FAVORITE PREACHERS

 Unfortunately, I Corinthians 1:12ff has been misused to produce an unnecessary guilt on the part of believers. Here's the text: 

"Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.  For I have been informed concerning you, my brethren, by Chloe’s people, that there are quarrels among you.  Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am of Paul,” and “I of Apollos,” and “I of Cephas,” and “I of Christ.”

The way this text has been used by some Bible teachers to create guilt is that people come away with the idea that if they have a favorite Bible teacher from whom they learn and grow, that such is sinful.  But that's not what Paul is saying.

We all have a teacher or teachers from whom we learn and grow more than others. Granting that your list of teachers with whom you are familiar contains names of those who are accurate in doctrine, yet, if you have a favorite, the text is used to make you feel guilty. Again, that's not what Paul is saying. 

There might be a name on your list that, although he's on the mark in doctrinal matters, to you, he's boring, repetitious to a fault, or you can't concentrate because of some mannerism he has such as having to read his sermon and never making eye contact or he says "uh," "ah" over and over.  

But then there's one to whom you resonate. Maybe he comes from a background similar to yours, geographically, educationally, or vocationally. Maybe his sense of humor appeals to you. He's on the top of your list. Is that wrong? Sinful? That isn't the reason Paul is being critical of the Corinthians. 

We find what he's warning against in verse 10: "that there be no divisions among you." For the Jewish believers in the Corinthian church, Peter was at the top of their list perhaps because he was the apostle to the Jews--he was the apostle who wrote I Peter specifically for Jewish converts; but the Gentiles would put Paul at the top of their list because he was the apostle to the gentiles. 

The problem is that, as each group had its favorite, each group was making an issue out of it. They were quarreling. It's like we hear today from some believers: "Isn't _____________ your favorite teacher?" Then if you have someone else at the top of your list , they have nothing to do with you. But we all have our preferences and to have a preference isn't a sin, yet it's made out to be and they let it cause divisions.

We're not talking about refusing to listen to someone for legitimate reasons such as his doctrine isn't orthodox or because of his moral failures. The issue is that we aren't to cause divisions in the church by quarreling over sound teachers.

 

ST. WEIRD

 Some one wrote, “It is difficult to think clearly about Francis of Assisi.” 

 
However with Bible in hand, we can think biblically and therefore clearly about him and come to the conclusion that he fundamentally misunderstood the Bible and his misunderstandings led him into bizarre thoughts and deeds. Yet his weirdness brought him misguided admiration that has lasted down through the centuries. 

Francis was born in 1182 in Assisi, Italy. When people think of him, the first thing that comes to mind is that he preached to birds and tamed wolves. (There’s weird and not biblical.) As the record states, “As Francis and some companions were traveling through the Spoleto Valley in Italy, Francis noticed that a huge flock of birds had gathered in some trees beside a field. He saw that the birds were watching him as if they were expecting something. He decided to preach a sermon about God's love for them. Francis walked over to a spot beside the trees and began a sermon, "My sweet little sisters, birds of the sky, you are bound to heaven, to God, your Creator. . . .”

According to “Catholicism Pure and Simple, “Francis wondered aloud to his companions why he had never preached to birds before. And from that day on, Francis made it his habit to solicitously invoke all birds, all animals and reptiles to praise and love their Creator.” [Score another point for weirdness.]

Later in his life, he believed that Christ spoke to him three times from a crucifix: One day as he prayed in a run-down church, he said that he heard Christ repeat from the crucifix: "Francis, go repair My house, which, as you can see, is falling completely to ruin." Francis understood that he was to repair the church he prayed in, so he proceeded to sell family goods to raise money for repairs. [Score two points for weirdness.]

Then there was the time he stripped himself naked in front of a bishop and renounced his father, claiming God was his father. Then he walked out of the cathedral to become a hermit—to "be alone in solitude and silence," a biographer noted, "to hear the secrets which God could reveal to him."[The points are adding up.]

One day he heard a sermon from the book of Matthew, "Take no gold or silver or copper in your wallet, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics or sandals or a staff." He took it literally and began an itinerant life.

Abandoning his own wealth, Francis determined that there must be no man anywhere poorer than he. No matter what rags Francis might be wearing, if he met a beggar dressed even worse, Francis would remove his own clothing and give it to the beggar. [His problem here is a modern one—the Matthew text is a description of what the disciples were to do on that occasion, not a prescription of what we are to do.]

