Social Justice and the Gospel

Last Sunday we looked at what the role of the Christian was in light of the social needs of the time. What does it mean to be a follower of Christ? What is the role of the believer in social justice?

Spectrum

Let me just save us a lot of time and say that we looked at two extremes in the beginning - the inward salvation only Christian, and the social gospel Christian. Neither of which are right.

The inward salvation only Christian desires only for the spiritual needs of someone to be met. They do not consider physical needs worth caring for since we are all in fallen flesh, and seek to only spread the good news of Jesus. While there is truth in that model, it goes against the teaching of Scripture to see someone in need and do nothing about their physical need, while at the same time trying to give them the gospel (see James).

The social gospel Christian seeks to let the world know they are loved by serving them, and in all of our hearts this person is far more endeared. It is easier to love this martyr of human cause, who has given up so much to serve in such need, because it is so admirable. However, the social gospel begins to exist when only someone's physical need is met, and no teaching of their sin and need for a Savior is discussed. At heart, someone like this wants people to love them, not God.

Scripture

We see that the truth of Scripture is that Jesus spent his entire ministry doing two things more than anything else: meeting physical needs, and meeting spiritual needs. He healed the sick, but He had no delusion that their only great need was physical healing. He also shared the gospel, but He didn't do that coldly to the masses without touching the lepers and giving sight to the blind.

We have to be honest with ourselves in that mankind's greatest need is the gospel. It isn't to bring them into social peace with all cultures, it isn't to end disease, it isn't to bring about equality. Those are all temporal things this side of eternity. BUT, we do those things because we love mankind, and we want their circumstances to be raised so that when their physical hunger has died away, their spiritual hunger can now be dealt with.

We see this in the story of the Prodigal Son. This does not end with the son being given some bread and a clean room to sleep in, after he was longing over the pig slop, though that is how many today would want to fulfill his need. His greatest need was to be reconciled to His Father, which we have to see as people's greatest need.

Jesus talked again and again about meeting physical needs - The story of the Good Samaritan, the Parable of the King (where we see "whatever you have done for the least of these..."), the feeding of the 4,000 and 5,000. We see lepers, blind, deaf, lame, dumb, mute, demon possessed, self righteous, poor, rich, etc, etc. get their needs met by Jesus in the midst of the gospel message.

So then...

How does this apply? Some of you are at certain ends of this, others at the opposite side. Let's list some things to avoid:

Social Justice as a sexy issue to slam the church:
This is growing incredibly popular. The reason that there are _____________ is because the church is having potluck dinners instead of ________________ . Be careful with this. In every church you can find things that happen that don't seem vital to the kingdom, but in the end are part of community time together, and serve a legitimate purpose (we see the book of Acts mentioning meals and just relaxed time together). I bet you relax at some point too. Be careful about trying to place blame on someone other than yourself. If God has given you a burden, move patiently through the means of a spiritual community, and find ways to serve there. But just because you are passionate about this one area this week doesn't make everyone apostate for not being on your wavelength.

Being arrogant about the church's role:
Believe it or not, the church wasn't put in place to solve the problems of the world. Christ is going to return to solve the problems of the world. So let's not place ourselves on the throne of all powerful in the world, that is God's role. That being said, it is the role of the church to labor tirelessly to meet physical and spiritual needs in its members and in the community, country, and world.

At Winter Conference, while being asked about the Haiti earthquake, one of the panelists said that the church in America should accept blame for the buildings in Haiti not being what they should be. It reminded me of what Josephus, an early Jewish historian, wrote about the Tower of Babel in Genesis. That men were so wicked they wanted to build a tower high enough to survive a flood as if to trump God's ability to get them. I am not saying that it was God's role to get Haiti in the least, but I am saying it is foolish for the church to be so arrogant as to think that in all the nations of the world we are going to take care of all things so that nothing bad can happen to anyone. That is the arrogance and guilt game, not love.

Let's Not Reduce this to politics:
Okay, let's not confuse these issues for being liberal or conservative. It is neither one of those, it is either loving and Christ following, or self seeking and idolatrous. Those of you who are liberal/moderate reading this will have to struggle with feeling like the conservatives are heartless because of some presupposition that they are money-guzzling, self-righteous racists based on the fringes of your party portraying them that way. Those of you who are conservative reading this will have to struggle with feeling like the liberal believers are freeloading, baby-killing, socialists based on the fringes of your party portraying them that way.

Believers, not political parties, need to unite around the truth of Scripture on this issue, nothing else. There is much that could be said here, but I will stop here.

