The Rest of the Old Old Story

Nevertheless the foundation of God stands sure, having this seal: The Lord knows those who are his, and let everyone that names the name of Christ depart from iniquity. -2 Tim. 2:19

Today I had a friend tell me that he hates seeing how doctrines divide the church today. Then he added: “I know there are some doctrines that are crucial.”

There are. Every different denomination has a different idea of which doctrines are crucial; however, which ones are truly crucial was decided a long time ago.

1700 years ago, in A.D. 325, all the bishops of the churches throughout the Roman empire gathered to attempt to preserve the unity of the Church. They met over one specific issue, but by the end of it they had crafted an essential creed that has been given the amen by all thriving, godly churches for the last seventeen centuries. We know it today as the apostles creed.

It’s important to know exactly where that creed came from.

All the early churches had what was known to them as “The Rule of Faith.” It was taught to a new believer at baptism, and every believer was required to believe it. Jesus began the process by teaching the apostles to baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Over the next couple centuries, the churches added—slowly and with great care—to that creed. Since there was no pope and no overarching hierarchy, each church developed their own. They were similar, but not the same.

At Nicea in A.D. 325, the council of bishops decided to use the rule of faith of the church at Caesarea. Most likely, it simply represented a typical rule of faith and there was nothing outstanding about it. At the council, after much debate, they added a couple of phrases to it in order to deal with the controversy current at that time.

For 1700 years since then, godly churches have given their amen to this creed.

We cannot forget that Jesus’ last prayer with his disciples was for their unity. He prayed that his disciples would be as perfectly one as he is with the Father. Dare we ignore that? Dare we lightly break that unity? Dare we meet separately from one another over any doctrine that is not as dear to his heart as it is to ours?

I can assure you that Jesus is not fooled by our proclamations of unity while we meet in separate buildings, having no part in the lives of Christians that are meeting in a different building at the next street corner. The world isn’t, either. Only we are.

The apostle Paul had an even smaller list of doctrines that he called essential. He said, “The Lord knows those who are his, and let those who name the name of Christ depart from iniquity.”

I would like to suggest that you are not free to break fellowship with any believer who will live in obedience to Christ and who believes that the Father is creator, that Jesus is his Son who came in the flesh, died for sins, ascended to heaven, and will return to judge the living and the dead. When God asks you about that brother, do not be found replying, as Cain did, that you are not his keeper. God will not be thrilled to find you caring more about your own family than you do about yours.

Tomorrow I will comment again on the difficulties of pursuing unity in an age of denominationalism. The devil mocks us. He believes he has made it impossible for true believers—those who actually obey Christ—to give their lives to one another. If we don’t know that the eye can’t say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” yet and still the devil has not forgotten it. He knows that “divide and conquer” is a true principle when applied to the Church of Jesus Christ.

He has not made it impossible. He’s just made the price very high. Are any of us willing to pay it?

See you tomorrow.

I’ve spent the last couple days working on a potential ebook that I want to call Honest, Historic Christianity. If you’re a reader of this blog, I wouldn’t mind you helping me with it. It is not linked to on my web site, only here.

It’s only started, but it is about 17 pages of single-spaced writing in a Word document. The two main finished chapters are on the church and unity and salvation by faith. It won’t be real new if you read my blog a lot, but it is a unique approach to the Scriptures.

I call the approach the honest and historic approach because I have two goals.

One, honesty. I don’t want to explain away any Scriptures. I want the things I believe, hold to, and teach to be without “difficult” Scriptures. Nowadays, without the apostles to teach us and with their traditions, so honored in the early churches (2 Thess. 2:15), lost to us, it can take years of prayer and waiting to find what’s true.

Two, historical. I want to believe and teach what works. A prophet is known by his results, not his words. The kingdom of God does not consist of words, but of power. I want what I teach to be historical in the sense of being what powerful, holy, and united churches have taught in the past. I would also like it to be historical in the sense of “actual”: real and lived out.

You can see how I’m doing at this link: http://www.oldoldstory.org/Honest and Historic Christianity.doc

The only charge is feedback if you have any.

The quotes used below are from the Jan. 15 posting at a blog at http://www.beautyfromtheheart.org/index.html. Great blog, and I’ll add it to my blogroll as soon as I get a chance.

Back in 1982, at the tender age of 21, I had become an atheist. I wasn’t an atheist very long, just over a couple months, but it wasn’t an accident. It was a conscious choice that I put a lot of thought into. It was at that point, however, that God really began to go after me in a personal way.

