Sanctification Confusion Clarified

Transcript

GR 2237
05/10/2020
Sanctification Confusion Clarified
Romans 1-8; Selected Verses
Gil Rugh

What I want to do together this evening is review briefly where we have been in Romans. We’ve come to the end of another section with the end of chapter 8, and then I want to overview some different views that have confronted the church and continue to confront the church on the doctrine of sanctification. I think this is an area of confusion that makes its way into evangelical churches in subtle ways and undermines the clear, biblical teaching.

So, let’s start with just reviewing the first eight chapters of the book of Romans briefly. We’ll put up the outline which began with an introduction in the first seventeen verses of chapter 1, which gave a compact presentation and it will be unfolded through the rest of the book of Romans. Then the first major section we titled Condemnation, where Paul, under the direction of the Spirit, from chapter 1, verse 18 through chapter 3, verse 20, made clear that all, Jew and Gentile alike, are under the condemnation of their sin. Paul could conclude that section in chapter 3, with those verses coming down, 19 and 20, that I have shown that all, Jew and Gentile alike, are under condemnation.

Then he moved to talk about how condemned sinners can be considered righteous by a holy God, and we moved to the section on Justification with chapter 3, verse 21 and it went through chapter 5, verse 21. There Paul unfolded so clearly, particularly picking up with chapter 3, verse 21 through the rest of chapter 3, that the work of Christ is to be our substitute, to take the penalty for our sin. He illustrated that could only be applied to us by faith. In chapter 4, using Abraham particularly as the example. Then chapter 5 began by saying there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. When we place our faith in Christ we are absolved of all guilt. The righteousness that God provided by His death on the cross is applied to us, the very righteousness of God. And then that chapter moved to the last part of it comparing the first Adam, Adam at the beginning of creation in the Garden of Eden and his one act of sin which brought condemnation on the human race, and then the one act of Christ, of His death on the cross to provide salvation by the payment of the penalty of sin, to absolve us from guilt and enable God to credit us with His righteousness.

This naturally flowed into the next major section, which we’ve called Sanctification, and that covers all of chapters 6, 7, and 8. If you have your Bible to look at chapter 6, that’s foundational. What’s clear in the section on Justification was that it was the death of Christ and our identification with Christ and His death, through faith, that enabled God to declare us forgiven and credit us with righteousness. Now in chapter 6 as we move, how are we going to live now that we have experienced the salvation that God has provided? Chapter 6 opened, “Are we to continue in sin…?” God’s grace is great, the death of Christ covers all my sin, past, present, and future, so now I can continue to love in sin without fear of consequences. “May it never be!” King James says, “God forbid!” The word God is not used there, but they’re trying to give the force. ME GENOITO! It’s inconceivable! That cannot be a possibility. We died to sin. “…How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” That’s the question at the end of verse 2.

That’s the foundation for living our new life in Christ. What we call the doctrine of sanctification. The word saint, the word holy, and the word sanctify all come from the same basic Greek word HAGIOSMOS. You’re set apart from sin. God is perfectly holy because He’s perfectly set apart from sin. We are His saints, or His holy ones because through Christ we have been set apart from sin for God as His own possession. In chapter 6 he unfolded the reality that we were identified with Christ spiritually, when we placed our faith in Him. We were considered as having died when He died. Remember Peter wrote, He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. That’s what Paul is saying with a little different wording here. He calls it “…baptized into His death”, identified with Him in His death. It’s not water baptism here. It’s the baptism of the Spirit. 1 Corinthians 12:13, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…” Identified with Christ, so God can look at us as having died when Christ died, because Christ was taking our place. Buried with Him, but not left buried. Raised with Christ to new life. Romans 6, verse 4 said, “…in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” That’s the doctrine of sanctification.

How do we now live as those who have been the recipients of God’s grace in salvation? We walk in newness of life, because we have been made new. “…if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature… (a new creation).” Paul wrote that in 2 Corinthians 5:17. So, now it’s a matter of walking in our new life. And it’s a certainty, that there’s no such thing as entering in God’s salvation and having your penalty paid by being identified with Christ’s death on the cross, but not receiving new life. We are being identified with Him in His resurrection. As Romans 6, verse 5 says, “For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.”

That doesn’t mean that we live a perfect life and never sin, but we are no longer under the control and domination of sin, and the reality is that I never have to sin. Sometimes I choose to, and the blood of Christ cleanses, and we’ve talked about that. “Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him…” And it goes on. This is the Christian life; this is the package of salvation. It’s not pieced out. Well, I’ll give you this part and then if you earn it, I’ll give you the next part. Which is what a lot of what is offered as “Christian” is presented today. We’re saved by grace and we’re kept by our works. That’s contradicted by what is said in Romans 6. So, the point is, verse 11, “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”

Now I am in a relationship with God and the Spirit of God dwells in me and I can live a new life. “…do not let sin reign in your mortal body…” verse 12. “…and do not go on presenting the members of your body (the parts of your body) to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead...For sin shall not be master over you…” We’re not under the law. Well, does that mean now, since we’re not under the Mosaic Law, we’re free to do what we want and sin as we please? No! Verse 15, “…Shall we sin because we are not under the law…? May it never be!” You can’t go back to that old situation in which some of the Jews wanted to do, and they wanted to encourage the Gentiles to do that. Verse 18, “…and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness.” And then the end of that chapter keeps reminding, at the end of verse 19, “…so now present your members (the parts of your body) as slaves to righteousness...” Which is part of our sanctification. We’re being brought more and more into conformity with God’s holy character. Down in verse 22, “But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God…” You now produce fruit, resulting in sanctification, and it will end with life in His presence.

