A Much Better “Activism” for Christians in America
The great need of the hour is collective humility and repentance for our sins, for our selfishness, for our idolatries, and our attempts to make our home in this world in denial of our heavenly citizenship.
One of the most important things Christians should talk about right now is repentance. With the plethora of problems we are facing at the moment, the fact is that, almost universally, among Christians, there lacks a deep humbling of ourselves before the Lord in true repentance.
It really is the height of arrogance for us to avoid the question of why nothing is going well. We are plagued by wars and rumors of wars, economic fall-out, corrupt leadership, and a lingering pestilence that has brought mass confusion as we watch the systematic destruction of a nation before our eyes. And the people seem to expect the government to save us as de facto God. Yet, we angrily respond in outrage to the newest hypocrisy of the day, lobbing “gotcha articles” for our side and the corresponding pot shots toward our enemies. But maybe we’re missing the real issue, the most important of issues.
Fire From the Throne
The reason things are not going well and why it feels like everything is going to hell in a hand basket is because temporary judgments are being issued from the throne room of heaven. You cannot have this kind of chaos, disorder, abuse, sickness, and confusion part from what David called the heavy hand of the Lord. But Christians, by and large, seem afraid to talk about God’s temporary judgments. For clarity, I’m not talking about the Pat Robertson kind of stuff, namely, that God is judging because of some specific group of sinners. Jesus corrected that thinking in Luke 13. Let’s move on from that to a right understanding of dark providence.
We sing from the psalms that Christ “judges the nations” and executes justice on oppressors, as the wrath of God is revealed from heaven in the present (Rom. 1:18ff). We are told from the book of Revelation (a book meant to encourage the church in times of great persecution and satanic assault by the corrupt, beastly governments of this world), that God, in answering our cries and prayers, throws fire back down on the earth. That this fire comes in the forms of the “earth burning up” or the “sea becoming blood” or the “water becoming bitter” is meant to be understood as God answering the cries of his elect (see. Rev. 8).
Why then are Christians falling apart in shock over the things that are happening on the earth? The governmental grabs for power, the ungodly responses, and the many oppressions in the earth by the wicked, are desperate attempts to “save Babylon” from heaven’s divine blows. Yet, we act like we can stop this and “save America.” We sit in front of our computers and yell angrily at the wicked for taking our “freedoms and rights” as if our purpose is to bring calm to the storm in America through activism, on social media. Does anyone stop and think for a minute that what we are facing are symptoms of the world’s panicked response due to divine judgments from the throne? God hears the cries of his people; when we pray, he repays, this is what deliverance from Egypt by plague should have taught us.
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He Really was Little, Weak, and Helpless
His divine nature still had all the divine attributes of God that he had before the incarnation. But in his humanity, the expression of those attributes was limited. In his humanity, Jesus took on all that means to be a human. That includes being little, weak and helpless.
Christmas continues to provide a rich source of blog material at the minute. A couple of days ago, I gave my yearly reminder that what you do at Christmas is not a measure of your spiritual temperature. Off the back of that, yesterday, I wrote about how we can go a bit gnostic at Christmas and how that often affects all sorts of aspects of our lives as believers. Today, I thought I would stick with the ancient heresy theme.
If ever there was a time that heresy slips under the radar in our churches, I think Christmas is it. We either stick it in our carols, or we pick up on lines in carols and then import heresy ourselves by ‘correcting’ what is already perfectly credible, or we just end up preaching it straight up. After all, the trinity and the incarnation are tricky business, are they not? One mere slip of the tongue and we’re in trouble. When the difference between orthodoxy and rank heresy boils down to one letter in a foreign language (ὁμοούσιος, homoousios or ὁμοιούσιος, homoiousios) I can understand how people end up in shtook.
I am reminded of the year that we sang the carol, Once in Royal David’s City. The following lines caught the attention of the person leading the meeting:
For He is our childhood’s pattern,Day by day like us He grew,He was little, weak, and helpless,Tears and smiles like us He knew,And He feeleth for our sadness,And He shareth in our gladness.
Those lines met with the incredulous comment: ‘I take real issue with this. Jesus was NEVER little, weak and helpless. He was the eternal Son of God!’