One of the ways was a movie called In the Presence of Mine Enemies. It made a huge impact on me. It’s about a guy who was in a Vietnam POW camp for seven years. It showed some of the torture he went through and a lot of the horrid conditions he lived in all those years. What affected me was what happened when he was released.

He was released when the whole POW camp was delivered by the Americans. All the prisoners were released at once, and they all made their way into a clearing, blinking in the bright sunlight. Immediately, they did two things. They sang “God Bless America,” and they all knelt and gave thanks to God.

I was incensed. I was in the military myself at the time, and I was alone in the barracks rec room watching the movie on TV. I stood up and started yelling at the TV. “Why are you giving thanks to God? If he really exists and can deliver you from the POW camp, then why didn’t he do it seven years ago? You should be cursing him for letting you go through all that torture!” I stormed out of the rec room, stewing and brewing in my own anger.

That night I laid awake in bed wondering how that could have happened. Why would all those POW’s give thanks to God? Why all of them, or almost all of them? Why didn’t most of them agree with me and curse God?

The only answer I could come up with is that God was with them, comforting and helping them during their imprisonment. Somehow, they did not feel abandoned by God despite the torture and despite the ongoing suffering. It shook my atheism, and it was the start of God showing me his Son and causing me to bend my knee to him.

Today, I was reading the story of another prisoner of war, this one at the horrible Nazi labor camp at Dachau. This prisoner of war, Alexandria Goode, was thirteen at the time. Listen to these portions of her story:

Countless prisoners from Alexandria’s own barracks were found dead after committing suicide in their bunks. Utterly alone and parentless, Alexandria credits God with saving her from that same fate. “Oddly enough,” she says, “that’s where I found Jesus.”

Not so odd to me. I became convinced 26 years ago, as an atheist, that God doesn’t abandon the imprisoned. Alexandria, who has much more right to speak about such things than me or you, agrees. She was the subject of Nazi “science” experiments. She had her tonsils removed by them without anesthesia. They injected her with various substances, resulting in boils all over her body (remember Job?). This is what happened to her:

Lying awake in the darkness atop her straw-strewn bunk, she begged God for the strength to survive. It was her bargain. Either should we commit suicide, or God would give her help, somehow.

Following her plea, a peace Alexandria still cannot fully describe overcame her agony: “I was filled, literally filled with the joy…I went to assure the girls who were with me that we were going to be okay, and they really thought I had lost my mind. But I was so sure! I was just filled with an assurance. It was unquestionable.”

Alexandria is living in America today. You can see her picture at the blog I linked above. She’s in her 70′s and serving God wholeheartedly and with great energy.

We serve an awesome God. Thank you, Alexandria Goode, for your incredible testimony and example.

The comments are turned back on. I found a much better spam filter that I was able to add as a plugin. They had great instructions, so it wasn’t too hard to figure out how to do it.

I have a couple recent prayer stories I could add to my prayer answers series, but I want to tell you a story instead. Hopefully, it will encourage you. Hopefully, you’ll be able to relate!

Unfortunately, this story is around 26 years old. Wow! It still stands in my memory, though.

It was 1982 or 1983, and I was in Florida in the military. I was on midnight shift, and one night there was no work at all for me to do. We weren’t allowed to sleep, so I got a book out to read. It was The Release of the Spirit by Watchman Nee, and I read the whole thing in about two or three hours. I was a relatively new Christian at the time, but I could totally relate to everything he said. It was not just like I could understand it, but I could feel the whole thing.

The gist of the book is that God works on our soul from the inside and the outside. He uses circumstances, trials, and other things to crack us from the outside, while the life of God in our spirit presses on us from the inside. He compared it to a seed that is planted in the ground. Pressure, heat, and moisture work on the hard outer shell of the seed, and the life inside the seeds presses its way out as the shell breaks.

Watchman Nee is awesome at helping us understand that God wants people to be able to see Christ in us. Even our best points are not what God wants others to see. He wants them to see Christ. Therefore, our greatest strengths can often be our greatest weaknesses because those are places where we trust ourselves. It may look good and righteous to us, but it’s still part of the hard outer shell of our soul. God wants to break those things and let Christ be released from our spirits.

That book completely filled me with God. I was overwhelmed, and after the first three hours or so of reading I spent the rest of the night outside under the stars praying and crying out to God. The presence of God was so strong that I felt like I’d been transported to heaven.