Coming to chapter 7, where he showed that the Mosaic Law has been dealt with. He just touched on that in chapter 6 but expands it because Paul was constantly dealing with Jews who professed to believe in Jesus as the Messiah, but wanted to constantly say it wasn’t enough, and now you must keep the Mosaic Law. He is showing them, no! And they wanted to have the Gentiles keep the Law. The church at Rome is mostly a Gentile church, but these Judaizers, as they’re known, these teachers would come in and say, That’s great! You’ve trusted Christ. We’re Jews, we have too, but you’re not complete. You need to observe the Law. We have some churches that teach that today, that the Law is the way of sanctification. That is often a teaching of reformed churches, as we’ll broadly identify them. That we are under the Mosaic Law, we do keep it, or you’re antinomian. There are commandments, rules, laws, the law of Christ as we now call it. Now there are things we are to do, and not to do, because we are new in Christ. That was chapter 7.

When you come to chapter 8, the Holy Spirit is now clearly brought into the picture in a fuller, clearer way, and He is mentioned repeatedly in this chapter. He is the one who has operated to identify us with Christ and His death, His burial, and His resurrection. We have been made new by that regenerating power of the Spirit when we place our faith in Christ. He’s the “Spirit of life”, as in verse 2. Now we walk not according to the flesh, and those old desires and the old man as we saw in chapter 6, because we’re a new person. We’re a new creature. We walk according to the Spirit. He is there to direct us, to control us, to enable us. If you’re still putting your mind on the flesh and still serving the old person and sin, and are controlled by that, you’ve never experienced the transforming power of the Spirit of God. Verse 7, “…the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”

That’s the contrast between a believer and an unbeliever, and that’s why we do not have reformation projects as a church where we want to help the unbeliever clean up his life and then hopefully, as he’s cleaning up his life, he’ll find out he needs to trust Christ. Cleaning up his life is not an answer! He can’t do it, and he can do nothing to please God. But verse 9, “However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you.” Well, see, there may be some Christians who don’t have the Spirit of God dwelling in them. No! Because the rest of the verse says if the Spirit of Christ doesn’t dwell in you, you don’t belong to Him. You see this happens, it’s part of the package of salvation, that work of the Spirit resulted also in the Spirit taking up residence in our life. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. He dwells in you. That’s the blessing we have, so now we live by His power. Verse 13, “…but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” It’s by His power, and I no longer use the parts of my body to do sinful things. “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.” Verse 14. We’re God’s children and that leads us to the hope of the final realization of the completion of what God has begun in us—our salvation. When we experience the transformation of this physical body, glorified. And we’ll pick that up and we’ll see some of that as we move on in Romans.

This is the doctrine of sanctification. The Spirit operates on our behalf, there can be no condemnation to us, that’s the last part of chapter 8 that we looked at. The Spirit of God intercedes for us, He works all things in our lives for our good and God’s glory. Even the things that we would think of at the time are negative, but “…God causes all things to work together for good…” We say, I don’t see any good that can come out of this, tragedies that come, difficulties. But our confidence is that God is sovereignly in control. And no one can bring a charge against us, including Satan himself, who accuses the brethren. As verse 33 says, “Who will bring a charge against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies; who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died, yes, rather who was raised…” He intercedes for us, He’s there to say, I died for them. That sin has been paid for. So, the chapter ended. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is ours in Christ Jesus. There’s a beautiful, complete picture, but sometimes believers forget.

That’s why I want to take a little time to walk through some of the things that come into the church, that have come in, and we as a church have been impacted by some of this directly. Others are just sometimes commonly taught out there. We want to be aware while these teachings are fresh in our mind, what is the biblical doctrine of sanctification? Did we get everything when we placed our faith in Christ, or is there a second step? Did we get one part of the package but the other part, the power to live the life, and so on, is there a second step? Glorification is the final, but that’s not something we do. That’s something God will accomplish in us as a result of His promise. We’re looking forward to that, but we’re in the process of being more and more conformed to the character of God as we mature in our new life in Christ as a new creation.

Then we will someday experience the finality of that when these bodies are resurrected or transformed and brought completely in conformity with what God has provided for us in Christ. The error on sanctification can be pervasive. I’ve selected out just a number, some I’ll just mention briefly, others I’ll read from maybe a certain section of the book. We won’t go into depth on any of them because some of them we’ve already covered in depth at other times. But I just want to point out the conflict you have with Scripture in some of these areas of the doctrine of salvation, and it’s an area that we keep confronting because it appeals, some of these, to believers. That there’s something more you’re missing. That there’s something additional.

I’ve shared that one of these is higher life theology, sometimes known as holiness theology. That two steps are taught that you have been saved from your sins. But now you need that second step of God’s grace in your life where the Spirit of God will take control of you and you will be moved to a newer, higher level. And now you can live the higher life. Going with that would be teaching on abiding theology by Andrew Murray and some of those in that realm. Some of the stuff he’s written is okay, but there is misunderstanding of abiding. I had some interaction in past years with those who thought that the problem in my teaching is that I didn’t have clarity on what it meant to abide. But I think their misunderstanding is they didn’t understand the doctrine of abiding.

Sometimes a view is that some Christians are abiding and some are not, and when you sin you don’t abide and you need to be moved to that other level, to another step where that is the realm in which you live, abiding in Christ. But that happens, and we don’t have time to go into that and it’s not necessary. But the biblical doctrine is that Christ abides in me and I abide in Him. We saw if the Spirit of Christ is not in you, you don’t belong to Him. Jesus said, I abide in you and you abide in Me. We’ve talked about that earlier in Romans, so there’s not two kinds of Christians. Every Christian is an abiding Christian. That’s the realm in which he lives. That’s what the word abide means. It’s an intransitive verb there. To abide, that’s where you live. That’s where you dwell.

