Why SNF: Teaching

A couple of weeks ago, I turned your attention to Acts 2 and the gospel community that the earliest members of First Presbyterian Church in Jerusalem experienced together. Last week, we considered the early church’s devotion to the prayers and our opportunity to pray with and for one another at SNF.

But there are other features that stand out in Acts 2:42-47, other markers or indicators of the spiritual health of the saints in Jerusalem, and one of those is a devotion to the “apostles’ teaching.” The early church was hungry for more of the truth of God’s Word.

Sunday Night Fellowship affords us one more opportunity, especially as we discontinue Sunday school during the summer months, for a brief study of Scripture. To that end, I’ll be leading a discussion through a book I recently read that I greatly appreciated. Each chapter addresses a particular aspect of the Bible’s teaching about church membership. As you might expect, our discussion will focus on the Bible and not this book; no need to read before you come.

The book? Well, you’ll just have to come to SNF to find out.

Please bring food to share and we’ll see you Sunday night at 5 (we’ll start eating promptly at 5:15).

Why SNF Prayer

Last week, I wrote a little article explaining why we’re bringing back Sunday Night Fellowship and began considering what we hope to accomplish during these evenings together. And, as I mentioned last week, one goal is the fostering of gospel community.

But there’s so much more going on in the church in Jerusalem during their early days together as we see in Acts 2:42-47. These recent converts were committed to several things together. One of those is prayer (Acts 2:42).

However, there’s something curious about the way Acts 2:42 is written; the ESV has picked up on it. Each of the nouns (teaching, fellowship, prayers, etc.) has its own definite article.

Maybe I find language more interesting than some, but humor me for a minute. The way grammar works, I can use one “the” in a sentence and let it serve for more than one noun – I went to the zoo and saw the lions, bears, and monkeys. One definite article (the) and three nouns, but the article applies to each. I don’t have to say, “the lions and the bears and the monkeys.” In fact, it’s a little cumbersome.

But in Acts 2:42, in English because it’s written this way in Greek, we have “the teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers.” Have you ever wondered why that is? Well, it seems that the article suggests that there were stated times for prayer, for fellowship, etc., and the saints made a habit, a commitment, to be at all of them.

Well, it’s our hope that SNF becomes one of those times at which we can have fellowship and prayer together. Not only will we eat together, but we will gather and pray for one another, for our church, for our community, for the gospel to grow, and much more.

This is a great opportunity to grow in gospel community both through fellowship and prayer with and for each other. Meanwhile, it’s an opportunity for us to boldly enter the throne room of heaven together, as a church fellowship, bearing one another’s burdens, pointing each other to a loving and faithful Father, sharing in each other’s joys and sorrows.

We hope you’ll commit to the fellowship and the prayers of GCPC.

Why Sunday Night Fellowship?

Some of you remember Sunday Night Fellowship from years gone by. Others are new and, perhaps, a little curious.

It may seem a little silly to explain something that sounds so self-explanatory. The three words int he title are easy enough to understand and putting them all together doesn't exactly create a complex mathematical formula we can't comprehend. You know when Sunday is. You know morning from night. And if there's anything leaving room for lack of clarity, it's that word "fellowship." So, why an article about Sunday Night Fellowship?

The answer is that simply knowing what a thing is doesn't always tell you why it exists. And I want you to understand why SNF exists. 

If you can read the words Sunday and Night and Fellowship and have a pretty good handle on what to expect on these evenings, then you could just as easily read the first few chapters of the book of Acts and recognize some characteristics of the early church that fueled it's growth and the advancement of the gospel. Those characteristics we call the ordinary means of grace, characteristics like the preaching of God’s Word, prayer, participating in the sacraments, gospel community, worship, and service. You can find this list clearly listed at the end of Acts 2, but we see them portrayed over the next several chapters.

As it turns out, your session has had a few conversations recently about our commitment to the ordinary means of grace. We believe that these are the means that Christ has given to his church by which sinners are converted and saints are sanctified. And we want to make use of those means regularly and frequently.

Enter Sunday Night Fellowship. Our hope is that this event in the life of GCPC will serve a variety of purposes. Let me take a couple of weekly emails to call your attention tot he benefits of Sunday Night Fellowship in hopes of drawing you into committing to being there.

Gospel Community
Our snack time between worship and Sunday school is great, but it’s only so great. It’s short. Sometimes shorter if the preacher gets long winded. The room is small. Lengthy conversations are difficult. And it always feels like you’re in someone’s way. It’s wonderful, but it’s only as wonderful as it can be.

SNF will give us roughly two hours to eat together and pray together. We will eat promptly at 5:15 leaving you plenty of time to visit with the others around you. We won’t give the whole time to eating, but you won’t feel rushed, (well, the later you arrive, the more rushed you’ll feel).

In pursuit of gospel community, we will see you at 5:00pm on June 16.

Fighter Jets, Aircraft Carriers, and The Church

What’s that in the ocean? It’s a fortress! No, it’s an airport. No, it’s a hotel. Wait, I think it’s a hospital.