In the morning, as the sun came up, I sat in our dispatch office waiting for my relief to come in. Apparently, I was not the only one who could feel God’s presence. Five different people walked up to me as I sat there and talked to me about God in some way. My boss showed up and basically apologized for not following God, and he promised me that he was thinking about it. I hadn’t said anything to him. Another co-worker I barely knew came up to me, told me she went to church, and invited me out to visit her church. Another co-worker asked me a couple questions about God, then told me he’d try to be less crude around me. Again, I hadn’t said a word to him about being crude, neither that day nor previously. All this came out of the blue, and I realized the great power of the presence of God.

I was thinking about that today, and I’m reminded once more that it’s not our strength that will reach the world. It is the power of God. May our focus not be on the work of God but on the face of God, for only there will we find the power that will make the work of God something good, spiritual, and divine. It is not our righteousness but his that will transform the world.

The high places were not taken away out of Israel; nevertheless, Asa’s heart was perfect all his days.

~2 Chronicles 15:17

God’s not a legalist. Other kings were commended for getting rid of their high places, but Asa didn’t do it. Nevertheless, Asa’s heart was perfect, says the Holy Spirit through the Scriptures.

If you’ve read the Gospels, you may have noticed that Jesus wasn’t very fond of the Pharisees. What you may not know is that the Pharisees are the descendants of the Maccabees, of whom God was very fond. The Maccabees fought for Israel, defended the temple, defended the Law and the traditions of Israel, and they trained the people to reject idols and obtain the blessing of God. They were great men of God. If you’re a Protestant who hasn’t read Maccabees because it’s in the “Catholic” Bible, you’re missing out. It’s not as exciting as watching a modern movie, of course, but there’s a lot to be learned in it.

Think of the Maccabees as being like the church of Ephesus before it lost its first love and the Pharisees as being like the Ephesians after they lost their first love. Judas Maccabeus and his brothers and descendants had their eyes on God and on the people of Israel. The Pharisees had their eyes on rules. The latter made Jesus mad, real mad. Read Matthew 23 some day. He didn’t like the doctrine of the Pharisees.

Today there are all sorts of movements insisting that some little particular is required in order to please God. The Sacred Name movement, for example, insists that you have to use Jesus’ Hebrew name (Yeshua, Yehoshua, Y’shua, Yahshua or some other version they’ve made up) if you want to be saved. Other denominations insist on some other thing.

Years ago I met a man from the Church of Christ who told me I was the only other man who would talk with him about God. No one at his church, he said, was much interested in such conversation. He was delighted to have met me. The third or fourth time we got together, however, he found out that my water baptism, years earlier, had not been for the purpose of the forgiveness of my sins. I told him, “I understand Scripturally why you would want that to be so, but it’s impossible. By the time I went to be baptized, my sins were already forgiven. I can’t change that, and I wouldn’t want to.”

That man cut off fellowship with me from that moment. I was awestruck by his legalism. He was bent on literally interpreting Acts 2:38 and 22:16, but he seemed to have no regard for Matthew 7:20, literally or figuratively. It meant nothing to him at all that his doctrine was producing no interest in God at his church so that I was the only one who would converse with him about God. His doctrine was his doctrine, and it just didn’t matter what the fruit of it was.

Let’s not be like him. Let’s be like God. God had fellowship with people like Sampson, and he believed that people like Asa could be perfect. Samuel the prophet was one of his favorite people, and he not only didn’t tear down high places, he regularly sacrificed at them, as well as anywhere else he wanted to, thus breaking the Law of Moses. Nonetheless, the Scriptures testify that God let none of his words fall to the ground. It can be very important to recognize God’s prophets, as God tends to back up their words. You won’t recognize them by some minute rule you want to enforce. You’ll recognize them by their fruit.

Don’t forget, the Pharisees were unable to recognize God himself when he walked among them.

We will not require that you punish our accusers; they being sufficiently punished by their present wickedness and ignorance of what is right. ~Justin Martyr, c. A.D. 150

Yesterday my son, upon hearing that a fellow student had ignored a teacher’s instructions without consequence, decided that he had been a fool for his own obedience. What reward had he gained for his self-restraint?

I had to get him to pause and look. Do you really want to follow this student? Do you really want to be like them? Every day this person pays for their lack of self-restraint. What Justin Martyr said over 1800 years ago is true. The unrighteous are sufficiently punished by their own wickedness. The flip side is also true. Righteousness is its own reward.

I want to be careful not to label my son’s fellow student as wicked for two reasons. One, I don’t want to speak more negatively about this person than is fair. Two, I want to apply this to you, my dear reader. It is your unrighteousness that is sufficient punishment of itself and your righteousness that is its own reward. This is not purely the domain of the “wicked.” Every day all of us make choices that mark who we will be.

