Category: Evangelism

Very short but inspiring.

I had a discussion recently w/ some peers on the whole Head, Heart, Hands thing. There was a consensus reached among them that one could start w/ any of the three and end up arriving at all three. I disagreed and disagree. I kept insisting w/ my friends that this is a trichotomy that makes no sense for if we think God’s thoughts after Him (Head) the heart (emotions) & hands (service) will follow like heat and light follow fire. There is no need to pursue Christian emotion (heart) or Christian duty (hands), for when we are thinking God’s thoughts after them these will inescapably follow. If they don’t follow then we aren’t thinking God’s thoughts after Him.

A counter example was raised using the hypothetical person who has a great deal of “head knowledge” but does not serve his fellow man. The solution for this man, it was offered, was that he needed to jump in to some Christian duty. However, can it honestly be said that a person who has “head knowledge” and has either no passion for Christ or service unto Christ really has knowledge? I would contend that our hypothetical person has a desperate need to know Christ if his “knowing” Christ yields no passion or service. The problem of this hypothetical person isn’t that they have “head knowledge” it is that they don’t know Christ, and launching them into some kind of Christian service or urging them to have proper Christian emotions is not going to fix what is wrong with their Christianity.

Thinking Christianly always results in proper affections and rigorous duty. If it doesn’t then one isn’t thinking Christianly. The cure for the person who is stone cold emotionally is not to get them to gin up their emotions. The cure for moribund affections is to know the Christ of the Scriptures. How could anybody be without religious affections who genuinely conversant with their sin and misery and the deliverance they has been granted by Christ? How could anyone not have compassion on people who does not know how much compassion Christ daily has for them? A proper heart disposition is impossible apart from the mind being tutored by Christ, but if the mind is tutored by Christ the heart will always be right. It is not possible to seek Christian emotions apart from the mind for emotions are but the residue of a mind properly oriented. If one has the right mind one will have the right emotions. If one doesn’t think Christianly then it is a guarantee that they will feel pagan(ly).

Christian duty (hands) can not be Christian unless those hands are first instructed by a Christian mind. Lot’s of good works might be done but if those works don’t have the mind of Christ behind them they are just so much chaff. This needs to be articulated repeatedly given the great problem the Church currently has with the Social Gospel. Many people tend to think that if they do good deeds they are Christian. Now, doing good deeds is better than doing bad deeds but good deeds are only genuinely good when they are directed by the mind of Christ.

This idea of majoring on the feelings or the doing absent majoring on thinking rationally is what has led the church to to value the “experiential” and the “emotive” above all else. Currently Christianity is flooded and defined by Pentecostalism and Charismatic-ism. This is a consequence of people not valuing the life of the Christian mind and the result is that the church in the West is irrational, insipid, and irrelevant. Certainly the experiential and the emotive have a important and significant place in the Christian life but the genuine articles will never be reached apart from the a Christian mind that learns Christ by thinking God’s thoughts after Him.

I am reminded of this when I hear of Reformed Churches explicitly teach that the heart is more important than the head and where Pastor’s believe that much of Christian truth is paradox and should be considered “mystery.” I am reminded of this when I constantly hear that “what is important is a right heart and not right doctrine,” as if a heart could ever be right absent of right Christian doctrine. I am reminded of this when it seems that the people who have the most difficult time finding a Church home are people who are interested in prioritizing the life of the mind.

The church is in desperate need of being sanctified and set apart unto Christ. This will never happen if the Church doesn’t once again return to the life of the mind. Not the life of the mind that leaves people cold and sterile in their faith but the life of the mind that floods them with Christian affections and emotions and gives them a mad desire and zeal to do all that they do to the glory of God.

If we horizontalize this and put in terms of human relationships it certainly is the case that I don’t approach my wife the way a Scientist approaches the object under his microscope but neither do I expect to increasingly love my wife unless I increasingly know my wife. Fitting emotions for my wife and duty towards my wife are dependent upon me knowing her better and better.

In the end the head must be right for the head is the engine that pulls the cars of emotion and duty. Orthodoxy ALWAYS leads to orthopraxy. Where it doesn’t the problem is the absence of orthodoxy. One can only fix the absence of orthopraxy by the re-establishing of orthodoxy.

Scripture teaches that this is eternal life “to KNOW God, the only true God and Jesus Christ who thou has sent.”

Scripture teaches,

This is what the LORD says:
“Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom
or the strong man boast of his strength
or the rich man boast of his riches,

24 but let him who boasts boast about this:
that he understands and knows me,

Scripture admonishes us to have this mind in us that was in Christ Jesus. Scripture teaches that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. Scripture admonishes us to take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. Proverbs is a whole book dedicated to getting wisdom.

Now certainly, emotions and duty are absolutely necessary but they only come where the mind is been set ablaze by Christ.

