This Entertaining Truth, Part 4: The Sufficiency of "Christian".

There is something else I wanted to discuss now: the sufficiency of "Christian". I could identify myself as a "Reformed Baptist" or "Christian Hedonist" or an "I'm of John Piper". The guys at TeamPyro describe themselves as "Calvidispiebaptogelical". And of what use is that in describing what saves me? It's a cute label and something that people in my school of thought would chuckle at and possibly unite under. There are two problems with that.

First, it is not good for the unity of the church. If a Christian labels themselves as anything other than Christian, it can divide them from other legitimate believers. I am not talking about "Christians" that prayed a prayer and went back to sinning so that grace would abound. I mean others that have turned from their sins, believed in Christ alone for salvation, and have been given a persevering faith in Christ that stands up to trials so that God will find them faithful when they stand before Him at the end of their lives.

Second, you are not saved by a theological framework! Jesus did not die on the cross and say, "The limited atonement is finished! I didn't die for you, Caesar! Haha... gotcha!!" Everyone who is saved, regardless of their background, becomes a Christian when they repent of their sins and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:15). Those are the only essentials, though they carry a much higher cost than most people think.

Strangely enough, most of my close friends are Christians who do not agree with me theologically. Some of them are from my old church, a church that calls itself Baptist but does not preach a gospel of repentance. Yet some people there (including the aforementioned friends) have truly repented from their sins and believed in Christ and remained in that church, more or less, as missionaries to it - teaching what they know is right even though the pastors don't always agree with them. And one of my best friends is a member of a Pentecostal church. He does not personally subscribe to the health-and-wealth gospel, but he goes to that church because that is what he has always done.

See, in most contexts, enjoying fellowship with another believer until I find a disagreement with them, then spending all subsequent time disagreeing with them until we both just say "hmph!" and part ways does not help. It is important to fellowship with those who are like-minded. But if someone really is a believer and is not like-minded, and it really is that important to win them over to my side, I need to win them over with love. And if "love doesn't work", I need to repent of my pragmatism and continue giving them the truth in love anyway.

Here is another thought just in case I have made it seem that theology is not important. Many of the differences across Christian theologies boil down to one question: Does God exist to make me look great, or do I exist to make God look great? Phrased another way, who is at the center - man or Christ? Our answers do a lot to shape our views of Him and of the world around us.

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Tim Conway from Grace Community Church and I'll Be Honest said the following in one of his Q&A sessions. My apologies for not remembering which one:

"There are Calvinists in hell. ... Whatever Bible you have, it ought to be teaching you how to love other Christians more. Whatever doctrine you have - whatever theology you have - it ought to be revealing Christ to you more and more, that you will want to love Him more and more."

"If your doctrine makes it harder for you to get along with - if it makes you more difficult - if it makes you unbearable - if it makes you ungracious - if it makes you unloving, then ... you're making an idol out of that. And I'll say the same thing about Bible translations, about denominations. If your denomination, or being a Baptist, or clinging to a certain Bible translation makes you ugly towards other people, makes you bitter towards other people, you've made an idol out of it."

"Many times, discipline is right in the area of the sin. You know what sin a lot of times He comes after us for? Idolatry. A lot of times, we tend to treasure something in our lives more than Christ. ... He will come to us right at that idol. ... If you are in sin and you can just keep on going at it, beware."

This Entertaining Truth, Part 3: A Soundtrack for Life

In my music collection, I have at least 38 days' worth of songs, sermons, and podcast episodes, accrued through about 13 years of buying music and 4 years of listening to sermons. I definitely appreciate good music and preaching. Most of my days at work are spent, at least partially, listening to various songs in order to block out noise in the office and help me to focus on my tasks. And then I usually listen to music on the way home and sometimes after I get home as well.

As Joshua Harris said well in Dug Down Deep, everyone is a theologian; but is what you believe about God true?

