Based on Psalm 92

Sweet is the work, my God, my King,

To praise Thy Name, give thanks and sing;

To show Thy love by morning light,

And talk of all Thy truth at night.

Sweet is the day of sacred rest,

No mortal cares disturb my breast;

O may my heart in tune be found,

Like David’s harp of solemn sound!

My heart shall triumph in the Lord,

And bless His works and bless His Word;

Thy works of grace, how bright they shine,

How deep Thy counsels, how divine!

And I shall share a glorious part

When grace has well refined my heart;

And fresh supplies of joy are shed,

Like holy oil, to cheer my heard.

Sin, my worst enemy before,

Shall vex my eyes and ears no more;

My inward foes shall all be slain,

Nor Satan break my peace again.

Then shall I see, and hear, and know

All I desired or wished below;

And every power find sweet employ

In that eternal world of joy.

            –Isaac Watts, 1674–1748

Many years ago, on October 31 something took place that changed the course of my life. I am not talking about Martin Luther’s seemingly innocuous act in 1517 of nailing 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg. In ways that he could never have anticipated that act did come to symbolize the beginning of a movement that rocked the world as the Protestant Reformation recovered the full and final authority of God’s written Word and its message of salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone for the glory of God alone. Luther, along with those who stood with him and followed him in proclaiming this gospel message, most definitely have impacted my life. The Reformation has impacted all Western civilization.

But I am reminded of October 31, 1978. On that Tuesday night I accepted a call to become the pastor of the Rock Prairie Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. Two days before that, the church let me know that they wanted me to become their pastor. That phone call was unexpected. The previous pastor had moved and I had preached for the congregation several times in the previous weeks. Though I had enjoyed worshiping with them and getting to know some of the members more personally, I had no thought that they would consider asking me to become their pastor.

I was not a great candidate. I was a single, twenty-one-year-old sociology major at a state university. I had taken a couple of seminary extension courses and preached intermittently over the previous five years. But by any reasonable metric I was ill-prepared to be a pastor. In fact, when the call came from the church, I was actively trying to avoid entering a life of pastoral ministry. The church in which the Lord saved me and that had nurtured me as a child and young person believed that God had called me to preach and had given me a license to do so (that was fifty years ago next month). But my antipathy for pastors caused me to shrink from the thought of pursuing vocational ministry.

Looking back, though I had many reasons for my lack of regard for pastors, the bottom line was that they were mainly rooted in pride and arrogance. I was a self-righteous prig when God saved me and much of that remained (and remains) unmortified in me. Because of that, as I embarked on my last year of college I was developing a plan that I hoped might satisfy God and ease my own conscience. Since pastors help people, I thought that if I entered a “helping profession” that would do the trick. 

Through a connection with some professors, early in my senior year I was offered a contract to work for an organization that provided care and counseling for troubled youth. The job was to begin upon my graduation the next semester. I let the contract sit on my desk for the month of October with a growing sense that this was a wonderful opportunity that would allow me to help young people, be active in the life of a church, and perhaps fill in preaching and teaching on occasion. 

Those plans were disrupted when the chairman of deacons told me that Rock Prairie wanted me to be their pastor. Donna (who was seven months away from becoming my fiancé) and I decided to go to the church’s “harvest festival” two days later on the 31st. The church provided this each year as an alternative to trick-or-treating for kids in the community. As we watched the members of that small church work together to serve children and parents the few remaining doubts I had about accepting their call vanished. I had harbored many doubts and fears and my list of reasons for saying no was long, but several trusted counselors urged me to give the call serious consideration. So, that night, October 31, 1978, I told the deacon chairman, Arthur Olden that I believed it was God’s will for me to accept their call and that I would start immediately. 

