Briefly? We're never safe

Gurnall expounds another time — or a pair of times — which Satan finds advantageous for the attack:

Fifthly, After great manifestations of God’s love, then the tempter comes. Such is the weak constitution of grace, that it can neither well bear smiles nor frowns from God without a snare; as one said of our English nation, Totam nec pati potest libertatem nec servitutem; it cannot well bear liberty nor bondage in the height: so neither can the soul; if God smile and open himself a little familiarly to us, then we are prone to grow high and wanton; if he frown, then we sink as much in our faith; thus the one, like fair weather and warm gleams, brings up the weeds of corruption; and the other, like sharp frosts, nips and even kills the flowers of grace. The Christian is in danger on both hands, therefore Satan takes this advantage, when the Christian is flush of comfort, even as a cheater, who strikes in with some young heir, when he hath newly received his rents, and never leaves till he hath eased him of his money; thus Satan lies upon the catch, then to inveigle a saint into one sin or other, which he knows will soon leak out his joy. Had ever any a larger testimony from heaven than Peter, Matt. 16:17; where Christ pronounceth him blessed, and puts a singular honour upon him, making him the representative for all his saints? No doubt this favour to Peter stirred up the envious spirit sooner to fall upon him. If Joseph’s party-coloured coat made the patriarchs to plot against him, their brother, no wonder malice should prompt Satan to show his spite, where Christ had set such a mark of love and honour; and therefore we find him soon at Peter’s elbow, making him his instrument to tempt his Master, who soon espied his cloven foot, and rebukes Peter with a ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ He that seemed a rock even now, through Satan’s policy, is laid a stone of offence for Christ to stumble at. So David, when he had received such wonderful mercies, settled in his throne with the ruin of his enemies, yea, pardoned for his bloody sin, now ready to lay down his head with peace in the dust; Satan steps in to cloud his clear evening, and tempts him to number the people; so ambitious is Satan, then chiefly, to throw the saint into the mire of sin, when his coat is cleanest.

[William Gurnall and John Campbell, The Christian in Complete Armour (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845), 48.]

So to the question "When may I safely lay down my guard and take off my armor?", the answer would be, "Never in this life."

Borrowed ethics question: how to respond to an associate pastor who confesses to homosexual "orientation"?

Mark Lamprecht poses a question, framed as coming from a faithful good-guy associate pastor:

As you all know I’ve served as a pastor here for several years. You also know that I have remained single the whole time. What I am about to tell you is not easy to openly admit.

The fact is that my sexual orientation…is…homosexual.

But please hear me out. I am fully convinced, and professes to you now, that theonly justifiable and acceptable sexual expression is heterosexuality within a heterosexual marriage, one man and one woman committed for life.

I have put specific guidelines in place to protect myself and the whole congregation. For example, I always leave the door open when counseling people. I am accountable to other pastors about this issue and I even have internet filtering software on my computer.

Finally, it is important for you all to know that I have not engaged in any illicit sex and have no plans to. I also meet with a Christian counselor about the same-sex attractions. Please stand with me in prayer on this issue. Thank you.

My first, non-serious response is "What — now they hold orientation-meetings for this?"

But here's my more-serious response. First, I acknowledge that there are many good ways to respond. Mine will feature the response that I think is (A) less likely to be given, and (B) probably more important than the likelier touchy-feeling good-sounding responses.

I think it's important to tell him that the first step in dealing with any problem is correct diagnosis of both the problem and the desired solution.

Next, it is important to tell him that he does not seem to have done either.

Third, by way of explanation, I'd point out to him that there is no help from God for an "orientation." The Bible doesn't know of such an "orientation." This may be why his only goal as to his "orientation" is that he "[has] no plans to" act on it — as I have "no plans to" visit Canada or live in New Jersey... though either could happen, and there's no moral or absolute reason why they shouldn't.

What do you do with an "orientation"? Since it is an un-Biblical category, forget the Bible. There is no forgiveness or redemption for an "orientation." So I guess you have to do therapy, or meditation, or yoga or something. No idea. Can't help you.

Or perhaps by "orientation," he is meaning to say "I struggle with sinful temptations to have sex with other men"? Okay, fair enough. Now we are getting somewhere Bibley.

But in that case, how do you say you "have no plans to" act on them? Picture a man standing up and saying he struggles with temptation to commit adultery with the senior pastor's wife, but he "has no plans to" act on it? Or that  he struggles with temptation to have sex with little children in the church Sunday School, but he "has no plans to" act on it? Or that he struggles with temptation to rape some women in the congregation, but he "has no plans to" act on it?