Not wanting to share the gospel, just wanting to "love" people.
That's not love. We need to hear that. I am constantly praying that God will again and again scream that into my heart. We long to go through life making people think good about who we are, and maybe even have them think nice things about God, but as Paul says "how will they call on Him whom they have not believed? How are they to believe in Him they have not heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching to (telling) them?" (Romans 10).

Conclusion:
That being said. I love how passionate many of you are about what God has placed in your heart. Use that to glorify Him, bring the church along patiently to assist you in that work, and humbly seek to grow in the knowledge of God in righteousness. Don't use these grand ideas and huge tasks to replace your need to grow in love of Christ, and as a student of His word.

People need their needs met: physical and spiritual. We need to use what God has given us to make sure we are laboring to do what we can in both of these areas.

Final Church History Lectures

I have included these powerpoints that we went through, but if anyone wants an even fuller source of information on a particular time period check out the lectures on www.firstbaptistwelcome.org/collegeresources.html.

PowerPoint 2

PowerPoint 3

PowerPoint 4

Church History Session 1

Church History 1

Just to save time, I am posting the PowerPoint and taking questions. So, if you were not here, and want to know some more specific information then email me a question, otherwise hopefully this can be a resource for you.

Powerpoint

Also, this is the deleted scene from Gladiator that I referenced on Sunday, with a group of Christians being fed to lions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6z38LmxW4g

Church History stuff

Alright, so I am going to try to do a better job at initiating this 4 week study on Church History. I am going to take a mulligan for Sunday, and do some better resource usage for you guys. Pictures and what not.

So beginning this week, we are going to begin again on a four week look at the history of Christianity. I promise that it will be interesting, cause I know many of you aren't history people. Hope you guys can make it, if not I will try to blog with the resources that I have.

Below is the link for a resource page that I am starting on our college page. For now I am including an even larger and better list of MP3s on Church History done by a really great pastor named Tom Nelson in Texas. He is a nationally known speaker, and author (He once was the keynote speaker for Campus Crusade's Christmas Conference in Charlotte when I went over Y2K - yeah that's right, I said Y2K)

http://www.firstbaptistwelcome.org/collegeresources.html

I hope this will be a fruitful experience for all of us! Don't miss it if you get to be in :)...

Luke 2:39-40: Is there a problem?

(Taken from Sunday School on Dec 13th)

Luke 2:39 says the following:

And when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.

The question then becomes, is Luke saying that after Jesus is blessed by Simeon and Anna that they went to Nazareth and that was it? Is he saying that there was no fleeing to Egypt, no wisemen, no confrontation with Herod?

There needs to be some considerations before we begin this discussion.

1. If my memory serves me correctly, a typical scroll of this time period was about 40 feet long. The characters were fairly large, so that 40 feet isn't quite as large as it would seem to us. We are used to Word Documents that are endless, but all writers of the time period knew that there was a time when their space ran out. So Luke and Matthew had only a limited amount of space to write about Jesus' entire life. That is why there is a 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, etc. They could not fit on one scroll. The Psalms were not kept together on one scroll, but a collection of them, others in similar fashion.

2. A comparison of the birth stories in Matthew and Luke show the following: (click the picture for a readable size).


It is interesting that Luke and Matthew do not mirror one another's telling of the story of Jesus' birth, though their gospels mirror one another a lot. The gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke are often called the "Synoptic Gospels" because of the stories that are contained within each one of them.

It is hard then to make the case for either one of them being a rogue gospel, since there are so many similarities between them. Matthew and Luke were written, as each of the gospels were, to be "stand alone" gospels. They needed no other gospel to communicate the message of Jesus to people.

HOWEVER, it seems likely that Luke knew of Matthew's gospel, and the perspective that is told of Jesus' birth in it. The birth narrative is very important, but it is Jesus' adult ministry that really teaches and shows and clarifies who He is, why He came, and what that means and calls mankind to do.

3. So, the assumption can be made, and it is an assumption, that at least Luke perhaps knew of the narrative in Matthew, and that is why on the birth narrative he told the other perspective of what happens (from Mary's perspective). Matthew's birth narrative is almost entirely Joseph, Mary is a supporting character. The opposite is true in Luke, even the genealogy in Luke 3 is Mary's (as Luke notes that Joseph was only "thought" to be Jesus' father, then the next male back that Jesus was descended from was Heli (Mary's father), so he is listed next - compare the genealogy in Matthew 1 and you will see that Joseph's father is listed there, and it is not Heli. Matthew is examining Joseph's line as an affirmation of Joseph's role in Jesus' life, but not claiming true fatherhood in a DNA sense).

So, then...

