One thing we want to think about now is the
particular topic of conversion. But before I do that, I want to see who I’m speaking
to these next couple of days, so I’m going to ask you to stand up a few times, alright.
But you should feel free and look around to see who is here. So everybody stand up. Now,
I want your name, I’m serious, and your denomination loudly and we’re going to start
right here. .... What kind of Baptist?.... Independent
Baptist. Alright, if you’re Independent Baptist, sit down at your own rate whenever
you want to but now. Alright. Great. Alright. Chris. Independent Reformed. Okay, whatever
that means. If that’s you, please be seated. Okay. Alright. Matthew Freeman. Southern Baptist. If that’s
you, please be seated. That’s the largest group so far. I’d say 20% maybe. R.C.? PCA, please be seated. Alright, that’s
like another 20%. Yes, sir.... okay, PCA, please be seated.
Great. Yes, sir. Non-... now how is that different
than Independent Reformed? Non-denominational Reformed, please be seated. Wow. Okay. Alright. Yes, sir. Great. Evangelical Church
in Africa. Please be seated. Excellent. Excellent. Yes, right here. Nondenominational, please
be seated. Yet still some remain standing. Yes. PCUSA,
please be seated. Alright. Whoa, and there go a good number. All righty. Yes. E-Free, please be seated. And some stood
back up. That’s a… That is such an interesting development. We’ll come to you in a moment. Sister, how about over here?.... Say again.....
United Methodist, please be seated. Alright, a few United Methodists scattered around. Yes, over here. ..... American Baptists, please
be seated. Okay, right there. Yes. .... United Reformed, URC. Brian Lee
is the pastor, a fine man. It’s a fine congregation. We do pray for them. So United Reformed, please
be seated. Okay, a few of you. Yes, now, have you all decided? Okay. Did
you just switch during the...? ..... Okay, Presbyterian Church in Canada or if you’re
in Bermuda, please be seated. Great. Yes. North American Baptists, now is that
like German or is that Landmarkist or what is that? ... German, okay. North American
Baptists please be seated. Yes. Evangelical Friends. Great. Please be
seated. Yes. Reformed Baptists. Please be seated. Really. Okay. Yes. Okay, none of the other
Independents, just Independent. Alright. Alright, really Independent, please be seated. Just
be seated. Just deeply meant independent. Yes. What? Episcopalian, please be seated.
Great. Yep. ..... okay. Independents, please be seated.
All of you, just now, be seated if you’re Independent, if you’re Independent. Yes. ..... Reformed Church of New Zealand.
Alright, please be seated. Great. BGC, Baptist General Conference, the dear
Swedes, please be seated. Over here. OPC, please be seated. We should be running out of denominations
sometime soon. Yes. .... Sovereign Grace. You guys, of course, don’t need to be seated.
Okay. Alright, yes. .... EPC. Alright, EPC, please
be seated. Great. ELCA. Great. Please be seated. A couple of
ELCA. Say again. .... Grace Brethren. Alright, please
be seated. Okay. Free Methodists. That sounds wonderfully
free. Alright. Because when I think Methodist I think free already, and then when I hear
free Methodists. Wow. Alright. .... Are you separating yourself
from your brother over there, I mean? Alright. Thank you. Okay, if it’s.... Yes. CRC, alright, please be seated. There
go a couple. I think were running out. Yep. RCA, alright. Great. I was just with
some RCA brothers up in Chicago in May. I had a great time. Yep. .... Associate Reformed Presbyterian,
okay. Yep. Primitive Baptists. Now may I ask you a question?
Are you a pastor? Do Primitive Baptists -- this is a serious question -- do Primitive Baptist
Churches these days have paid pastors or is that still not considered appropriate? .... okay,
interesting, okay. Great. Thank you for being here. Is that everybody now? One more time.... AME Methodists. Great. Good
to have you. Well, that was interesting. Thank you for
that, and what a mixed group. I mean, it’s not... the largest groups were Southern Baptist
and PCA, and I would say they were each like maybe 15% of the folks here. That’s interesting.
Alright, stand up again. This is so interesting. I’m now looking for your main role in your
church, okay? So if you are not, and I don’t have time to do all the different roles that
there are, so I’m just going to do this real simply. If you are not an elder in your
church, please be seated. Some people aren’t sure. That, in and of itself, is interesting.
I see more sitting down as they think about it more. Alright. If you are not a teaching
elder, please be seated. Okay. If you are not the one who normally teaches on Sunday
mornings in your congregation, please be seated. So the people remaining standing are the brothers
who normally bring God’s Word to their congregation on Sunday mornings. Okay. I want to do two
things with you guys. First, if you have been pastoring the congregation where you are now
for more than five years please be seated. For more than five years, please be seated.
If you’ve been pastoring the congregation where you currently are for more than four
years, please be seated. Three years, please be seated. Two years, please be seated. So
the people who are standing, I understand are senior pastors of their congregations
for less than two years. Wonderful. For less than 18 months, please remain standing. Several
of them took a while counting that one. For less than one year, please remain standing.