In winter, he often threw himself in a ditch full of ice and stayed there until all sinful temptations departed. To avoid lust, he fixed his gaze on the sky or ground whenever he spoke with a woman.

 
One other oddity: Francis loathed laughing or idle words. He didn’t laugh, and he didn’t want to give others any reason to laugh. [At this point, I've lost count.]

Yet, this is the man whom Protestants and Catholics have admired. Go figure.

SQUEEZING

 The Jewish fellow had a burning question for which he needed to know the answer: "Can I go swimming on the Sabbath?" He was so obsessed with knowing the answer that he wrote to an authoritative Jewish website to learn the answer. The answer was amazing. Read on.

According to the Mishnah, (the authoritative collection of material embodying the oral tradition of Jewish law) the obedient Jew cannot go swimming on the Sabbath and it defines swimming as "lifting both feet from the ground and floating on or treading water." 

The Talmud (the body of Jewish civil and ceremonial law) says that the reason for that decree is because swimming could lead to building some sort of flotation device to help someone learn to swim which is forbidden on the Sabbath. 

But wait--the prohibition not only applies to swimming in a body of water similar to a lake or pond, it also includes a man-made pool of water, if, when a person swims in it, he's likely to cause some water to overflow the pool, which will then run into rivulets and pools, resembling a pond or lake. There have been many an argument over what constitutes a "rimmed" pool which would, therefore, keep water from overflowing. An unrimmed pool would not be able to do so.

In addition, there are other considerations: Since swimming implies the wearing of a swim suit, this apparel might lead to violating the prohibition  of squeezing  out water from it. But that's not the only thing to be concerned about--if it's extremely hot, a person would be allowed to immerse himself in a rimless pool (it must contain cool water) without swimming if there's no squeezing of the swim suit afterwards. 

But what if, for medical reasons, the questioner has to swim on the Sabbath? The answer was in three parts: "Consult your rabbi and if he approves, use a private pool and take the necessary precautions so prevent  squeezing." 

During Christ's earthly ministry, He confronted the same thing (Matthew tells us in 15:1-20).
The angry religious leaders said that Jesus and his disciples had violated the “traditions of the elders” as if those traditions were authoritative and could be sinned against. These traditions were still in oral form in Jesus’ day, but were written down a two centuries later in what. became the Mishnah.

 What was going on in Jesus' day and what's still going on today is that the traditions of men had been and continue to be elevated to the status of Scripture, so that a person could be guilty of violating them. Many groups today have their “biblical” views, and to violate them means facing anger, criticism or expulsion from the group. 

What we often don't see is that, Jesus, knowing of these traditions of the elders deliberately broke them and allowed or instructed His students to do so. This infuriated the religious leaders. 

Sound familiar?

It's a very serious matter to replace the true meaning of the Word of God with traditions. Traditions can be helpful, but they can crowd out the basic biblical standards. We don't have to look far to see that the attitude of these teachers appear in our churches. 

So many traditions have grown up over the centuries that many of them are regarded as sacred. They remain untouchable, unquestioned. We can become more concerned that people might violate our man-made rules for the running of the church, the institutions of baptism and communion, or the set of rules that our particular group follows in the name of being spiritual, than we are about righteousness. We can spend far more time getting physically ready for church than we do preparing the heart. If we aren't careful, these traditions quickly achieve biblical status, and we might even forget what the Word of God actually says about some of those things we do. 

Dr. Allen Ross writes a note of caution: "Before we come down too hard on the Pharisees for focusing on externals and outer show, we need only to remind ourselves that week in and week out we spend far more time getting the outer body ready for church than we do the heart."

That Jewish questioner, what about him? He's trying to bear an unbearable yoke (cf. Acts 15), now learning that he must not only be concerned with swimming of the Sabbath, but also with man-made pools, rimmed or unrimmed, sloshing water, not squeezing water out of a swim suit, what his rabbi decides, and potential medical reasons for swimming.

Yet, Christ's invitation echoes through the ages, "Come unto Me and I will give you rest." 

 

A POEM FOR PORTLAND

Portland, Oregon rioters followed the lead of a king (Jehoiakim), the lead of the the French Revolution, and the lead of university students in Nazi Germany.

On April 8, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Union proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit," which was to climax in a literary purge, or "cleansing" by fire. The burning of works by Jewish authors, and Jewish literature, took precedence over everything else.

