Wheat, Tares, and Waiting for the Harvest: Communion of Saints with R.C. Sproul

it was St Augustine who first gave an indepth theological Exposition and formulation of the distinction that we have between the visible and the invisible church and as old as that concept may be in church history it is still subject to much misunderstanding and confusion in this session what I want to do is to take us back to the 4th century and try to gain a deeper understanding of the significance of that distinction I've already mentioned at least in passing about the phenomenon that we experienced in America in the decade of the 60s with the Advent of of the so-called underground Church which uh which people who were involved in that movement expressed in many times at many times a disdain for the visible organized church and somehow they saw themselves as being a conscious alternative to the visible church and by virtue of their loose organization and so on many considered that they were the invisible Church well that reflects I think a serious misunderstanding of what St Augustine had in mind when he made this historic distinction between the visible and the invisible church because in the view of the 60s it was as if they had there is this one Circle or sphere that we call the visible church and then outside of it ex external to it uh would be another group of people who would make up the invisible church now this is not at all what St Augustine had in mind with the distinction if we're going to use the image of the circle the circle would look more like this that here we have the invisible Church and in fact what I'll do is erase that and give you a uh a clearer picture of it so we can make it a little bigger this is the invisible church and then this second Circle would be the visible church now we would have to make one slight amendation to that and that is I'm just going to take this little blip out like that as it were and uh and see that in addition to this circle there is this circle we'll just leave it like that out there now what this image is trying to show is this that for Augustine the invisible Church church is something that is found basically and substantially within the visible Church there may be this little blip out here that is floating uh independent if you will of the visible church but this represents an extremely abnormal and unusual phenomenon what Augustine would include in in that little blip outside the visible Church would be people for example like the thief on the cross who was converted in his hour of death he had no opportunity whatsoever to align himself with some visible institution there was no uh opportunity for church membership or even for baptism as he hung on the cross in preparation of death we know C certain times in history at points of Crisis people are dragged away from society thrown into prison or in some kind of isolationist position solitary confinement uh alone in a concentration camp where they have no possible opportunity to align themselves with a body or a group of other Christians and yet those people who are truly members of the body of Christ because of their faith and so on they remain at least for a season outside the visible church now there's one other possibility uh by which a person could be in the invisible church and not be in the visible church and that is the person who is truly a child of God truly regenerate has authentic self iic faith in his heart but in his spiritual infancy or spiritual immaturity he has a seriously defective view of the church maybe he has been disappointed in his local congregation and he has not yet uh been exposed to the teaching of scripture he's a new convert he said I don't want to make the mistake of uh falling into the Trap of institutionalism and so on one and so by personal decision and choice he avoids entrance into the visible church now notice I said that that would be a temporary shortterm problem that would be indicative of an infant Christian I'm bending over backwards here I'm describing a hypothetical possibility of somebody who just simply doesn't know and any better but we would assume that once that person even had a cursory reading of the New Testament if he were indeed regenerate of the Holy Spirit he would hear the voice of his Lord commanding him to be a part of his body and his Disobedience at this point would be shortlived now this uh portrait that I've given here then the basic portrait of the two circles the visible church and The Invisible by which the invisible church is seen as being substantially within the visible church I have drawn these concentric circles without any particular view to proportion because because these people and the Outer Circle are people who are church members that is their names are on the roles of the visible church but they are not children of God they are unbelievers they remain outside the kingdom of God they're part of the visible Church community commity but they are not part of the invisible Church which Augustine said is made up only of the elect only of those who have been called not merely externally through the preaching of the gospel and so on but those who have been called eternally and internally by the work of the Holy Spirit and brought to True Faith now again the reason for this distinction at this point is that Augustine said that the church is a body a corpus as we've already seen with the concept of the Corpus Christi the body of Christ but that it is a corpus per mixtum that it is is a mixed body now this was not a judgment that Augustine learned empirically or inductively by canvasing the members in his bishoprick and looking at their behavior and saying well you're a Believer and you're not no no no he drew this conclusion of course from the teaching of Jesus that is found so clearly in the New Testament Jesus speaks of the condition of the church as including a mixture of Tears or weeds if you will that live and