Today I had lunch with a Missionary / Pastor who spent three years in Honk Kong Pastoring a Church there. He had several fascinating insights concerning the Chinese Church and Chinese culture, one of which really caught my attention.

He was saying that the Chinese government desire the moralism that is found in Judeo-Christianity in order to support their turn to capitalism. He said that many of them have come to learn that Communism does not give the moral underpinnings that is necessary to successfully pull off a expanding Capitalism.

However he also suggested that Chinese government officials realize that this is a dangerous game they are playing. While on one hand they desire a Judeo-Christian moralism, he also said that on the other hand they also understand that the Bible is a anti-statist book.

When he said this I was dumbfounded. Here he is testifying that Chinese Communist government officials understand that the Bible is a anti-statist book and I can’t seem to get large swaths of Reformed people in these united States to understand that the Bible is a anti-statist book. Quite to the contrary large swaths of the Reformed community seem to either think that Christianity can walk hand and hand with statism, or that Christianity doesn’t care one way or another about centralized government. The Chinese Communist government officials understand the Bible better than American Christian ministers and laymen.

Other interesting insights from his conversation were his explaining how many Chinese have completely lost categories and vocabulary to talk about an extra-mundane supernatural God. He says that for 60 years the Communists have beat into their heads that there is no God and so now they have lost the capacity and ability to talk God. He was not denying that the these sense of divine has been lost but only that the ability to communicate that sense has been largely lost. He noted that being back in America he is seeing the same thing in many “post-Christian” Americans.

He noted that in one of his studies with College age Americans he was teaching on God cutting covenant with Abraham. He was trying to communicate God’s goodness in making covenant with Abraham. He said that several of the students said that they, “didn’t want anything to do with a God who cut a heifer and birds in half.” I thought when he said that, “man, I need to get out more often.” If they are offended when God cuts a cow and birdies in half how much more are their heads going to spend when they get to the part where God puts His Son on a Cross?

Can it really be the case that the West has deteriorated so far that it will have nothing to do with a God who cuts cows and birdies in half because that is mean?

Pray for China. Pray for the West. If we completely throw off Christianity we will enter into a Dark Age the like which mankind has never known.

The following excerpts are pulled from this link,

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33807907/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/

The shooter in the Fort Hood incident, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s exchanged e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, once a spiritual leader at a mosque in suburban Virginia where Maj. Hasan worshipped. Those e-mails indicate that the troubled military psychiatrist came to the attention of the authorities long before last Thursday’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but left him in his post.

Mr. Awlaki, an American citizen born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, wrote on Monday on his English-language website that Mr. Hasan was “a hero.” The cleric said, “He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

He added, “The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

At another site we learn,

Several former colleagues have come forward to say Nidal would tell them: “I am a Muslim first and an American second”.

The reason I note these snippets are as follows,

1.) Mr. Awlaki, Major Nidal’s former cleric insists that the inconsistency of a Muslim fighting against Muslims is what pushed Major Nidal to resolve the contradiction in the direction of killing Americans at Ft. Hood instead of killing Muslims in Afghanistan.

Major Nidal understood there was a contradiction between being a Muslim and being an American soldier in a war killing Muslims. Now, what Major Nidal did was reprehensible and justice will only be served if he gets the death penalty but it does cause one to ask why American Christians in military can not see about themselves what Nidal saw about himself, and that is that they proclaim to be adherents to a faith but they are in an organization dedicated to snuffing out the faith they say they adhere to. Christians by being in the US military are supporting an institution (US government) that is committed to snuffing out the Christian faith. I’m saddened that Christians can serve in an army that is a instrument of a government that is at war with the individual Military Personnel’s own Christian people, without the slightest pangs to their Christian consciences.

The truth of the matter is that most American Christians don’t feel the contradictions that Nidal felt because they have compartmentalized their faith. For example, did any Christian serviceman feel the contradictions between being a Christian and bombing into oblivion Christian Serbia? For example, did any Christian servicemen feel the contradiction between their involvement in Iraq and the reality that that involvement led to the necessity of the indigenous Iraqi Christian community having to flee from Iraq for their safety due to the oppression they were suffering — an oppression that had official US government sanction? For example, did any Christian servicemen feel the contradiction between serving in Afghanistan and knowing that their Chaplain corps were destroying Bibles so that their usage wouldn’t be offensive to their host Muslim country? Instead the American mindset is, “Jesus saves my soul and that being so it doesn’t matter that I am one of those that the State uses to implement its humanist agenda in order to build an anti-Christ globalistic tower of Babel.”

2.) Is it really so surprising that Major Nidal would say, “I am a Muslim first and an American second?” What would we expect any true son of Allah to say? I would hope that Christians in the military would say, “I am a Christian first and an American second.” The difference is, is that Nidal saw the contradiction between being an American and being a Muslim while most Christians, being imbued with a kind of “Civil religion Christianity,” never pause to consider the things that Nidal considered.