One relative, as we discussed my new role, pulled out a handheld calculator (which was a novelty at the time) and jokingly congratulated me for taking a job that paid $15 an hour (which was $12.35 more than minimum wage!) while requiring only three hours of preaching a week. In reality, that move cost the church much more than money and what they gave me cannot be measured in finances. The people of Rock Prairie Baptist Church loved me and patiently endured with my inexperience and ineptitude. They genuinely cared for me and, after we were married, for Donna and me. They were forgiving of my many mistakes. And they genuinely loved me. 

I only served that church for two years but doing so led me to pursue theological training that I would have otherwise eschewed. The discipline of preaching week after week was good for me. I still have notes from those sermons and though much of the understanding of God’s Word that they reflect now make me cringe, I would not trade anything for the lessons I learned in those early years of pastoral preaching. That church gave me a start. They were used by God to put me into pastoral ministry and on a path that continues today, 45 years later. 

I thank the Lord for His faithfulness through those years. I am grateful for the way that He providentially overruled my plans and changed my desires about being a pastor. To me it is the most wonderful calling in the world and I am still amazed at the privilege of being a servant of God’s people in a local church of Jesus Christ. All of it is a testimony to the steadfast love and immeasurable grace of our sovereign God. 

Soli Deo Gloria

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Duty is defined as “that which one is morally or legally bound to do.” That defines duty in an absolute sense. Another definition is “action or conduct required by one’s profession or position.” That might, often does, involve absolutes, but the particular actions required are relative to the skill, qualification, interpersonal relations, and professional office of a person. My duties to my children are different from my duties to the children of others but are not on that account less than absolute.

On occasion, public speakers, including preachers of the gospel, will belittle “duty” as if it is an inferior motivation for action or compliance to standards. Delight is seen as a superior motivation while duty is—Well, if I have to do it, OK—synonymous with begrudging action. One brings his wife flowers because it is his delight to do so, for he is delighted with her. If he gives her flowers presenting them to her out of a sense of duty, this is connoted as a lackluster action deserving scorn. But this tendency to diminish the excellence of a sense of duty is misguided. It is a moral error. The husband’s duty is to love his wife as his own body, for he who loves his wife loves himself (Ephesians 5:28; Genesis 2:22, 23). To treat one’s wife tenderly, to look to her desires and happiness, to bring her flowers, to live with her according to knowledge is to love her, to delight in her, and at the same time to do one’s duty.

The bifurcation between duty and delight is one of the sinister results of the fall. That one can feel duty to be a burden is one evidence of how the flesh lusts against the Spirit. In Galatians 5, Paul investigates the relationship of the law to love and the operations of the Spirit. Through love, we serve one another (13). By the flesh, we “bite and devout one another” (15). The whole law, that is, the whole duty of one person to another, is fulfilled in this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” So how does one overcome the antipathy of the flesh to the law of love? “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” (16). The Spirit, law, and love unite in giving expression to human duty. When one walks by the Spirit and bears the fruit that the Spirit produces (5:22, 23), he does nothing contrary to law but walks aligned with the law. God’s law constitutes the duty of man and at the same time is the perfect expression of love.

I will not seek to investigate vigorously the relation between benevolent love and complacent love but only this.  God loves sinners out of benevolent love as far as his knowledge of their sin and rebellion is concerned and their consequent worthiness of eternal wrath. There is nothing lovely in us that would give God pleasure in loving us.  He does nurture, however, a complacency in his unmerited favor toward sinners, for he does this to the praise of his glorious grace and the demonstration of the “depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God” (Ephesians 1:6; Romans 11:33). His benevolence toward us, therefore, finds it foundation in true complacence toward himself. On our part, both benevolent love and complacent love is due to God, first, foremost, and unstinted and then to all other things on his account. He has the most of being and is in fact the only thing that has being in and of himself, the only self-existent entity, and infinitely so, in all of reality—so benevolence is due him above all things. In addition, his being not only is large and indestructible but is beautiful, the sum of all goodness. Jonathan Edwards argues, “For as God is infinitely the greatest Being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent.” Real virtue then, the faithful expression of duty, “must necessarily have a supreme love to God both of benevolence and complacence” at its core. All is derived from him and is absolutely dependent on him and his “being and beauty are, as it were, the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence” [Works, BOT 1:125]. God’s comprehensive and infinite excellence, therefore, establishes the consuming duty of all intelligent creatures to love him in seamless devotion of all our parts.