In Germany, on May 10, 1933, a book-burning of more than 25,000 volumes was presided over by the most intellectual of the Nazi leaders, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. It was broadcast on the radio for all to hear. But it didn't stop with secular books; in November 1938, Torah scrolls were burned inside 237 burned synagogues in Germany and Austria. Torah scrolls are copies of God's Word and cost a large amount of money for a Jewish synagogue to have and hold.

A German author whose books were burned made a famous prophecy: "Where they burn books, they will also burn people."

AMERICAN REACTION

Back in 1938, Yale University's head librarian, Professor Andrew Keogh, yawned and said, "European book burnings are never so serious as the newspapers make them out to be." The book and Bible burnings were seen by Americans back then in newsreels in the movie theaters, newsreels in which the narrator dismissed  the burnings as "student pranks." But the world would soon learn that the Nazis weren't pranksters out for a little harmless fun.

THE MOTIVATION FOR THE FLAMES

Enter Portland, Oregon. At midnight recently in Portland, they burned a Bible. Listen to Rabbi Abraham Cooper:

"The burning of the Bible is different [than destroying any other book]. Bible burners want to eradicate the truths which have provided believers with pillars of hope and faith, and which have inspired even non-believers to pursue a just and compassionate world.

"This is why the Bible has always been attacked by the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Maos—and yes, the Xis and the Kims of the world.

"Totalitarian regimes have always understood that their control could never be total so long as God's word was in the way."

Israel's King Jehoiakim knew God's word was in the way, so he threw Jeremiah's scroll into the fire; the leaders of the French Revolution  knew it because their revolution, unlike the American one, was, according to Os Guiness, “expressly anti-biblical, anti-Christian, anti-religious, and anti-clerical.” The Bible must go and unaided human reason take its place. The result: the guillotine came down on an estimated 40,000 people during the French Revolution.

We see the motivating idea in places high (CNN) and low (rioters) as reflected by commentator

Chris Cuomo who told his viewers: "God did not do that [bring the numbers of cases of the virus down]. Faith did not do that. Destiny did not do that. A lot of pain and suffering did that...That's how it works. If you believe in one another and if you do the right thing for yourself and your community, things will get better in this country.  You do not need help from above. It's within us."

There we have it, the adaptation of the philosophy of the Greek Protagoras who's famous for his claim that "Of all things the measure is Man," an aphorism in direct opposition to Christianity.

In all of this, the following poem might be dedicated to the rioters in Portland:

"Last eve I paused beside a blacksmith's door

And heard the anvil ring the vesper chime;

Then, looking in, I saw upon the floor

Old hammers worn with the beating years of time.

"`How many anvils have you had,' said I,

`To wear and batter all these hammers so?'

`Just one,' said he; then said with twinkling eye,

`The anvil wears the hammers out you know.'

"And so, I thought, the anvil of God's word

For ages skeptic blows have beat upon,

Yet, though the noise of falling blows was heard,

The anvil is unharmed-the hammers gone."

Christ has the last word: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”.

CHRISTIANS DON'T TRUST EACH OTHER

Christians don't trust each other? Believe it or not, it's true; we don't. Not only that, but we even put it in our church constitutions and/or by-laws that we don't trust each other. Anyone who's interested in seeing it can do so by reading almost any church's by-laws or by punishing themselves and attending a church business meeting.

Let's go back to 1863, to a business meeting held in a church, one which gave birth to a guidebook that's plagued multiplied thousands of churches ever since. It all started when Henry Martyn Robert was an engineering officer in the Regular Army. Without warning, he was asked to preside over a meeting and realized that he didn't know how. He tried anyway and his embarrassment was supreme. This event left him determined never to attend another meeting until he had read and mastered parliamentary procedure. He did and published in February1876 what we know as "Robert's Rules of Order." (RRO)

Few have read RRO, but when the meeting starts, whoever oversees the meeting using RRO controls who makes motions from the floor and how a motion is tabled. He decides who has the authority to say when a motion is out of order. He knows when you can cut off a discussion and when you may vote. Whoever controls the RRO controls the meeting. The person who controls RRO is the person who knows exactly what they are and how they work to control a meeting.

Robert was so discouraged after that meeting, he said, "One can scarcely have had much experience in deliberative meetings of Christians without realizing that the best of men, having wills of their own, are liable to attempt to carry out their own views without paying sufficient respect to the rights of their opponents." If Christians loved each other and trusted each other, they wouldn't need Robert to darken and dampen any meeting.