And I think we have a winner, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, brother, what’s your name? ..... And
Alan, where are you? ...... Ashburn, Georgia, what church? .... First United Methodist,
and how long have you been the minister there? ..... Five months. Matthew Freeman is going
to bring you a set of four books that we hope will be an encouragement to you, the Festschrift
that Ligonier did sort of for John Calvin for the celebration of his birthday recently,
the book by Ed Clowney on the church, which is superb, and some other good material that
we hope will be an encouragement to you. Now, if those senior ministers who were just
standing, if you can all stand again, the senior ministers who were just standing, stand
again. And I just want to work it the other direction now. We’re thinking of how long
you’ve been pastoring the congregation you’re currently pastoring. So we’ll begin with
Alan sitting down because he is the junior among us. And now if you’ve been pastoring
your congregation for less than five years, the congregation you are currently in for
less than five years, please be seated. Less than 10 years, please be seated. Less than
15 years, please be seated. Less than 20 years, please be seated. Less than 25 years, please
be seated. Less than 30 years, please be seated. And again I think we have one brother, yes,
can you give us your name and your church? ....... Wow, in Anchorage, wonderful. Brother,
thank you for being with us. And Matthew is bringing another couple of books for you,
just to encourage you in the ministry there. Well, thank you for bearing with me in that. It’s good to see who’s here, good to get
a sense of that. I want us to think about conversion, and let
me just tell you why. Let me go on and front load this. This is where I’m going with
this. I think Biblical faithfulness entails, and the words here are chosen carefully, apparent
exclusivity in our churches. I think Biblical faithfulness entails apparent exclusivity
in our churches. I bring this up because I think that the common wisdom today among pastors
is that that’s not the case. What I want to do first is confirm that we’re thinking
the same Biblical thoughts about conversion. And then like in the last 10 minutes of what
I want to say, I want to run this into a mindset that we’re increasingly finding among evangelical
pastors today, and asking how these things that we believe the Bible teaches about conversion
fit with what we’re being told to do in our churches and think together about this
as a meeting of pastors. Here is Langston Hughes, the famous writer
of The Harlem Renaissance, writing about his own upbringing in African-American churches
in the early 20th century. Quoting Hughes here, “I was saved from sin when I was going
on 13, but not really saved. It happened like this. There was a big revival at my Auntie
Reed’s church. Every night for weeks there had been much preaching, singing, praying,
and shouting. Finally, all the young people had gone to the altar and were saved but one
boy and me. He was named Wesley. Wesley and I were surrounded by sisters and deacons praying.
And it was very hot in the church and getting late now. Finally, Wesley said to me in a
whisper, ‘I’m tired of sitting here. Let’s get up and be saved.’ So, he got up and
was saved. Then I was left all alone on the mourners’ bench. And my aunt came and knelt
at my knees and cried, while prayers and songs swirled all around me in the little church.
The whole congregation prayed for me alone in a mighty wail of moans. God had not struck
Wesley dead for taking His name in vain or for lying in the temple. So I decided that
maybe to save further trouble I had better lie too and say that Jesus had come, and get
up and be saved. So I got up. Suddenly the whole room broke into a sea of shouting as
they saw me rise. I couldn’t bear to tell her that I had lied, that I had deceived everybody
in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus, and that now I didn’t believe there was
a Jesus anymore.” Friends, you can go to bookstores and find
lots of accounts of people growing up in Christian churches and being around a witness to the
gospel, who are not believers. And that’s not just something in literature from 70 years
ago. Gina Welch has a very popular book out earlier this year called In the Land of Believers.
She lives on Capitol Hill. She came to see me not long after it came out, and she told
me her story, what she did. She is from a secular background from Berkeley, California,
but she was concerned that our nation was too politically divided so she wanted to see
what this Christian conservative world was all about, so she moved to Lynchburg, Virginia,
much to the horror of her family. And she joined Thomas Road Baptist Church, the Baptist
Church made famous by the ministry of Jerry Falwell some years ago. In 2006, she joined
the church. And when she was writing in her book about this experience of joining the
church, she actually gave an exposé of how even she as an atheist experienced what she
called the sort of feeling X, this feeling of religious engagement and even ecstasy as
a complete atheist in the church. And she went ahead and joined the church deceptively
in order to get inside it and to understand other people. Honestly, for many people today such hypocrisy
however is, I think, less of a problem than the actual idea of conversion itself. Do you
realize how offensive that idea is increasingly to people in the 21st century? It doesn’t
seem civil. In fact, to some people it seems rude to the point of the intolerance. To others,
it seems even scary. What’s going on? People today are skeptical really that anyone can
change. Politicians, lawyers, preachers, professors, reporters, lobbyists, I mean everybody has
their pre-determined vices, don’t they? Wisdom today is thought to be in learning
to accept your internal circumstances, to adjust to them, to adapt to them, not to try
to fundamentally change them. What is it Freud wrote? “It is through love and work that
we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness.” The die is cast.
