Blind Man's Fancy

I love the church.  Jesus died for her (Eph 5.2, 25) and it’s good to love those for whom Jesus died.  But she is one messed-up group of people, in large part because I am one messed-up person.

Jesus gave himself up for the church not because of who the church was but because of who he would make the church to be.  Jesus knew full well his church would never be perfect in this life.  He would have to sanctify her until the last day, when he would raise up new bodies to present to his Father (Eph 5.26-27).  We serve an illusion if we think our churches will be spotless, wrinkle-free, holy and blameless before the day Jesus presents her on that day.  It was never Jesus’ intention to create the perfect church in this age,  but to preserve a faithful people who ride the ups-and-downs of sin, pain, sorrow and joy by faith in the One to Come.

In the meantime, we are one messed-up group of people running a difficult race of faith.

The Reformers identified the true marks of a church to be the right preaching of God’s word, the right administration of the sacraments/ordinances and the exercise of church discipline.  Any church trying to hit those marks will go through some very painful circumstances.  When Jesus came on the Galilean scene, demons came out of nowhere to go toe-to-toe with the one they knew would destroy them.  Likewise, striving for and maintaining healthy churches means meeting sin and Satan in the dark alleys of human hearts.  And no one comes away without scars in that fight.

Have you considered the reason why we have thirteen New Testament letters?  They’re all, in one sense or another, responses to church conflicts.  There were no perfect churches in the NT and, in fact, we’re surprised to see some groups of NT believers still even considered part of the church!  Jesus seven letters in Revelation 2-3 were to confront imperfect churches.  Until the end of time, Christ’s church will not be what she will be when Christ gets done with her on the last day.

The ministry of Jesus invited conflict.  Therefore, true gospel ministry invites conflict in the “best” of churches.  We don’t relish the conflict, but we’re not surprised or excessively despaired by it.  In fact, conflict is often the means of testing faithfulness (2 Cor 2.9) and reminding us that we’re not There yet and therefore must keep eyes fixed on Christ.

We can ignore conflict, wanting to avoid the hard work of communal accountability to the gospel.  We let folks slip out the side-door so as to avoid any confrontation and stain of scandal.

We can exaggerate conflict, assuming Satan is successfully destroying the church.  But Satan only has as much leash as God allows.

We can understate conflict, acting like it’s not there until the cancer takes over major organs.  Suddenly a group is “led by the Spirit” to start a new church.

We can fear conflict, running from it so much that we end up being with people who are exactly like us.

Or, we can consider conflict biblically.  In the best of churches, conflict will happen.  That’s why we have most of the New Testament.  Therefore:

• We should be honest about it.  The world doesn’t need to see a superficial billboard of smiling suburbanites.  The world needs to see a community of sinners who have found Living Hope in the gospel.
• We shouldn’t be surprised by it if we’re striving to be healthy churches.  Satan has declared war on the church (Rev 12.17) and when we poke him he snarls.
• We should see it in light of the big picture.  Christ is sanctifying a global community and we’re barely a sliver of it.  Whatever conflict we face in the American church should be seen in light of the persecution of Christians in most of the rest of the world.
• We should consider conflict part of God’s means of sanctifying his people.  We still need Christ to redeem, repent and restore.
• We shouldn’t consider a healthy church the one without any conflict.  The healthy church is one who deals with conflict in a Christ-exalting, saint-loving, purity-protecting way.

While conflict shouldn’t dominate a church’s life, it will be a regular condition in the life of the church.  Such is life in the age of groaning (Rom 8.22-24).  There will always be someone(s) giving into temptation, incubating wicked thoughts, hiding secret sins, etc.  The joy of Christian ministry is not making sure everyone looks perfect, but in making sure everyone is hoping in Christ and his perfections.

We live in the age of the hope of glory (Rom 5.2; Col 1.27), knowing the day is coming soon when we will finally, and in reality, be the glorious people for whom Christ died.  Until then “with perseverance we wait eagerly for it” (Rom 8.25).

“And all [in the synagogue] were speaking well of [Jesus], and wondering at the gracious words which were falling from his lips” (Lk 4.22a-b).

“And all in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city had been built, in order to throw Him down the cliff” (Lk 4.28-29).

Jesus’s public ministry began with a whirlwind itinerary of preaching the arrival of God’s kingdom.  He eventually toured back to his hometown synagogue where his Sabbath text was Isaiah 61.1-2 (cf. Lk 4.18-19).  His preaching thrilled the hometown crowd.  Joseph’s son has made it big and would put Nazareth on the map.

