Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of evangelicalism in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library.
First, I would like to thank the organizers of EMA for the privilege of being back here again. This is a highlight for me. It’s wonderful to share in the gospel with you folk. It’s wonderful to have links again in Britain. We used to live here one year in three, but my children have just been at the age where they’ve been finishing off secondary school recently. One in university and one more to finish secondary school. Of course, we keep a little closer to one educational system for a while. Who knows? We may someday have an empty nest and regain that older cycle.
Secondly, I would be remiss if I did not thank you, many of you individually and perhaps many of your churches, for the prayers you have offered up on behalf of my wife and me during this past year. I do not intend to turn this into testimony time, but many of you have written or emailed me and assured us of your prayers, and we are profoundly grateful. Joy really was on death’s door, but she is now remarkably recovered, but the long-term prognosis is who can say?
I remember a few years ago when I had a disease that could have taken me out, I staggered here to London for a committee meeting, and Alec Motyer was present. While most people were mouthing commiserating things, he put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Don, we’re all under sentence of death.” I think only Alec Motyer is capable of saying that in a pastoral way, and it’s perhaps those who have walked through the valley and managed not quite to get to the other side who are a little more aware of this valley of death.
For what it’s worth (probably not worth much but I’ll say this), not for one moment was this past year a year of spiritual anxiety or doubt or, “Why me?” or “God, what on earth are you doing?” Because my wife and I have always believed Christians are not exempt from suffering. We expect to get kicked in the teeth.
We’re living this side of the fall, and the Lord has all kinds of things to teach this way, so although it was emotionally tiring and physically tiring and especially grim for Joy on occasion, it was not in any sense a time of spiritual anguish. Meanwhile, we have so many things for which to thank God in what the Lord was doing through our children through this year. We really have come out all the more grateful, and this, I’m sure, in answer to many of your prayers. Now let me pray.
Wise and merciful God, we thank you for your providential watch-care over us. Every hair on our heads is numbered. You do all things well. You are immaculately holy, the One before whom even the highest order of angels cover their faces and cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!”
So let us, men and women whom you have redeemed by the blood of your Son, rise up with Christians in every generation to sing your praises, to live out lives of obedience before you, to pursue holiness without which no one will see the Lord, to cry with the church in every generation, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”
Work in us all that is pleasing in your sight. Continue the work you have begun in us, as Scripture reminded us just a few moments ago. For the praise of your dear Son and for the good of the people for whom he shed his life’s blood, we beg these things. In Jesus’ name, amen.
In the first address I drew attention to some fundamental differences in ecclesiology among us, differences we all know are there but seldom take out to examine. Nevertheless, I suggested this is not necessarily stifling to genuine Christian unity since confessional evangelicalism places soteriology above ecclesiology. It is the gospel that defines us, not the structures of our respective churches, however much some of us feel those structures are themselves property grounded in Scripture.
This is tied to the Lord’s Prayer, I suggested, recorded in John 17. We are to understand the Lord’s Prayer has been substantially answered, and even if we manage to muck it up in our sinful ways on all kinds of occasions, nevertheless, there exists more than a merely theoretical unity, a substantial unity amongst those who name the name of Christ.
In this second address I want to pursue a little further this theme of gospel unity among confessional evangelicals by offering, first, a meditation on some verses from Paul, secondly, a meditation on some themes from Scripture, and thirdly, a meditation on some words from Christ.
1. A meditation on verses from Paul
The passage I have in mind is Ephesians 4:1–6. I wish I had enough time to run all the way down to verse 16 or so, but let me take the first six verses. Ephesians 4:1–6. I shall begin by reading these six verses, as well-known as they are.
“As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
The central exhortation of this passage is found in verse 3. Paul exhorts believers to keep the unity of the Spirit. Moreover, he understands this is going to take some hard work. The verb in verse three is very strong: make every effort. The assumption is this is not something automatic or easy, that there will be barriers, difficulties, all kinds of hurdles to cross. Work hard at it and deepen the unity the Holy Spirit gives.
The Holy Spirit was first introduced in this epistle back in verse 13 of chapter 1. “You also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.”