Except, of course, whilst he was the eternal Son of God incarnate, the eternal Son of God had indeed submitted to all that it meant to be a little human baby, including being little, weak and helpless. Unless we believe that Jesus – much like our Muslim friends – was chatting in full sentences from birth, what else are we supposed to think?
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The Order of Salvation: Sanctification (Definitive)
Definitive sanctification encourages progressive sanctification. As the Apostle goes on to write, “So then brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.” (Rom. 8:12) Through our union with Christ, we are empowered to live by the Spirit. Definitive sanctification does not take away our responsibility to pursue holiness, but it grounds it in a settled reality.
Nothing but the sight of death impresses on us so viscerally a sense of finality. As Christians, we are comforted by faith in the resurrection and the life to come, but death nevertheless strikes our limited and sin-affected minds with definitiveness. Do we think of our being made holy in Christ as just as definitive? When we continue to struggle with sin and unbelief, how can we think that our new life in Christ is real, definitive, decisive, and final? And yet it is the image of death that the Apostle Paul invokes in Romans 6 to describe our being made holy, separated from the power of sin. “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Romans 6:2).
The Scriptural words for “holy” mean separate, set apart. God is holy because he is removed from all creaturely vulnerability. He is holy too because he is separate from all imperfection and sin. We are made holy when we are called and set apart for God’s purposes, and when we are decisively changed through union with Christ. Sanctity is another word for holiness. Sanctification is the process of being made holy. And while it is a process, and so we speak often about “progressive sanctification,” Scripture also teaches what John Murray called in his seminal article by the same name, “definitive sanctification”. There is, as professor Murray states it, a “decisive breach” with sin through our dying with Christ and rising again in him.[1]
Another way this is described in Scripture is as a cleansing, or purification. Because sin is defilement, sanctification is washing. And while we go on confessing our sins and being cleansed (1 Jn. 1:9), there is also a sense in which we have already been washed and have already been sanctified.
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Lemuel Haynes: The Most Important American Figure That You’ve Never Heard Of
Written by Jared C. Wilson |
Wednesday, March 1, 2023
In many ways, Haynes could be considered a kind of American Spurgeon—a faithful preacher and pastor, beloved for decades by his church and his family, and concerned to see the implications of the gospel fleshed out in homes and in society.An Unquestionable Legacy
Lemuel Haynes is perhaps the single most important American figure most Christians have never heard of. Born July 18th in 1753 to a Black man and a White woman, Haynes was abandoned by his parents in the home of a family friend who sold the infant Haynes into indentured servitude. By the providential hand of God, however, young Lemuel was placed into a Christian home, where by all accounts, including his own, he was treated as a member of the family and raised to love the things of God.1
Growing up in colonial Vermont, Haynes worked hard and studied hard, proving himself quite adept at intellectual pursuits despite being largely self-taught. He has affectionately been called a “disciple of the chimney-corner” as that is where he would spend most evenings after work reading and memorizing while other children were out playing or engaging in other diversions.
Haynes’s commitment to theology began in that chimney-corner, and eventually he was born again. Not long after his conversion, he turned his followership of Christ and his intellectual bent into a serious endeavor by writing and preaching. An oft-told anecdote about Haynes concerns a scene of family devotions at the Rose household where he was indentured. Given his adeptness at reading and his deep concern for spiritual matters, the Rose family would often ask Haynes to read a portion of Scripture or a published sermon. One night, Haynes read a homily of his own without credit (apparently the sermon on John 3:3 included in this volume). At the end, members of the family remarked at its quality and wondered, “Was that a Whitefield?” “No,” Haynes is said to have replied, “it was a Haynes.”
The few sermons we have of Lemuel Haynes prove him to be an exceptional expositor in the Puritan tradition, similar to Edwards or Whitefield though simpler than the former and more substantive than the latter. And yet, what Haynes may have lacked in eloquence compared to his contemporaries, he more than made up for in biblicism and applicational insight.
Officially licensed to preach in 1780 by the Congregational Association, Haynes soon after preached his first public sermon (on Psalm 96). He was then ordained in 1785 and would go on to receive an honorary Master of Arts degree from Middlebury College.Related Posts:
