Pastor's Page: June 16, 2009

The Problem With Prophetic Utterances Today

I want to begin by defining the term "eschatological orthodoxy". "Eschatological" means having to do with the end times. "Orthodoxy" means right belief. So eschatological orthodoxy is the right belief about end times. If you are eschatologically orthodox, you believe what is true (or at least acceptable, church-sanctioned) about the end of days.

Now, a story:

In 1995 my friend John received a prophetic word from a charismatic pastor. "John," the pastor said, "I have a word from God for you concerning your future spouse." The pastor shared what he felt God had put on his heart about John's wife-to-be.

John was excited and figured he would be meeting that special someone in the next day or two. But he didn't. Thirteen years of singleness followed, during which, he said, he felt that that pastor "should have been stoned, or at least rebuked." Last year, however, John finally met, courted, engaged and married the woman of his dreams. Joy is evident on both his and his beloved's face. He still puzzles, though, over why it took so many years for the prophecy to be fulfilled.

I do not share John's puzzlement, because I do not believe that the prophecy in 1995 and the marriage in 2008 had anything to do with each other. My reason for this disbelief springs from my zealous, unwavering commitment to eschatological orthodoxy.

By eschatological orthodoxy I don't mean anything like the nature and duration of the gap (if any) between the rapture and the second coming of Christ. Nor do I think that any of the competing views of the millennium, pre-, post-, a- or pan-, are unorthodox. (If you are unfamiliar with pan-millennialism, it's the view that punts the question away and says everything will pan out all right.)

To be eschatologically orthodox you must embrace by faith two very simple core doctrines:
1) Jesus will return, and
2) You must be ready for it, because it can occur at any time.

Christians may differ about what signs may precede his arrival, and whether those signs have already been fulfilled - but there is no mistaking the biblical urgency to be ready now, right now, for the appearing of Christ. He may arrive before the sun sets tonight, or before I have finished typing this page. 1 Thessalonians 5:2 says "for you know very well the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night." Jesus concluded a parable that contrasted those who are prepared and those who are unready by saying "Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour" (Matthew 25:13). In 1 Corinthians 15:52 Paul says it will take place "in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye". Our constant state of readiness for this moment must stir us to holiness: we are to live "self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope - the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ" (Titus 2:12-13).

I do not know if Christ will return today or 100,000 years from now, but my orthodox faith insists that I be spiritually prepared should it occur just seconds from now. I know nothing that would prevent it from happening that soon.

And that is the problem with confident prophetic utterances today. When a man says, for example, "God has told me such-and-such about the woman you will some day marry," he is necessarily (though of course unintentionally) saying "God has revealed to me that Jesus will not return any time soon." Think about it. Jesus taught that marriage is for this age only: "those who are considered worthy of taking part in that age and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage" (Luke 20:35). Therefore, in order for my friend John to have believed that his pastor's prophecy had to be true, he would necessarily have had to believe that the possibility of a sudden return of Christ could not be true. Any time a prophet today proclaims a "thus says the Lord" about some future event that necessarily pertains to the conditions of this present age, he or she is - in effect - denying the doctrine of the imminent (that is, "possible-at-any-time") return of Christ.

Just a couple days ago I was asked about what I was discerning of the voice of the Lord in circumstances pertaining both to my personal life and that of Faith Bible Church. In answering I clung doggedly to my eschatological orthodoxy, saying that, while it sure looked to me like things were lining up beautifully under the hand of God for A, B and C to happen, it was impossible to know for sure. How could anyone know that? How dare anyone pronounce a "Thus says the Lord" over such possible future events? After all, Jesus could return before I finish this senten

Pastor's Page: June 9, 2009

"Do It Again Just The Same Way, God"

Nine-year-old Michelle wanted a bicycle very badly, though it seemed unlikely that her father, a struggling dairy farmer, could afford one. She decided one night to pray for a bike with all the spiritual effort she could muster. At church she had heard about fasting, and also that Jesus said that when you prayed you weren't supposed to tell anyone about it, but go to your closet and shut the door and pray there. (Our newer translations of Matthew 6:6 say "your room", but the old King James Version said "thy closet".) So she dismissed herself from the dinner table without eating, went to her room, shut herself in the closet, and prayed for a bike as long and as hard as she could. Then she went to bed.

The next afternoon her father called her and her two sisters out to the barn where - Hallelujah! - there stood three shiny new bikes. The kindness of God gave her more than she asked for, because it even included her sisters in the bounty of joy.

But the climax of that story was not revealed till a quarter of a century later, when Michelle told her father for the first time that he had gotten those bikes right after she had prayed so hard for one. He teared up and told her, "You don't know the half of it." He explained that that morning when he checked the mailbox there was a blank envelope with three one-hundred dollar bills in it. He did not know, and does not know to this day, who put them there. He thought about paying bills with the money, and maybe a wise steward would have done just that. But he loved his longsuffering daughters, and wanted to do something special for them, and so he went to town and bought the bikes. I know this story is true, because I heard it from my sister Grace, Michelle's aunt.