Well now, that's very different, isn't it?

No, actually, it is no different. It's just that, at the moment, the particular sin of homosexuality enjoys a martyred, romantic celebrity-status among sins. It's a special sin. People tempted to it are special cases.

But you see, while I believe that a certain amount of motivation behind evangelicals who (should know better but) give in to this trend is loving and compassionate, the net-result is actually disastrous and unhelpful.

"Disastrous and unhelpful" because, as I mentioned, God offers no help that I know of for dealing with "orientation"... unless you mean that orientation to sin which afflicts all natural sons of Adam (Rom. 8:7-8). Now, if it's a sin, like every other sin in being a sin, then we're on Biblical grounds. Now there is all sorts of help to be found in Scripture and in the truths of the Gospel.

But then he does lose his romantic, martyred status, and has to queue up with the rest of us plain old, garden-variety sinners, who don't go up to the pulpit and say we have a "polyamorous orientation" or a "hyper-acquisitive orientation," rather than saying we struggle with lust and covetousness. Why don't we? Because we know it! Unless we're far off from Biblical truth, we already know that there are only two kinds of people this side of heaven, viewed in one way:

1. People under sin's unchallenged lordship
2. People struggling with sin

There is no saint this side of heaven who doesn't struggle. Period.

So on the one hand, he has to give up his "Special Sin" card. He loses Tragic Hero status. He also mortifies the "no plans" out. Sin is to be mortified, and that means "deaditized." On the other, he gets to tap in to the same glorious Gospel help that all struggling saints have enjoyed for 2000 years. Gospel, repentance, forgiveness, regeneration, justification, mortification, sanctification, with the sure promise of ultimate glorification.

Hopeless pop-psychology for redemption in Christ. Not a bad trade, I'd say.

Postscript: as I've often said, I have great sympathy for anyone struggling with this sexual temptation as a temptation. I can only imagine how difficult it is, I know that. In fact, I think it's too difficult and too important to abandon such folks to pop-psychological mumbo-jumbo with a sprinkling of God-talk. They're sinners. I'm a sinner. The Gospel is for sinners like us.

That's terrific news, and it's the news we should stick with plainly, emphatically, insistently, and confidently.

Reflections on hope

As I wrote over at Pyro today, hope is as necessary to the human being as food and drink. You can't really live without it.

I started to write "to the Christian," but that isn't true. Everyone needs hope, and everyone has it. The unredeemed man has his own hope, but it is a doomed illusion. Eve and Adam hoped to have God-like knowledge and freedom and autonomy. They acted in hope. But because they did not act in faith, which is to say according to truth, what they attained instead was guilt and shame and wrath and misery and death. And so is the lot of every child of theirs who follows in their footsteps. I wrote a lot more about that somewhere, and it isn't my focus here today.

Here I focus on the Christian and hope.

I lived for years without (or with very little) hope, as a Christian. It was a dark, horrid time. With the occasional clarity of retrospect, I see that the real lack was a lack of faith.

Don't love that phrase much because it's overused and abused, but it's the truth. Understand, though: by "lack of faith" I do not mean "lack of orthodoxy." I was perfectly orthodox. That's not a self-congratulatory statement; it's categorical. I affirmed the verbal, plenary inerrancy of Scripture, the truth of the Trinity, the truth of penal substitutionary atonement, and on and on. Affirmed them with all my heart, internally and with my mouth and fingertips.

The trouble was that I did not embrace for myself the sweetness that comes from those truths to believers. Here we camp a moment on Ephesians 6:16 — "In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one." I see the shield as a bit different from the rest of the armor. "The faith" probably does refer to the revealed body of truth. However, excepting the only the sword, all the other items of armor just stay on, once donned. Put on the helmet and leave it; strap on the sandals, and leave them; belt on the belt, etc.

But the shield doesn't do you a bit of good if you don't hold it tight and hold it close. Possessing a shield alone is of little practical value. The only way you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one is if you hold the shield and hold it tight and hold it close.

So for that period, I bristled with flaming darts and little hope, because I possessed the shield, but I didn't hold it close. John Piper's Future Grace helped me see that, and it combined with other facets of the Lord's patient dealing with me to turn me from despair to hope.

So hope comes from personal, appropriating, clinging, living faith, and that faith must come from revealed truth.