This is the new realm, that’s what we’ve been talking about. You’ve died with Christ, now you’re in a new realm. You’re not the old person. You want to be careful when you read this. Well, you need to learn to abide. I read articles on this, there are books that have been written where Christians give their testimony. I struggled in the Christian life but when I learned what it meant to abide, that brought me to a new level and a new realm. Some of that, you read it and you wonder if they were saved before they knew what it meant to abide. But they just are coming up to when they’re saved. We don’t have time, but when you go through the use of the word abide in the New Testament, it’s clear. If you’re not abiding in Christ, you don’t abide in Him. He’s not abiding in you and it’s always a mutual abiding. I abide in Him; He abides in me. That is a permanent, unbreakable relationship.

Charismatic theology is another step in that, another form of that. These all overlap because they all involve a second step. You’re missing something, you haven’t gone beyond. There’s more than you received when you trusted Christ. Charismatic theology tied it to speaking in tongues. That became the identifying thing. That marked it off. When I was in a holiness college, theology, and churches, it was just a matter of experiencing the second work of grace. And sometimes it would just overtake the people in the service we were in, and they would just break out in the service while the preacher was speaking and put their hands up. I sat next to people where this happened, and they say, Oh, the Lord… when they go on in English. But people would say, Oh, praise the Lord! They’ve got the Spirit! And it was a second work of grace and now they can live on a ‘higher level’ while you’re sitting there and thinking, Boy, here I am. Dead wood! I sat in a service one time and thought, I’m not going to go forward if I don’t see biblically that this is what I should do. Marilyn and I were visiting a service and when all was said and done, I think we were the only two sitting in the seats that hadn’t gone forward to get this. What are you going to do? You understand you’ve received everything when you placed your faith in Christ. That doesn’t mean you aren’t going to mature; you are. But that’s a process of growth. It’s not getting something else, something additional, something more, more of the Spirit.

An area that we had to deal with was Christian psychology, that whole area of not knowing how to deal with sin in your life. There are a number of people with that; we dealt with Larry Crabb’s writings. He taught for a while at the seminary that I graduated from, after I graduated. When this kind of teaching comes in, it is divisive. It’s dividing. He’s very critical. I went through some of his stuff the last couple of weeks. As I reviewed some of these books, I didn’t reread them all, but they’re marked, so I just read what I marked. He’s very critical of those who think just teaching the Bible and learning the Scripture and applying that to your life will make you what you need to be. Let me read you a couple of statements. Some of you go back that far to where we dealt with some of these things. What Larry Crabb taught was the Bible is good, and we need to be in the Bible, and this is where sanctification can become confusing. Much of what is said in these books is fine, it’s good, we’d agree. It’s the error. He called those who believe that the Scripture is enough the “nothing-but-erists.” He gets very critical here of the “strict Biblicists.” He thinks you have to go to psychology and learn more about the inner workings of the person and wed that with the Scripture, and then you’ll be able to deal with sin. So, churches and teachers and preachers who are just bringing the word of God are not helping people. In fact, they could be making their problem worse.

But he’s very comfortable going to Sigmund Freud. So, he says, and no context here, let me just read you some excerpts. “Freud is rightly credited with introducing the whole idea of psychodynamics to the modern mind.” Now, psycho-, psychology, comes from the Greek word psyche. In Greek you pronounce the ‘p’ because there are no silent consonants; you pronounce the ‘p.’ In English we drop the sound of the ‘p.’ But that’s the soul, so he brings in the study of the soul. How are we going to learn about the immaterial part of man from Sigmund Freud? Read anything in his biographies, and so on. Carl Jung, sometimes you feel like you need a bath after reading what they’re writing and the life they lived.

“Freud is rightly credited with introducing the whole idea of psychodynamics to the modern mind. The term refers to psychological forces with the personality, usually unconscious.” And that’s where that comes from; the unconscious. You hear people joke, oh that must have been my unconscious, and they’ll say something. They call it the Freudian slip. He introduced that. “Forces within the personality that we’re not even aware of...” This becomes the key here. You can be a believer but not know about these, “…that have the power to cause behavioral and emotional disturbance. He taught us to regard problems as symptoms of underlying dynamic processes in the psyche.” Now wait a minute, I go to Sigmund Freud, who is as far from being believer as you can get, and I’m going to learn about the forces that are working that determine my behavior in the immaterial part of me. I think there’s something wrong here.

“I think Freud was correct on at least three counts." And you understand I’m not reading consecutively and I’m not going to tell you all that every time. “He was right when he told us that we should look beneath surface problems to hidden internal causes.” This become the key. I’ve had people come to my office, sit down, and say, Gil, I think you don’t know there are things hidden below the surface, below the layers in your life. If you will let me help you peel them back, I can help you learn more about yourself than you ever knew or could know. Well, wait a minute. That’s not biblical. He gets that from Freud. “Freud also insisted I think properly, that in order to deal effectively and thoroughly with people, one must have a rather clear understanding of how human nature functions on the inside where it is not possible to observe directly. Third, Freud was right in thinking that one necessary means of understanding other people’s dynamics is to understand your own. Fourth, it is for this reason that in most training programs, every student who wants to do psychoanalysis must first be analyzed. If the error of Freud and other dynamic theorists is not an insistence that we pay close attention to unconscious forces within personality, then what is it?” I think that we can make a case that… His disagreement with Freud is Freud doesn’t include biblical material. It’s not so much what Freud brings to it, but Freud is incomplete. Sounds like the Judaizers, doesn’t it? That’s what they want to do, that’s what all these things do. What you have is fine, but it’s not enough. That’s great, we need the Bible, we need people to teach the Bible, but you have to understand that’s not enough. And if that’s all you do, you don’t help people, you compound their problems.