The lot is fixed. Our personality is assigned. And except for some terrible trauma, the assumption
today is that the leopard does not change his spots. The anxious person is personality,
the insecure person their psyche, and that’s the way it is. And maturity comes with us
facing up to that truth and resigning ourselves to it. That’s what our world around us says
and believes. And the suggestion that you can change deeply is regarded with serious
suspicion. Any such suggestion is taken to be a potentially sinister tool of manipulation
in the hands of the person who would coerce you into conformity to their standards by
cultivating in you a kind of self-hatred, a loathing of some characteristic of yourself
and your own person, whether that would be your sexual desires, or your vocational ambitions,
or your ethical standards, or your religious beliefs. What we’re taught today is we are
who we are, and we are taught to be proud of it. But for all of this uncertainty and suspicion
even about the possibility of change, there is no denying that people do have a deep longing
for change. There is no doubt. There is a restlessness about the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, and if the truth were known, a dissatisfaction with ourselves that
is as widespread as it is deep-seated. We are not content, and so we rearrange the furniture,
we paint the hallway, we buy some new clothes. If it gets worse, we wonder if changing where
we live wouldn’t be helpful. We work to have flexible hours at our job. If we think
it’s possible, we might even work to change our job. Sometimes we may even long for changing
our spouse. And today the more traditionally fixed boundaries of sexuality and of life
itself are transgressed in vain attempts to find satisfaction, to meet the deep lack of
satisfaction that we find in our own selves and situations. And yet as at work and at
jobs, marriages, families, even gender, and death, as they all become subject to our own
choices, we seem to find ourselves defeated and trapped and hopeless. Again and again,
Christians do hold out hope of a different, a better, a more humane life to non-Christians
around them. There does seem to be something even to non-Christians that’s going on with
Christians. And they are curious when they find real Christians. In one of Paul’s earliest letters in 1 Thessalonians,
chapter 1, Paul refers to the conversion of the Thessalonians. In I Thessalonians, chapter
1, verse 8, he says, “Therefore, we do not need to say anything about it, for they themselves
report what kind of reception you gave us. They tell how you turned to God from idols
to serve the living and true God and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from
the dead, Jesus who rescues us from the coming wrath.” Now, after Paul left Thessalonica,
the conversions there had produced such obvious changes that they had caused such a stir that
Paul himself far away continued to hear about them wherever he went. Conversions had happened,
change had happened, and it made a difference. The news traveled faster than Paul did. The
reception that the Thessalonians gave Paul and his gospel is spelled out in those verses,
in verses 9 and 10, “They turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God
and to wait for His Son from heaven,” a fine epitome of saving faith, turning to God
from idols to serve the living and true God, to wait for His Son from heaven. True conversion
will always involve turning in faith to the true God from the false ones which we set
up. True conversion will always involve serving in love God and for His glory those around
us. And true conversion will always involve realizing that the final answers don’t come
here, but that we, as Paul says here, wait. We are awaiting the coming justice of Jesus.
The Thessalonians had just such a conversion, and it had been confirmed to Paul, as it had
been gossiped about all over the place. So conversion is an idea in both the Old and
the New Testaments. It’s basically this idea of turning, and used positively it means
turning to God. So a person who turns is said to be a convert. Various people in the New
Testament are called the converts to Christ. In many ways the Book of Acts is a series
of conversions. You have, you know, Pentecost’s thousands, and then you have Paul in chapter
9 and Cornelius in 10 and Lydia and the Philippian jailor in 16, and so many others, these stories
of the magnificent conversions. So what exactly is conversion? Well, most
simply, it is the act of turning from sin to Christ in faith, turning from sin – what
the Bible calls repentance – and to Christ. So you might want to look at Acts 20:21, as
a good summary of this. Paul is recounting to the Ephesian elders. He summarizes his
preaching to them, and he says in Acts 20:21, “I have declared to both Jews and Greeks
that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus.” So conversion
is the translation of man from sin to Christ in faith. Christian conversion has continued to create
provocation to people around, provocations that give hope to them. Christians were unique
in defending slavery, but they were in the lead in ending it. Christians have been the
ones who have pioneered education, and care for the poor, the rights of women and minorities.
Albert Einstein noticed that in Nazi Germany almost all the scientists, and researchers,
and professors that he admired, all submitted to the Nazi tyranny. Only among groups of
pedestrian people, who were unexciting members of their unexciting churches, did Einstein
find heroic rebuttal of Nazi doctrine and practice. As a result, Einstein wrote of the
church, “That which I had hitherto despised, now I wholeheartedly came to honor and admire.” I remember when I was living in England for
a number of years, an atheist friend of mine in Cambridge was moving up to Scotland, to
Edinborough, and I was talking with him about it and asked him what he was going to do when
he got up there. And he said, “Well, the first thing, of course, I’ll do is find
a good church.” And I said, “A good church? Why are you
going to find a good church?” He said, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s not
that I’ve become a Christian or anything.” He said, “But you know, I just… Christians
are nice people. Whenever I move to a place, the first thing I always do is find a good
church.” You know, we’re very self-critical, and
that’s in part very appropriate, but we also need to realize the fruit of God’s
Spirit among us is different than what people experience in the world. We’re not perfect.
