Must We Tare the Vail Again?

I am an alum of a Christian college famous for creating what the evangelical world calls "anointed worship". IHOP in Kansas City has what they call "presence worship". Presence worship is chiefly concerned with invoking a spiritual move of God in a room or physical place. It is The Drive in most worship services today to have an experience with God like in the Holy of Holies in the days of the great Jerusalem temple. When God is worshipped correctly and His Spirit resides in a building where presence worship is happening, a sort of climax is reached and the worshippers experience a piece of Heaven. So the point is to have Heaven now before we die and are glorified in Heaven with God.

Perhaps the proponents of these worship philosophies forget the transcendence of their God. Does the Spirit of God manifest in a local place? Absolutely. We see this specifically in Acts 2. But when He is not felt, is He still just as present? Absolutely. How else do the elements of our world continue in relationship with one another. It is God's hand that sustains all His creation. God is not just Creator like the deists believed, but He is Sustainer as well. Not even Hell is without the presence of God. In Hell God will forever be the Judge and Punisher of sin. He is Creator and Sustainer.

For those who want to imagine God like a temple with a inner room of holiness... please don't. You must have forgotten that at the death of Christ the vail in the temple was torn. And at his resurrection He became the High Priest of a new covenant as the book of Hebrews says. Peter writes that Christians are a holy priesthood. Do you understand what that means? The presence of God is no longer something that we have to come into or as in other religions, strive for. As Christians, we are in the presence of God whether it manifest or not. In fact, most of the recorded manifestations of God have been in times of judgement. What that means is that we Christians should live lives according to the teachings of Christ so that God doesn't have to manifest and show himself. If He does its probably because we were too busy with third heaven trances that we forgot to stay faithful to our wife.

A Biblical Philosophy of worship is concerned singularly with Truth in the Bible. Our lives are supposed to be lived as worship to God, not just the songs we sing, though songs do have their place. I am worried that some worship song writers don't have enough faith in God. There are songs we sing in church that are weak theologically and sometimes sadly to say doctrinally wrong. It is scary.

When our favorite psalmist was a boy, he sang songs to the Lord amongst his sheep. They probably were simple songs, but they were real worship songs nonetheless. Today we don't feel the need to write long verses about God. We can sing our anthems a lot quicker, but for some reason we sing a lot less, and mean even lesser. King David didn't always write long psalms, but he did communicate a lot of meaning. Each verse became biblical truth.

Rules for worship song writers

1. Worship songs must be about the identity of God. His Attributes. Who He is. What He has

done. We must give the singers of these songs a clear theologically true identity of God.

2. If one can take out the words "God" or "Father" or "Jesus" or "Christ" or "Spirit" and insert a

woman's name and turn it into a love song, then it is not a worship song.

3. The Goals of worship must be:

a. to thank God for being and for doing.

b. to fill the listener with theological truth and understanding.

4. If a writer wishes to be autobiographical in their worship song, he/she should communicate

reverently and theologically.

5. God inhabits the praises of his people. This true. If you fail to fill your song with Biblical

Truth, it is not praising to God, and it can no longer be true that God is in your song.

6. In an age where our Bible is under fire, it is increasingly important to use the exact phrases

and wording of the Bible. The Bible is Truth.

Grace Resistible

Last week, In a favorite class of mine, something to the effect of, "You can refuse the grace of God" was said. The I in TULIP screamed out from with in me and I raised my hand.
"Luke."
"Are you saying God's grace is resistible?"
"Yes. Absolutely. That's what we're talking about." My face must have betrayed me because my professor asked for my thoughts on the matter. Though this is more than I said in class, it is a more complete argument in favor of Irresistible Grace. What I actually said was confined to point 2.

1. The Bible says "For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus" Philippians 1:6. The Author of Hebrews says so matter-of-fact, "...and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith..." Hebrews 12:1c,2a. Both these passages speak of two parts of our salvation--Initiation and Completion. Our God is credited explicitly with both components. Our God is the Alpha and Omega. As my friend Clint says, "God is obsessed with His own Glory." He will get all the credit and glory for our salvation. It is because of this that God cannot allow man to refuse His Grace. If that were possible Philippians 1:6 would have to read, "He who began a good work in you will wait for you to except His grace so He can perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus." The Bible does not leave space for man to screw up the Perfect will of God.

2. If my salvation is dependent upon my acceptance of God's grace, it puts the power in my hands and suddenly I am my own savior. This is not only Humanism. It is works righteousness. And it is also Idolatry. If we put on Grace and Faith ourselves, we can thank Jesus for doing His little work on the Cross and say, "It's ok God, I got it from here."

3. "Yes, God is sovereign, but we still have Free Will!" you say. In this line of thought, man is nothing less than a little god. Proponents of the glorification of man's will point to Genesis where God told man to take dominion of the earth. "After all," they say, "man is made in the image of God." And presto! Man's will is no longer bound by the will of God.

Ultimately these word of faith folks have actually taken their faith away from God and put it in their own works of faith. It is a sick cycle that my friend Brent calls "Faith in faith." And if your trust is in your level of faith, you will inevitably be without God. You may call Him Lord, but He is not your Lord. You may call Him savior, but He has not saved you. You did. Remember. It was your "acceptance" of His Grace. Your lightweight Jesus thanks you for not resisting his weak grace. He probably looks at you without fire in his eyes because you like a God you can stare down. His word probably don't cut like a double edged sword because your words have creative power and you don't need His. And He probably doesn't sit on a throne in Heaven judging the nations that are his inheritance because you have claimed the kingdoms of the earth for your own glory.