This is what’s put Grace Seminary in the news. And caused John Whitcomb to get fired because he stood against this. Can you believe it? “We had a split in our church over it…” He says, “…when I argued for biblical sufficiency.” Well you see now, I thought you said the Bible wasn’t enough. Well, it is sufficient, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need other things. And it goes on. Let me read you a couple more pages. I’ll have to be careful or I’ll go all out.

“Unless we understand sin as rooted in unconscious beliefs and motives and figure out how to expose and deal with these deep forces within the personality, the church will continue to promote superficial adjustment while psychotherapists, with or without biblical foundations, will do a better job than the church of restoring troubled people to more effective functioning.” That’s Crabb’s view. “You see, when it comes down to it, if you don’t understand sin is rooted in unconscious beliefs and motives and figure out how to expose those deep forces within the personality, your church will continue to be superficial and the psychotherapists who don’t believe the Bible will do a better job of helping.”

How does this get a hold in the church? Men that I studied under, somehow got so entangled in this and the personality of this man, that they threw out the man who stood for the biblical position, and never came back. In a recent publication, they referred to how they had to clean out, but the seminary is nothing that it was. So, these things come in, they’re subtle, they sound like they’re very personal. I was involved in those issues back then, and how did he win these people over? Well, he was so personal. He won the professors over, not by theology, but by, “Come on over to our house. We’re going to have something, and I know you’re under a lot of pressure and you’ve certainly got things you’re trying to deal with, and you’re expected to be the expert, and I’d just like to be available to you.” And soon, friendships supersede theology. We dealt with that, but it doesn’t go away. Christian counseling now.

One of the Christian colleges, was going to deal away with their counseling department back when they started it, now advertises, “We have the largest Christian counseling department of any Christian school in the country.” Wait a minute. I thought you were going to deal away with that, replace it with the biblical teaching on sanctification. “Well, students didn’t want to come if we didn’t have counseling training.” All right, you get the idea. I don’t agree with that.

Another area, demon possession. We had to deal with this. Demon-possessed Christians, or demonized. They want to make a distinction. We don’t want to say demon-possessed totally; they’re demonized. The demons are so influencing them that they’re doing what the demons want. This was The Bondage Breaker by Neil Anderson. He was a professor. I don’t know that he still is. This goes back a few years, at a Christian seminary, an evangelical seminary. It’s recommended by evangelicals, and I’m not going to mention their names, but you would recognize a couple of them. He believed you could not deal with people’s problems seriously, unless you understand the working of demons. You see it comes back. Something’s wrong! The Bible alone, it won’t get you there. We need what the world offers. We need experiences. This man can tell us because, “I have firsthand experience in dealing with demons.”

Now here’s another professor at the same evangelical seminary where he taught. “Written by one actively involved in the battle for lives. This solidly biblical work reminds us of our spiritual struggle that involves more than sinful desires and psychological disorders. Evil spirit powers are waging wars against us, often undetected. Dr. Anderson unmasks their deceptive influence in our lives and guides us in the practical use of God’s means and provisions for victory.” This was written by the man who’s a professor of systematic theology at this evangelical seminary. I’m not going to read much out of here, but here’s how he starts out.

“Are you one of those Christians who lives in the quiet desperation of bondage to fear, anger, depression, habits you can’t break, thoughts or inner voices you can’t allude or sinful behavior you can’t escape? I’m not saying that every spiritual problem is the result of direct demonic activity, but you may be in bondage because you have overlooked or denied the reality of demonic powers at work in the world today. Your inheritance in Christ is the complete freedom He promises in the Scripture.” Well, is he going to take us to Romans? Oh no, no, no, no! “I’m going to take you to help you understand about demon forces.” Wait a minute. If you’re living in quiet desperation and bondage to fear, anger, depression, habits, what happened to Romans 6? Well, it’s the demons! They’re doing it.

I’m just going to read one other and then we’ll go on to some other material. “Those who say a demon cannot control an area of the believer’s life have left us with only two possible culprits for the problems we face—ourselves or God.” Well, you’ve claimed to be a believer, maybe that’s not bad. “If we blame ourselves, we feel hopeless because we can’t do anything to stop what we’re doing. If we blame God, our confidence in Him as our benevolent Father is shattered. Either way, we have no chance to gain the victory.” Remember the old black comedian whose joke line was, “the devil made me do it.” That’s Neil Anderson’s third answer. “It’s not God, it’s not you. It’s the devil. He made you do that.” Now, we don’t deny the activity of the devil, demonic activity, but as a believer, I’ve been set free. You’ve got to go to him, and he’s got a series of writings and things that take you through. “To be demonized means to be under the control of one or more demons.”

You know where this goes to, the subjectivity? Good people get caught up in this and then he’ll tell a story, and others have told similar stories. “I was talking to this woman and she’d been dealing with her immorality and she was a believer and she wanted to be free from immorality. When I was talking to her, the demon spoke to me and he speaks in this gruff voice, ‘Get away from me, you.’” Through all this, you say, is this really how we find out about demons? “So, I told that demon, ‘You get out of her now!’” This is what Christianity gets reduced to? You see how it comes, and sometimes Christians even get frustrated. And instead of coming back and saying, God, You said I’m free, You say I have the Spirit. I do not have to live there. Well, no. Maybe I need someone to help me. And then you’re going to sit there and somebody’s going to say… And I’ll sit there and try to figure out… Is this you? Maybe a demon’s making you do this. Where do I get that in Scripture? He gets it out of the gospels where there were demon-possessed people, but finding demon-possessed Christians, that’s why they get this fine line. We had an issue with this back when someone came to town and he was going to hold meetings for evangelicals and afterwards, he would have a time for Christians who might have been demonized to get set free. We can’t be part of that, but it impacts and influences Christians.