Thirty-five-year-old Jennie's desperate prayer was starker than Michelle's. Jennie was deathly ill with what was later diagnosed as tularemia. She had prayed for healing but only got worse; now she just wanted to know whether she would live or die. She put a "fleece" before the Lord, like Gideon in Judges chapter 6. She prayed, "Lord, if I'm going to live, please let Laverne come over today." Laverne, Jennie's sister, occasionally stopped by to help with housework and take care of Jennie's four children.

Laverne, however, didn't come. Jennie did receive one kind visitor that day, old Mrs. Foster from church, but her sister never knocked on the door. Jennie went to bed that night thinking that if the Lord honored her request, she would need to put her affairs in order and prepare to die.

But, lying in bed, a sudden thought struck her with the force of a lightning bolt. She cried out to her husband, "Honey! Do you know what Mrs. Foster's first name is?" "Of course," he said, "Laverne." That was the only day, ever, that Laverne Foster stopped by to visit the mother of four who, three years later, became my mother too.

When my sister told me about Michelle and the miracle bike, I said, after recovering from gooseflesh, "I wonder what Michelle asked for the next week: 'Oh God! Now make it a car! I want a car this time!'." But Grace corrected me. "No, Michelle never asked like that again."

Good for her. Maybe Michelle understood that a holy moment like that was not the kind of thing that she should expect to be repeated. "Upping the ante" of a prayer like that would not be a sign of faith, but a sign of greed coupled with an effort to manipulate God.

My mother understood that too. Though she received a stunning answer to her prayer, she never again put a fleece before the Lord. She told me, "I should have just received whatever God would have chosen to give me, whether life or death. But in my weakness I had to know, and he graciously responded. I would never test him like that again though." And she advised that I never do it either.

In "Letters to Malcom: Chiefly on Prayer" C. S. Lewis writes, "It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in the single word encore." That gets it exactly right. Christians must develop a sense of gratitude for those things that God chooses to do only once - without expecting (or, heaven forbid, demanding) that he repeat the pattern of yesterday. Look for new and different graces from the Lord.

I've been reading through the gospel of John lately, and several examples from that book come to mind. In John 6 Jesus miraculously feeds 5,000 men, but when the crowd follows him the next day looking for another meal, he refuses to give it to them, and even rebukes them. In John 11 Jesus resurrects Lazarus, who was probably killed soon afterward (see John 12:10). If Lazarus was indeed killed later, it is hard to imagine his sisters sending word to Jesus, "He's dead again. You need to come back!" Or take John 13, where Jesus assumes the role of a slave and washes his disciples' feet. How perfectly awful it would have been if, during one of his resurrection appearances, some idiot disciple approached him and said, "Hey, Jesus, glad to see you! Here's a bucket, go get yourself a towel. I'm afraid I stepped in it outside, and could really use a good cleaning."

There are some things, of course, that God does repeat. He repeats his pardon. His mercies are new every morning. I'll not test him on a one-and-done, but, for my daily offering of sin, I'll trust his daily supply of grace.

Pastor's Page: June 2, 2009

The Dearest Idol I Have Known

It is possible for a human being to become an idol for us.

Probably not in the literal sense, where we would actually render worship to the individual, or pray to him, or ascribe to him qualities unique to God. You see that in the Bible sometimes. In Daniel 6 King Darius, pressured by lackeys, wrote idolatry of himself into law, insisting that for 30 days no prayers be offered to any god but him. (Daniel disobeyed and got thrown to providentially meek lions.) And Herod Agrippa received worship in Acts 12:22 when a crowd heard him and cried, "The voice of a god and not a man!" He died soon afterward - it turns out he had the body of a man and not a god.

I don't think we worship people like that any more - though perhaps it is worth noting that that is one of the complaints Protestantism lays at the feet of Catholicism. Protestants detect in Catholic worship a tendency to treat Mary and other saints as gods whenever petitions are offered to them rather than through them. (And a good Protestant won't even ask a departed saint to pray on his behalf for the simple reason that the Bible forbids communication with the dead.)

But even a conscientious Protestant can find that he has made an idol of somebody. Colossians 3:5 is instructive here: it says that greed is idolatry. Just as a greedy person puts gold in the place of God, so also someone might be tempted to put a person in the place of God. I believe that is what Jesus warned about in Luke 14:26 when he said that a man must "hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes, even his own life" in order to be his disciple. Of course "hate" is not literal (we are commanded to love our enemies - how much more our family members!), but serves to underscore the priority of Jesus first, and all earthly attachments - even family - after him.

A few months after my father died we sang at church the great William Cowper hymn, "Oh For A Closer Walk With God". I recall my mother confessing to me how hard it was for her to sing the 4th stanza:

The dearest idol I have known,
Whate'er that idol be
Help me to tear it from thy throne
And worship only thee.