Those who make bad choices stand out by their own words. They describe their own punishment in the complaints that pour from their lips; “People are always saying things about me”; “Nobody likes me”; “I never get to do the things I want”; “There’s no opportunities for me to achieve what I want in life.”

We’re made by God. He didn’t make us to be satisfied by wickedness. What satisfies his heart satisfies ours as well. We are made in his image. It is not “people” that do these things to complainers. It’s their own hearts and consciences that do things to complainers. The closed doors they face are created by their lack of discipline and diligence, not by people who are standing in the way.

For my son, overcoming his own desire for the sake of respect–for the sake of some authority’s desire–is training to acquire a skill. It is the same skill that will be needed to overcome other obstacles that stand in the way of the tremendous satisfaction that comes from being an achiever. Strangely enough, a heart that is capable of self-denial is a grateful and uncomplaining heart. This happens because it is satisfied and happy from living the way it was made to live.

Note: comments are enabled again; I found a better filter. 

Today we passed a church marquis that read, “For a happier year, try Jesus in 2009.” I understand the mentality that wants to ask people to try Jesus, but something about that statement really bothered me. Contrary to popular belief, Jesus is not pleading or begging. Jesus is offering because he has something tremendous to offer. And his Father is commanding. As Paul put it, “God . . . now commands all men everywhere to repent.”

Then my wife added an even more pertinent point. “They ought to try telling such-and-such to try Jesus. I think he’d have something to say about it making you happier.”

Yes, it’s true that Jesus said that he came to offer abundant life that would make our joy full. It is also true that he himself was a “man of grief, acquainted with sorrow.” Paul was once “pressed out of measure, beyond strength, so much that we despaired of life.” No wonder he said, “If we have hope only in this life, then we are of all men most to be pitied.”

Trying Jesus isn’t going to work, and his goal is not going to be to make you happy. He is going to ask you to take up your cross and deny yourself. Otherwise, according to Jesus himself, you cannot be his disciple (Luk. 9:23; 14:26-33). Do you understand what it means to take up your cross? Picture Jesus stumbling down the Via Dolorosa, a crossbar the size of a railroad tie across his striped and bleeding shoulders, and you will have an idea of what he’s asking from you. Not exactly the picture that’s painted by “for a happier year, try Jesus in 2009,” is it?

True joy has nothing to do with what American Christians mean when they say to try Jesus. According to Scripture, it was for the joy that was set before him that Jesus endured that torturous trip down the road to Golgotha. It is that joy that Jesus wants to give us. “My brothers, count it all joy when you fall into various trials,” Jesus’ brother said. Paul so realized that suffering was the route to joy that he spoke of suffering as a promise of God. “For to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him but also to suffer for his sake,” he wrote in a letter to the church in Philippi. And he sought after it as though it were a gift himself: “I have suffered the loss of all things . . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings.”

Are you really ready to try Jesus?

I visited a local church tonight with three other adults and about 10 of our teenagers. We were only there for about an hour and a half, which was completely filled by the testimony portion of their New Year’s Eve service. There, a man I know a little bit told one of the neatest prayer stories I’ve heard.

When Jeff’s daughter was born–a couple of the teenagers I was with know her; this isn’t one of those “my aunt’s cousin twice-removed said” stories–she had problems and required open heart surgery. At the end of the surgery, the whole family was called in and they were told that something had went wrong. Jeff saw his daughter, and her head was swollen as big as a basketball and she was blue.

Jeff said he wasn’t following Jesus fully at that time (2001), and he didn’t feel comfortable praying. His mom, he said, was a saint, however, so he asked her to pray. With tears, she told him she couldn’t pray. So he went downstairs and called his pastor, but despite repeated attempts couldn’t reach him. He was desperate and hopeless, believing that his daughter would die, when he got in the elevator.

When the elevator doors opened a man and lady were standing there. He referred to the lady as an angel. They said hi to one another, and when he asked them what they were at the hospital for, she asked if she could pray for him. Apparently, they got together to pray in the waiting room with the rest of the family, and he said that as the lady began to pray a dark cloud formed and moved around the room. As it reached each person, their tears would dry up, their frown would disappear, and they would begin to smile. For 45 minutes they prayed, and the cloud touched every person in the room.

After prayer, they went in the recovery room, and the swelling was down and the tubes were removed from the baby. Obviously, this made an incredible impact on Jeff.

I wouldn’t normally include a story from someone I’ve only had a few conversations with, but Jeff, despite being a Christian and an integral part of this local church, is not real religious. He’s very down-to-earth and fun, and I can’t imagine there’s any way this story is made up. All the people at the church know him, and several people from the village have met his daughter. We drop in on this church pretty regularly.