Loving Studying God More than Loving God

A few days ago I posted a video that explored what it means to love loving God more than to love God for who he is. Today I ran across an article, by Carl Trueman, that warns against a similar phenomenon--loving knowing and studying God more than loving him. 

The greatest temptation of a theology student is to assume that what they are studying is the most important thing in the world. Now, I need to be uncharacteristically nuanced at this point: there is a sense, a very deep and true sense, in which theology is the most important thing in the world. It is, after all, reflection upon what God has chosen to reveal to his creatures; and it thus involves the very meaning of existence. In this sense, there is nothing more important than doing theology.

But this is not the whole story. One of the great problems with the study of theology is how quickly it can become the study of theology, rather than the study of theology, that becomes the point. We are all no doubt familiar with the secular mindset which repudiates any notion of certainty in thought; and one of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that intellectual inquiry is rather like trying to get a date with the attractive girl across the road with whom you have secretly fallen in love: the thrill comes more from the chase and the sense of anticipation than it does from actually finding the answer or eliciting agreement to go to the movies.

Read the rest here.

Our פֶּסַח Lamb, Slain

Lately I've been reading through a small, neat, and eminently useful and wise volume titled The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World (Piper & Taylor, eds.). One of the contributors, pastor Voddie Baucham, Jr., has this to say about the stark, unchanging reality of Christ's sacrifice. It struck me.

In days gone by God had been passing over, or overlooking, sins. And some were thinking that this called into question the justice of God: God, how can you claim to be righteous and yet not crush Moses the murderer, or crush Abraham the liar, or crush David the adulterer? How, O God? But in the merciful providence of God there came a day when God the Father crushed and killed his one and only Son in our stead in order to satisfy his wrath, "so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:26 ESV). Was that enough for the sins of Adam, Abraham, and Moses? Can you hear the rhetorical questions from Calvary? Was that enough for your sins? Was that enough for you to recognize the supremacy of Christ in truth as it relates to redemption? There was nothing else that could have been done that would have allowed God to be both just and justifier. But in the humiliation and exaltation of Jesus Christ we find a resolution to the question, "How can what is wrong be made right?" . . .

How can what is wrong be made right? The spotless, sinless Lamb of God was crushed, rejected, and killed to pay a debt that he did not owe on behalf of sinners who could never pay him back.

We don't talk about the blood of that Lamb nearly enough, it seems to me. Not once in my many years of childhood Sunday school do I recall ever hearing about Jesus as a slain sacrificial lamb. Maybe that's because children would inevitably squirm at that image. Yet it is so essential to the character of our salvation that passing over it (forgive the unavoidable pun) for the sake of some kind of decency, or because, for adults, it sounds too metaphorical, is to fail utterly to understand just what was at stake and involved in the crucifixion. 

The form of our substitute was in reality paramount. The Lord knew that no amount of pure, white-fleeced animal sacrifices could ever atone for the sins of all mankind, from the first man to the last. Only the Christ could fulfill the role. Only the Anointed One could bear such a massive burden. Only he could achieve the victory. Only his blood could make us "white as snow." In the end, the Lamb of God had to be slain in order to satisfy the perfect, just wrath of God. And that is the reason for our hallelujahs, the reason we gather to worship, the reason there is a church--the center of everything, what holds everything together. I needed a good reminder.

Loving Loving God More than Loving God

Here Piper warns against the tendency (especially of "Reformed types") to idolize the loving of God rather than loving God himself. It's a crucial distinction to make, and one that I have not lived by with much dedication till now. A very valuable warning -- one that hits me with particular force in this season of life.

Summer-Sojourning, and Doing Church American-Style

I sat down in a huge, modern sanctuary this Sabbath morn to find a hymnal in the pew. I was ecstatic. Though there were two large video screens and a drum-set, a few guitars, and some other accoutrements of postmodern American evangelicalism littering the stage of College Avenue Baptist Church, the hymnals were a good sign, I thought to myself.

There was music being played as congregants shuffled in to the massive space, and it was hymnic enough. Ah, but then, a full ten minutes after the supposed 10 a.m. starting time, a loud, booming voice suddenly filled the sanctuary. I squinted to see who it was. The piano player, it turns out. He introduced himself, still sitting at his instrument, as the pastor for worship and creative expression--or something like that.

Uh-oh. They do creative expression, I thought. That scared me a little. I'd found this church through the online directory of Converge Worldwide--the former Baptist General Conference. (Think Piper's Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis.) I figured it was a good way to find a church while I'm summer-sojourning here.

Eying the rather unfriendly family sitting next to me, none of the members of which ever even seemed to consider looking to their left to greet me, I sank into my long stretch of pew space while announcements and other brightly colored slides were projected onto the suspended screens. (For some reason, hardly anyone ever sits near me when I go to a church alone. It must be the fangs.)

The music began right away. Standard modern fare--Hillsong, Chris Tomlin, and the like--and not one invitation to crack open the old hymnals. Odder still was the fact that no one was singing aloud. Over five or six long worship songs I hardly heard a peep from anyone around me. Most stood there looking like zombies, young and old (something I call the Californian condition). There was no Psalm 5:7 or 29:2 kind of worship happening. I consequently felt as though I was singing through a megaphone and tried to quiet myself down.

I started to realize in that moment that in my six months abroad I'd become thoroughly accustomed to the British church experience. Britons are not typically shy in singing, even if their voices tend not to be the most polished or smooth I've heard. They sing with gusto, with full dedication to and comprehension of the words. And, more than this, they sing hymns! Some Tomlin and Redman and Townend are peppered in, but, at least at St. Ebbe's in Oxford, the standard songs were those good, old, solid, meaningful, soul-deep, Psalm-based hymns the church has been singing for centuries.

Back to America, and the music seems so shallow in comparison. God is love, God is mighty to save, Jesus, Jesus--and more apparently empty praise heaped up. I don't mean to sound needlessly judgmental. My point, which I realize I've not yet really made, is that it's far from a meaningless, irrelevant critique. If man is indeed made for worship, then just how man worships is in fact of paramount importance!

This morning the worship seemed less than worshipful. The lead pastor made a good effort in trying to get congregants involved and participating, running through aisles to meet visitors, who were asked to put their hands up. (No, I didn't; I was much too embarrassed.) Yet, despite these earnest efforts, the throngs of worshippers had little to say, little to sing, little to write down during the sermon.

The greatest irony, speaking of the sermon, was that the pastor preached through the passage in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount where he outlines how not to pray and then how to pray. I'm not sure anyone was listening. I looked around to find most people whispering to one another, or sitting still with eyes glazed over as if watching late-night TV. No one seemed to really be desiring God. It was incredibly bizarre. (And no, there's really no happy ending, or some great twist at the end of my story.)

All I can say, as I reflect back on the experience, is that we ought to learn, as culturally American Christians, from our brethren in culturally less hospitable places (like England or, I imagine, any number of distant sites). Where Christianity is less embedded in the fabric of daily life is where Christians are forced to consciously choose faith and choose Christ and choose to be bravely countercultural. As for us,  in the well churched (over-churched?) regions of this strange land, where we are so free from stigma and persecution, we need to remember to one another what it means to give over one's life, wholly and without reserve, to the One who in his sovereignty and grace has chosen to redeem sinful, irredeemable us. If we sang more hymns perhaps we might recall and see more clearly the jagged lines and messy sacrifices involved in faith and begin to notice the folly and unreality of a clean, sanitary, smoothed out, strangely passionless, reverenceless, aweless, Gospel-less evangelical way.

Always reforming, indeed.