Have you ever read RRO? Most people haven’t, which is a problem because the person who knows the rules may not have the best interest of the church in mind, or worse yet, he may be a carnal believer or an immature one.

Here's the heart-wrenching testimony of one man: "A friend called me a couple of years ago after a church business meeting.  In tears, he told of the ungodly things said among the people of God. He told me about the personal attacks that took place.  He told me of the name-calling, the cursing, and the selfishness that pervaded the entire meeting.

"He asked me what I thought went wrong.

"I asked him to describe how the meeting started.  Taken aback, he said, "The beginning of the meeting was fine. Later it turned ugly. I asked him to describe it in detail.  He finally shared the piece of information that I was looking for.

"After praying, a moderator took the platform, grasped the pulpit with his hands and then told the people of God that they would conduct their meeting according to Robert’s Rules of Order.

"My response to the caller was that the church business meeting didn’t have a chance for success when they relied more on Robert’s Rules of Order than they did on the Word of God.  Many would argue that you need structure and systems in meetings like these, and I would agree, but the Bible has plenty of instructions on that matter.

"God says to regard one another as more important than yourself (Phil. 2:3-4).  God says not to let any unwholesome word come out of your mouth (Eph. 4:29).  God says to respect and to honor spiritual leaders (Heb. 13:17).  God says there is an order about a confrontation in the church (Matt. 18:15).  And so much more!

"What needs to happen in many American churches is that they get rid of Robert and put Jesus back in his rightful place!  Robert didn’t die on the cross for your sins, so I would let the one who did say how the people of God should conduct themselves.

"I don’t know how many church business meetings you have attended.  You may be at a church where that doesn’t happen.  You may be at a church where the business meeting is the thing that has the most attendance.  Whatever your situation may be, don’t allow our culture or the words of man to dictate how you conduct yourselves.

"Let God’s Word be the standard by which we live. Which book guides your church’s business meetings?" The Bible? Captain Robert's 699-pages of rules? The church always shoots itself in the foot when it borrows from the world. It's like trashing fine china and replacing it with paper plates.

What Robert did was to treat the symptoms and not the cause of the disastrous meeting. The rules were an aspirin; the symptoms would return meeting after meeting with the cause never addressed.

In II Peter, we read that believers have all they need to live a godly life. If that's true, why do churches incorporate RRO?

If Christians love each other and in loving each other, they, therefore, trust each other, then RRO are out of order.

THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE 10TH COMMANDMENT

Thomas Jefferson was emphatic: religious freedom is important. Jefferson believed that such liberty came from God, as he eloquently stated, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Jefferson held firmly to the belief that the state should not sanction an official, established religion. But in his state, Virginia, the Anglican church was both an established and an official religion to which, by law, Virginians paid taxes. It was against the law for a citizen of Virginia whose motto was and is, "Sic Semper Tyrannis,” meaning “Thus Always to Tyrants,” to disseminate beliefs the Anglican church deemed unorthodox.

You might think that the Declaration of Independence took care of that matter and Virginia's tyrannical religious dictates were gone with Jerrson's pen. But such wasn't the case. The taxes and the laws remained on the books for a while.

The thinking behind the First Amendment to the Constitution was, is, and forever should be, "No one can make you profess or support ideas or teachings you don't believe." That amendment, standing number 1in the Constitution, says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech . . ."

You can think whatever thoughts you like and say whatever you believe to be true. To put it another way, contrary to old Virginia's laws, you have a right to be wrong, a right to think wrong thoughts and a right to express those thoughts, but you do not have the right to force people to think the way you think and to force people to express beliefs that you express.

In George Orwell's 1984, he foresaw a tyrannical government of Big Brother that made its citizens think only the approved thoughts, called, "Doublethink," (the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them as true.) The citizens could say only the approved thoughts with only the approved words called "Newspeak." To think differently was a thought crime.

John Milton would have agreed with the First Amendment. He wrote, "Truth . . . is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of the natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."

To the thoughts of Jefferson and Milton, we would say with Sherlock Holmes in the movies, "Of course. That's elementary, my dear Watson." But we live in a day in which it would be difficult to find a college president, administrator, or professor who has the courage to express what Jefferson, Milton, and almost all the rest of us believe. The reason they don't have such courage is that they will be lynched via technology, harassed, howled down, assaulted, or even fired.