Discipleship, a place we’ve been through. This goes with Lordship salvation, discipleship. Some take the gospels and say discipleship is a second step. You are a believer in Jesus Christ, you’re a saved person, but you need to become a disciple. That means now you evaluate, and you’ve decided to take the second step. You can see it’s not much different than the holiness theology. You have to take that next step, the holiness. I’m going to be ready now to have Christ be my Lord and go all-out in unreserved commitment to follow Him. I think discipleship in the gospels is a call to salvation, it’s not a call to higher life. That’s why when you get into Acts 14, the disciples start to be called Christians because they’re followers of Christ.

We’ve been through this battle. We got put off several Christian radio stations back when we were on, because we taught Christ is Lord. That’s not a bargaining chip where I come as a sinner and say, God, I’m coming. Here are my terms. I’ll accept Your salvation, but I will not have You be Lord of my life. Wait a minute. Can you be saved? What is this? I thought you placed your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus said, Consider the cost. Don’t decide you’re going to become a follower of Mine thinking it’s just going to be all comfort. No. It’s not salvation by works. I think at the moment of our salvation, when we place our faith in Christ, that may be one of the purest times we realize I am trusting Christ. There are no strings attached. Lord, I need Your salvation. I want to place my faith in Christ.

I didn’t understand everything. If you had said, what do you think about the Theanthropic Union, Gil? I don’t think anything about it. I don’t have a clue to what you’re talking about. I believe Jesus died for me. Do you believe He’s God? Of course! Do you believe He was a man? Of course. Well, explain it. I don’t know. I’m trusting Christ. He’s the Lord. What does that mean? This was an issue, and it still is, at Dallas Seminary. I still get their theological quarterly. It may be stopping after 50 years, but this still comes up. I review books like this, and they’re on that side. How can you have a two-step process? What happened when you trusted Christ? You died with Him; you were raised with Him! Now, I need to decide, do I want to become a follower? I don’t think I want to be that committed. You see how it begins to corrupt Christianity. It’s deeper than just a sanctification issue. What is involved in salvation?

So, the extreme of this is in Zane Hodges’s, which inflamed the debate, The Gospel Under Siege. “If you’re saying when you place your faith in Christ, He’s also Lord and He has sovereignty over your life, you’ve corrupted the gospel.” He was a professor at Dallas Seminary when he wrote that. What in the world? “When you place your faith in Christ, you can become a blasphemer and a denier of doctrine. You’re still saved.” I don’t even recognize this as Christianity. I realize there are good men who hold that. I appreciate writings of men like Charles Ryrie, but it is a wrong doctrine. Wrong doctrine always catches up to you and gets worse.

The Trellis and the Vine, that is a discipleship book, is an example of it. Some were reading it, so I went through it and I have a dozen or so pages I wrote in critiquing it, but I’m not going to read those to you. Let me just read a couple pages. And all of these start out, “They’re going to help the church…” It begins, “And again, some would say it is good...” That’s the problem. The biggest danger that is done to the evangelical church comes from those who seem to be in so much agreement with us. Grace Seminary didn’t get torn apart, and John Whitcomb, who recently went home to be with the Lord, didn’t get fired because it was a clear, open false doctrine that everyone would believe. There’s enough truth there that even “good people” get confused; and once they’re entangled in it and have sort of been brought into that way of thinking, it’s like talking to a person who’s been tangled in the cults. When they’ve gone down that way of thinking, it’s hard. You take them to Scripture and it’s so clear, but they’ve been brought into a system where indeed, the devil has entrapped their minds.

That’s why I want to be careful about what I submit my mind to. This is not a game; it does involve spirit forces. I don’t want to allow the devil to influence me. So, these are going to help, and what they’re saying is “Most churches need to make a conscious shift…” This is from The Trellis and the Vine. “…away from erecting and maintaining structures and towards growing people who are disciple-making disciples of Christ.” And we say, well, we don’t want to think we’re just maintaining and building structures, organizations. We want to grow people, but disciple-making disciples. Now we’re talking about evangelical churches, and what they really end up with is they say two things at the same time, like we always talk about an oxymoron. One time they’re saying this, and I could say, boy, this is great, this is true. I turn the page over, and I say no, you just undermined what you said previously. The goal is not to pick apart everything, but you’ve already got “Most churches need to make a conscious shift away from erecting and maintaining structures, toward growing people.” But do you know where they’re taking you? Let me read you at the end of the book. I will spare you the in between.

“The philosophy of ministry in The Trellis and the Vine has been brewing and developing in our minds and lives over the past 30 years or so. It has spawned two sister organizations.” Wait a minute, wait a minute, I thought we weren’t going to build structures and organizations. Well, we’ve built two so the church doesn’t have to build anything and can take ours, and then they have a couple dozen books you can buy that will enable your church not to concentrate on structures, use the structure organization they built, so your church will be biblical. I say, wait a minute! It seems to me like they’re putting a ring in my nose and leading me around here.