We are sinful as Christians. Romans 7 applies to Christians, at the same time so does Galatians
5, the fruit of the Spirit. Friends, if we’re really saved, our lives are different. And
when you get not just one virtuous person in an office but a whole community of people
together whose lives are different, it’s provocative to non-Christians around. People
are shocked sometimes by the humane lives that go on among Christians. Admitting that Christians are far from perfect,
what’s going on with both the distinctive character of Christians, and particularly
with the claim standing behind it, that they’ve been converted, that they have been changed?
I mean, is conversion simply what William James said, you know, just this sort of breaking
in on the conscious mind of connections long growing in the subconscious. Is it some kind
of psychological or even physiological brainwashing, some kind of behavioristic psychology with
the Christian evangelist as a kind of amateur Pavlov, merely creating and manipulating reactions
and reflexes? It’s common today to affirm that we are
spiritual beings. This last week at a restaurant I go to all the time in Washington, I’m
talking to the guy who’s waiting on the table and have a good conversation with him.
And when I asked him just directly if he’s a Christian, he says, “No.” He said, “I’m
not religious in any organized sense,” to which when I thought maybe he was a Baptist.
But he said… But he said, “But I’m definitely spiritual. I’m definitely spiritual. I….”
And this man is probably 25. I’ve found that again and again among that generation
of those of you who are in your 20s, the strong affirmation of being spiritual even while
rejecting religion. It’s popular today to humbly deny finding but to appreciate the
journey. But friend, an unending quest, a kind of cosmic traffic jam of meaning, you
know, when seeking the meaning of your life, it’s something you might sadly accept. You
wouldn’t rejoice in it. You wouldn’t rejoice in the journey in that sense. Gandhi was honest when he wrote in his autobiography,
“What I want to achieve, what I have been striving and pining to achieve these 30 years
is self-realization, to see God face to face. I have not yet found Him, but I am seeking
after Him, for it is an unbroken fortune to me that I am still so far from Him. I have
not seen Him, neither have I known Him.” Friends, as Christians we believe there are
countless people throughout history who have come to know God. We understand that conversion
is a miracle that brings us to do what Gandhi here admits he never did, to know God. Oh friend, if you’re here today, and you’re
not a Christian. Let’s just say you happened to come with some religious friends, and they
said, “Oh, it will be interesting. You’ll like the building. The speakers will be good.
I’ll take you to a good lunch. We’re glad you’re here. Come to the Ligonier Pastors
Conference every year.” You know, the most important thing we could say to you is you
really can know God. There really is a point to your life more than what you’ve already
found. You really can be forgiven of your sins against God, those things that your own
conscience tells you that you’ve done that are wrong, and that because God is good, He
will judge you for. The eternal Son of God became man. Jesus Christ took up our lot,
and He lived a life of perfect trust in our heavenly Father, and He died on the cross
– that most famous piece of Christianity, you know, Jesus on the cross. He died on the
cross deliberately and specifically, bearing the penalty, paying the price for the sins
of anyone that would turn from their sins and trust in Him, from all of us that would
do that. Friend, you can know that even as God raised Him from the dead that you can
be raised from your spiritual death to spiritual life if you will simply turn from your sins
and trust in Christ. If you want to know more about that, turn and talk to the person next
to you at the break. There’s nothing we would rather talk to you about in this conference
than that. That’s what we understand conversion to be. Let me just give you three simple statements
about how conversion happens. Three simple statements – number one, we’re called
to repent of our sins and believe in Christ. That verse that I mentioned in Acts 20:21
is a great one to see that, to understand that. We… Paul says, “I have declared
to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our
Lord Jesus.” So in Acts 20 and again in Acts 26:20, Paul seems to summarize his gospel
proclamation in terms of his appeal for their response. So closely allied is the news about
Jesus to the response demanded, it seems to become a part and even a summary of that message. True repentance always accompanies saving
faith. True repentance always accompanies saving faith. A lack of one falsifies any
credible claim to the other. Calvin said that repentance and faith should be joined rather
than confused. So that these two aspects, repentance, turning away from every form of
rebellion in order to serve the living and true God on His own terms, and faith, personal
trust in Jesus, the only Savior, the One who has come from God to save us from God’s
coming judgment of us. We shouldn’t misunderstand this faith. This faith is not mere knowledge
like the demons are said to have in James 2:19. Nor is it merely the approval of some
facts, like say Agrippa approves of in Acts 26:27. There must be a personal trust, a relying
on Christ as part of this faith if it is to be saving faith. But that’s where the problem comes in, human
depravity. The very thing that makes us need to turn to God, our sin, also prevents us.