And what does all this have to do with Commandment Ten of the Mosaic Law? That commandment says, "Thou shall not covet." What's coveting? It's desiring what's not for sale or what you cannot legitimately have, such as "your neighbor's wife."You might want a Samsung 65 inch 4KHD TV, but that's not coveting. It becomes coveting when you want your neighbor's and it's not for sale.

When you read the Ten Commandments, you'll notice that they all carry a penalty but one. Break nine commands; pay the price. One command carries no penalty: the last one, "Thou shalt not covet." And why is it the only one that carries no penalty? Because it's a thought crime. Thought crimes aren't punishable. You have a right to be wrong. But you can't be punished for your thoughts.

Except in our day when the howling mob comes. The barbarians are not at the gates; they have crashed through the gates at full howl demanding that you think as they think and say what they say or face the consequences. You will be punished for thought crimes. The day grows darker.

 

SERIOUS BASEBALL

One area of theology has been under attack for a long, long time and no surcease is in sight. Because of a history of past and on-going attacks, even people inside our churches firmly hold to beliefs that have been declared heretical throughout church history.

Those filling up pew after pew aren't the only ones who are the heretics, albeit it silent ones; pastors, missionaries, and popular Christian authors hold to heretical ideas as well and propagate them all over the place. The problem is further complicated by the fact that, because folks are weak in two areas, church history and Christology, they have no idea that they're either falling for and/or promoting heresy.

An example of this occurs when well-meaning folks try to explain the Trinity with this illustration: I am a teacher and I am a father, and I am a husband--three different roles yet one person. This heresy is called modalism and has been around for a long time.

"Modalism rejects the Trinitarian belief that God exists at all times as three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Rather, the modalist believes that God is one person made known in three modes. In the Old Testament, God manifested Himself in the mode of the Father. With the incarnation, God manifested Himself in the mode of the Son. And following Jesus’s ascension, God made Himself known through the mode of the Holy Spirit.

"Problematically, modalism rejects that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist simultaneously, which means that modalists deny the distinctiveness of the three persons in the Trinity. This problem is compounded when you consider the baptism of Jesus. At His baptism, we see all three persons of the Trinity present. The Father speaks from heaven, the Son is baptized, and the Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove."

These heresies spring from a paucity of knowledge of church history and in a knowledge of Christology (the Person and work of Christ). Instead of instruction in Christology which could incorporate a look at the battles fought in church history to cleanse the church of various heretical infections, many are content with "biblical" instruction in "How To Live Your Best Life Now," "How to Conquer Depression," and "Conquering Disease."

We're talking serious here. According to a 2018 survey conducted by LifeWay Research, over 70% of people in our evangelical churches hold to a heretical belief about the Person and work of Christ. Something is wrong, very wrong. Deep Christological books Paul's letter to the Colossians, II Peter, Jude, and a host of texts like Philippians 2 are treated like the red-headed stepchildren of the church.

Let's talk baseball. Serious baseball. The winningest high school coach in America, the winningest ever, took baseball seriously and expected nothing less from every player and every team he coached. They were either serious or they quit or he ran them off.

He was so serious about winning baseball that every new player had to take a written test of over 200 questions, a test so hard that no one could pass it as it dealt with situation after situation that could arise in every game and where the player, no matter his position on the field, should be when that situation occurred. Things like that. The test was designed to show the player, "You don't know as much as you think you do about this game."

Then, every summer, he ran a baseball school. This wasn't a baseball camp for a week or two. It was every morning, the entire morning, five days a week all summer long. He took kids starting at age 7 and they would come back, summer after summer through high school. By the time they got to that level, they were BASEBALL PLAYERS.

When the player got to his high school team, they would practice 6 days a week starting in February and the practice sessions included each player's taking 200-300 pitches in the batting cage from the pitching machine. (The average high school team would have each player take 6 or 7 swings in the batting cage.) The practice sessions would begin after school at 4 PM and continue until it got so dark, they couldn't see the coach. The question is, with that level of seriousness, how did that coach ever lose a game?

Can you imagine what the results would be if we took kids starting at age 7 and every summer through high school used the best teachers to give biblical instruction 5 mornings a week, specializing in Christology? A pipe dream? I know, you're right.

So, all this boils down to a plea to get serious about Colossians, II Peter, Jude, and Christology.

Really serious.