Revival

  The kind folks at EP books sent me a review copy of Paul Cook’s Fire From Heaven: Times of Extraordinary Revival.  To be honest, I have mixed feelings about revivals: some had to do with solid doctrine and true calls to faith and repentance.  Others had to do with emotional frenzy and unbiblical mysticism.  Cook’s Fire From Heaven isn’t really a book about the “ins” and “outs” or the “goods” and “bads” of revival.  Instead, it is a look at a series of revivals which took place in Britain from 1791-1840 among the Calvinistic Methodists and Baptists.  Before going on, I should point out how Cook defines revival:

“The characteristics of revival are no different from the characteristics of any normal working of the Holy Spirit except in terms of intensity and extent” (p. 117).

Cook begins in chapter one by discussing the period before 1791-1840 to give a historical background of his topic.  He later writes about some of the theological beliefs (prayer, God’s sovereignty, calling, etc.) of the preachers of this revival period.  Of course he also talks about those leading preachers of the day, such as William Bramwell, Hugh Bourne, Oliver Heywood, and others, along with the areas of Britain that benefited from their preaching.  If you’re interested in this topic, I do recommend this book. 

This book got me thinking in quite a few ways.  One of them is the necessity of churchly prayer.  I was convicted once again that prayer is more effective than programs, bands, committees, clubs, and societies when it comes to the spiritual health of a church.  I’ll end with this great quote from page 70.

“In our desperate situation today we need to cast ourselves upon God.  We are not as desperate as we ought to be.  Depressed, perhaps; but that is because we have been too self-assured, overconfident in ourselves and our schemes.  We do not cast ourselves upon God like our forefathers.  Despite our professions, our Reformed theology is too much in our heads and too little in our hearts.  The truth of the matter is that we are not Reformed enough.  Despite their doctrine, the mentality of the old Methodists was much more Reformed than ours.  They depended upon God more than we do, they looked to him more often, they prayed more diligently.  In the sort of situation that faces us today, they had but one answer: call upon God.  And this they did again and again.”

Makes me think of 1 Thessalonians 5.17.

shane lems

Preaching: Faith and Repentance

Do you hear the clear call to faith in Christ and repentance from sin frequently in your church’s preaching?  If not, why not?  Christian preaching should have frequent and clear calls to faith in Jesus as well as repentance from the wickedness in our hearts.  I love how Herman Bavinck said this.  Notice how he says the call to faith and repentance has everything to do with the covenant of grace.

“For this reason [the truth of the covenant of grace] congregational preaching ought never to omit the serious summons to faith and repentance.  Proceeding on the basis of the covenant [of grace] does not exempt the preacher from that, but rather it is precisely this that obligates him to issue such a summons.  That obligation is derived not first of all from the presumption that all elect persons already in their first days of life even before baptism have been regenerated, and this obligation applies not only with reference to those who in their childhood are supposedly regenerate.  But this obligation is grounded in the covenant of grace, as it has spread historically throughout the human race under God’s leading, and includes all Christians and their children, and it applies with reference to them all together, whether or not they were already regenerated in the earliest days of life.”

“For no matter how inestimably great the blessings already are that God bestows upon us when from our birth we are included in the covenant, born in a Christian church to Christian parents, baptized with holy baptism, and nurtured in a Christian family – all these blessings are still not enough.  Each person is confronted with the obligation of personal, saving faith; only one who believes in the Son has eternal life.”

“Whether the church already presumes that all its members are believers, or, being unable to judge the human heart, the church must be satisfied with an outward confession and walk and base its response on all these – all of this in no way detracts from the truth that each must examine and test himself, and that no one, whether inside or outside the church, will enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is born again of water and Spirit.  Not the church, and not the minister of the Word, but only God in heaven brings about salvation.”

“[A pastor's] sermons should continue…warning of the need for self-examination, so that people do not deceive themselves for eternity.  Biblical sermons seriously summon church members to faith and conversion both initially and continually, for only those who believe will be saved.”

I realize such preaching can sound offensive so many American churches will not preach it.  The rationale is that telling people they are hell worthy sinners who must repent of the deep sins in their heart and flee to Jesus in faith – telling people harsh things like that will certainly anger the larger donors and make quite a few people leave.  But the truth of the matter is this: if a church doesn’t preach repentance and faith, she is not a loving church, for she does not care enough about people to tell them life-and-death truth.  If a church doesn’t preach repentance and faith, she can call herself many things, but she cannot call herself an apostolic, biblical church.  Please, if your church doesn’t preach clear and consistent calls to repentance and faith, prayerfully approach the leadership.  If that doesn’t work over time, you really need to find a church that preaches these things clearly and consistently.  It is not about preferences and likes; it is not a matter of putting up with some church deficiencies for denominational reasons; it is a matter of eternal life or death.  If your pastor cannot look his congregation in the eye and tell them that they will go to hell if they do not repent and believe in Jesus, he is not worthy of the title “pastor.”