It just so happens that an aircraft carrier is all of those things and then some. If you’ve ever walked on the deck of the USS Yorktown, retired at Patriot’s Point in Charleston, SC, you know how overwhelmingly enormous those things are.

Just think about a floating hotel where hundreds of sailors and pilots live for weeks and months at a time, while also carrying I don’t know how many airplanes in its hangar. Those fighter jets literally takeoff from a ship, fly into enemy territory, do their thing, and return only to land on that same ship. If that’s not mindboggling, you watch too much TV.

Well, have you ever thought about comparing the church’s Lord’s Day activities to an aircraft carrier? While I’ll grant you that New Testament isn’t remotely concerned about swarms of jets or floating airports, this is a reasonable comparison.

Christians live their lives out in the world which is, by definition, enemy territory. OK, creation declares the glory of God (Psalm 19) and there isn’t “one square inch of creation over which Christ doesn’t say, ‘Mine’” (Abraham Kuyper). But we are commanded to put on the whole armor of God (Ephesians 6) for a reason – we are at war, spiritual though it may be. And in that sense, we Christians are like fighter jets being sent out to complete our assigned mission(s) each and every week. We may not have the same assignment. But we all have an assignment.

What happens to those planes at the end of their mission? Where do they go and what do they do when their assignment has been carried out for that day? They return to the carrier to be checked for damage, patched up, refueled, and prepared for the next mission.

That’s exactly what worship on the Lord’s Day is intended to accomplish for the believer. We need to be checked for damage, patched up, refueled, and prepared for another mission, another week of battle. In that regard, the Lord’s Day activities of the church are like an aircraft carrier.

This has practical applications and implications, doesn’t it?

For example, what is a Benediction at the end of the service except a “good word,” a blessing from God to His people, promising his presence and care with them as they fly their respective missions.

Another implication serves as a warning – why would we skip that? Imagine the plane that calls back to the Chief Officer and says, “Nah, I’m just gonna keep flying a little longer. I don’t need to come in yet.” You’d take his wings the moment he landed and charge him with insurrection and endangering the fleet. But how easy it is for us to excuse irregular participation in the life of the church?

One more implication is a question – Why would a fighter jet want to take off sooner than necessary? But isn’t that what we do when we only give half the Lord’s Day to worship and rest and the remainder to our work or to our pleasure? Would we only fill half of the fuel tank in a fighter jet preparing for a mission? Would you only bandage half the of wound or only give a portion of the mission assignment to a pilot and still expect him to be successful? Why, then, do we check the box, having only attended morning worship, as though we’ve done enough? How much more would we be equipped for our weekly mission if we give the whole of the Lord’s Day to God’s glory and our spiritual nourishment!

It’s in worship that believers are repaired, refreshed, and refueled. It’s a joyful and diligent use of the Lord’s Day and the ministry of the local church which equips us for serving in our various and respective areas of kingdom work throughout the week. It’s worship, therefore, to which we ought to give our best energy and delight.

Creative License and the Sufficiency of Scripture

from January 13, 2023

 
Have you ever known anyone who couldn’t keep “watch” and “warning” straight?  They were never sure when to run to the closet or when to just be prepared.  “Watch,” to them, means something closer to “watch out, there’s a tornado coming” than “just keep an eye and ear to the news because conditions are favorable for tornados.”  
 
Well, I’d classify this as a watch and not a warning – be wary, but you don’t have to hide in the hall closet yet. 
 
Mel Gibson, Francine Rivers, and whoever is leading the way on The Chosen are among the many who have taken creative license when it comes to writing stories or movies about the backstories of events and people in the Bible. We understand creative license – it gives the writer freedom to imagine, to suppose possibilities, to fabricate where facts or reports are lacking.
 
And, I suppose, it gives us things to think about. This practice might even make the events and people seem more real to us because we get to consider, even if only for a moment, what might have been.

However, there are dangers to this creative license when it comes to adding to the Bible. For example, there’s a warning at the end of Revelation 22 not to add to or take away from the Bible. Oh, I realize that Mel Gibson doesn’t think of himself as adding to the Bible. In fact, I’m guessing he’d vehemently deny such a charge. But if our engaging with these works causes us to reimagine the people or events according to the creative license taken by these authors, then we might be in danger of adding to Scripture.
 
There are, of course, at least with Gibson’s movie and The Chosen, second commandment issues at stake, but that’s another article for another day.
 
Perhaps better, let me remind you of a favorite verse – Deuteronomy 29:29. What comfort to know that the secret things belong to the Lord! But the “secret things” are the very curiosities we seek to satisfy by reading modern works that take creative liberties to invent a background that may or may not be true but that certainly God has, in his perfect infinite wisdom, chosen not to reveal to us. In other words, if we let Francine Rivers inform our understanding of Hosea (which, by the way, she misses by a mile), then we are suggesting that what God revealed (see the rest of Deuteronomy 29:29) is somehow inadequate or insufficient.
 