grow along with the wheat in fact though Christ institutes a process of church discipline that involves the expulsion from the membership of the visible Church those who are engaged in Gross and heinous sin nevertheless Jesus put certain constraints upon how church discipline is exercised and the process is a kind of process by which the church virtually bends over backwards in its care not to hastily excommunicate someone out of fear that the uh weeding process is done IND descrip ently and brutally to the end that someone who is truly a child of God is wrongfully cast out of the body of Christ and so Jesus though he does Institute excommunication fences that process with great care and great caution say basically saying this it is better that the church continue living in the presence of weeds growing among it then that in our Zeal to purify the church we ruthlessly rip up the wheat whom God has planted and Destroy them along with the tears the other image of course that Jesus uses is the image of the sheep and the goats the Sheep referring of course to those who truly belong to Christ who truly love him and embrace him the Nots uh are those who are uh spurious in their confession of Faith they their profession is false it is not genuine it is not authentic I once heard the difference between the sheep and the goats has defined in this manner that when Christ gives a commandment to one of his sheep the Sheep always says yes Lord but when he says a commandment to one of the goats the goats reply yes but but but but that's not biblical that's uh that's extra biblical but I think uh illustrative now Jesus again indicated that it was clearly possible for people to make a profession of faith and do all of the things that are required by the visible Church to enter into her membership a person can go through a communicant Class A person can give a credible profession of Faith a person can receive the sign of baptism and do all of those things that are required for church membership person may even give of his worldly substance be a scrupulous tither and so so on uh be involved in the life of the church attend the services uh regularly and punctually and all of this at the same time being without saving Faith being a false professor as Jesus indicated this people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me now again the lips and the speech of the lips the claims of the mouth are things that we can perceive outwardly they belong to the visible or to the audible realm but the reason why Augustine calls this inner core of True Believers the invisible Church is because the thing that is invisible about them is their heart again the Bible says man looks on the outward appearances but God looks on the heart the invisible Church therefore is invisible to us it's not invisible to God Christ knows his sheep he knows who are authentically his he can read their hearts just as he read the thoughts of the woman of Samaria and of Nathaniel and all of that God can read the state of your soul without seeing any external visible evidence of your faith he knows who is truly redeemed and who isn't but we don't we can be fooled people can make a good outward appearance of godliness in fact we call that the problem of hypocrisy I remember when I first became a Christian and went home to my home church and and I had a discussion in the drugstore one night with a friend of mine who had always been an outstanding student and now he was work working on a degree in science at Carnegie melon University and he kind of prided himself in his academic skepticism and of course he was not only skeptical but virtually contemptuous of the truth claims of Christianity and as I spoke to him about my new found Faith he exhibited disdain for my naive and uh and mocked me for uh my convictions and I remember how troubled in spirit I was I was personally wounded by it because he was a friend and so on and the next morning I went to church and I looked across the aisle and there was my friend in church with his parents and I just watched him and I noticed that when it came time for the Apostles Creed that he stood just like everyone else and I he said I believe and God the Father Almighty he said it for anyone who was present to hear him he gave an outward profession of Faith he honored god with his lips while the night before he had expressed to me his utter contempt for the Faith of Christ the day I was examined by the presbyter for my ordination trials one of my friends who was going to be examined that same day as we awaited the summons to come and stand before the whole presbyter which is one of the most intimidating experiences in a young man's life and as we were nervously awaiting the call he looked over at me and he said should I go with the resurrection of Christ or not and I said what do you mean and he said well should I say that I believe in the res resurrection of Christ and I said well do you he said no no man he said I haven't believed that in years how can anybody be acquainted with Hier critical theories and so on and still embrace the resurrection of Christ but I know that they that that some of those people out there are going to insist that I say that and he was called and he stood before the presetter with cross fingers he perjured himself in terms of what he believed that we call hypocrisy the word having its origin in the Greek language as it was a term borrowed from the state from the theater from the person who is engaged in play acting he's pretending well there are still pockets of our society where there are business advantages and social advantages and other kinds of advantages for being perceived by your neighbors and your fellows as an upstanding Christian so there are still reasons in our society other than the right ones to give this pretext and that's always been the case I'm I'm astonished when when uh when lay people come to me and they're they're upset because of some