They use verses from the Bible, but sometimes they twist them. When they got to Ephesians 4, I got notes on it. I don’t think I understand what they’re saying this verse really says. We teach the word to equip the saints to do the work of serving. Well, that’s not exactly what that verse is saying. They want me to think what we really need. Now we have two organizations, ministry training strategy, developed by these men, and the media organization they have developed. Both these organizations have this book in their veins. I like Charles Spurgeon, the Bible was what his veins bled, but they have this book in their veins. In various ways they seek to promote this ministry philosophy and provide resources to support it, and the particular focus of ministry training strategy, which is one of their organizations, is ministry apprenticeship and to raise up 10,000 new workers.

One of their problems is that they’ve lost sight of the local church. They’re building the kingdom, and so the local church somehow can’t do it. If you don’t have specialized training programs building this, you don’t get the job done. Then they come to all areas, and the last part of it is all this material you can order and get “6 Steps to Encouragement,” “Growth Gropes,” “One to One Reading,” “Passing the Baton,” and on it goes. To facilitate outreach here’s a whole series of 8. You can get all these resources from them. What’s wrong with the Scripture? Well, that’s what we’re doing. We’re showing you how. What’s wrong with just teaching the Scripture? Well, you’re not really training people. It’s just another form of the other side of it; there’s something you’re missing. If all you’re doing is teaching the Bible, you’re not training people.

Now we do specialized things. If a person wants to be a teacher of the Word, we might have classes to help them go through the Word. If you’re going to work in any of the areas of ministry, there are things you learn about that ministry. That’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about the basic development of people. Creating disciples who train other disciples. What’s the church doing? See, all these things are saying the local church is nice, but what the local church does in teaching the Word, that won’t get you where you have to be, and they’ll just concentrate on structures. Well, we have structures. We have organization. Everybody does. We need to organize when we’re going to have a service. What time will we meet? Nursery, they have organizations, structures, so the children are properly cared for and the people caring for them know how to take care of them. There are structures. They’re not ends of themselves. They have a purpose all tied to enabling people to develop in the Word. We have a great nursery. We have great children’s ministries to gear the teaching of the Word to those age groups, also freeing people up to concentrate without distraction in our time together in the Word. So, this idea that somehow, we’re pointing out what the church is not to do, we have to get involved in building the kingdom, and we’ve got just the material.

I’ve gone through in past years on the whole discipleship issue and how it’s a distortion of Scripture. A recent one, and I’ll end with this one, and it’s currently going on. I’ve read one thing that this man has one million followers on his internet site. He’s a popular person, Christian hedonism and John Piper. I’m not a fan of reading John Piper, but I read him when I have to. I’ll tell you up front, I always have the sense when I’m reading him, that he’s telling me, now, don’t make any decisions here. This is new, you’ll have to take it. And he wants to take control of my thinking. Here, just take this piece. And he turns me that way and okay now, don’t get ahead of me here. We’ll get to that, now here we go, take this next step, and I feel like he’s just wrapping himself around me, and if you allow him to do that, when you’re done, you’ll think what he wants you to think. I don’t think it’s biblical thinking.

Something bothers me. Before I get to his sanctification, it takes a certain arrogance. I took this out of his book on hedonism. “It does no good to tell people,” tell these people that he’s talking about. “Someone may ask, ‘If your aim is conversion, why don’t you just use the straightforward biblical command: believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved? Why bring in this new theology, this new terminology, Christian hedonism?’” He thinks it’s better to use it with unbelievers as well as believers, but his real audience, and this has been demonstrated, is believers, particularly young believers. That’s the mass of those who follow him. Listen to this now, here’s what he says why you don’t just tell them to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Remember that’s what Paul told the Philippian jailer in Acts 16. What must I do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. But that doesn’t work today. “It does no good to tell unconverted people today to believe in the Lord Jesus. The phrase is empty. My responsibility as a preacher of the gospel and a teacher in the church is not to preserve and repeat cherished biblical sentences, but to pierce the heart with biblical truth.”

That’s not his job! That’s the Holy Spirit’s job. And the Word of God is alive and powerful and sharper than a two-edged sword, and it’s the Holy Spirit who takes that word and as Jesus said He would do, convicts the unbelieving in the world of sin in righteousness and judgement. For him to say we’re not going to preserve cherished biblical sentences. They’re cherished because they’re the word of God!
His solution, “Could it be that today, the most straightforward, biblical command for conversion is not believe in the Lord but delight yourself in the Lord and might not many slumbering hearts be stabbed, brought awake by the words. And unless a man be born again into a Christian hedonist, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Anybody who thinks he improves on the Word of God, which is alive and powerful, I’m going to tell that person, don’t believe in the Lord? Delight yourself in the Lord. What does that mean? Do you think that that pagan jailer in the Greek city of Philippi was well-versed in the language ‘believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved’? He lived in a pagan world filled with idols and gods and everything else. That was effective for Paul, but we don’t want to just repeat those old biblical phrases.”

So, I can replace what the Word of God says? Nicodemus, you must be born again. Well, I wouldn’t say that. I’d say you must be born again into a Christian hedonist. What does the word hedonist mean? I looked at several dictionaries. He wants to give it a definition that fits what he wants to do. Most people in the world today understand that being a hedonist is being something that John Piper’s not making it mean, and I’m going to tell the unbeliever that what you need to do is become a hedonist. I’m already doing that. I belong to a fraternity. I was on Spring Break. I’m doing it, man. That’s my life. No, no, no! That’s a hedonist. You need to be a Christian hedonist. Live for pleasure and call myself a Christian?