Resistance to duty is resistance to moral perfection and resistance to love—both for God and man, neighbor and family. Nurturing selfishness and personal pleasure at the cost of loving service equals lawlessness rather than obedience, flesh-following rather than Spirit-walking, irregularity rather than duty. In the unfallen state of man, obedience to the law written on the heart was the supreme delight of Adam and Eve. To expand their vision of God’s attributes and to be more maturely conformed to his beautiful perfection was the goal that drove their obedience. This moral propensity was used perversely by Satan to entice them to disobedience—“His mercy is greater than his law and this act is the very path to be like him.” Such reasoning deceived Eve to take an independent path to these goals and brought about the fall. As uncorrupted image-bearers, however, their duty was their delight and the prospect of unwavering obedience their true happiness. Andrew Fuller stated in his confession of faith, “I believe if Adam or any holy being had had the making of a law for himself, he would have made just such an one as God’s law is; for it would be the greatest of hardships to a holy being not to be allowed to love God with all his heart.” In the unfallen state, they loved the duty that was theirs; the obligation that was perfectly commensurate with the righteousness set before them was no burden but their holy hope.

Presently, fallen creatures have no regard for God. Instead, they shut off from their contemplation the power and perfection that should be obvious from the witness of every created thing around them. Duty is reprehensible because the concept of divine beauty, power, and prerogative conflicts with the corrupt mind in its self-centered, rather than God-centered, goals. If any sinners are to be converted, each must come to grips with the distance between their affections and their duties. 

The new birth involves a reconciliation of affections with duties. The faith that adheres to justifying righteousness approves God’s righteous law, righteous judgment, righteous atonement, and righteous reconciliation. Saving faith admits that our duty toward such righteous expressions of divine goodness infinitely transcends and is radically other than our pursuit. Sanctification progresses in proportion to the affections’ realignment with intrinsic duties. Again, Andrew Fuller presses this truth into a confessional article: “I believe that such is the excellence of this way of salvation, that every one who hears or has opportunity to hear it proclaimed in the gospel is bound [italics mine] to repent of his sin, believe, approve, and embrace it with all his heart; to consider himself, as he really is, a vile lost sinner; to reject all pretensions to life in any other way; and to cast himself upon Christ, that he may be saved in this way of God’s devising. This I think to be true faith, which whoever have, I believe will certainly be saved.” One’s being “bound” to these responses mean that every stage and trait of justifying faith arises from duty. Reconciliation with God necessarily involves reconciliation of our highest desire with our highest duty.

When one grasps accurately the moral loveliness that requires the devotion of all moral beings, it is impossible to dismiss duty as an inferior motivation for action; rather one sees duty as a moral disposition, an aesthetic judgment, a true perception of fitness, a consent to perfect being, and a joyful submission to expressions of order, law, love, moral symmetry, infallible purpose, transcendent wisdom, and divine revelation. Duty permeates the entire calling of the minister of the gospel and the message that he preaches. Again, listen to the confession of Andrew Fuller:

I believe it is the duty of every minister of Christ plainly and faithfully to preach the gospel to all who will hear it; and as I believe the inability of men to spiritual things to be wholly of the moral, and therefore of the criminal kind, and that it is their duty to love the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in him for salvation though they do not; I therefore believe free and solemn addresses, invitations, calls, and warning to them to be not only consistent, but directly adapted, as means, in the hand of the Spirit of God, to bring them to Christ. I consider it as a part of my duty which I could not omit without being guilty of the blood of souls.