(The great quote from Bavinck is found in his excellent book, Saved by Grace, pages 126-7.)

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Barth’s High Altitude Bombing Runs

I’ve finished I.1 of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and I’m well into I.2.  So far, my favorite parts have been when Barth aims his guns at the modernists and theological liberals.  It sort of reminds me of the high altitude bombing runs in WWII.  Barth goes over the modernist positions and drops a salvo; some pages later he returns to that position and drops another salvo.  He repeats this process over and over.  By the end of I.1, he hits the target more than once!  And his bombs are so powerful he also hits cults like Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses as well as modern deism and pantheism.

I also have to add that I’m completely annoyed by his doctrine(s) of the Word and revelation.  He writes about three different “forms” of the Word: revelation, Bible, and proclamation.  I think he’s wrong when he distinguishes between these, but I’ll have to save an extended critique until I’ve read more.  He’s tough to pin down because he sort of circles around a topic; he seems to say everything about it which leaves me sometimes thinking he said nothing!

Anyway, here’s one great quote regarding the aforementioned bombing runs (makes me wonder what Barth would say about all the cheesy church choruses that are popular today):

“The ‘fairest Lord Jesus’ of mysticism, the ‘Savior’ of Pietism, Jesus the teacher of wisdom and friend of man in the Enlightenment, Jesus the quintessence of enhanced humanity in Schleiermacher…all this looks at least very dubiously like a profane and sacrilegious intrusion in the Old Testament sense in which it is thought possible to come to terms, as it were, with the presence of God in Christ and to take control of it with the help of certain conceptions deriving from the humanity [of Christ].”

When discussing the Nicene Creed, Barth says that it “is for us the most important record of the dogma of the deity of Christ on the following grounds.”  After naming a few, he turns to liberal Protestantism:

“It [the Nicene Creed] says unequivocally what Liberal Protestantism refuses to listen to, and for that very reason its validity must be recognised absolutely in an Evangelical dogmatics.”

And, of course, Barth says other good things from time to time, like this.

“The Church should fear God and not fear the world.  But only if and as it fears God need it cease to fear the world.”

Stay tuned for another Barth bombing run in the future.

shane lems

The Gospel vs. America

 When Christianity and the American dream get all mixed up, the result is disasterous.  I like what David Platt says on this.

“The dangerous assumption we unknowingly accept in the American dream is that our greatest asset is our own ability.  The American dream prizes what people can accomplish when they believe in themselves and trust in themselves, and we are drawn toward such thinking.  But the gospel has different priorities.  The gospel beckons us to die to ourselves and to believe in God and to trust his power.  In the gospel, God confronts us with our utter inability to accomplish anything of value apart from him… [cf. John 15.5].”

“Even more important is the subtly fatal goal we will achieve when we pursue the American dream.  As long as we achieve our desires in our own power, we will always attribute it to our own glory.  …This, after all, is the goal of the American dream: to make much of ourselves.  But here the gospel and the American dream are clearly and ultimately antithetical to each other.  While the goal of the American dream is to make much of us, the goal of the gospel is to make much of God.”

Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2010) 46-7.

shane lems

The Devil’s Christmas Fist

Though I don’t get too “into” the holidays, I never tire of hearing about the Incarnation.  Here’s a great piece by Luther showing the beauty of the truth that God became man.

“When we were still under the papacy, they used to tell this story.  Once upon a time the devil attended Mass in a church where it was customary in either the Lord’s Prayer or in the Creed to sing et homo factus est (God’s Son has become a human being).  While they were singing this, the people just remained standing and did not kneel down.  The devil was so incensed, that he slammed his fist into one man’s mouth, saying, ‘You boorish bum, aren’t you ashamed to just stand there like a post and refuse to kneel for joy?  If God had become OUR brother, as he did become YOUR brother, our joy would be so great that we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.’”

“That story may be pure fiction, but if so, then it was invented by someone who was very intelligent and who correctly understood the great honor which was bestowed on us, when God’s Son became a human being….”

The quote is from  a sermon by Luther on Christmas day, 1534.  By the way, if you like Luther quotes, you’ll want to check out Tabletalk and I highly recommend his very readable 7-volume sermon set.

shane lems