There are a few things that are red flags for me. Before I read a couple things and then we’ll be done. Number one, when you have to get it from this person. I’ve never met anyone who wanted to talk to me about Christian hedonism who didn’t get it from John Piper. The other thing is Piper claims he got it from Blaise Pascal, C.S. Lewis. Blaise Pascal, he was a genius, a brilliant mathematician, philosopher, but he was Roman Catholic. Why are we going to Roman Catholics to get our theology? And then Piper can’t say enough about C.S. Lewis’s influence on him. He studied at Wheaton under one of the major C.S. Lewis scholars, I understand, but he delights in C.S. Lewis.

Now I know many Christians like C.S. Lewis, but I’ve always had trouble with him. He’s sometimes called an Anglo-Catholic because he was an Anglican and I don’t know that he ever formally converted to Catholicism, but he was very comfortable with Catholicism, which he indicated in his book Letters to Malcom. Shortly before his death, he was turning towards the Catholic church. He turned himself very Catholic and here’s what he did: he practiced prayers for the dead, believed in purgatory, rejection of the literal resurrection of the body, he even went to a priest for regular confession. People think his fantasy writings, the seven-volume series, The Chronicles of Narnia, was Lewis trying to convey biblical truth in fantasy. You know what C.S. Lewis says about that? “Anybody who thinks I was trying to do that is moonshine.” Here’s what he says, “Some see the parallel warfare between God and the lion, Christ.”

Some of you have read those, I haven’t worked my way through those. I have little or no interest in that kind. They say it is arguing that in presenting a blend of fantasy with an analogy to Christian truth, Lewis hoped to encourage his readers to search out truth further. Here’s what Lewis said. “Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children, then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I’d write for, then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out allegories to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way at all. Everything began with images: a fawn carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sleigh, a magnificent Lion. At first there wasn’t anything even Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord. In other words, people made it up and read it into my writing. I never had it in mind. That was moonshine.”

So why do you go to that? For a number of things. He quotes Karl Barth. He loves Daniel Fuller. Daniel Fuller preached his ordination sermon, talking about John Piper. Daniel Fuller went and studied under Karl Barth. They came back to Fuller Seminary not believing in the full inerrancy of Scripture. A Barthian created the corruption that expanded through Fuller and ended up driving out all the sound evangelicals. This, is the man you admire? He writes a glowing… What do they write? For somebody who writes a book, for Fuller’s book on interpreting the Bible. How good it is, and you learn Bible interpretation, but man, Daniel Fuller is a disaster! Karl Barth, and neo-Orthodoxy. The bodily resurrection, that’s not important. You have to have a resurrection experience, as neo-Orthodox. You have these kind of people, Ralph Winter, I’ve read you some. That book I mentioned on missions. You read, and you’ll find out about Ralph Winter, and John Piper can’t speak highly enough about Ralph Winter and some others.

Let me read you a couple of comments out of Christian Hedonism. He says, “During my first quarter in seminary I was introduced to the argument for Christian hedonism by one of its great exponents, Blaise Pascal.” A Roman Catholic in the seventeenth century. Maybe he wrote some good stuff, was a genius no doubt. “What especially struck me here with the Pascal was not making any moral judgement about this fact. As far as he was concerned, seeking one’s happiness is not sin, it’s simply giving into human nature. And secondly I’d grown to love the work of C.S. Lewis in college.” So those influences, he’s got this mystical side. So, he goes on to say, and now he wants to define Christian hedonism. He starts out by saying, “Fresh ways of looking at the world do not lend themselves to simple definitions. A whole book is needed so people can begin to catch on. Quick and superficial judgements will also almost certainly be wrong. Beware of conjecture about what lies in the pages of this book. The surmise that here we have another spin-off from modern man’s enslavement to the centrality of them self will be very wide of the mark. Ah, what surprises lie ahead!”

You see, I want to draw you in. It’s like the man offering the candy to the kids that you warn your kids about. This is nothing bad, it’s good candy. Go ahead and open up one. Taste it. It’s good. Don’t think I have anything bad in mind. I’m not going to corrupt anything. In fact, he’ll later say that this book will be predominately a meditation on Scripture. It will be expository rather than speculative. I didn’t find it that way, and I find it filled with misuse of Scripture. Very troublesome.

Let’s see, let me jump, I pulled out some of my papers so I could find my way, and I usually leave a paper in the pages that trouble me the most, but I had so many pages in I had to take my papers out. Page 97, okay. Now he’s going to say, “The labor of Christian hedonism, it’s a labor of love. This will take some explaining and defending. I plead your patience and openness.” Wait a minute. I read things with a closed mind. I read the Bible with an open mind. I read everybody else with a closed mind, constantly comparing what they have to say with Scripture. “I am swimming against the current of a revered river in this chapter.” And he’s right. Almost all trustworthy theologians disagree with him! Like when we did Ecclesiastes. We are to have pleasure in living as God’s children, but we don’t live for pleasure. Jesus made that clear in His call to discipleship.

It’s emotions, and where he’s going is, and he’ll attack those who understand Romans 12:1, that it’s by the renewing of your mind. You have to understand it’s not just the mind. You need to get into the emotions. This is where the people go and where it becomes similar to the charismatic movement and Crabs’ psychology. It becomes emotion. Do you feel it? It’s driven by your emotion. That’s where it comes from; out of the love of your heart and that love is an emotion and you have to feel it, and pretty soon when you’re going through this, you say, boy, I’m feeling it like I’ve never felt it! I must be missing something. That’s what he wants. So, become a follower of mine. You wouldn’t have found this if you had just read the Scripture because you didn’t get it from there. You need to get it from him.