Or, as in the case of Redeeming Love, the focus is on an aspect of the story that is merely an aspect of a larger story and not the focus of Hosea. Rivers has Michael Hosea setting his desires on Angel before even knowing who she is. That’s not at all how the prophet Hosea operated. And the two only diverge more from there. 
 
I think this is what I dislike about these works – they lead us to believe that what God actually told us wasn’t sufficient, that we need more, that it would be better for us if we made up a backstory or filled in the gaps with possibilities. The creative license required to make the books and movies interesting simultaneously puts us in danger of diminishing what God has chosen to reveal.
 
We have to make sure that Scripture drives our understanding of and confidence in these modern works and not the other way around. They should not be determining our view of the Bible. God’s revelation is sufficient for our salvation, for our spiritual growth, for equipping us for service in His Kingdom and nothing that shows up on the New York Times bestseller list or that Hollywood can produce can add to what the Creator of heaven and earth has said in His Word.
 
The next time you want to read a fiction work that purports to be about the Bible or to illustrate events from Scripture, be on your guard and watch how these works influence your understanding of God’s revelation.

Considering Creeds and Confessions...

As you might imagine, many of our Christian creeds and Confessions of Faith grow out of conflict and debate in the church. When teaching in the church began to split into camps, as it were, councils were called for the purpose of resolving the source of the divergent teaching. We even have an example in Acts 15 when a council met in Jerusalem to determine, from Scripture, whether or not Gentiles needed to be circumcised in order to become Christians. 

There are more Councils called throughout the ages for a similar purpose. Councils met, for example, in Nicaea (325 AD), Constantinople (351 AD), and Chalcedon (451 AD), and more. They each served a particular purpose. The Council of Nicaea, for example, addressed the particular heresy of Arianism that taught that Jesus was not fully divine. It didn’t produce a thorough doctrine of the person and work of Christ because it wasn’t supposed to, that wasn’t its purpose.

Something we might not consider but that makes perfect sense, there’s always a chance that a decision made at one Council, since it wasn’t designed to say everything possible, will lead to different confusing and erroneous teaching later.

The Council of Chalcedon was called for the purpose of addressing the question of how the humanity and deity of Jesus Christ are supposed to…work (for lack of a better word). On one side was the temptation to blur all lines between his humanity and his deity. On the other side, there were those who wanted to drive too large a wedge between the two natures of Christ, even to the point of contending that Jesus was basically two persons sharing one body. If you’re familiar enough with the Westminster Shorter Catechism (written nearly 1200 years after the Chalcedonian Creed), we affirm that Christ “the Son of God became man and so was and continues to be God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever” (WSC 21). Well, we can say that with confidence because the Council of Chalcedon formulated that kind of language back in the 5th century.

Since we’re about to launch into a new sermon series in the Gospel of John and will be considering John 1:1-18 this coming Lord’s Day, I really wanted to use the Chalcedonian Creed (click here to read it). What it teaches about the nature of Christ is incredibly thoughtful and thorough. However, it’s also wordy and a little too cumbersome for reciting corporately. Therefore, I’m giving it to you here to that you can take a look and learn and grow and then rest easy knowing that we will affirm our faith together this Sunday with the Nicene Creed instead.

How to Recognize a True Church

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it’s a…yep, a duck. Surely, you’ve heard that saying before, one typically used, I believe, to make an accusation stick. However, it goes beyond just that one use. On the surface, something that has all the qualities of a duck must be a duck, whether you’re trying to get an accusation to stick or just trying to figure out what something is.

What if you changed the word “duck” to “church”? How would you recognize what a church is? Or, to ask it another way, what makes a church a church? Is it the name on the sign out front? Is it a certain status with the IRS? What are the indicators that an organization is actually a true church and not simply a club?

Well, think about it this way. If the church is the body of Christ on earth, then how will the church be the body of Christ? What would it look like for Christ to be faithfully and accurately represented by the church? If we ask it that way, then we’re left with the three offices of Christ – prophet, priest, and king.

Just as Christ is our Prophet, so to the church, the local expression of the body of Christ, should be marked by faithful commitment to the preached Word of God (Acts 2:42). Just as Christ is our priest, then the local church, in order to be a church, must be committed to a proper administration of the sacraments (Matthew 28:18-20; 1 Corinthians 11:23 32). And, just as Christ is our king, so too the local church should be marked by the practice of church discipline (Matthew 18:15-20; Hebrews 13:17).

Preaching and sacraments we understand, more or less. However, lest you get the wrong impression, discipline isn’t merely punitive, but instructive also. Sure, church discipline can involve the elders having conversations with a church member about unbiblical views or practices, but technically anytime the edicts of the king are handed out, we are exercising discipline. In that sense, then, discipline takes place in Sunday school and worship and Bible study. When the King speaks, his subjects are being trained for obedience, which is positive and preemptive discipline.

So, if it preaches like a church and biblically observes the sacraments like a church and disciplines like a church, then it’s a church.

If ever you’re looking for a church, make sure you’re looking for a church.