So what are we to do? The answer to this is not to ignore our need, or to try to redefine
it or soften it. What we need is to be converted. We need the Holy Spirit of God to convert
us. Friends, you realize, by nature we are worship thieves. I love that image that Calvin
uses in The Institutes, book 2, where he talks about… he says, “We wickedly defraud God
of His glory.” It’s a terrible picture of what we do by nature, but it’s true.
It’s what we do. It’s true of every one of us. Now, many of us have repented of our sins,
and we’ve trusted in Christ and are doing so today even. Praise God for that. So everyone
is either a believer or an unbeliever. Everyone is either converted or unconverted. There
is no middle ground. And no one is born a Christian, not even those of us who have been
born into the home of the most pious Christian that’s ever lived. You must be converted
to be a Christian. So Paul reminded the Ephesian Christians of what they were before they were
converted. Two more statements that I assume are non-controversial
among this group, though we could certainly look at any of them more if you thought that
was important in the Q&A in just a couple of minutes. Number two, God must give us the
gifts of repentance and faith. Since we are depraved, God must give us the gifts of repentance
and faith. And number three, God uses means to give us
these gifts. And the normal means are the right preaching of the Word of God and the
right administration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. There are many ways that our understanding
of the gospel shows itself in our understanding of conversion, and conversely, our misunderstandings
of one may be reflected in the way we misrepresent the other. Let me come to one that’s particularly important
for churches today, and this is the sort of pastoral point that I’m driving at. And
let me just give you a couple of examples. I don’t know how many… One of the things
I do is try to look at every new book on the church that comes out. I do not read them.
Let me be clear. I do not read them. I look at them. I look at every new book that comes
out that I can find. I look at the table of contents. I look at the back. I try to see
what they are saying. I do not take the time to read them all. Some I take the time to
read. Let me just bring out two that are very recent that I think are typical of what I’m
seeing among pastors today, and see if you’re getting this also. Let me pick Steve Timmis
and Tim Chester’s Gospel Centered Church. Now, an earlier version of it came out in
2002, but in 2009, Good Book Company just put out another one. It comes out of the crowded
house movement in Great Britain. Is anybody here familiar with that? Raise your hand if
you’re familiar with that. Anybody? One person. Okay. Well, oh, but it’s Jonathan.
Sorry, from our own church, hello, Jonathan. Jonathan’s English. Well, yeah, I had some
concerns about that movement but more appreciation. My main difference would be their antipathy
toward formal church membership. I really think that’s a misunderstanding. They refer
to this one person mentioning that there were “hoops to jump through before he felt he
belonged in our church.” (end of quote) And that’s the way they tend to talk about
formal church membership. And my response to that would be, look, if that… if membership
is meaningless in your church, well then, of course requirements for it will, of course,
appear arbitrary and counterproductive and just pointless. But this little book that’s come out, Gospel
Centered Church, attractively presents the popular call to build our churches so that
people belong before they have to believe. That’s the key idea. That’s what I want
to talk about, belong before they believe. Quoting from that book, “People are attracted
to the Christian community before they are attracted to the Christian message. The best
place for belief to emerge is in a context where people already feel they belong. If
a believing community is a persuasive witness for the gospel, then people need to be included
to see that witness at work. The best way to draw people in is not to make them feel
on the outside of what is going on, but to include and involve them.” That’s page
85. Or the next page, page 86, again Steve Timmis and Tim Chester, Gospel Centered Church,
(quote) “Treat people as part of the church even before in a sense they really are. It
will get messy at times. Church life is a lot easier if you only let respectable, sorted
out people into the church in the first place. Other churches may raise their eyebrows, but
drunkard, glutton, friend of sinners, these should be badges of honor among those who
follow Jesus Christ.” (close quote) That’s my first example. Second example, my old classmate at Gordon-Conwell,
Tim Conder, is even clearer in his 2006 book, A Church in Transition. (quote) “A doctrinal
approach to community formation also has significant missional liabilities. One common axiom of
emerging culture ministry is the declaration that emerging culture persons will join a
community before affirming the beliefs of that community. In other words, emerging culture
persons place belonging before believing. Using doctrine as the doorkeeper essentially
slams shut the front door of the church in the face of spiritual seekers. These persons
need to enter and participate in community as part of their search for spiritual truth
and goodness. In fact, they are far more likely to make their spiritual discernment based
on the quality and characteristics of a community rather than its doctrinal propositions.”
(close quote) That’s Tim Conder, Church in Transition, page 149. I both appreciate
what Tim is saying but also question his assumption of the necessary sort of antagonism and antithesis
of believing being foundation to, as he puts it, community formation over against persons
feeling loved and in some profound senses accepted and even belonging in a community.
