I Felt Led To…

 Common phrases in evangelicalism today include “I felt led to…”, “God told me to….”, and “The Lord laid it on my heart to….”  I now cringe every time someone uses these phrases because I’ve heard so many unbiblical endings to them.  In fact, I’ve seen people’s lives take a million tough twists and turns because they were ”following the promptings of God.”  For one example, I hesitate to think that God would “prompt’ somebody to avoid the ER when their daughter gets a deep cut that probably needs stitches.   

If I can speak candidly, I believe this has to do with lack of biblical knowledge.  Sinclair Ferguson says that perhaps one reason why our Christian forefathers rarely wrote about finding God’s will is because they knew the Bible better than most Christians today know it.  “They concentrated on teaching themselves and others the will of God which they discovered in Scripture, and the life of obedience to God in a daily submission to and application of his truth.”  Another example: If you know that the Bible says Christians shouldn’t mary unbelievers (2 Cor 6.14), you won’t need or care about “promptings.”

What is God’s will for us?  To know his word (cf. Ps 119, Ps 143:10), to grow in godliness, faith, and obedience (sanctification - cf. 1 Thes. 4.3), and to give thanks always (1 Thes. 5.18).  Instead of going by our gut feelings, promptings, or some kind of leading, we go by the word first and foremost.  God’s will is that we obey his law - our duty is to know it, study it, and meditate on it (Ps 119).  We do not and cannot know the big part of God’s will that is secret, but we can and should know the part that is revealed in the Bible (Deut. 29.29). 

Ferguson says it well.  He writes that our own thinking that has to do with discerning God’s will.

“Do you speak about God’s guidance as ‘discerning the will of God?’  Or, do you usually speak of it in terms of ‘I felt led to do it?’  Guidance, knowing God’s will for our lives, is much more a matter of thinking than feeling.  We are not to be ‘foolish’ (literally ‘mindless’) says Paul, but to understand what the will of the Lord is (Eph. 5.17).”

That’s exactly right.  The Christian life doesn’t need to be a constant, subjective, and often frustrating attempt to step into God’s will.  We don’t need to treat scripture like a lottery system (in John Newton’s terms) and hope for some single random verse to spark a prompting.  We have God’s revealed will in the Old and New Testaments.  Our duty is not to pry into God’s secret will, but know his revealed will, both the law and the gospel, praying for the Spirit’s help in applying the word and giving us wisdom to make those tough choices in life.  We know the first Q/A of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, but we shouldn’t divorce it from the second Q/A!

In summary, instead of saying “God really spoke to my heart and told me…” we need to say this: “I prayed, read through God’s commandments and his promises, asked a few friends, and these things helped me decide to take that job on the other side of town instead of move to another state.

By the way, I highly recommend Ferguson’s book I quoted (pages 34-36): Discovering God’s Will.  In fact, since it is inexpensive, get two and give one to the next person who tells you that God has been prompting him to do something obviously unbiblical (and probably quite foolish).

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Feelings and Emotions

 One characteristic of modern Western Christianity is the focus on feelings and emotions.  Many people gauge their faith by their feelings; they also judge worship based on how it makes them feel.  The former can lead to depression (i.e. if you don’t feel saved maybe you’re not).  The latter can lead to superficial emotionalism divorced from doctrine (i.e. worship becomes a matter of getting a good feeling usually based on ambiguous emotional songs).  Lloyd Jones has a good word on this.

“Avoid the mistake of concentrating overmuch on your feelings.  Above all, avoid the terrible error of making them central.  Now I am never tired of repeating this because I find so frequently that this is a cause of stumbling.  Feelings are never meant to take the first place, they are never meant to be central.  If you put them there you are of necessity doomed to be unhappy, because you are not following the order that God himself has ordained.  Feelings are always the result of something else, and how anyone who has ever read the Bible can fall into that particular error passes my comprehension.”