Now I will expand this to musicians and entertainers in general. Every song that contains lyrics expresses theology, whether it says, "How great is our God" or "Shake that [rear end], girl". I say that of the latter example because it still expresses a worldview that says, "The chief end of a man is to pursue pleasure for himself, and women exist to provide him with that pleasure." This is the obviously wrong example to most Christians, although the fact that such songs still express some form of theology is far less obvious. One can find another less obvious example in songs which teach, "God exists to give me what I want."

Christians can respond to this in several ways. One is to still listen to the world but try not to let it affect our worldview. That often sets us up for additional temptation. Others will listen to anything that calls itself Christian without examining its doctrine. And others will only listen to songs that are doctrinally sound.

Customized theology can creep in here as well. Few, if any, people use lyrics alone as the determining factor in what they will willfully listen to. The song must sound good too, right? We obtain some sort of pleasure from listening to music, and it also serves as a means to worship corporately. Otherwise, we would just listen to preaching all the time.

So we can have two filters: one, lyrical; the other, musical. And then our playlists become routine. I don't know anyone who sets up playlists on their music player of choice based on the theology that the songs teach. Most people use a genre, an artist, or just favorite songs. So then the favorite songs become stuck in our heads and we start meditating on the words. And we can get a skewed theology this way. I suspect this is one way how some people listen to songs that say "all things are possible" all day and then start praying outside the will of God.

There exist other dangers in considering music as a soundtrack for life. How many times have I been inclined to pray and decided to listen to my umpteenth holy hip hop song of the day instead? It is trading "best" - communion with the Father - for merely "good" - learning great doctrine. We can listen to doctrinally sound worship music or holy hip hop or read wonderful books or listen to deep expositional preaching all day and still not abide in Christ. Often I need to check myself: would I really rather listen to a full playlist of music than just read Scripture? Would I really rather listen to another sermon than just pray? In doing this, I exalt my teachers instead of my Lord.

And I have found it also sometimes becomes hard for me to sing a simple worship song after a week of listening to lots of doctrinally deep Christian music. If I go into a worship service expecting to sing a certain deep worship song with the rest of the congregation, and I'm disappointed when we sing something simpler instead, the service starts to become about me instead of about God. Even in giving myself to God-centered Christianity, I can still center my Christianity on myself.

Some of my friends have been able to go on a media fast for a week or 40 days. Honestly, I don't think I could do it right now. When I fast from food, I have not been able to also fast from Facebook or checking my email - or sometimes even checking my Blogger stats! When Jesus communed with His Father, He withdrew - away from the disciples, away from ministry and fellowship. Ah, as C.S. Lewis says, "we are far too easily pleased" - with our electronic toys.

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"The best thing some of you can do is take every television set in your house and destroy it - and learn to read, and think, and talk."

- Paul Washer, "The Sovereignty of God and World Missions".

This Entertaining Truth, Part 2: Sola "Scriptura + My Opinions"?

"In a separate report, Barna found that more than 6 in 10 born-again Christians say they are customizing their faith, not following any one church's theology. 'Americans are increasingly comfortable picking and choosing what they deem to be helpful and accurate theological views and have become comfortable discarding the rest of the teachings in the Bible,' the report notes."

- "Christian faith: Calvinism is Back".

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In the last few years, I have picked up on a tendency of American Christians (including myself, to some extent) going into a church service with everything they believe already made up and then filtering everything they hear through that lens instead of through Scripture. There's this notion of "Joel Osteen is saying this; Paul Washer is saying that; they are both Christians, so they must both somehow be telling the truth... so I'll believe both of them." A lot of them don't read their Bibles enough to know the difference, and a lot of them do not "search the Scriptures to see if these things are so" like the Bereans did. And a lot of them don't examine themselves well enough to see whether they or their teachers are genuinely converted. (Note: God is the final arbiter of that, as the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked - Jeremiah 17:9. But: "you shall know them by their fruit" - Matthew 7:16.)