If I sound bitingly sarcastic, I am. I hate this kind of false gospel. It brings God low so I can be High. It is a self exalting doctrine from the pit of hell and I squirm every time I hear it proclaimed from the pulpit.

"Prophetic" Arrogance

If you haven't read Dutch's Response to the US Presidential Election read it first before hearing what I say. This is a response to a forward I received late last week.

I'm glad that I'm not included under "Dutch's stream" of Christians. Where does he get off that he can say that God's will didn't happen last week during elections. That is absurdly unbiblical and it is arrogant. How does Dutch "prophetically" proclaim that God did not appoint Obama when in Romans 13:1 it says "Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God." And don't let anyone say that this verse is out of context, because in context, Paul is writing this while Nero is the Cesar in Rome. How dare we as Christians live defiantly against the man that God established as OUR leader. 1st Timothy 2:2 says we are to pray for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity. Not a life of repaying the Democrats for the ridicule they paid the Republicans for the last 8 years.

I'm not saying the new president stands for everything we as Christians believe. But God has a purpose for everything. And as my Hess grandparents are so faithful to remind me, God is Sovereign and can take any evil and turn it into something that will Glorify him. Our Faith is in God, not in our government. We serve a God is much bigger than American politics. The Beautiful thing about God is that when the man who we would rather lead us isn't elected, we can lean that much more on His goodness regardless of what the circumstance makes us feel. We are not led by feelings we led by the Word of God.

I love God's Goodness. And unborn babies being aborted does not convince me otherwise. God is still Good. This is not a denial of the colossal waste of life and the grisliness of the abortion. But it is a refusal to let an evil world dictate how I interpret what the Bible speaks of God's attributes. I feel sorry for those who think they are always out of God's will as if there is alternate realities of time and space. As if what was true for one reality was not true for another. This a postmodern man's idea of God. It is a God who is weak like Baal and false like a golden calf. Come on, God is bigger than that.

False Teachers and their Golden Calves

Caveat:

Last week I began to put everything I believe about false teaching into a small little blog. That proved impossible. So today I've decided to refocus and put a call out to my church family and anyone who wants to talk about what I present and challenge. Let's ask questions and try to bring a uniformed and coherency to our thoughts concerning false teaching.

Then all the people tore off the gold rings which were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took this from their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a molten calf; and they said, "this is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt." Now when Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made a proclamation and said, "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord."

Exodus 32:3-5

I start with this old testament story because I think it is a great example for the basis for what a Christian should deem as false. The first time I came across this story was probably in a children's Sunday school setting. The moral of the story back then seemed to be "don't worship idols like TV or sports heroes." Now I'm a little upset that the main point of this story was not proclaimed and driven as deep into me. What I read in Exodus 32 is a very clear message that correct Theology is vitally important. Jesus says in John 4 that "the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth... God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth." Theology is that truth side of worship. The Israelites didn't believe they were giving credit to another God in Exodus 32. The problem was their mode of worship and their Theology. They believed falsely of their God. How did they come to these false beliefs of God? There must have been false teaching present. Some Egyptian idea of God had joined itself to the true knowledge of God passed down through Jacob's sons. We call this Synergism. The result is a golden calf. A perversion of the Truth. Moses then instructs the tribe of Levi to kill three thousand men responsible for this offense against God. Talk about Theological purification. I don't mean that to be funny.

Today our churches are filled with many different theological ideas. Men lean on other things than the Bible for their theological code. As a result many have set up theological golden calves. They have a view of God that is faulty and perhaps a half truth mixed with a lie. Our Lord has allowed many of these calves to stand unchallenged. I would like to remind the reader of the church in Ephesus whom Paul addresses directly and indirectly in the New Testament. Paul himself set in place the eldership in Ephesus. For nearly three years he discipled and labored to have the church founded in Biblical Truth and Faith in Christ. Finally Paul addresses his elders in Acts 20 before his departure. Paul prophetically tells them to their faces that from among them will come wolves. 

Imagine the pastor of your church is handing over the church to you and a handful of other elders and says, "By the way some of you guys will turn out to be false teachers. Basically some of you men are enemies of God who like Satan want a measure of glory for themselves. You'll make up your own teachings and proclaim them so that people will leave sound Christian beliefs and follow you because you are more eloquent and your message makes men feel good about themselves and their own works." Ouch.

When facing Acts 20, my mind is blown. Paul elevates the gospel above the elder. He has made these men elders so that means that they meet the qualifications of church leaders in 1st Timothy and Titus. Yet he knows that some of them are not truly saved. He cannot be sure who, but the Spirit has told him that some of the men standing before him are like wolves in sheep's clothing. This must have been heartbreaking for the Apostle Paul. Since God did not deemed it necessary to sovereignly weed out the false teachers before they began teaching falsely, we can only guess that He must have meant this to be a Deuteronomy 13 situation. God values the testing of our faith. God wants the real followers of Christ to know who the false converts are. 

Yesterday I was talking to my brother Jack on the phone. We were talking about Persecution the church in America. I think it is obvious that a lot of our problems in our American churches will be solved when persecution comes. Our golden calves (false ideas about God) and our modes of worshiping God (how we glorify God through our lives) will be melted away. At that point the true worshippers of God will be evident. Those who's unseparated [theology and life] is a daily blessing to the church and a glory to God.

 

But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of hypocrisy of liars seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron...

1st Timothy 4:1,2