We need to have it, live it, speak it. Joni — who has known daily suffering for decades, to a degree few of us can imagine — speaks passionately, eloquently and movingly on the importance of hope. Parents need it, spouses need it, singles need it; all of us need it.

Worldlings have to make it up or materialize it. All of their hopes either are based on lies and illusions, or deal with things that thieves, moths and rust can destroy. They amount to a chimera. Barring repentance and saving faith in Christ, all their hopes are in the final analysis utterly and completely doomed. However good things are now, one day they will turn for the unimaginable worse, and will never improve.

The Christian's case is the precise and exact opposite.

Pastors should cling to and preach more hope. I've known pastors who show little hope; I've been a pastor who showed little. Pastors (most pastors, anyway, superstars aside) are exposed to such disappointment and sorrow and heartbreak. People fail, fall, betray, deceive, slander, malign, are ungrateful. Churches stubbornly refuse to grow. The hardened stay hard. Miracles are few and far, far between.

And you as a pastor may care more intensely than anyone else. Others drop by, go home, flick on the TV, and they're done. The pastor lives and dies with the church. He needs to have a hope that goes beyond how the church is doing this week, or how it's likely to do next week.

And more, the pastor really needs to hold it and preach Biblical hope. As I said, I've known pastors who've been so beaten-up by the church that the whole service has a doomed, gloomy feel. I'm not saying this either in harsh judgment (believe me!) or in lofty disdain (believe me!). I'm just saying it because it's true. My heart bleeds both for them and the church.

Those pastors need to find a hope that will lift their spirits and give them joy regardless of how faithful or faithless or feckless people are. They need that to lift them, and they need that hope to fill their preaching.

Yes, absolutely, preach the holiness of God and the fearful terrors of sin. But also and with equal passion (like Isaiah! like Jeremiah! like Ezekiel! like Paul! like Peter!) preach the sweetness and glories of the Gospel and its hope and promises.

I say this to you, and I say this to me.

Amen.

Jay Adams and "Gospel Only"ism: an exercise for World-Tilting Gospel readers (and others)

Brother Chris recently called attention to a Jay Adams essay titled Preaching the Gospel to Yourself. It's a brief essay, and characteristically pointed. Give it a read.

Adams' point is that many Christians are stressing the Gospel to the exclusion of other truths relevant to

Christian living. Here are some quotations from Adams' article to set us up:

Doubtless, this idea seems strange to many Christians today, yet it is the rage in some circles. Such ideas as going deeper into the Gospel and that the Gospel is the means of sanctification, all bundled up together with a half dozen other such statements can be found—not in some backward-thinking, offbeat fundamentalist weirdo church—but in the preaching and writings of a number of big guns as well!

It seems as if one writer is attempting to outdo the next in getting in his licks on the subject... When asked about the matter of biblical obedience, we are told such things as “Oh, it’s hard work getting into the Gospel more deeply.” Such “hard work” replaces biblical obedience to Scriptural commands.

There is a kind of Monkish mysticism in this idea. Think of all that Jesus did for you on the cross—over and over (“Preach the Gospel to yourself every day”)– and somehow or other you will be sanctified thereby. Sanctification no longer is a matter of becoming more and more like Christ by putting off sinful ways and replacing them with biblical ones. Though most mysticism is difficult to articulate, it seems that what is being said is that Gospel immersion automatically makes you a better Christian without learning and doing what God commands by His Spirit’s wisdom and power.

I know for a fact that Adams is considering a very real problem, so let's us discuss it a bit ourselves — but with a twist.

I know that The World-Tilting Gospel has only been available a few weeks, but I also know that a number of you have already read it. (Hey, even in Honduras!) The Scripture studied and expanded on in WTG will fully-equip any reader to respond to what Adams is talking about.

So I am focusing on you who have read the book: how would you respond to Adams' concerns? Some would respond by saying that he is downplaying the Gospel, it really is central and all-sufficient in the sense that sanctification will come almost automatically as we simply preach the Gospel to ourselves and meditate on Christ and His salvation. Others might say no, the Gospel tells us how to become Christians. Then we shift our attention to God's commands, and to obedience. That is sanctification and discipleship, and it has no relation to the Gospel, which is introductory doctrine.

WTG fully equips readers to evaluate and respond. How would you? Feel free to quote or cite.

(Others can chip in too, of course, but I'm really encouraging WTG-alumni to start using what they've learned.)