The question becomes, what does Luke mean when he gives verse 39. At first glance it seems to indicate that when Jesus was 8 days old and had fulfilled the law of the Lord at the temple, everyone went home and hung out until Jesus was 12.

I don't think that this is a contradiction, I simply think that Luke doesn't deal with the other things because he has limited space, and Matthew has dealt with it already. In Eusebius' History of the Church (dated about 312 AD) it is mentioned that when John wrote his gospel, he did so wanting to tell the story of things that were not mentioned in the other gospels that he had read, and had access to. John ends his gospel by saying "and Jesus did many more things as well, I suppose that if they were all written down that the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written" (John 21:25).

And so we have to recognize, in our world that demands to have the loose ends tied together, that we do not know for sure the order that things happened even with all of the Scripture written about Jesus' birth and early life being correct and systematic (connecting and complimentary).

- Jesus could have been circumcised, headed back to Galilee with them, and for unforeseen circumstances that we aren't told about, they moved back to Bethlehem so that the wisemen would find them so close to Jerusalem, and prophecy could be fulfilled, and then the flight to Egypt would occur.

- As Luke refers to the "Law of the Lord" in verse 39 he could be referring to the fulfillment of the prophecies in the Old Testament that were fulfilled by the flight to Egypt and return along with the circumcision at the temple, though he does not mention them.

- a lot of other possibilities are there as well. But I hope that this helps you as you look at these Scriptures to take a bigger approach then simply thinking, "well I guess that doesn't fit, one of these is wrong." While the Bible is accurate historically, its goal is not simply connecting details for us, it is the story and message of Christ, that was given in a time when 600 page histories were not written by just anyone. Can you imagine trying to be people of faith if the life of Christ was given in a 12 volume encyclopedia set? We'll know all the details one day, but for now "only as in a mirror dimly" (I Cor 13:12).

Atheism and Agnosticism

Sunday we looked at two topics not completely removed from one another, both in essence are the same thing, with the same goals in the end. I would love any comments or additions to this in the comments section below, if anyone wants to add anything. Let's unload what we looked at.

First, the two positions:

Atheism - fairly straight-up, men like Dawkins, whose book is pictured, who would claim that there is no God, god, or gods, or any beings supernatural. Any need for intelligent design in creation could have been performed by alien beings long ago, or ooze on the back of crystals (see Xpelled with Ben Stein). Therefore morality is a human invention, which is necessary, but ultimately there is no sort of judgment or anything else where people are held accountable for what they have done (obviously).

Agnosticism - this can mean different things to different people who call themselves this, but in the end it goes something like this: there may be a god(s), probably not the Biblical God, but perhaps a greater design or being somewhere. However, he hasn't revealed himself to us, so we shouldn't worry too much about him. Morality, judgment, heaven, and hell, probably don't exist, but if they do, I'm sure everyone as good as me or better will get in to heaven. All faiths then are mostly human by invention, but none can be put above another. I need not concern myself with my soul, in a real sense, because who can know what to do for sure.

Now let's get a little broader perspective:

Agnosticism finds its roots in Enlightenment Deism. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and some other early intellectual American colonists were part of this belief system, and it is about 3 inches different than agnosticism. The Classic Deist would say that YHWH (Yahweh) created the world and set it spinning and that was it. It is impossible to know Him, and He doesn't want to really know you. Jesus was a great man, he wasn't God, he wasn't a Savior.

Jefferson formed his own Bible by going through and cutting out all the things that he didn't agree with (not kidding). Mostly all the things that dealt with prophecy, Jesus' divinity, miracles and other supernatural thinking, God's communication with mankind, and anything that just didn't seem to work. You can imagine how small the Bible was that he was left with!

Deism was actually the fruit of slavery in one sense, I know that seems ridiculous, but it really was. These rich white men who should have had to earn a living instead spent much of their youth and young adult lives on their own pursuits, making money off of slave labor. (If you look at a cross section of colonial deism, it was almost completely made up of wealthy and/or intellectual white people). They poured themselves into John Locke, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and others. All of the sudden they FELT more intelligent than anyone around them, and because they FELT that way, they now became the authority on ultimate truth in their own minds, because of their pride.

Sunday we read Romans 1 as we looked at these topics; read it and see what Paul says as he talked about people who "exchanged the truth of God for a lie" and "their thinking became futility." That no men get to atheism naturally, instead they shut God out of their minds and hearts. They exchange His authority, for their own authority.

Where do these belief systems come from?

There is one thing that makes it possible to move from a Deist to an atheist - Darwinist evolutionary theory in its classical sense. (To clarify, there are those who hold to certain elements of evolutionary theory, but still see a Creator in the midst of the process, that is not what I am talking about).