I reject that as a dichotomy. Let me present a different way to come at
this. If Jesus Christ came to save sinners, 1 Timothy 1:15, and if people must, as Jesus
said, realize they are sick before they see the need for having a doctor at all, you know,
Mark 2:17, then don’t people have to be aware of some doctrine, God’s right wrath
against us for our sins, before they understand the One who creates our community, Jesus Christ,
and how He does it by His work on the cross. I think that one way we can help each other
in the church is by having what you could call high expectations for each other, for
those who claim to be converted. By high expectations, I simply mean that if you’re a communing
member of our church, we will treat you like you’re converted. We’ll assume that you
increasingly love God and that you increasingly hate sin and that you are living accordingly
and wanting us to help you do that, which is why you’ve joined. Many churches compromise at just this point
in order to gain a sudden influx of members, but by so doing they usually doom themselves
to losing the gospel and finally to extinction. Think carefully. Taking unconverted persons
into communing membership in a Christian church will inevitably tend to obscure the gospel.
If the gospel is downplayed or confused, the very lifeblood of the church itself is cut
off, and the church is increasingly… the church increasingly loses any distinction
from the unbelieving world, and if the salt loses its saltiness, it’s good for nothing. This raises the interesting question of how
apparently exclusive should we be in our church, how apparently – that is obviously to everybody,
not hidden – how apparently exclusive should we be in our church? Should our churches calibrate
our times of meeting, the length of our sermons, the style of our music to the unbelievers
we want to reach? It’s a question I’m asking. How much is our gathering on the Lord’s
Day for the sake of those who are not Christians? Do we understand our meetings and our church
service fundamentally or mainly in terms of evangelism to non-Christians, or are they
for the building up of our congregation and the members of it in Christ? Brother pastors, this is another way of considering
the question rather than the often discussed, how inclusive should we be? You hear that
question all the time. How inclusive should we be? Friends, of course, everybody wants
to be inclusive. Brothers and sisters, God has included us in tremendous mercy in Christ.
We are people who deeply want to be inclusive. We realize how amazingly merciful God has
been to us, so we’re in favor of inclusiveness in that sense. It’s obviously loving. The question of how apparently exclusive we
should be perhaps more quickly gets to the point of how we think our transparent differences
of life and doctrine reflect a deeper, complete change that the non-Christian must self-consciously
own by self-consciously being aware first that they are subject to God’s right wrath
before they can understand and accept God’s love in Christ, and so turn from their sin
to savingly trust in Christ. As I said in a sermon recently in our own church in Washington,
my non-Christian friend, there is an unavoidable discontinuity between our lives and your life,
and we actually serve you best if we’re clear about that difference. If you’ve been
enjoying the people, the friendliness, the helpfulness of people in our congregation,
that is wonderful. I hope that continues. And the good news I have for you in this is
that there is even more to all this than you’ve experienced. You can try to be winsomely apparently
exclusive. Brothers, I think that this raises some questions
about the idea of belonging before believing. We must be careful of giving non-Christians
the theological lie, that is that they in the most profound sense belong. In the most
profound sense, they don’t. And we serve them if we will tell them that. Now of course,
in our churches we can and should be deliberately inclusive of professing Christians and non-Christians
in some senses, and yet we are also deliberately and openly to be exclusive in another sense.
We should show them that there is something more than just horizontal community that they
can come and participate in or a vague sense of God’s presence in a congregation’s
life. Now, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying
about conversion. Conversion need not be dramatic, emotional conversion created by well intended
emotional manipulation, nor is conversion the mere assumption of your place in the family
pew. Rather Christian conversion, being born again, being regenerated is… Christian conversion
is a self-conscious owning of our sin and of our resolve to repent and trust in Christ.
And clarity on this point is essential for Christian faith and life and for Christian
churches. Now, there’s a ton more that I could say
about implications about this for preaching, for pastoral care, for evangelism, but it’s
15 minutes till the hour. I want us to have some time just to talk about this for a minute.
So Chris, do you want to… R.C., do you want to come up? And just think of what implications
this may have for us in our churches, maybe some issues, some things you think this addresses
that you’ve seen. If you have a pressing useful question, I’m going to ask R.C. just
to come over here for a minute, and just brother, anything in this you particularly think is
useful for pastors to think of especially today, and then we’ll see what questions
or comments the friends here have. R.C. Sproul: You’re asking me? Mark Dever: I’m asking you just the significance
and importance of that idea of belonging before believing or in putting believing first, just
anything here. R.C. Sproul: I think this may be one of the
greatest crises that face the church today, Mark, that this almost intoxicated desire
to build our churches, to get people in there, and to accommodate the world, and to make
people feel included when in the sight of God, they aren’t. Mark Dever: Now, I don’t want this to be
misunderstood. R.C., you’re one of the friendliest people I know. I’m sure you want people
at Saint Andrew’s Chapel when they visit if they are non-Christians…. R.C. Sproul: Oh, absolutely. And I want them
to feel… I want them to feel welcome. Mark Dever: Of course. R.C. Sproul: I want them to feel warm. I want
them to feel loved. But I also if they’re unconverted, I want them to know they’re
unconverted,… Mark Dever: Yeah, yeah. R.C. Sproul: … because one of the things
we have to deal with all the time in the church are people who have a false sense of assurance.