In other words, the gift of the Holy Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance is bound up with gospel blessings, and he has already effected a unity amongst us. Now, Paul writes, “Make every effort to keep that unity.” Then we may say he answers three questions: “How?” “According to what standard?” And, “By whose example?”
A) How do we keep that unity?
Through the bond of peace. In other words, peace is seen perhaps as a rope tying everything together. Peace is not the goal; peace is the means. The goal is the unity of the Spirit. To lose the unity of the Spirit by insufficient attention to the peace which holds all together is a grievous sin.
At the practical level, the least that means is that we learn, for instance, a soft answer turns away wrath. A very practical point. It means we learn to reflect something of the character of God who is the supreme peacemaker, according to the Beatitudes. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.”
Insofar as we are peacemakers, we reflect God’s character and are rightly called his children. In fact, there may be an allusion here to the great theme of peace again in chapter 2. In chapter 2, verses 11 and following we are told the Gentiles have now joined the Jews to constitute one new people.
Thus, verse 14, “For he himself [Christ Jesus] is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace.” In other words, this too is a gospel blessing, and what we are to do is to pursue peace as a means of pursuing the greater unity of the Spirit whom God has given as the down payment of the promised inheritance.
B) According to what standard are we to act in this way?
We are to live a life worthy of the calling we have received. Verses 1 and 2. In Paul, as you know, the call of God is effective. That is, those who are called are saved. Those who are called truly do become Christians, so we must conduct ourselves, we’re told, in conformity with our calling. That is, in conformity with what it means to be a Christian.
Explicitly, we are to be completely humble and gentle (verse 2), thus mirroring Jesus Christ himself, of whom it is said that he is meek and lowly of heart (Matthew, chapter 11). Humility suggests the kind of lowliness, the kind of allowing others to take precedence that is not so much concerned for mere equality and certainly is suspicious of self-promotion but is eager to count others better than ourselves, to use the language of Philippians, chapter 2. That mere approach would already solve many, many, many ecclesiastical debates.
Meekness on the street level means not being slighted when others are offensive, not being retaliatory, acting indeed like Moses in Numbers, chapter 12. Patience in this context suggests the ability to deal quietly and courteously with those who are offensive and untoward, bearing with one another in love, which again assumes it is not always easy to do so. This is mere living in conformity with our calling. This is what it looks like to be a Christian.
C) By whose example?
Paul dares to allude to his own situation. Verse 1. “As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life this way.” Probably playing a bit of a pun. He is the Lord’s own slave, the Lord’s own prisoner, but at the same time, he is a prisoner because he is a Christian.
He has landed in prison because of his zeal in promoting the gospel. Paul’s devotion to Christ, even for Gentiles, has led him to be a prisoner for the Lord, so he speaks, therefore, not out of an elevated position of pomp or ease above the fray but as someone who has learned to suffer and still to love.
Having made his exhortation, he outlines the theological unity which Christ’s people share. Verses 4 to 6: “There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”
First, one body. The one-body theme is common in Paul, of course, as you know. Already it is introduced in chapter 1. So many of the exhortations in this part of Ephesians refer back to some of Paul’s arguments a little earlier in the book. We are told in chapter 1, verses 22 and following, “God placed all things under Jesus’ feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is the body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”
The body metaphor is tweaked in various ways. Sometimes the whole body is the church and Christ by his Spirit animates it. Sometimes the body is the church but Christ is the head. It’s a slightly different use of the metaphor. In 1 Corinthians 12, this business of individual members in it acting to contribute to the whole becomes a dominant theme, as also in Romans 12, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
Secondly, one Spirit. The blessed Holy Spirit, the common agent of our regeneration, the one who is given to us commonly as the down payment of the promised inheritance.
Thirdly, one hope. Probably both the anticipation itself and that which is hoped for. All true Christians, members of the body, share the same destination, and we join Christians in every age who cry, “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” There is not going to be a separate cell for Southern Baptists in heaven, although some of them may think they are the only ones there. This, at some point, will be disclosed to them.