gross Act of misconduct that they observed in their Pastor or an attitude of unbelief that they heard expressed by their pastor and they say he's an ordained minister how can he do that or how can he say that the tacd Assumption of the lay person is well if he's a minister he must be a Christian and not just a run-of-the-mill Christian but a profoundly committed Christian I say to these people who was it who screamed for the blood of Jesus who were those who were most hostile to the historical Christ wasn't The Sinner it wasn't the Publican it wasn't the lay person in the community it was the clergy who were most vicious in their hostility toward Jesus and toward the apostles that's true in every generation to a lesser or a greater degree I remember Gilbert tenant in New England wrote a little book a couple of hundred years ago that was entitled simply the danger of an unconverted clergy what I'm saying simply is from the first century to the 20th century there's always been the clear and present danger of unbelievers present mixed together with the real Believers in the body of Christ and that believe those unbelievers May in fact be head of the church the clergy of the church the Bishops of the church or whatever that's always a serious possibility now as I said the proportion of these two circles isn't arbitrary as I put it up here on the Blackboard there are obviously times in church history where God so renews his church and where the church experiences Awakening to spiritual things that the church the visible church is comprised almost completely of those who are truly in the faith but there are dark moments in church history Dark Ages where the church falls into deep deep corruption and Disobedience so that churches become as the scriptures suggest synagogues of Satan where we are fortunate to find the remotest speck or presence of the invisible Church within the visible Church remember what happened happed in the Old Testament the whole nation of Israel was called into fellowship with God the whole nation participated externally in the visible Church of Israel in the Covenant Community but by the time the Old Testament draws to a close the hope for the future was for a tenth for a tiny Remnant that would still be faithful and then of course there's the danger on the other side sometimes we're so acutely conscious of this problem of the visible and the invisible that we even further reduce uh the possible number of those in the invisible Church down to a DOT that we require the lamp of diogenes to discern and uh we suffer from what I like to call the elijas syndrome do you remember when Elijah complained to God that he was trying to be faithful in the midst of a people that were collectively Unfaithful priests and Prophets together were going in a completely different path from the Prophet Elijah until finally he laments before God oh God I and I alone am left huh you heard about the two preachers that say you know there's only two of us left here that that are faithful anymore in it's sound and sometimes I worry about about you so that's the Elijah syndrome and God had to rebuke him and say to him be careful Elijah I have preserved for myself you know 7,000 who have not bowed the knee to bail from the Vantage of Elijah everywhere he looked he saw people on their knees before Baal he couldn't find seven not to mention 7,000 but God knew who his people were and so again the point of the distinction between the visible and the invisible has to do with the state of the Soul just this morning I was writing the final chapter of a book that I hope will be titled when it comes out the Soul's quest for God and I was dealing with one of the most terrifying warnings that Jesus ever gives and that's his conclusion to The Sermon on the Mount when he says many will come to me saying Lord Lord and he says it's not everyone who says Lord Lord who will enter the kingdom but those who do the will of his father and again he says they will come and saying Lord Lord didn't we prophesy in your name didn't we cast out devils in your name didn't we do many wonderful things in your name and Jesus said on that day he will look at them and say depart from me I never knew you now I'll tell you what scares me about this that not only that there will be some people on the final day who will come saying not only Lord but Lord Lord the repetition of the form of a dress indicates an assumption of a close personal intimate relationship these aren't your Easter and Sunday visitors to the church that he's anticipating are going to come and say Lord Lord but people who suppose that they have a deep personal relationship with him but what scares me is not that to some will but he says many there is a multitude a great multitude of people who actually believe that they have a personal relationship with Christ to whom Jesus will say on the last day please leave me I don't know your name and they going to say they're going to protest but Lord I was a preacher I prophesied I did Miracles I cast demons out of people look at my track record of the wonderful works that I have performed in the name of the [Music] church please leave th he says because they are defined as those who are workers of lawlessness again they are people who say they love Christ but refuse to keep his Commandments now John Calvin struggled with this distinction between the visible and the invisible and he said yes the hearts of the faithful are known only to God but it is not as if the church is to be a corporation of HG wells's invisible men Calvin said that the task the principal task of the invisible church is to make the invisible Church visible that those who have TR true Faith are to be a light to the world to make their faith manifest that we may bear witness to the Lord whose church we are

Channel: Ligonier Ministries

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Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024