“The Psalmist has put it in the 34th Psalm.  He says: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good.’  You will never see until you have tasted; you will not know it, you will not feel it until you have tried it.  That is something that is constantly emphasized everywhere in Scripture.  After all, what we have in the Bible is truth; it is not an emotional stimulus, it is not something primarily concerned to give us a joyful experience.  It is primarily truth, and truth is addressed to the mind, God’s supreme gift to man; and it is as we apprehend and submit ourselves to the truth that the feelings follow.  I must never ask myself in the first instance: What do I feel about this.  The first question is, do I believe it?  Do I accept it, has it gripped me?”

“Very well, that is what I regard as perhaps the most important rule of all [in fighting spiritual depression], that we must not concentrate overmuch on our feelings.  Do not spend too much time feeling your own pulse taking your own spiritual temperature, do not spend too much time analyzing your feelings.  That is the high road to morbidity.”

Well said.  Emotions come and go like the tide; feelings wax and wane like the sun.  The truth of the gospel, however, is constant truth.  Jesus died and rose again to save sinners.  This is an objective, historical, unchangeable truth, not an inner subjective feeling.  Once again in the words of Lloyd Jones: “We are never told anywhere in Scripture that we are saved by our feelings; we are told that we are saved by believing.”

The above quote can be found in Spiritual Depression, pp. 114-116.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

Anthropomorphites, Audius, and Mormons

 In the broader context of the early church there was a group of people called the anthropomorphites who took the Bible “literally” which led them to believe and teach that God has a body.  Since the Bible talks about God’s right hand, his footsteps, his eyes, (etc.) they thought that God was some sort of majestic and divine giant.  Audius was a prominent leader of this group, therefore sometimes the anthropomorphites are called Audians. 

Cyril (d. 444), Jerome (d. 420), and many other early orthodox Christian leaders were quick to condemn the group for this heresy, which opened the door to a host of other heresies.  For example, if God had a body he could not be omnipresent nor could he be simple (simplicitas Dei; without parts or composition) both of which the Bible clearly does teach.  If God had a body, he would be subject to time; he would be contingent and part of creation – all of which the Bible clearly does not teach.  The modern-day Audians include Latter Day Saints (Mormons) who say that ”the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:22).  There is nothing new under the sun.

So what do we do we make of the parts of the Bible that speak of God’s eyes, hands, feet, etc.?  Well, we view the Bible for what it is: God’s word to fallen, sinful humans – for us and our salvation.  God doesn’t speak to humans in “God-language,” but in “human-language.”  This means he accommodates himself to us by using our language - words and concepts we can understand.  I like how Herman Bavinck stated this.  He put it in the category of God’s grace towards sinners.

“If God were to speak to us in a divine language, not a creature would understand him.  But what spells out his grace is the fact that from the moment of creation God stoops down to his creatures, speaking and appearing to them in human fashion.  This is why all the names by which God calls himself and allows us to call him are derived from earthly and human relations.” (H. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics II.100)

The church fathers realized this too.  Frances Young summarizes Ephrem the Syrian’s (b. 306) views on accommodation.

“It is only because of God’s condescension and accommodation to the human level that we can speak of God at all.  Ephrem offers as an analogy an amusing picture of someone trying to teach a parrot to talk and hiding behind a mirror so that the parrot imagines it is talking to one of its own kind; that is the kind of thing God did, bending down from on high and acquiring our own habits from us.  God clothed the divine self in metaphors: scripture speaks us of God’s ears to teach us that God listens to us, of God’s eyes to show us that God sees us.”  (F. Young, From Nicaea to Chalcedon, p. 182)

This is a basic teaching of Christianity: the eternal, infinite, omniscient, and omnipresent invisible God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – graciously adapted his communication to the level of our understanding.  Though we cannot fully comprehend him, we can apprehend him through his word, which is able to give us sufficient knowledge and faith for salvation.

shane lems

The Pope’s Second Hand Junk

 The following are words from the last few minutes of an address R. C. Sproul gave to the 2008 graduating class of Westminster Seminary California. 