Her eyes filled with tears as she said, "But my dearest idol was Dad!" It seemed cruel to her to have to rip him from the throne - as though he were some godless usurper of affection - when she knew him to be kind and worthy and a lover of God himself. I can't remember if I was able to say anything helpful to her, or anything at all.

A wise widow wrote to me saying that she was asking God what she could do to keep his good gifts from becoming idols to her. Her conscience likewise afflicted her about having idolized her husband, of having allowed him to take the place of God in her heart.

But I'm not convinced that either my mother or this widow were really guilty of shunting God aside and giving their husbands the honor that is due God alone. Wives are supposed to honor their husbands (Ephesians 5:33) and train younger women to love theirs (Titus 2:4). In the two churches I have pastored, I have yet to see even one woman who adored her husband the way my mom adored my dad - and I can't say I view that as a positive thing. It is not, "Good for them! See how well they resist the temptation to idolize their husbands!" but rather, "Why so little respect, deference, and spontaneous affection? Are all their men really so hard to love?"

I believe the better test of whether we have idolized someone is when we see that we have granted him or her the power to make us sin. It is not so much when we love, respect and delight in them but when we have let them lead us into wrongdoing that we have made an idol of them, and must rip them away from the throne of God. I know one man - I'm not making this up - whose young wife beguiled him away from a Sunday worship service by doing a striptease in front of him just before he was about to leave for church! She became his "golden calf" that day, standing provocatively between him and the appointed hour of worshipping the Lord.

Other forms of human idolatry will be more subtle, but I think that that spicy example illustrates the main idea. Human idols are not merely people whom we treasure - however highly - but people whom we permit to hinder our glad submission to God.

Pastor's Page: May 26, 2009:

On Discerning The Will Of God (Part 2)

Just to cover a few things left unsaid in last week's essay. And some personal testimony.

I believe the strong, sincere desire on the part of many Christians to "discern the will of God" actually tends to reflect a bit of a mismatch between something we want from God and something he wants from us. We are desperate to be guided in matters that are unclear, while he desires that we simply obey in matters that are already abundantly clear.

Christians are commanded to trust that God will direct our paths - not fear that he won't. I have known cases of Christians obsessing so badly about knowing God's will that it developed into a kind of neurosis for them. They feared missing the subtlest of clues, worried about not having said the right prayers or fasted long enough. Maybe they sinned and they figured that just ruined everything, irreparably, and made it impossible to get back on track. Sometimes they even got mad at God (how dumb is that?) when they tried everything they could think of to discover his will and things still turned out badly.

They need to relax, and learn wisdom from the prophet Jonah. I am indebted to Erwin Lutzer for pointing out a lesson from Jonah's story: if God will go to such extreme measures to re-direct a man who knows his will but chooses to disobey, how much more will he direct the person who longs to do his will, but is momentarily confused as to what it is?

Part of our problem I think is that we tend to assume we know what will be the end result of our having discovered and obeyed God's will for our life. If we get it exactly right, then of course we'll have inner peace, enjoy happy and exemplary marriages, serve God in productive ministries, etc. But how do we really know that any of that is God's will for us?

Jesus, Peter and Paul all lacked peace at times while serving faithfully in the center of God's will: see Luke 22:44; John 21:18; 2 Corinthians 11:28-29; 1 Thessalonians 3:5

It was God's will for the prophet Hosea to have a perfectly rotten marriage - the poor man was wed to a whore who cheated on him! (I think of a woman who complained about God "tricking" her into a bad marriage when she had done everything right - prayer, fasting, seeking good counsel, everything! - and her husband turned out to be a foul wretch of deep darkness. But how could she know that it was not precisely God's will for her to marry such a beast?)

I've never known a minister or missionary who did not pray for a thriving ministry. "So, if I'm stuck in a ministerial dead end, is that a sign that I have misread God's will?" No, not necessarily. It was God's will that Noah, Isaiah and John the Baptist - biblical titans all - wind up preaching to audiences of seven, zero, and one respectively. See 1 Peter 3:20; Isaiah 6:11-12; Mark 6:20.

I have had opportunity to reflect at great length on the topic of God's will concerning whom we should marry. My past marital woes are no secret, but to this day I neither doubt the leading of God in that area, nor regret having taken the path down which he led me. It is true that, almost certainly, had I married someone else, I would have been a much happier man all these years - but does that mean I would have been a better man? No. What could a person like me have learned from uninterrupted bliss, and how could that have shaped my character for the purposes to which God called me? It was by the severe mercy of God that I was kept from experiencing the kind of happiness that every man craves. So be it. Not my will but his be done. I praise him for his good leading.

And he will continue to lead, and do so with such deft care and a loving touch that I really don't need to worry or lose sleep over it. The analogy that suggests itself to me is that of being on one of those water rides in an amusement park. The raft will careen and bounce all over and jerk me from side to side, and it might even send me directly under that waterfall up ahead. But the course is safe, and pre-selected, and I can't go over the side if I just obey the posted rules. All I really have to worry about is keeping my arms in the vehicle at all times, remaining seated, with my safety belt fastened and my loose items secured. That kind of thing.