Fourth, one Lord. Here the reference is quite clearly to the Lord Jesus. After all, this too is a cardinal Christian confession. “If you confess with your mouths, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Fifth, one faith. Certainly in the subjective sense and perhaps also in the objective sense. In the subjective sense, the faith has been introduced as far back as chapter 2, verses 8 and 9. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and that not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” That is, all Christians have learned to trust this grace that has been disclosed to us in Christ Jesus. Sometimes the faith itself refers to the object of what is trusted, in which case it becomes equivalent to the apostolic gospel. We share this one common faith.
Sixth, one baptism. You say, “Ah! Now we have you.” Yes. I’m going to tackle this one from the side, if I may. In the late 1920s and the early 1930s in America, there arose a preacher by the name of Billy Sunday. By and large, he did not afflict the Brits. He stayed in North America. Phillip Jensen spoke about cricket and the ignorance of North Americans with respect to this sport. On the other hand, I have observed baseball is not widely understood here, and Billy Sunday was a baseball player.
He was a hard-drinking, hard-living, violent, cussing sort of man who, then, really did get marvelously converted. In the Finniite tradition, he went around the country preaching approximately equal measures of Finniite gospel and prohibition. (That’s prohibition against alcohol in case you were wondering what was being prohibited.)
It became his practice to erect a large tent, and in the Finniite tradition, he preached with a great deal of zeal (not always with the equivalent amount of knowledge), and many people came forward and made professions of faith, and some were genuinely converted. Thousands over the next years were genuinely converted. There’s no doubt about that at all.
He quickly discovered this tent, if put on dry ground, had a decided disadvantage. When people surged forward, their feet churned up dust and there would be low clouds of dust in the tent during the invitation, which was a bit off-putting. On the other hand, if you put this tent up on wet ground, when people went forward pretty soon they were sliding in the muck which was not exactly edifying either.
He soon developed the practice of putting down sawdust in all the aisles, and out of this came the expression, “To hit the sawdust trail.” You could say to someone about 1936, “When were you converted?” and he or she might respond, “Oh, I hit the sawdust trail in Cincinnati in ‘31,” and everybody would have understood.
It might be, in fact, that person was converted at something other than a Billy Sunday meeting. The little expression, to hit the sawdust trail, came so much to be connected with conversion because it was connected with conversion in the experience of so many that it came by synecdoche. The parts standing for the whole a way of referring to conversion.
We do the same thing in other forms of speech. Do we not? A large ranch out in the Western part of the United States.… “How many cattle do you have?” “About 1,000 head.” What happened to the rest of the animal? How else …? Are you going to count the legs and divide by four? A thousand head means a thousand cattle. You refer to the whole animal by the part.
In the first century, baptism (whatever all of its significance was) was so connected with conversion that you could refer by synecdoche to all of conversion simply in mentioning baptism. “As many have been baptized have put on Christ,” Paul writes to the Galatians. By this, he does not mean to say that baptism takes on some sort of magical power or the like. What he is saying is, “As many have been converted have put on Christ,” because it was unthinkable that a converted person should not be baptized in that kind of frame of reference.
I suspect here, then, when Paul writes one baptism, he is not hereby establishing the mode, although some of us would like to think he is. He is saying something like, “As many as have been converted have put on Christ. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” After all, here too he has spoken along similar lines in slightly different categories.
He has said by nature we are all children of wrath, in chapter 2. We all need converting. We are all lost. We are all a damned breed, but by grace we have been saved through faith. We have come under the lordship of Jesus. We have been converted. It marks us out in gospel unity. One Lord, one faith, one baptism.
Seventh, one God and Father of all. Over against paganism’s polytheism, with gods who officiate, as it were, in various domains.… If you want to take a sea voyage, make sure Neptune isn’t upset with you. If you want to give a speech, try to get Mercury or Hermes on the Greek side on side by the appropriate sacrifices. The gods had various domains.
One of the entailments of monotheism is that if there be one God, he is God of all, all domains and all people. The fundamental axiom of mission is monotheism. He is God over all. Over all, supreme, transcendent, through all working in everything and everyone. In all. To all of his people.