It’s just like Crab with the psychology. If you’re going to really understand the soul, you don’t just get it from that Bible literalism, the “nothing-but-erists” that go to the Bible. And you don’t get Christian hedonism just from the Bible. You get it from the Bible and Piper, who channels Pascal or Lewis or some of the Catholic mystics or even Karl Barth and his neo-Orthodoxy that moves you more. Charles Ryrie says that he can’t really tell where he is. Some things he says are good, and he didn’t move them away from the full German liberalism, but some of what he says, like the resurrection, is up in the air and he’s not clear about substitutionary atonement. But somehow, I read him because these guys keep coming up. Something’s wrong.

Here’s where he says, and these are the words of Ralph Winter, founder of the United States Center of World Missions. “His life and strategy have been a constant summons of young and old, that the only way to find life is give it away. He’s one of my heroes. He says so many things that Christian hedonists ought to say.” Wait a minute. Ralph Winter is not one of my heroes. I’ve talked about Winter. Something’s wrong here. He has a twisted theology, but you just love him. Now what you’re cranking out is what every Christian needs to have, and young people get into this stuff. Young Christians eat it up and boy, he’s getting to where I want. I don’t want to feel this way. This is where we are. We’re at an emotional state.

I like cars; it’s a distraction for me. I read car magazines. That’s a sideline. It drives me crazy on car advertisements when I watch T.V. and Marilyn’s even got the point. They’re selling you an emotion. Tell me about the motor. Tell me how it drives. What does it take to get 0 to 60? How does it turn? They’re saying it’s a sanctuary and they show a lady sitting and turning on the radio, not even leaving the driveway. I want to buy a car so I can go out and listen to the radio? Another guy turns on the radio and throws his fishing line and he’s doing ice fishing and he sits in the back of the car with the tailgate up and listens to the music. I want a car! Then somebody else has their dog and they’re in love with their dog, and they don’t have anything to show or say about the car; it’s all about the dog. I don’t care if you love your dog, but I want to buy a car! Everything is emotionally driven, and we have a generation who wants to be driven by their emotions.

I’ve had some people here say, Gil, you’re not emotional. You don’t understand this. You think just as long as people take it into their mind it’s good. As long as they try to put into practice what the Bible says. But if it doesn’t come to heart, it doesn’t mean anything, and that’s your problem. You don’t tell people that it has to come from the heart. Well, if the Holy Spirit’s not in it, it’s not good. We transfer Christianity to a feeling that will come and go.

I realize Piper’s making converts, but it will come and go. Some of these I read you’re not even that familiar with, and he’s got a new book out, Reading the Bible Supernaturally. I do this because I get paid to, but these aren’t the kind of things I read for my own growth and strength, but I read it. I mark it. He quotes verses and then he uses them in a way you’re feeling. Of course, you are! You’re a person, but for him, that’s where you always need to get to, and that’s when I’m back in the holiness movement. Soon you have that feeling of the Spirit moving in you and dear people. When I went forward at an altar call to get saved, they kept asking me. They gathered around to pray for me and then they’d say, do you feel like you’re saved? No, I don’t think so. Bow your head and we’ll pray some more. Then they’d ask me again, do you feel like you’re saved yet? I don’t think so. Finally, I got my head bowed, and I realized I wouldn’t get out of there until I said yes. So, the next time they asked, I said yes, I do. Oh, wonderful! I think I got saved the first time. I said, Lord, I’m a sinner. I want to trust Christ. I believe in Him. But for them, the feelings come. I mean, if you’re a genuine believer and you read the Bible without feeling, you’re not a genuine believer. Now every day, the feelings aren’t the same. Quite frankly, some days I’ve sat down and I read it and say, Lord You know my heart. You know where I am now. This feels like sawdust to me, and it’s my problem, and I need to keep reading until the Spirit makes it come alive in my heart and my soul. I don’t doubt that there are feelings there, but it’s like a relationship. The feelings aren’t there every day at the same level. Marilyn gets up with the same feelings every morning, but I have to work on them. But it doesn’t happen that way.

I have a lot more I could say on that. Well, you’ve been in your Bible all those years, but read my book and you’re going to get what you need. Buy our books and you’ll really get what you need. Why didn’t I get that from Scripture? Well, I have a twist on it, and when something new comes, it takes a whole book, and then it’ll take a second book for you to know how to read the Bible because the Spirit can’t do it. I have to tell you how to do it. Then you really end up undermining the whole ministry of the Holy Spirit. So, I come to this because we just went through the biblical doctrine of sanctification. Everything gets sifted through what the Bible says, and we don’t want to be led astray. Alright, let’s have a word of prayer and we can go on.

Thank You, Lord, for Your blessings, the riches of Your word. Lord, we are thankful that Your Word is sufficient, and You’ve provided Your Spirit. And ultimately, we need no man to teach us because the Spirit of God is our Teacher. Now You’ve provided teachers to help us as we work through the Word, but not to insert their new ideas and imply that what the Spirit has been doing in our lives is insufficient, that You need what I add. I need to be humbled before You that we have nothing to add. The Scripture is clear. We believe in the perspicuity of Your Word, its clarity. The ministry of the Spirit in the heart of the unbeliever. We cannot make it clear to the unbeliever, only the Spirit of God can pierce that hardened heart as our hardened hearts were pierced. But He does minister Your truth so we can feed upon Your Word and its nourishment. Lord, I pray for any who think they’re believers and their cold condition, lack of affection and love, is not a result of not experiencing something more and something further, but that it’s because they’ve never experienced the transforming power of Your salvation. We pray for them. We pray for the week ahead, for our church family and others spread out wherever they are. Lord, that You would encourage us, You would strengthen us, and above all, You would use us as faithful testimonies of Your salvation. We pray in Christ’s name, amen.