They think that they are Christians when they’re not. And it’s not my job to convict them
of sin. It’s my job to preach the Word that the Spirit takes and brings the conviction.
I mean, we’re not called to be policemen. We’re standing there on the corner, saying,
“Stop, you’re not allowed in here,” none of that. We should be warm and open and
welcome and loving, but you don’t design worship or preaching for the unbeliever. I
don’t think that the primary task of the church on Sunday morning is evangelism. I
do evangelism some, but my top… my top responsibility, I think, is to feed the sheep. Don’t you? Mark Dever: 1 Corinthians 14:26, “whatever
is building up the congregation…” R.C. Sproul: I knew there was a verse in there. Mark Dever: There it is. So… So why do you
think it is that so many evangelical, even Reformed pastors today seem to be reluctant
to tell non-Christians that they need to be converted? They seem to not want to talk about
that. R.C. Sproul: They’re afraid of offending
them, and again we’re… we’re in a culture that says exclusivity of any kind is a manifestation
of intolerance and therefore a lack of charity. And that’s not what it is. It can be. And
some people are puffed up with self-righteousness and all the rest. But the true believer, you
know, the old saying that we’re just beggars telling other beggars where they can find
bread. But we know we’ve found the bread. Mark Dever: Amen. Yeah. And I love that, but
in Mark 2, you know, where Jesus says, “Look, I’ve come not for the healthy but for the
sick.” It’s the sick that need the doctor. So people have to know they are sick before
they are going to appreciate Christ as the doctor. Friends, any question, comment you
want to – obviously it needs to be brief in a group this large. We don’t have that
much time. But anything you think would be relevant for us more generally, not just you
personally, but generally. Chris, you want to go right over here. Just give your name
and church, – Chris is bringing a microphone – and then the brief comment or question. Questioner #1: My name is Pastor Omar from
Key West, Florida, Grace Tabernacle Church. I believe that one of the greatest sins today
is that we’ve upstaged God and trying to tell Him that the second commandment of fellowship
is more important than “followship,” and so that we’re very enthralled with being
accepted rather than being pure. We’re reaching for a unity rather than purity. R.C. Sproul: I think that’s true. I think
though that we know from the polls that the number one reason that motivates people to
come to church on Sunday morning is not worship. It’s for fellowship. And we pick up on that
either consciously or unconsciously. We design our buildings. We design our services. We
design everything about it to make people feel comfortable in an atmosphere of fellowship,
and they may never, never, never get the slightest glimpse of the character of the God they are
assembled to worship. And that’s… we’re not doing anybody a favor by doing that. Mark Dever: Amen. Somebody else, anything
else before we have a break? Right here. Questioner #2: Yeah, I do… Mark Dever: Wait, wait. We’ve got to get
a microphone, so people in the back can hear. R.C. Sproul: Hurry up, Chris. Run. Move. There
he goes. Questioner # 2: We all belong to a PC… Mark Dever: Name and church. Questioner #2: Yeah, First Presbyterian, Fernandina
Beach, and we’re all here with a wishing, want to be PCA church, but we’re PCUSA.
And all of us are very involved with Evangelism Explosion, I mean on the side. We cannot get
our pastor to embrace this whole concept that you have to know that you’re lost before
you can be found. And D. James Kennedy’s diagnostic questions, the first one, Do you
believe you’re going to heaven when you die? And most people in our church would say,
“Yes.” You know, when you ask that question, most people think that they’re good. R.C.
Sproul, I realize that you say your job is not to convert but to just preach. Gosh, most
of these people just come to church once a week. If they don’t hear it from the pastor,
they don’t hear that the penalty of sin is death and the free gift from God is eternal
life, and unless you repent and turn and put your trust in what He did for you and not
yourself, they’re never going to hear it. And I spent, you know, my 30 years or 25 years
going to a church and never hearing the gospel, and it took a guy coming to me in the street
in New York City, presenting the Four Spiritual Laws, and right there I felt the indwelling
of the Holy Spirit. And my first reaction was, why did I never hear that from my Pastor? Mark Dever: Amen. We want to share the gospel,
and you know, I think if we do the services right, and you know, I don’t think that
R.C. and I would do everything the same way liturgically, but there would be a lot of
similarities. I think you’d find the gospel is going to be there in the service, I mean,
even before the sermon – the prayer of confession, assurance of pardon, the hymns that are sung.