These are the things that bind us together. This is not necessarily an exhaustive list, but it is the sort of thing Paul can throw out within a moment’s thought precisely as being bound up with gospel, theological, and experiential unity. “So make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Granted that these are the great theological themes that unite us.
2. A meditation on themes from the Bible
Here I want to highlight a selection of biblical, ecclesiological themes on which we ought to agree. This is not an exhaustive list, and here and there, there might be some who would wish to quibble but not much, I think. These are great ecclesiological themes on which we ought to agree.
A) The church is the community of the new covenant.
Perhaps we could begin with Jeremiah 31. We regularly quote Jeremiah 31:31, but perhaps we should begin with a proverb of Jeremiah 31:29. “In those days people will no longer say, ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ ” That proverb is also quoted in Ezekiel where it’s turned a slightly different purpose. What purpose does it have here?
“In those days people will no longer say this proverb. Instead, everyone will die for his own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—his own teeth will be set on edge.” Then the new covenant passage. “ ‘The time is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant. It will not be like the old covenant. It will be this way. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor …’ ”
Do you see the flow of thought? Under the terms of the old covenant, the very structure of the people of God was tribal and representative. There was special enduement on prophet, priest, and king. The task of the king was to make sure the people followed the covenant. He was the one who was called the son of God, par excellence. That was bound up with his enthronement. The priest, although the priest was to officiate in the tabernacle and the temple, was also to teach all the counsels of God in a kind of mediating sort of way.
There was special enduement upon prophet, priest, and king. “But in those days,” says the Lord, “it will not be like that.” Under this tribal, representative system, when the king went astray the whole people went with him. When the priesthood became corrupt, the whole nation fell under the curse. There was a tribal, representative system. The fathers eat sour grapes; the children’s teeth are set on edge. It will not be like that under the new covenant, we’re told.
“ ‘The time is coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,’ declares the Lord.
‘This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,’ declares the Lord. ‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the Lord. ‘For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.’ ”
This past year I was supposed to finish the NIGTC commentary on the epistles of John, but it was one of the things that fell by the by in my wife’s illness, but I got far enough into it to have learned some interesting things. When you read Raymond Brown’s massive and learned commentary, you discover he thinks John is a very substantial hypocrite, for John keeps saying things like, “You do not need anyone to teach you,” and then proceeds to teach them.
“This can only be the mark of some sort of nasty demagogue, a hypocrite. In a pluralist society we don’t tolerate such voices anymore, do we?” says Raymond Brown. In fact, what John is doing is referring back to this passage. “In those days we won’t need teachers.” The idea is not teachers in any sense. John’s not stupid. Rather, there is no longer any need for mediating teachers because we all have this (what John calls) anointing from the Lord, this enduement of the Spirit. The eschatological age has come.
In the old age, the teachers were mediators of God’s grace (it was a tribal, representative system), but under the new age, that is what the priesthood of believes is all about. Under the new age, I may be a teacher of the Word of God, not however because I have an inside track with God. Not because I am intrinsically more holy. Not because I have some special enduement of the Spirit.
In fact, using the body language, it’s just because I’m a bit more like a stomach. My job in the body is to take in food and nurture the rest of the body. You will shatter the dignity of most Bible teachers if you look to them up at the front and think, “You, sir, are a stomach,” but that’s basically what we are.
We are not special mediating people (priests). No, no, no. Under the terms of the new covenant, either there is only one priest, the Great High Priest, the Lord Jesus himself, or we are all priests of God, using the language of 1 Peter. That is, we meditate the grace of God through the people of God to the broader world.
Within this kind of framework, then, the church itself is the community of the new covenant, so that on the night he is betrayed, according to Luke and Paul, Jesus says, “This is the blood of the new covenant,” and the theme is developed at length in Hebrews.
B) The church is the community of the Spirit.
This really flows from the theme I have just developed. Jeremiah can write about this matter without talking of the Spirit explicitly. When Ezekiel brings up the matter in Ezekiel 11:19–20 and Ezekiel 36:25–27, it is precisely in the context of the enduement of the Spirit.
