Lost and Found
Witnessing Tools
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Wendy Wippel
The war between the modern church and the culture it finds itself in is rapidly escalating. (Can you say Chick-fil-A?) Admittedly, it is discouraging. But they know not what they do. We should. And Jesus told us to beware the leaven of the Pharisees.
I'd be the first to admit that I'm feeling Psalm 12:8 lately:
"The wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honored among men." (NIV)
And it seems to me lately that our media is a constant parade of the vile being honored.
Exhibit A: the current festivities in Charlotte, NC, in which the DNC's motto appears to be "not only practicing sin but approving of it as well." (Romans 1:32)
But God spent a whole book on only one sin, and it had nothing to do with the lost. It concerned the found, and the log we often have in their own eye (usually when when we're focusing on the sins of the lost). The book is Galatians, and log the church has in its own eye, the cancer in the body of Christ since the beginning, is legalism.
Legalism, by definition, is adherence to the Law, and that's where it began. Some years after Pentecost, Gentiles began to come to believe in the Jewish Messiah. And that meant trouble. The Jewish believers felt that they had to adhere to the law to be real followers of Jesus. The resulting furor nearly tore the church and its leadership apart.
When the dust cleared, the leaders agreed that salvation was through faith in Christ's work alone. In the words of Peter,
"Men and brethren, you know that a good while ago God chose among us, that by my mouth the Gentiles should hear the word of the gospel and believe. So God, who knows the heart, acknowledged them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us,and made no distinction between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith. Now therefore, why do you test God by putting a yoke on the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear? But we believe that through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ we shall be saved in the same manner as they." (Acts 15:7-11 NKJV)
Peter defined hearts as purified by faith, and the Law as a burden that even the Jews could not bear.
The Jews were saved just like the gentiles, not the other way around.
Christians, over the years, have kind of substituted their own "Law". Real Christians don't smoke. (My old pastor used to say "smoking doesn't send you to hell, it just makes you smell like you've already been there.)
Another pastor told me once that real Christians don't see R-rate movies. I've seen PG-13s (inadvertently) that were absolutely foul. Schindler's List, on the other hand is an R, and I personally think everybody should probably see that.
I think that is why we have the Spirit. It's not a list of rules.
I got a real dose of legalism as a new Christian (at Ohio State, the largest college campus in the world at the time) in the form of a host of well-intentioned traveling campus preachers that seemed to have only one topic: sin. And I'm more than willing to concede that sin is a topic relevant to college life.
But an awareness of sin is only half the Gospel. And the imbalance that a focus on other people's sin can create was brought home to me quickly by the fact that one group, accompanied by a trio of women, went out of their way to acknowledge the presence of more than a few Christian coeds in the audience (all of us in our usual jeans) by condemning us for our sin. We had broken God's Law (revealed in Deuteronomy 22:5) by wearing pants. (Men's clothing.)
Didn't they all pretty much wear dresses in Jesus' day? It is the women's department I shop in at Kohl's, not the men's.
But these kinds of legalism have largely been left behind, right? The church has changed as our society has changed?
Yes. (For better or worse.)
But other kinds of legalism have replaced those old rules.
Franciis Chan is arguably the most celebrated apostle of the "new holiness", Lordship Salvation. The idea that you are not really a Christian unless you are doing some specific things for God. In Crazy Love, he states that unless you are planning to do something big for God, like selling your house and going to the Sudan to take care of babies with AIDS, you are not a real Christian.
In a recent article, he says,
"Put simply, failing to help the poor could damn you to hell."
He always adds that this is not works salvation.
Well, Francis, yes it is.
My sister and her husband didn't go to the Sudan to rescue a child, but they did go to China. Ten years ago this week they brought home a precious bundle of joy they named Hope. A baby girl, abandoned on the steps of a condiment factory.
The year leading up to that moment was a tumultuous roller coaster ride of emotion, beginning with (formidable stacks of paperwork behind them) the day they received the picture of their new daughter-to-be in the mail.
For the next six months that picture was the most important possession the expectant parents owned. It would have been the first thing they went for in a fire. They never left home without it. In fact, it almost it never left their sight. They spent hours gazing at it, imagining the moment when they would hold that baby girl in their arms.
That picture is buried in a drawer now. Why obsess about the picture when the real thing is here?
And that's the problem with legalism. The Law was meant to be a picture of Christ. Christ said I am the way. I am the truth. I am the life. And any time you substitute something else, you're trading down.
It's funny, God never, ever, asks for our resume. In fact, for the group in Scripture that tried to submit one (Matthew 7:21-32), it didn't work out so well. Jesus said, "I never knew you."
It's not a resume. Even our crowns we'll cast right back at His feet.
It's redemption, through a relationship, with the only Righteous One.
The Righteous One, the Kinsman-Redeemer, who will clothe us with robes of righteousness.
One glorious day.
Last week: Blind Guides
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