“[In a sermon late in his life, Luther] wondered, why is it that [despite gospel preaching] people are still spending their money on indulgences and on what Luther called the Pope’s second-hand junk [i.e. relics].  He said, the Pope is like a decoy duck, sitting on a pond with a great bag of tricks, seducing people with this nonsense.  He wondered why it is that people ignore the Word of God and exchange it for Joseph’s pants.”

“…What relevance does that have for us today?  We don’t see the evangelical church of our day rushing to depositories of sacred relics.  Nobody’s looking for Joseph’s pants.  Rather we have invested our time, our energy, and our money in more contemporary ways to improve the gospel.  We look to programs, to Madison Avenue methodologies, to entertainment, to pop psychology, even to the establishment of Starbucks in the church to improve the gospel.”

“Why do we do this?  I think people in the church today are looking for exactly what they were looking for in sixteenth-century Germany.  They went to Trier, they went to Aachen, they went to these relics because they believed the relics had power.  Every pastor wants to have a powerful ministry.  And so we look to the latest program, to the latest method to give us a powerful ministry, forgetting where the Lord God omnipotent has put the power the in the first place.”

“In the first chapter of Romans, Paul introduces himself as a slave of God, one who’s called to be an apostle, and for what mission is he set apart?  For the gospel of God.  IF we look at that text carefully, we will see that what Paul says is that he has not been consecrated to preach a gospel about God, but rather the text means that it is the gospel that belongs to God.  It’s God’s gospel.”

“We will inevitably be tempted by decoy ducks on the pond to seduce us into thinking that we can improve upon the power that is in the gospel.  It is, however, our task to diligently and faithfully preach the Word of God, which Word he has empowered and has promised will never return unto him void.  We don’t need anything more.  We can’t improve on that in any manner.”

This excellent address can be found on pages 188-191 of Always Reformed.

shane lems

Is Anybody Wrong?

 J. C. Ryle wrote this around 150 years ago (though it could have been written yesterday):

“We live in an age when men profess to dislike dogmas and creeds, and are filled with a morbid dislike to controversial theology.  He who dares to say of one doctrine that ‘it is true’ and of another that ‘it is false’ must expect to be called narrow-minded and uncharitable, and to lose the praise of man.” 

“There is a general tendency to free thought and free inquiry in these latter days…there is a wide-spread desire to appear charitable and liberal-minded: many seem half ashamed of saying that anyone can be in the wrong.”

“There is a quantity of half-truth taught by the modern false teachers: they are incessantly using Scriptural terms and phrases in an unscriptural sense.  …There is a silly readiness in every direction to believe everybody who talks cleverly, lovingly, and earnestly, and a determination to forget that Satan is often ‘transformed into an angel of light’ (2 Cor. 2:14).  There is a wide-spread gullibility among professing Christians: every heretic who tells his story plausibly is sure to be believed, and everybody who doubts him is called a persecutor and a narrow-minded man.”

Those are some loaded phrases.  I’ve run into Christians who will tolerate anything and everything in attempt to keep everyone happy.  It seems as if no one can be actually wrong in our culture.  Ryle puts it this way: “Many people will put up with anything in religion, if they may only have a quiet life.  They are possessed with a morbid desire to keep the peace, and make all things smooth and pleasant, even though it be at the expense of the truth.”

Here’s part of Ryle’s answer.

“I believe that to maintain this pure truth [of the gospel] in the church men should be ready to make any sacrifice, to hazard peace, to risk dissension, and run the chance of division.  They should no more tolerate false doctrine than they would tolerate sin.  …Peace without truth is false peace; it is the very peace of the devil.  Unity without the gospel is a worthless unity; it is the very unity of hell.”

These quotes are taken from chapters 5 and 6 of J. C. Ryle’s Warnings to the Churches (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1967).

shane lems