Likewise, one finds other passages with the same thrust. Isaiah 44: “This is what the Lord says—’He who made you, who formed you in the womb, and who will help you: Do not be afraid, O Jacob, my servant, Jeshurun, whom I have chosen. For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour out my Spirit on your offspring, and my blessing on your descendants. They will spring up like grass in a meadow, like poplar trees by flowing streams.’ ”
Or the prophecy of Joel 2:28–32 picked up by Peter on the day of Pentecost where, likewise, Peter immediately draws the inference. The Spirit is poured out on young men, young women, old men, old women. The age of the mediating enduement has gone under the terms of the new covenant. The church is the community of the Spirit.
C) The church is the eschatological community.
This, too, follows. That is, it is not simply that the kingdom has dawned even though it is not yet consummated, but the blessings of the final age have broken out in powerful ways by the giving of the Spirit. When Jesus says, “I will build my church,” he is saying in effect, “I will build my messianic assembly (this messianic of the final age).”
This side of World War II, of course, many of us have followed the language of Oscar Cullmann who developed the already/not yet language with respect to D-Day and V-E Day. All this is now quite common among us. D-Day in his scheme of things becomes a bit like the work of the cross and the resurrection.
Once the allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy and, meanwhile, the Russians were pressing in from the east, North Africa had already been cleared out, and the allies were already nicely situated on the peninsula of Italy, it was pretty obvious to anyone who had a brain in his head that the war was, in principle, over.
That does not mean there was no struggle left. Some of the most violent fighting came later. The Battle of the Bulge still had to take place where, conveniently in the providence of God, Hitler ran out of gasoline; nevertheless, the fighting went on until the war was over and V-E Day was declared, which is equivalent in Cullmann’s symbolism to the return of Christ and the end of all things.
I sometimes wonder if it would be slightly more focused, slightly more sensitive, to New Testament nuances to speak not quite of the already and the not yet, though that is not wrong, as of the new and the not yet. The already and the not yet focus on what we already have but might stretch that already back just a wee bit too far. There is something new that is already here.
Hence, in the New Testament there is a constant pulsating power to new creation, to this new age of the Spirit, to this new covenant in fulfillment of Old Testament Scriptures. There is something decisive that has come about in Christ, but yet it is not here in all of its eschatological fulfillment just yet.
This has a bearing on a lot of things. It has a bearing on Christian ethics. If I am not mistaken as to how the Sermon on the Mount is put together, when Jesus says, “I have not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them,” he is not saying, “I haven’t come to destroy them but to preserve them in all their detail.” He is not saying that. If we may quibble about this or that detail, none of us here recently has sacrificed a lamb or offered a bull and a goat on Yom Kippur or kept the food laws, I suspect. Some things have gone.
What does it mean to fulfill? Fulfill in Matthew’s language is not the flip side of abolish. “I have not come to abolish but to keep.” In Matthew’s use of the verb pleroo, to fulfill, it means to bring to fulfillment that which has been promised, to accomplish that which has been announced. There is a sense in which, even in the domain of the ethical (“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit murder’ ”) there is an announcement, an anticipation of something which is now being fulfilled.
Let me put it this way. In the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness, will there be any posted notices prohibiting murder? Well, if we have resurrection bodies I suspect it would be rather difficult to commit that crime in any case, but more profoundly, we won’t need laws prohibiting murder because we will be so transformed that murder will never even cross our minds.
What the law about murder finally announces is the kind of transformation of people such that we will not hate. Not at all. The prohibition of adultery is not just that you don’t sleep together. Ultimately, it’s announcing something better, bigger, and deeper; namely that people will not succumb to lust and mere self-focus and self-gratification.
Finally, those things are fulfilled in the new heaven and the new earth. Are they not? But that final eschatological community which is the church glorified is also, as it were, to be the rule back here now in the church that is anticipating this glorification. Of course, we have not yet been glorified, so that you get the tension even in New Testament ethics between what we are in principle in Christ and what we are not yet.
Hence, a great deal of Pauline ethics is summarized under this rubric, “Be what you are.” That is, you are already sanctified, so “Be sanctified” is the implication. You already are set aside for God and possessed by God; therefore, there are certain ways you ought to act. It is not that we have moved, as it were, from the old covenant to one ratchet up to the new covenant and ultimately there will be one more ratchet up, namely the consummation.