You’re going to get the gospel of who God is, who we are, what Christ has done, and
what we should do in that and in the sermon as well. But the church is not a stationary
Billy Graham rally. You know, we’re about more than that. We are about that, but we’re
about more than that. R.C. Sproul: You know, in the early church,
we know from early church history in the first century church, the pattern was kerygma followed
by didache. The apostolic preaching in the market place, they preached the gospel. People
responded. They repented. They believed. They were admitted into the church, and then subjected
to catechetical instruction and preaching and teaching in the Word of God. It can’t
be nurture or evangelism. It’s got to be nurture and evangelism. But what I’m saying
is that the chief purpose on Sunday morning – and that’s not the only time that we
speak or preach or teach is Sunday morning – but in the Sunday morning assembling together
of the saints, I don’t think that the primary aim of that is evangelism. Mark Dever: I agree. Last one. Questioner #3: I am with Gospel through Columbia,
a mission organization for Latin America, and the question is, how do you share with
the Roman Catholics, who believe that because they believe in Christ they are saved, but
they will not hear that it is through Christ alone? And how will you bring this message
to them indicating that it is Christ alone? They are in… The ones who learn the Christian
manner of speech, they say, “Yeah, I’m going to heaven because I trust in Christ.”
They say, “Yes, I believe in Christ. I trust in Christ, so I can continue to be a Roman
Catholic.” And I have to thank Dr. Sproul for making the difference this morning about
the Catholic Church, that we as Christians will not allow a pagan church to steal the
name of catholic to us… from us. Mark Dever: Now, if you can just remain standing
for a second. Alejandro, where are you? From our church, Alejandro Mellera. Alejandro,
that’s the brother that I want you to meet. Noé, right over here, Alejandro. Right, you
guys can meet each other at the break. How do we evangelize Roman Catholics and make
it clear that they have to be saved only by trusting Christ alone? R.C., you’ve got
a lot of experience of that here. With a building that looks like this, you must get… you
must get Roman Catholics coming in all the time. R.C. Sproul: That’s all we do with the name
of our church, Saint Andrew’s and everything else. Mark Dever: They think you’re Father R.C. R.C. Sproul: Yeah. I… I constantly help…
try to help our people understand the difference between the Roman understanding of the gospel
and the Reformation, Biblical understanding of the gospel. And I… I try… you mentioned
earlier that… I think you were quoting Roger Nicole. Mark Dever: I was – about how to deal with
those who disagree. R.C. Sproul: It used to be when I would be…
when I was a professor of philosophy in a secular university, and I had to teach secular
philosophy, my goal was to present that guy’s position as well as I possibly could. And
it’s the same principle in evangelism and apologetics. I think most Protestants don’t
have a clue about what Roman Catholic Church teaches about salvation, and I take the time
to explain it. Here’s how you’re saved according to Rome. It starts…. Mark Dever: So you think you should actually
explain to a Roman Catholic… R.C. Sproul: Explain them the difference… Mark Dever: … what their own church teaches. R.C. Sproul: What happens in their own church
is that if they die with any impurity on their soul, they go to purgatory. They don’t go
to hell as long as it’s not a mortal sin. Explain all that, and say that they may spend
a week, they may spend a million years in purgatory, in the place of purging, before
they can be admitted into the presence of God. And I say the simple difference is this,
before God will accept you and justify you, you must be inherently just. I don’t want
to slander them, and I’m very careful to point out Rome says you can’t be really
just without faith, without grace, and without Christ. So they salute those three things.
But with the aid of faith, and grace, and Jesus you can and must become inherently righteous
in order to be justified. And I say that to me that’s bad news because I have no hope.
And even Rome will admit that in the course of church history that but a handful of people
who when they died went directly to heaven, the saints. For us average people, we’re
going to either go to hell or to purgatory. And I’m saying that the gospel is this,
that it’s faith alone, grace alone, and Christ alone, and if you put your trust in
Christ and in Christ alone, all that He is and all that He’s done become yours right
now. And heaven is yours right now, no more purgatory, no more treasury of saints, no
more indulgences, none of that stuff. I mean, the Roman Catholic doctrine is anything but
good news. And I like to get people to see that and yet be as fair as I could possibly
be. I want to know Roman Catholic theology better than the local priest, and I think
I do frankly. I majored in that in graduate school. But again, a Roman Catholic, if you
ask him, “Are you a believer?” Nine out of ten of them will not say, “I’m a Catholic
Christian.” They’ll say, “I’m a Catholic.” Why do they say that? Because they really
do believe in sacerdotalism. They really do believe that the instrument of salvation is
the church, that the church through the sacraments saves them, and as long as they’re going
to church, going through the sacraments, going to confession, they’re in. But they don’t
have a clue about what the gospel is. Mark Dever: Friends, our time is up for this
session. I hope you’ve profited from this, and we will look forward to hearing the Word
of God further in just a few minutes. R.C. Sproul: This was an extra bonus that
came up at the last minute, and I just want to say how much I appreciate Mark’s doing
that for us. So thank you.