Six verses (four Greek sentences) later, Nazareth wanted nothing to do with Jesus.  In fact, we find them responding Satanically to Jesus.  In Lk 4.9, Satan ushered a beleaguered, haggard, famished Jesus to the tippy top of the temple.  It was a sonship test.  God promised that his Son would always be protected by the angelic cohort.  If Jesus was indeed God’s son then he could hurl himself off the temple mount and watch angels swoop in to his rescue.  Jesus’s sonship, however, would not be proven by silly, superstitious games but by resurrection from the dead.  Satan would have to wait “until an opportune time” (v13).

Jesus’s encore sermon in Lk 4.23-27 was not received as well as his first one.  What do we find the townsfolk of Nazareth doing to their visiting preacher?  They led him to the top of their hill in order to chunk him down the cliff to his death.  At least Satan gave Jesus the choice of doing it himself!  These hard-hearted Nazarenes wanted to lynch Jesus. Unbeknownst to them, they were in league with Satan just as Jesus spent Lk 4.23-27 implying.

Like any upstanding Jew in Jesus’s day, the Nazarenes assumed they were part of God’s kingdom for external reasons.  They had Torah, temple/synagogue, sacrifices, Jerusalem.  They awaited their Messiah who would finally put the rest of the world to rights and restore Israel’s fortunes.  Jesus had a different agenda.  Just as Elijah bypassed all the Israelites to bless a Sidonian (Gentile) widow and just as Elisha snubbed all the Israelites to cleanse the Syrian Naaman, Jesus brought God’s kingdom to the nations.

God’s kingdom would not be recognized according to borders, walls, temples, armies or kings.  It would be recognized by repentance and faith in Jesus.  Messiah would not change the world around them, but change the world inside them.  Jewishness was irrelevant now that the new creation had dawned in Jesus.  So, whereas the Nazarenes thought Jesus to be making much of them, he was actually making much of himself despite them.  And those were fighting words.

How we like preachers who make much of us!  We love those who praise our external religion.  But if ever a word pierces through the veneer of our superficial religiosity, we turn quickly from friend to enemy.  Any suggestion that we are unfit for God’s kingdom because of our sin opens the floodgate of rage.  With a religious résumé like mine, how dare anyone question my Christianity!  Where is the nearest hill on which our city has been built?

How well do you receive God’s word?  Do you consistently consider a threat against you?  Do you regularly feel condemned  by it and therefore enraged at it?  Do you direct your anger toward the preacher rather than the message?  Is your spiritual disposition fickle like the Nazarenes, who are happy one minute and livid the next?  Can you not receive difficult, confrontational, pride-killing messages from God?  Do you react impulsively as though God (or the preacher) is picking on you, or do you seriously meditate on God’s word as a means of grace for salvation and sanctification?

For those of us who are preachers, we should take great comfort from Jesus’s ministry.  In fact, Jesus ended his ministry the same way he began.  He was welcomed into Jerusalem on Monday with cries of “Hosanna!”.  By Thursday, those same folks cried, “Crucify Him!”.  God’s word is indeed a two-edged sword which wounds as well as and as quickly as it heals (Heb 4.12).

“In fifty years of being a pastor, my most difficult assignment continues to be the task of developing a sense among the people I serve of the soul-transforming implications of grace–a comprehensive, foundational reorientation from living anxiously by my wits and muscle to living effortlessly in the world of God’s active presence.  The prevailing North American culture (not much different from the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman cultures in which our biblical ancestors lived0 is, to all intents and purposes, a context of persistent denial of grace” (Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection: 96).

A graceless church is no church at all.  The church is a motley band of exiles, stained by the world and stung by death.  What distinguishes the church from the world is not necessarily the volume of sin, but the vigor with which we apply Christ to our sin.  The church is full of guilty-but-pardoned death row inmates while the world is full of those who don’t realize they’re condemned already.

We do not gather to enforce or encourage perfection.  We gather to enforce Christ, given for sinners.  Jesus will make us perfect one day, but until then ours to help each other keep repenting, believing and hoping in the sure and final work of our Savior.  We keep eating the bread and drinking the cup precisely because we’re imperfect, trusting wholly and solely on another’s righteousness to pulsate through our veins.

In preaching the panorama of God’s grace Paul was not content until he forced the question: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” (Rom 6.1).   In so doing, Paul pushed God’s sovereign grace to its highest conceivable limit.  Let us preach and invest grace so that we must at least consider the same question.  Then we will be reigned in because the same grace that would invite such a question is the same grace that will reign through righteousness (Rom 5.21).  The grace that is stronger, higher, deeper and wider than all our sin is the grace that woos and compels toward righteousness.  But in order for grace to reign in righteousness it must be pressed to its desired end:  ”a comprehensive, foundational reorientation from living anxiously by my wits and muscle to living effortlessly in the world of God’s active presence.”