I shouldn’t have to write next what I’m going to write, but just so as to ward off the kooks, I’m not saying that Christians in the military should start shooting up the place like Maj. Nidal did. I am saying that Christians should think long and hard about joining the US military as it is the enforcement arm of a government that is four square in favor of building up a anti-Christ globalist humanist Kingdom.

It’s just a shame that Maj. Nidal didn’t have a Muslim version of R2Kt that he could have used to resolve the contradictions between being a Muslim and being an American. A Muslim version of R2Kt would have allowed to be at peace with being Muslim while acting in a non Muslim fashion as he followed the magistrates orders.

Periodically, I have to reminds myself just what a minority Reformed people are. I need to remind myself because sometimes I tend to think that all my posting and argumentation matters. The Reformed world is a backwater pond to the ocean of Christian expression. The current ocean of America Christianity is Pentecostalism. And so going to a Pentecostal revival service reminds me of the smallness of my voice and the smallness of the Reformed voice as compared to the larger voice of Pentecostalism that is what most people hear when they hear the voice of Christianity in their heads.

Pentecostalism in one form or another has crept in seemingly to a great number of historically non-Reformed denominations. For example, while on Holiday I saw the influence of Pentecostalism on the Church I attended when I lived in Maine. There was the ubiquitous pentecostal praise music accompanied by the swaying hand raised attendees. In the denomination I serve Pentecostalism, in its “Third wave” expression, received an official favorable report. There are Charismatic Catholics and tongue speaking Lutherans.

Anyway, having said all that I attended a Pentecostal revival service this evening that was featuring Steve Hill who was one of the main actors in the Brownsville Revival. Several years ago I did some research and reading on Brownsville as well as Toronto Airport and the Kansas City Prophets. As such I thought I would go to hear and see Steve Hill.

The service was just about what you would expect. It opened with 45 minutes of a band playing contemporary praise choruses. The music was simple, repetitive, and as with most of these services there was the ability to reach crescendos at just the moment when the joint voices reach their fevered prayer pitch in the congregation. I’ve always wondered how they manage to do that.

Steve Hill’s message was random and scattered. His methodology was entertainment Oprah like oriented and was filled with personal anecdotes and story telling. He had a real ability to connect with the audience. He told stories about how when he was doing in ministry in Chili he had the foot traffic in a community park and the auto traffic that went by the community park come to a complete and total standstill because the spirit fell on the park. He noted how he went from stopped car to stopped car to tell the drivers and passengers that what they were all sensing and feeling was the Holy Spirit and that they needed to repent. He noted how one business woman stood stock still for four hours straight because the Holy Ghost was upon her. The emphasis fell on conversion by Spirit’s work over conversion by proclamation of the Gospel though Steve did mention that he told people they must repent.

Steve started the message by showing a USA Today piece that reported coming hate laws speech in America. Steve suggested that the way that the only way America can avoid coming hate laws that will stifle Christian speech is for Americans to get saved. He spent about 5 minutes on sin and 3 minutes on Jesus dying for sinners and then he went on to what people need to have in order to succeed. (Hey, I said it was random.) He noted that his listeners need to avoid negative people and negative people were defined as anybody who doubts how continuing revelation comes to individuals. Clearly the emphasis on this part of the service was the validity of current expressions of gifts, signs and wonders. This was underscored by his insistence that we need the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. This power is known by having supernatural occurrences in our lives.

Steve pushed for the necessity of an encounter with Jesus. I think he was emphasizing the personal relationship with Jesus necessity. It reminded me of something I read recently from Gordon Clark challenging the way Evangelicals have typically talked about a “personal relationship with Jesus.”

Steve gave us the Pentecostal Word of the Lord routine. He started the service by telling us that someone here is ________ and God told me to tell you this evening that _______. He informed us that the Jesus died for everybody. He told us that God was much more exacting in the Old Testament than He is today suggesting that OT penology isn’t for today.

The most important part of the service though was the altar time. Steve gave a typical altar call and then proceeded to slay people in the Spirit. Women were falling left and right, caught by the assigned catchers. The air was filled with the sounds of “heavenly languages.”

Somewhere in the mix we had an offering where Steve said with a straight face, “The small bill is of the Devil and the big bills are of God.”

On the positive side I really believe that God uses Pentecostals in the way of common grace. Pentecostalism does a wonderful job of supporting traditional Christian morality. It is long on emphasizing certain behavior patterns even if it is short on building a sound theological foundation under those behavior patterns.

In the end though it remains far to prone to measuring truth by means of emotion and experience. It remains far to little concerned with the life of the mind. Because of that its adherents are far to easily swayed by every wind of doctrine that blows. Were real Reformation to visit our country one sign of it would be Pentecostals becoming a little less existential and a little more Word oriented.