Rather, the eternal God in all of his holiness discloses his perfections across the sweep of redemptive history, and he, even in his law, anticipates the perfection of what is to come, and already that consummated kingdom is dawned, and we are that eschatological community and are to live out our lives in anticipation of the glory still to be revealed. The church is the eschatological community.
This is picked up in other biblical images as well, this anticipatory looking forward to what is to come. It’s picked up, for example, in bride-of-Christ language. In the Old Testament, it can be tweaked one way. The covenant people of God are Yahweh’s bride, and out of this, then, come the terrible metaphors for apostasy.
Apostasy is whoredom. That’s what it is. It is covenantal breaking, and under the New Testament similar things can be said. Jesus speaks to an adulterous generation. He doesn’t mean that they’re sleeping around even more than in some previous generation. He’s saying that, covenantally, they are breaking the covenant. It is a faithless generation.
To tweak it another way, the church is the virgin bride of Christ. Not yet consummated is this marriage, and in that use of the metaphor we look for the marriage supper of the Lamb, so that in the multiple imagery of Revelation 21 and 22, one of the pictures of what the new heaven and the new earth will look like is precisely this marriage supper of the Lamb.
That is, the relationship which in human terms at its best is the most intimate and joyful. The intimate love, including sexual love of a man and a woman, God himself dares to pick up as an image to show us something of what the joys and intimacy and delight of consummation of the union of Christ and the church will be on the last day. We are the bride of Christ.
Paul can pick up that sort of language, then, and apply it to the way we ought to live. “Therefore, we are to keep ourselves pure as a virgin betrothed in anticipation of the consummation that will be ours on the last day.” That is not so much an individual metaphor as a corporate metaphor for the whole church. The church is, in fact, the bride of Christ, whether the church as manifest in Corinth or in London.
D) The church is the gathered people of God.
Everyone knows ecclesia primarily refers in the secular arena to an assembly (a political assembly or some other assembly). Likewise, in the New Testament, it is first and foremost the assembly of God. Phillip Jensen was quite right to refer to Hebrews 12 the other day. There, the church is the assembly that has been gathered, not around Mount Zion, but around the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God.
“You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly to the church of the firstborn whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the judge of all men, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.”
Ephesians language (“seated with Christ in the heavenlies”) is a kind of spatial counterpart to that. That is to say, on the eschatological scheme we’re the assembly gathered around the heavenly Jerusalem. Another way of looking at it is we are already seated, in principle, with Christ in the heavenlies.
Although that’s our position, although that’s our assembly point, yet we crop up, as it were, in places like Wollongong, New South Wales, and Hudson Upon Thames. We crop up in all kinds of places in churches that reflect this assembly before the living God. The church is the gathered people of God.
E) The church is defined in certain respects by sanctification and worship.
Here I am thinking of passages like the opening lines of 1 Corinthians. “Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours.”
This side of the Reformation in our theological discourse, sanctification is often put over against justification. Justification is the declarative act of God by which we are declared to be just in his sight because of the finished work of Christ on the cross. Sanctification is the ongoing work of our transformation as we become more holy.
In the domain of systematic theology, I don’t mind if we use terminology like that. There are certainly lots of themes in Scripture that speak of our progressive growth in holiness. Paul can speak of forgetting those things which are behind and pressing on to those things which are before, and so forth, but, in fact, dominantly in Paul when he uses sanctification, I think he’s referring to what is sometimes called in the domain of systematic theology positional sanctification.
So also here, as churches go, you wouldn’t think of 1 Corinthians as the most sanctified in the Reformed sense. I mean, the kind of sexual sin that you find in this church is not too appealing and the one-upmanship and the lasciviousness and the division over tongues and all the other sins that manifest themselves in this church; yet, Paul dares write, “Sanctified in Christ Jesus,” because we have been set aside for God. That’s the truth.