And then as they hear all these teachers saying all these different things, they cancel each other out. So when they do hear something about how their lifestyle habitually does not fall in line with Scripture and that if they don't repent, that is evidence that they may have never been saved, they dismiss it as, "Oh, that's just what John Piper thinks. That's nice. I'll just let him believe what he believes." Just as bad: "Oooo, that's convicting! But I don't need to do anything about it." It becomes like a college lecture on something that has nothing to do with your job: just interesting, just entertainment, just more useless knowledge in a brain that is most likely already full of worldly useless knowledge.

The problem is, God, not you, determines absolute truth. He alone sets the standards that determine whether you are really saved and whether you are growing in holiness. A lot of people mask their opinions with "God told me..." to get away with anything. But the Bible alone holds final authority regarding doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.

So I ask: where does your "customized faith" come from? Does it come from legitimate Biblical convictions obtained by reading and praying through Scripture? Or is it just what you want to believe?

It would be nigh upon impossible for me to pick a church that agrees with me 100% on every major and minor issue. I identify, in rapidly descending order of importance, as a Christian, a five-point Calvinist, a Baptist, and a qualified continuationist (in the vein of John Piper and Wayne Grudem). And I don't worship like a dead man. All of this, I arrived at through studying Scripture and listening to faithful preachers from Baptist, Presbyterian, nondenominational, Sovereign Grace, Acts 29, (etc.) churches.

Maybe you are from a Sovereign Grace church, read the preceding paragraph, and said, "I don't see what this guy's problem is. He should just join one of our churches. We agree with him on practically everything." The problem is the will of God.

After spending time in prayer about it and becoming convinced that God would be most glorified in my life right now if I do this, I became a member of a Reformed Baptist church in my area. (This is also the "international church" to which I referred in Godly Fellowship, Part 8.) We don't actually have "Reformed" or "Baptist" in our name. We have gone through three names and two pastors during the two-plus years that I have been there. The majority of the members who were there two years ago have left the church and been replaced by new people whom I do not know as well. And in my age group, our church is so full of young men that we all basically have to look outside our local church for prospective wives - and then make sure that they too agree with us on matters of the faith and can serve in our church - not an easy task. (In our young adult ministry recently, we had five men's small groups and only one for women.) There is really very little in it for me except that I know I am being fed with the Word here and worshiping God truthfully with other genuinely converted people here. And those two things outweigh everything else.

I do not want to make minor issues major, if I can help it in the least. To have fellowship with me as a Christian, someone must agree with me on one thing: the gospel. That is the most important thing in all of Christianity, and everything else in our faith is insignificant to this one thing: Christ died for sinners. And if someone repents of their sins (not just confessing them) and believes in Christ alone, God has given them that repentance and faith and saved them. Nothing else really matters compared to this gospel.

At this stage in life, loving the church means the following for me: "To the wind with 10- or 20-year Christian friendships that were not founded in Christ. Possibly, to the wind with getting married or even finding love, at least for now. I do not wear a cross around my neck. I carry it on my shoulder. And this is no sacrifice to me, because God killing His Son at Calvary was an unthinkable sacrifice, and He did it anyway to glorify His name by saving my soul from His eternal wrath. These are my brothers and sisters. They are with Christ. So I am with them."

When we approach doctrine or the church with apathy or we emphasize our customized theology above everything else, we ought to consider the following:

"You wonder why people choose fields away from the States when young people at home are drifting because no one wants to take time to listen to their problems. I’ll tell you why I left. Because those Stateside young people have every opportunity to study, hear, and understand the Word of God in their own language, and these Indians have no opportunity whatsoever. I have had to make a cross of two logs, and lie down on it, to show the Indians what it means to crucify a man. When there is that much ignorance over here and so much knowledge and opportunity over there, I have no question in my mind why God sent me here. Those whimpering Stateside young people will wake up on the Day of Judgment condemned to worst fates than these demon-fearing Indians, because having a Bible, they were bored with it – while these never heard of such a thing as writing."

- Jim Elliot, Shadow of the Almighty, p. 237, quoted on Pure Church.