Holiness

This is a sermon preached by my father over thirty years ago, a couple weeks before he died. It's short. Give it a listen:

Is Holiness Possible Today (With a Warning from Esau)

If this sermon jolted you awake, it's time to find a church where you and your loved ones will be blessed by God with a faithful pastor who exhorts, admonishes, and rebukes his sheep. Life is short and without holiness no man will see God.

You say you have a Reformed pastor who's never told you that?

Run for your life.

* * *

The painting is Hogarth's "The Sleeping Congregation."

By the grace of God, we now move into 2017 and here's a copy of Jonathan Edwards' resolutions to help us pursue the holiness without which no man will see God. This particular list I typed and printed for my congregation some years ago—before Baylyblog. Now I can publish it here.

Edwards adopted these resolutions at various times prior to his twentieth birthday. Numbers one through thirty-four were all made prior to December 18, 1722, when Edwards was nineteen years of age. Numbers one through twenty-one were written at one sitting and numbers twenty-two through thirty-two at another.

Notice at the outset that Edwards recognizes...

Jeremiah 29:7 is used as a theme verse by many missional churches:

 Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.

Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan is one--perhaps the first--of many churches to make Jeremiah 29:7 a rallying cry for Christian engagement with metropolitan culture. 

A 2003 sermon by Tim Keller on Jeremiah 29:4-14 finds this description in Redeemer's sermon catalogue:

Recently, U.S. District Judge Richard Young struck down Indiana's lawful democratic ban on sodomitic marriage, joining a cabal of federal judges intent on defying God's Moral Law and violating their vows to submit to the Constitution of these United States. Vengeance belongs to God. Notwithstanding God's Ownership of vengeance, though, the citizens of these United States are our Constitution's stewards and defenders. In fact, we may properly say that the authority of the Constitution is every citizen's authority and thus the defense of the Constitution and the duty to discipline civil magistrates who rebel against it properly lies with every citizen of these United States.

Whether it's caused by lethargy or the stupefaction of R2K casuistry, Christian citizens who abdicate our duties to be our Constitution's guardians deserve the wickedness which has already corrupted our children and will corrupt our grandchildren even more. God made us stewards of the authority exercised by our civil magistrates and...

Listening to the talking heads doing a postmortem on Brazil's epic loss to Germany last night, I was fascinated to hear former soccer heroes lampooning Brazil's "passion." They kept saying things like, "it takes more than passion to win a football game" and "Brazil's emotions came up short against Germany's discipline."

For years I've been embarrassed for all the Christian men who take every conceivable opportunity to announce to the world what they're passionate about. I'm waiting for one of them to tell me he's passionate in bed with his wife, but of course that is what is never said. Instead these men simper and coo about their great passion...

After posting on Tim Keller and Redeemer, it seemed good also to post this excerpt from J. Gresham Machen's classic critique of early twentieth century liberalism, Christianity and Liberalism. If you have not read it, you simply must. This past Tuesday in our noon meeting with our church pastors and the students in our Clearnote Pastors College, I read the following excerpt out loud, making the point that this description of the liberalism of the early twentieth century is a very good placeholder for the culture of liberalism within PCA and other Reformed churches today. I say "culture" because the vocabulary of presentation has changed, but the substance is the same. There is no preaching of repentance in the PCA. Only grace everywhere and always. But grace without repentance is no grace at all. Instead, we preach to good people who just need to be a little less...

An Escondido seminary teacher who works alongside Michael Horton starts a 6,200 word blog post with this question: 

There is concern by some in the Reformed community that there is too much emphasis on grace, in the doctrine of sanctification, and not enough emphasis on obedience and even godly fear. The question has arisen how this matter should be addressed.

"The question has arisen how this matter should be addressed" might lead the reader to conclude the author of the post believes these concerns are valid and he shares them. But sadly not. Plowing through the Escondido man's endless words, the readers is led to see the fear of God as a very dangerous thing promoted by those who deny the Reformed doctrine of sola fide—that man is justified by faith alone. In other words, if a Christian starts talking about the fear of God or Christian obedience, watch out! "Holiness" people and Tridentine Roman Catholics are lurking just around the corner.

Now truthfully, in the Reformed church today it should be universally acknowledged that the grace mantra never stops suppressing obedience and the fear of God...

Several friends have made their home within St. Ebbes (Anglican) Church while doing grad work or on sabbatical at the local university. St. Ebbes' pastor (rector), Vaughan Roberts, is a single man who has written a book on seven temptations Christians face. Not ashamed to confess his need for God's grace, Pastor Roberts acknowledges he faces each of the seven temptations himself. One of those temptations is same-sex attraction.

Given the endless drum-banging by homosexualists demanding the normalization of sodomy, Vaughan Roberts' description of the work of sanctification in this area of his life is a spring of clear water.

For years, now, ministers of the Word and Sacrament in Christian churches that identify themselves as Evangelical, Reformed, or Bible-believing have been adopting a posture that allows them to hold on to their jobs while avoiding this breach in the wall. With blood flowing, we're determined it won't be our blood, so we blather on about not hating the sin or the sinner; about the need to distinguish between those who identify as gay men or lesbians, and those who act out on their gay and lesbian desires; about the superiority of monogamy to promiscuity; we equivocate, trotting out the old canard that God loves everyone just the way they are—no exceptions; and then softly, to our closest friends, we allow that the church across the centuries really was quite unkind to gays, and a reappraisal of the ancient texts and the Church's approach to this particular part of the diverse human community is long overdue.

Other pastors don't bother with such talking points: in the face of the teaching of Balaam everywhere around us, we're simply silent. We're prophets of God with nothing to say about the very thing the entire world is in an orgy of conversation and litigation over. One former member of the pastoral staff of a well-known Reformed church in New York City recounted how the church's senior leadership lived in terror of the New York Times coming out against their congregation because of Scripture's condemnation of homosexuality. Reflecting that terror, any inter-staff communication related to the subject was stamped in red ink, "CONFIDENTIAL."

Speaking tongue in cheek, we all understand this is precisely what's needed for the Reformed church to get a foothold there in New York City, isn't it? The Apostle Paul had to go easy on the "ignorance" of the Athenians...

The fear of the Lord, John Murray explains, has two aspects. Terror and dread of God's holiness is the first aspect. Veneration and honor of God's majesty is the second. We moderns are happy to go along with Murray on the second aspect, but, to our detriment, we have tried to jettison the first. Murray writes,