In that sense, it’s true of all Christians. That means we have been called to be holy. Indeed, we call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is to be bound up with all of our lives. That is how worship functions dominantly in the New Testament. We are to offer to God all of our lives all the time and, within that framework then, to worship God with heart and soul and mind and strength, not least when we gather together and reflect in corporate unity what we are to do individually and personally all week long.
F) The church is both a product of the gospel and the bearer of the gospel.
There are many things I could say about these passages, but I’ll leave them aside.
3. A meditation on some words of Jesus.
John 13:34 and 35. Jesus commands us to love one another. “As I have loved you.… By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Whatever else we do, we must not think of these verses in merely sentimental terms.
Not long ago I had to give an evangelistic address at the University of Maine under the title, The Intolerance of Tolerance, because in the Western world the notion of tolerance has changed. It used to be a tolerant person was one who had very strong views on something or other but then insisted others had the right to have equally strong views that differed from his and to speak them.
Nowadays, a tolerant person by definition is one who doesn’t have any strong views except the strong view that you mustn’t have strong views, in which case the question becomes.… What is there to tolerate? If everyone is right, you needn’t tolerate anything because everyone is right. I don’t know what tolerance means under the new regime.
There are some ways of approaching Christian love that are like that. They’re full of sentiment. “We’re all such lovely people, aren’t we, that of course we love one another,” but that’s not the way it is. Christian love is, in this respect, like the love of God. It is self-originating. It is absolutely self-originating in the case of God. He loves us not because we are so lovely but because he is that kind of God.
Because of the work of redemption and regeneration within us that transforms us we learn to love unlovely people because we, unlovely people, have been loved. We are asked to love one another not because we’re such a lovely bunch but precisely because we’re not. Do you know what? You really are an irritating bunch. The trouble is so am I.
We come from such different backgrounds in this assembly, don’t we, with different stances and perspectives. If we were all perfectly adorable it would be easy to love us, but we’re not, and it takes the transforming work of the Spirit of God within us to make us love, not because the object is always so lovely but because it is now in our nature to love.
That’s why Jesus says, “As I have loved you …” He did not love us because we are so lovely but because he is love, and if we, then, are to reflect what it means to be a Christian in our own lives and in our own churches we must similarly love. This is gospel unity. “So you will be known to be my disciples.” It is gospel unity that is gospel constrained, gospel empowered, and gospel limited.
It is the reversal of Eden and the fall. In the beginning there was God. The very nature of the fall meant the individuals who had been made in the image of God and who once thought about God and longed for God and turned toward God, now each one thought he or she was the center of the universe. “God (if he, she, or it exists) jolly well better serve me or I’ll find other gods. I’ll redefine god. I’ll make a god for me.”
Then, of course, at the horizontal level, the inevitable result is covetousness and lust and rape and offenses and war and jealousy and one-upmanship and abuse and on and on and on, all because each individual says, “I will be god,” but in the transformation brought about by the gospel, God is God. God alone is God. By his grace, we know sins forgiven. We come under his lordship. We confess Jesus alone is Lord.
And so transformed, thus reconfigured, in anticipation of the glories that will come in consummated splendor in the new heaven and the new earth, already for Jesus’ sake we love one another. This is gospel unity, gospel constrained, gospel empowered, and gospel limited, the reversal of Eden for the glory of Christ and the good of his people. All the practical decisions we make about helping one another in our evangelism or working side by side or referring people to other churches.… All of these things come out of this image.
I have a daughter who, this year, went to university and chose a fine Presbyterian church, and I’m a Baptist. Do you know what? I think she chose the best church in town. It’s a gospel church. I have a nephew who is working in North Africa. He takes teams of young people into North Africa. They go camping, and they stop here and there and talk to various people about the Lord Jesus, young people in North African states. He doesn’t know much Arabic but he’s fluent in French, and he gets by and talks with everybody.
After some long, long discussions with a group of Muslims that had sometimes degenerated into quarrels, Matthew backed off and was embarrassed and apologized. Then they talked some more, and they went camping together and they talked some more. At the end of several days, these Muslim students turned to my nephew and said, “Do you fellows ever say anything bad about people?” Behold, how they love one another. It’s gospel unity, gospel power, and gospel urgency. Let’s pray.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
