John Piper tries to rebuke Doug Wilson for being Biblical (Preachers should cry not be sarcastic)

so let me just read it as it has been asked here and the question says you began your talk by slamming brothers in christ who designed seeker-sensitive services you ended your talk by encouraging us to love our brothers lest we appear odious to the world should we attend to your words or to your actions or can it be both who is that guy mrs sprole it says here in that case she's quite right one of the things i i thought of mentioning this is an illustration but i wasn't sure how many people here were aware of the magazine that i edit in which some of these same things that i addressed in the talk are treated with imperfect tenderness and the the fundamental question that we're getting at here the thing that i would like to answer and provide as my answer to this is the question what would jesus do all right now however sappily that's been marketed and it has i think it's a wonderful question the question the question that confronts us is what does it mean in a disobedient culture to be prophetic what does it mean in a an in an insolent and arrogant culture to confront that insolence and arrogance well one of the first things it means is that you will be accused of being insolent and arrogant who do you think you are challenging everybody's going this way who does martin luther think he is who does how dare you now the the thing that we've tried to do is is ask this question how how did jesus talk how did he address the respected theologians of his day well he called them basically a bag of snakes right now what we do is we we gloss over you know jesus is talking so these are all holy words all right so we go into holy word mode in my neck of the woods woods you can drive up to coeur d'alene which is an hour and a half drive and sometimes i've driven that stretch of road and and i find myself approaching coeur d'alene and i know that i had to have gone through a small town on the way but i don't remember i don't remember it but i've driven that road so it's it's it's frequently traveled it's the same way with the text of scripture we just skate over the surface of many things that jesus said and did and we don't recognize as chesterton once put it that jesus threw furniture down the temple steps he he was not he was not a tame lion he was someone who confronted hypocrisy he conf he confronted and rebuked in the strongest possible terms the arrogance of man-centeredness and i believe that we are called to imitate christ in all that he does now this is the this is the lopsidedness of our age everybody when we asked the question what would jesus do everybody acknowledges that it's appropriate to imitate christ in his love or christ in his gentleness or christ receiving the children and i believe we ought to imitate him in that and how we receive the children and how we bless and how we speak to people in our family and how we love our children and i believe that we should imitate christ and pursue that imitation with a passion but we should also imitate christ in how he handled theologians that corrupted the word of god we should also imitate christ in the way that he spoke in church that got the people in his hometown so hopping mad at him that they wanted to throw him off a cliff how did he how did he do that how in in the gospel of john jesus begins by talking to a bunch of people that says who believed in him and so jesus begins discoursing with these people who believed in him and by the end of the discourse they're trying to kill him now what we say is it's safe to imitate christ in his love and his gentleness but it's not safe to imitate christ in his sarcasm or christ in his biting cultural criticism or cry you can't imitate him over there but you can imitate him over here well i i don't know any biblical grounds for that selectivity if we're going to imitate christ we should imitate christ if we want to be like him we should want to be like him and that means the whole thing now i i do believe that there are dangers in in imitating christ's polemic or john the baptist's polemic or paul's polemic or jeremiah's polemic and it's it's very hard to find a biblical character who doesn't have a polemic to imitate and that palette and the other interesting feature is in the modern evangelical world which has all the doctrinal rigidity of a bowl of pudding right it is hard to find anybody imitating anybody's polemic now i don't think we imitate it perfectly i don't believe that we imitate christ's love perfectly his gentleness perfectly i don't believe that we imitate anything he did perfectly but i do believe that we are called to imitate him across the board and we can do so confident that god has justified us and and receives our imperfect attempts at imitating him because of his perfect act of obedience and passive obedience in his life and his death on the cross so this is a long way of saying that we we want to be like jesus christ we want to be like the apostle paul we want to turn the world upside down and you don't turn the world upside down by being nice you turn the world upside down by being biblical that means you love what god loves you hate what god hates you praise what god praises you condemn what god condemns you make fun of what god makes fun of one of the most glorious sections in the bible is god god coming in at the end of the book of job you know where were you oh man when i created the world tell me since you know so much some of the loftiest sarcasm you'll find anywhere and it's dangerous for a creature to imitate god it's dangerous for a creature to imitate christ but that's our calling we're christians we have to imitate him so do i slam seek or sensitive worship worship yes i do do i slam things that people consider right and proper and people are well intentioned yes i i do that do i do it with fear and trembling yes i do do i sometimes get it wrong yes i yes i do but i think it would be a graver danger to sit back and get it wrong that way anybody want to jump in on that i want to go back to doug's uh defense of sarcasm and irony and to balance it one of the reasons i have a problem with simply do what jesus did is there is one huge difference between me and jesus and that is sin in me there are others and that one is picked up by the apostle paul because when he argues for tenderheartedness and gentleness and forbearance he grounds it in the fact that you were forgiven therefore forgive in other words paul draws attention to the very thing that distinguishes me from jesus when he's arguing for my tender heartedness towards people therefore we must stir into the equation of how i respond to something i regard as reprehensible the fact another place he does it galatians 6 if your brother is taking a default restore such a one spirit of meekness and gentleness lest you two be tempted and so on there seems to be added to do what jesus would do and remember it's not just dangerous it's much more dangerous for you than for him therefore james be slow to anger quick to hear anger is a much more dangerous emotion than gentleness or meekness i think it's much more explosive and and one of the reasons for that is not only that i'm so wired to exalt myself in being angry towards others or in finding a clever way to put them down but i think i wish i could remember the pastor who said it he says [Music] you cannot make much of christ oh the words are so good and they split my mind where people are thinking about the excellence of your rhetoric that's a lousy paraphrase now doug wilson is absolute genius at sarcasm and irony and i would just wave a little yellow flag to the effect that you come away from these articles thinking oh this is what this is what the quote said you can't exalt christ and commend yourself as clever you're very clever really clever and i think we need you like crazy i read cadenda agenda and i wouldn't waste my time on it if i thought it was only contaminating but i tell you i can od on it fast because it is so well done from a rhetorical standpoint so just a little warning that um i think there need to be more obvious tears in credenda agenda more obvious tears jesus the one illustration i would give is uh don't clap about that you don't need to do that one here's here's the illustration um jesus is in the synagogue and here's this man with the withered hand and he wants to heal this man and the religious leaders that he calls a bag of snakes elsewhere they they're upset about this and it says he looked this is i think mark 3 5. he he looked around on them with anger grieved at their hardness of heart and that's what i want to pull together what does that look like in a sinner like me anger for sure when i see what's being done in open theism now how can i be grieved at the damage and have the grief come out it's got to show with some tears as well as the clever so that the people in the world the people see the and they say well that's clever or that sounds mean or that's bright or but if they see the tears as well as that in some way and i don't really know how to do it then they might say wow there might be something really uh personal and caring and eternal and dangerous here not just uh the ability to turn a good phrase so that's a an exhortation a warning really to everybody who clapped for for doug when he said what he had to say and for you and for me because frankly i think i need to say that because i am wired to be a person who puts down stupidity and i have to work really hard to to manifest tenderness i appreciate that very much i do want to encourage you maybe it won't encourage you but every time you read something and credential credenda agenda just tell yourself they're holding back and that worries me it worries me

Channel: Doctrinal Watchdog

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Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021