Why does Fuller say that it is the sinner’s “duty to love the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in him for salvation.” The first concerns the fullness of the law; before all things and with all the energy of the mind, the will, the understanding, and the affections the Lord Jesus, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwells, is to be loved. Having fallen short of that in Adam and in personal transgression, sinners need a path to righteousness and thus life. In Jesus that righteousness has been perfected and the merit of eternal life is found in him alone. A complete resting of the soul on his work (trust) as alone worthy unites the soul to him. He is the Lord, and, also, he has loved the Lord his Father with all his heart, mind, soul, and strength. He is the goal of the law and he is the perfect doer of the law. The duty, therefore, to love him absolutely and to trust him for salvation is based on the same moral excellence involved in both. 

Duty, in reality, as indicated above is prior to love. The focus of love is determined by the duty implied in the excellence of the object. The greater the excellence, the greater the duty; the greater the duty, the higher and more focused the love. The infinitely perfect being calls forth our devotion and admiration; the law of such a being establishes our duty. That all things exist by his will and serve his purpose gives us varying degrees of duty toward all that he made and sustains. “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created” (Revelation 4:11). Though varied in degree, all duty is absolute. We have a duty to our pets as well as our parents, but the latter is of a higher degree of duty that the former. How the glory of God is manifest in each thing and in each relationship determines the intensity of duty involved. Food and drink are good and are partaken with gratitude and to God’s glory and with a fully-approving conscience, but may be omitted for the sake of the conscience of a brother (1 Corinthians 10:29-33). Fundamental to love, therefore, is the level of duty that defines each relation.

Articles in this edition of The Founders Journal treat those areas of duty that are of the highest order. The first is from the opening chapter of John L. Dagg’s Manual of Theology and explores the duty to love God. On this duty hang the reality and peculiar relevance of all other duties. 

Another article by Paul Taylor deals with the duties of church membership. Christ has died for the church, has called and gifted every member and united all these members in one common goal to achieve the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” {Ephesians 4:13). There is a duty, therefore, that each part of  this body do its work which “causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:16). 

Another article, by Ryan Denton, concerns the ongoing witness of the church, corporately and individually, with a view to the conversion of sinners. This is to occur until the final elect one is called. Benjamin Keach stated that the “task and calling of the minister as an ambassador” is “to persuade sinners to receive and embrace the Lord Jesus.” The truths of Christ’s seeking and finding all of his people should stir up ministers “to do their utmost in order to the conversion of sinners.” They should not be weary, nor faint, nor be discouraged even when reproached by men and Satan for “God has appointed preaching as his great ordinance, for the … conversion of lost sinners.”[i]  And though the minister has no power either of virtue or persuasion to change a heart and bring a sinner home, but only Christ alone by his Spirit can do that, nevertheless,  ministers “are to do what they can, they are to invite them, press, them, entreat and persuade them to come.”[ii]  A faithful ministry “will do what the Lord commands them to do” with the confidence that “in God’s heart is room enough for millions of souls; and in God’s house there is not only bread enough, and to spare, but room enough also.”[iii]  A minister of Christ, in order “to accomplish his Ambassy, and to bring the King’s Enemies to accept of Peace,” must pray, entreat,  and “beseech Sinners to be reconciled to God.”  In fact, like the apostle who cried tears over the lost, “Faithful Ministers art willing to spend their Lives to win Souls to Christ, yea, to die upon the spot to save one poor Sinner.” Ryan Denton reminds us, in Keach-like fashion, that this duty cannot be transcended in demonstrating love to God and man.

Concluding this edition of the Founders Journal is a brief resume of the Nature of True Virtue by Jonathan Edwards. This work is perhaps the most profound discussion on duty—its true beauty and its intrinsic ethical absoluteness—in American evangelical literature. We pray that each of these articles and the impact of the whole will give unction for holiness and faithful service.

[i] Benjamin Keach, Parables., 368-370.

[ii] Keach., 546.

[iii] Keach, 546.