasons.

First, social health. It really isn’t good for man—male or female—to be alone. Sure, there are introverts, and they’re not weird or antisocial or dangerous. But introversion and isolation are not the same thing, and we all need healthy relationships with other people. It broadens our outlook, it imports a wealth of experiences and wisdom, and it keeps us normal.

But there are reasons beyond that. Any old social club can broaden your outlook. What else?

Committing to a local church connects you with other believers—fellow travelers, as I called them above—and those connections are part of God’s plan for your spiritual growth. When you were converted, you didn’t just find the fire escape from hell; you began a life-long process of spiritual growth, of increasing Christ-likeness, superintended by the Spirit of God himself (2Co 3.18). He uses various instruments to keep you climbing that mountain—the Scripture (Ac 20.32), prayer (Heb 4.18), and interaction with other believers (Eph 4.29). As your fellow believers interact with you and exercise their spiritual gifts on your behalf, you’re going to be helped, even propelled, on your trek up that mountain. I could use the help; couldn’t you?

If you won’t commit to a local assembly of believers, chances are that you’re losing battles in your mind and in your home because you’re trying to fight alone, and you’re getting outflanked every day. And chances are that you’re not that serious about studying your Bible—really getting into it up to your eyeballs, and applying every day the things that you’re learning there. And chances are further that prayer isn’t that a big a deal to you—or that it doesn’t seem to be making a genuine connection.

The means of grace matter. And the assembly is one of them.

One more benefit of committing—and here I mean committing specifically by becoming an official member.

You ought to join your church because if you don’t, you can’t get kicked out.

Well, that was blunt. Perhaps I should explain.

An important part of your soul care, endorsed and even commanded by Jesus himself, is accountability to the fellow believers who know you best—your local assembly. When you’re headed for trouble, God’s plan is that you’ll be surrounded by people who know God and who love you and who are willing to invest the time necessary to see to the care of your soul. I’m not talking here about busybodies or snoops or gossips; I’m talking about people who genuinely love you and are ready to sacrifice their time, their money, their prayers, and their energy for your good. Maybe they’ll do that by helping you move, or cooking you a meal or three, or watching your kids when you have to go to the doctor. But one of the ways they’ll do that is by lovingly encouraging you to walk with them on the road to Christ-likeness. They’ll tell you, lovingly and graciously, when you’ve said or done something you shouldn’t. They’ll forgive you when you apologize; they’ll pray with you even if you’re crying and the whole thing is really awkward. And they’ll love you through it all.

Jesus said that if the church does that, and the sinning person (you, in this instance) will not repent, they slowly ratchet up the pressure until you do the right thing and have peace restored to your soul. And if you still resist, they are to remove you from the church as a way of increasing pressure on you to repent—even as they long and pray that you will repent and be restored to fellowship.

But if you’re not a member, they can’t kick you out. By not joining, you’re depriving God of one of the instruments he uses for your eternal spiritual good.

You’ve left the front door unlocked, and you’re in serious danger.

Don’t do that. Join.

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On Church, Part 1: At Arm’s Length

February 25, 2019 by Dan Olinger 3 Comments

I’d like to begin a brief series on what our relationship should be with our local church. Like any culture, our culture—early 21^st-century American conservative evangelicalism—has its strengths and its weaknesses, its sore spots and its blind spots. I think there are some elements in our church culture that have greatly improved on the way things used to be done—improved in the sense of becoming more in line with biblical teaching—but I think there are also some important elements that we tend to de-emphasize.

So a few posts on some of those.

To begin with, I’d like to talk about the importance of church membership.

There are those who do emphasize it—I very much like the idea behind Josh Harris’s Stop Dating the Church, published 15 years ago now*—but I’ve noticed that a lot of believers—and they are believers—seem to want to attend church but not join. And there are others who make much of being “spiritual” but distrustful of “institutional Christianity.”

Let’s start with the obvious. People are busted, badly so, by their congenital and pervasive sinfulness (Rom 3.9-18). That means that all associations of people—governments, businesses, Facebook, and, yes, churches—are busted as well. They don’t work perfectly, or even almost perfectly, and it’s a constant struggle to keep them out of the ditches on both sides of their obsessive rush toward complete collapse.

Whatever church you associate with is going to disappoint you, for actual reasons. Busted organizations do that.

But we don’t give up on our family and friends when they disappoint us, and we shouldn’t give up on our churches when they disappoint us. There’s a reason churches exist, and those reasons don’t disappear when their fallenness shows up.

Why might some people want to hang around them but still hold them at arm’s length?

Maybe an earlier hurtful experience—a real one, not to be minimized or dismissed.
A fear of commitment, a fear that if we get involved too intimately, we’ll be asked to do stuff, some of which we might not enjoy and all of which will crowd our already busy schedules.
A fear of accountability. We don’t want people poking around in our business. We’re up to something that we like a lot, but we’re afraid that we might be found out, and who knows what would happen then? I have a family; I have a career. I have to think about these things.
I ride alone, cowboy.

So let’s think about those reasons.

Sometimes people do get hurt by others, maybe others who are really trying to help them, but are just clumsy or ignorant, or maybe others who are not trying to help them, but seek to exploit them for some personal benefit, whether money or power or sexual satisfaction or something else. Those things are wrong—deeply, ungodly wrong. But they don’t change the fact that the victim arrived looking for help, and he still needs that help. There’s still a reason to seek a church that isn’t pathological. But they’re all pathological. My experience, and the experience of hundreds of others, proves it. Oh, my friend, now you’re another kind of victim. You’ve fallen victim to the logical fallacy called “hasty generalization,” or “insufficient data sample.” There are good churches, and there are good people, in the sense of people who are redeemed and well intentioned and competent. So as brutalizing and painful and real as the hurt is, it doesn’t constitute a reason to keep all churches at a distance.
It’s true that committing to a church will call for some of your time. (More on that later in the series.) But here’s the thing. You’re going to be spending your time on something—you can’t save it up—so why not spend it on something that benefits both you and others? Why not make a difference? Why not change the world, one image of God at a time? Isn’t that more important than Netflix, or basketball, or radio-controlled airplanes? And who said you’d have to give those things up anyway?
It’s also true that a good church will add a level of accountability to your life. (More on that, too, later.) But why fear cleaning up areas of your life that are distancing you from God, family, and friends? Why fear joy? If cleaning out a physical closet can spark joy, why not clean out the closets of your heart? And why not accept help from people who love you and are committed to your eternal good?

Living in fear isn’t anybody’s goal, and it isn’t a pattern for a delightful life. Why not walk away from all that?

Next time, the benefits of getting involved.

*Yeah, Josh Harris isn’t perfect, and he’s wisely repudiated his silly book I Kissed Dating Good-bye, but he’s had a good idea or two, and I think this is one of them.

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