The reason a Deist couldn't be an atheist, even though he practically was by the way he lived, was that Creation had to have a Creator. Darwin was the first person to lay out a theory that everyone bought where there was no longer a Creator necessary. In that sense, a true atheist has only existed for that last 150 years or so. Before that point, even if someone was a practical atheist, (they didn't live like there was a god, or they didn't trouble themselves with the specifics) they had to acknowledge that someone or something created the cosmos. The need was not there anymore with Darwinian theory.

Okay, enough of the theories, what does this mean to me?

Most of the time, the agnostic/atheist person came to their belief system in one of these ways:

-They have no TRUE knowledge of Christianity (i.e. the Gospel). Everything they know about Christianity has to do with morality (hypocrisy in their mind), perceived ignorance (think how Christians are shown in media outlets), political stances (Evangelical Christianity as Highly Conservative, or Liberal Denominations as Socially Driven), and the list could go on and on. They have never heard the gospel in its true sense, but they have prepared arguments over a lot of things.

- They were burned by someone or something tied to the church. This can be legitimate or illegitimate, but it doesn't matter to them. They cast Jesus off completely, because of what Brother Bill did to them.

- They view Christianity as primitive and themselves as enlightened. This is especially seen in these forms: My parents and their beliefs are stupid, I am smart. My hometown is small and ignorant, My college/new life is part of the enlightened bigger picture. I was sheltered as a child, so I must have been fed propaganda, now I am being exposed to all sorts of truth, and so this must be more legitimate, or at least since there is so much truth, there can't just be one truth. NOTICE: in none of these scenarios has the gospel been dealt with, only their situations. BUT, this is the most common thing that I have dealt with in people of the Atheist/Agnostic framework.

- They are in love with themselves and their own thinking. They literally would rather stay in the sinking lifeboat cause they built it, and they have much confidence in themselves as the ultimate authority.

When I talk to someone who is an atheist or an agnostic, there are several things that I try to remember:

There is a time for intellectual debate, especially when someone wants to just view you as an ignorant putz who has never dealt with tough questions, or gotten outside their hometown. However, debate will only get you so far, and in the end will only hurt your cause with many atheist/agnostic folks.

The gospel is the power of God unto salvation. When I talk to someone who is an atheist I take a little bit of time dealing with logic, science, historiography, or whatever, and try to keep prying them with conscience questions, and questions about their own position before God. If you haven't gotten a chance to listen to Judson's story yet, do it; it's in the previous blog. He was a deist, who came to faith listening to a dying man. The words that kept ringing in his head were "death, hell, death, hell."

I truly believe that God will use those words to haunt an atheist/agnostic if the gospel is presented to them in love and truth, in a way that they know it's God or nothing. At some point, somewhere, they are going to have to shut those words out of their mind as best they can, or deal with them before God. It's probably going to happen when they are alone, in thought, before God in the dark, not in an intellectual debate.

I try to present my beliefs as much as I can in asking questions (when it fits). The person who asks the questions controls the conversation. In my conversations with atheists/agnostics this fall, I have tried to simply deal with "what happens when you die?" type questions. Not because I am trying to scare them, but because they need to realize that their thinking is not a game, and this is serious.

I want them to unload their thinking and they themselves hear how it sounds out loud, (sometimes that makes a huge difference in them) and then answer the question that they will never have to stand before an ultimate authority and be judged based on His standards. I also want them to take full responsibility that it is their own thinking they are placing trust in. If it is someone I know, if I can do this the first time, the conversation is done, and I let it stew for a while before bringing it back up again. God deals with their heart, not me or you.

So I hope this has been helpful, I would love any thoughts you guys might have! God bless you all!

Missionary Story: Adoniram Judson

Missionary Story:

The first American missionaries were Adoniram and Ann (Nancy) Judson. They were missionaries to Burma, and went through unimaginable pain and loss for the sake of spreading the message of Jesus.

I was able to give their story last Sunday night, and below is the audio from that night. This is not a sermon, it is simply their story, and it is worth listening to. If you are interested at all in missions or just hearing stories of great believers, don't miss this. I encourage you to drop this on your IPOD or whatever, and listen to it when you have 45 minutes or so. Just click below, you are welcome to redistribute this as much as you like.

Adoniram Judson's Story

I also gave the following list of Missionaries, whose biographies are worth reading. I realize that this is nowhere near a complete list.

Ø Adoniram Judson – Burma

Ø Lottie Moon – China

Ø David Livingstone – Africa

Ø Eric Liddell – Olympic Gold Medalist, Missionary to China

Ø Hudson Taylor – China

Ø William Carey – India

Ø Nate Saint/Jim Elliot – South America