I'm not anywhere near as efficent as I should be with my time management. A sermon a week and two classes are a bit rough on my daydreaming and nap time.
I thought I would post a chapter or two from a great book by Jay Guin called, "The Holy Spirit and Revolutionary Grace; God's Antidotes for Division Among the Churches of Christ."
You can download the PDF.file for this book here or visit Jay's blog here.
Prologue:
Good morning, class.
The scene is a Sunday School class for college students. The teacher observes his students as they slowly drag themselves into the room. Cearly, many had been out late Saturday night. The girls were well dressed but very sleepy, having gotten up early to get their hair and makeup just right before coming to church. The boys were just sleepy. Some even came to class with their hair still wet from their wake-up showers.
This is the beginning of a new semester, and we’ll be studying The Holy Spirit and Revolutionary Grace.
A few students look up. “Would you repeat that?”
The Holy Spirit and Revolutionary Grace. This is going to be a different sort of course. Our only text will be the Bible, but we’ll be jumping around from book to book a lot. Get ready for some real “Bible drills.”
The lessons will be in two parts. First we’ll cover the basics of the Holy Spirit. Once we’ve gotten a foundation laid, we’ll talk about grace. Then we’ll draw some conclusions.
It will take a few months, but we’ll cover a lot of ground very fast.
By the way, we’re going to be studying the Holy Spirit to help us understand God’sgrace. We are not going to be talking about Pentecostalism, faith healing, or that sort of thing. These are very important topics, but we want to learn what the Bible really teaches about theSpirit, not what it doesn’t teach.
All too often, we have run into difficult verses in our Bibleclasses and have dealt with them by deciding what the verses don’t say. We read about predestination in the Bible, and we go to great lengths to prove the traditionally Calvinist churches wrong as to their understanding of it. But we forget that God put that verse in the Biblefor all of us to profit from, and so we haven’t understood the verse until we figure out what it does say.
Most of the class is now fully awake. They realize that this will not be an ordinary class. They’ll either learn something or else get to hear some rip-roaring arguments.
Just so, when we study the Holy Spirit and grace, we will not spend a lot of time talking about what other people teach or how these verses might be misinterpreted. We won’t talk much about how these issues have been interpreted throughout history. I’ve taught that material before, and we can learn much from our history. But this time I don’t want to get distracted by side issues.
The critical question is: What does the Bible say? We are also going to study how God’s grace relates to some very practical concerns.
The materials that we will be studying over the next few months are not just abstract principles. We in the Churches of Christ have a serious problem with division, and we will be looking deeply into God’s Word to see how God says that we should deal with this problem.
How many of you have attended a congregation that has split or that resulted from a split?
Hands shoot up all over the classroom.
Someone in the back makes a long whistle, as the class registers dismay at how many splits there have been.
How many grew up in a town where at least one Church of Christ split at some time.
Virtually every hand goes up this time. The class’s amazement becomes embarrassment.
Let me get a few of you to tell us why the Church in your town split.
One girl volunteers: “My congregation split over orphans homes back in the 50’s. We are still fighting with the anti’s in town over this, even though we dropped the orphanage from our budget 10 years ago. Sometimes I think that we spend half of our sermons defending our position on this issue.”
Another student offers, “We split just a couple of years ago when the elders accepted a divorced and remarried couple that had been baptized after the second marriage. Half thecongregation walked out of the building, and we had just built a new building and had a big bondissue to pay off?”
A third student says, “We split over the Pentecostal movement back in the 60’s. About 10 families left to start their own church so they could speak in tongues.”
A number of other examples are given. No one is very proud of the divisions, and manyof the class members are plainly angry about the splits. Clearly, this is an emotional issue, butfew class members realized that many others were so resentful of the division until they saw thereactions of their classmates.
“I’m sick and tired of every Church of Christ being too small to be effective. We split andsplit until the churches that are left can barely afford to open the doors, much less have any kindof an effective ministry!” one student concludes.
“Yeah, why do we always have to split a church whenever we disagree?” another student asks.
You’ve put your finger on precisely the right question. Turn with me to Amos 3:3. The teacher reads from the King James Version: “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?”
Doesn’t this mean that we have to agree in order to walk together, and therefore, wecan’t be a part of the same congregation if we disagree?
“Well, nobody can agree on everything,” suggests a girl on the front row.
Well, since this verse is in the Bible, maybe this means we must agree on everything in the Bible?
The students mull this one over. One of the older boys comments, “Let’s be realistic. We don’t even agree on what the Bible says. I know from talking with my friends here that somebelieve in an actual indwelling of the Spirit, and some do not. Some believe that God made theworld through evolution, but many say the world is only 6,000 years old. A few of us oppose having a kitchen in the building. We disagree about lots of things, but it hasn’t kept us fromworshipping God together, or working together in the benevolence program, or going on mission campaigns together.”
Many other students nod their heads vigorously. A nerve has clearly been touched.
Well, then, we must agree on some things, or can we just “agree to disagree” oneverything? What do we have to agree on?
The class is slow to respond. “We have to believe in Jesus!” one student exclaims.
Absolutely right. What else?
The class is lost in thought. What if someone is a Pentecostal? Can we accept a baptized believer who speaks intongues? Do we have to agree on the works of the Spirit?
Immediately, several students scrunch up their noses and say that such a believer cannotbe accepted.
“Speaking in tongues is just too weird!” one says.
Well, can we accept someone who is wrong on whether the Spirit indwells?
“We do it every day!” a student exclaims.
The class is now thoroughly perplexed. They have never heard these questions squarelyasked before and they have no idea where to go for an answer.
Isn’t this just another way of asking how broad is God’s grace?
I mean, if God forgives someone for his false beliefs, then we must accept that person also, right? How can we be less forgiving than God?
The class agrees, but the members clearly have reservations about this idea.
A student asks, “But when does someone fall from grace? What false doctrines make youfall?”
We are going to spend the next few months answering that very question.
But remember these things:1. God saves people, not “churches.”
The test for whether you are saved is (1)whether you have gotten into grace by being saved and (2) whether you have fallen away. If you’ve been saved and haven’t fallen away, you are a Christian and you are in God’s family, that is, his church. Your fellow Christians must recognize you as a fellow Christian and fellow church member. You may be in error on some point or other, but you are saved if you haven’tfallen away.
2. Being saved means hearing, believing, confessing, repenting, and being baptized.
Grace only covers the sins of those in grace. You get into grace by being saved. We can never “agree to disagree” about how to be saved in the first place.
3. God’s grace never excuses or justifies sin. It forgives sin.
Just because we conclude that your brother or sister is forgiven for his or her false beliefs, that doesn’t mean that we stop teaching what we believe to be true or that we can act contrary to our own understanding of this Bible. Neither is his or her sin “okay.” It’s wrong, and we cannot consider it to be anything else.
But God didn’t appoint you or me to pick and choose and say which sins put you outside grace and which do not. We must look to the Bible to see where to draw the line.
With these thoughts in mind, next week we are going to begin a study of the Holy Spirit.
This will give us enough common ground so that we can intelligently discuss God’s grace.
One reason that we understand grace so poorly is that we understand the Spirit poorly. When we’ve come to an agreement on the role of the Spirit, grace will be much easier to understand and to agree on.
We will then study God’s grace in depth, and use our studies to help us deal with thisproblem of divisions and splits.
Chapter 1 of Jay's book will follow or download it yourself. It's a great read.
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