Written by R.C. Sproul |
Tuesday, September 24, 2024
Even within the Christian community, there are wide differences of opinion regarding which behaviors are pleasing to God and which aren’t. One man approves dancing; another disapproves of it. How do we know who is correct? We see in the New Testament that the conscience is not the final ethical authority for human conduct because the conscience is capable of change. Whereas God’s principles don’t change, our consciences vacillate and develop.

It is vitally important for Christians to consider the issue of conscience. In the classical view, the conscience thought to be something that God implanted within our minds. Some people even went so far as to describe the conscience as the voice of God within us. The idea was that God created us in such a way that there was a link between the sensitivities of the mind and the conscience with its built-in responsibility to God’s eternal laws. For example, consider the law of nature that the Apostle Paul says is written on our hearts. There was a sensitivity of conscience long before Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of stone.
The famous philosopher Immanuel Kant was agnostic with respect to man’s ability to reason from this world to the transcendence of God. Even so, he offered what he called a moral argument for the existence of God that was based on what he called a universal sense of oughtness implanted in the heart of every human being. Kant believed that everyone carried with them a genuine sense of what one ought to do in a given situation. He called this the categorical imperative. He believed there are two things that fill the soul with an ever-new and growing wonder and reverence: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This is important to note because even in the realm of secular philosophy, there has historically been an awareness of conscience.
Historically and classically, the conscience was seen to be our link to the transcendent ethic that resides in God. But with the moral revolution of our culture, a different approach to conscience has emerged, and this is what is called the relativistic view. This is indeed the age of relativism, where values and principles are considered to be mere expressions of the desires and interests of a given group of people at a given time in history. We repeatedly hear that there are no absolutes in our world today.
Yet if there are no absolute, transcendent principles, how do we explain this mechanism that we call the conscience? Within a relativistic framework, we see the conscience being defined in evolutionary terms: people’s subjective inner personalities are reacting to evolutionary advantageous taboos imposed upon them by their society or by their environment. Having reached a period in our development when these taboos no longer serve to advance our evolution, they can be discarded with nary a thought of the consequences.
As a professor some years ago, I counseled a college girl who was overtaken with a sense of profound guilt because she had indulged in sexual activities with her fiancé. She explained to me that she had spoken of her guilt to a local pastor. He counseled her that the way to get over her guilt was to recognize the source of it. He reasoned that she had done nothing wrong; rather, her feelings of guilt were a result of her having been a victim of living in a society ruled by a puritan ethic. He explained that she had been conditioned by certain sexual taboos that made her feel guilty when she shouldn’t and that what she had done was a mature, responsible expression of her own emerging adulthood.
Yet she came to me weeping and exclaimed that she still felt guilty.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Sunday, September 22, 2024
The concept of believers being the gifts of the Father to the Son forms a central element of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer in John 17. Jesus makes repeated references to this “giving”: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son, that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. (John 17:1-2)

The motif of the gift of the elect to the Son is expressed by Jesus on various occasions, particularly in the gospel of John:
This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day. (John 6:39-40)
In this passage Jesus makes it clear that He is concerned about every believer being raised up at the last day. This qualifies His statements about what the Father has given Him that would never be lost. It is believers who are given to Christ by the Father, and these believers will never be lost. This affirmation builds upon what Jesus declared only moments earlier:
But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. (John 6:36-38)
Jesus is emphatic in His assertion that all whom the Father gives to Him will in fact come to Him. The order here is crucial. Jesus does not say that all who come to Him will then be given to Him by the Father. We do not determine by our response who will be the Father’s gift to the Son. Rather our response is determined by the prior election of God for us to come to the Son as gifts to Him.
The concept of believers being the gifts of the Father to the Son forms a central element of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer in John 17. Jesus makes repeated references to this “giving”.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Sunday, September 15, 2024
On this side of heaven, the Lord gives us a glimpse of our heavenly home in many ways, especially when we gather for corporate worship. I’ve experienced this in my home church, Saint Andrew’s Chapel, where every Lord’s Day we gather and cross the threshold from the secular to the sacred. But I’ve also seen it when I have worshipped in foreign lands.

There is just something about being at home, isn’t there? I am reminded of this every time I travel. As I write this column, it has been only a few weeks since we returned from a Ligonier study cruise in the Caribbean. We had a wonderful time of study and fellowship with Ligonier’s friends and supporters, many of whom are likely reading this column right now. Despite my enjoyment of the trip, however, I was happy to return home. I feel the same way every time I travel. I love my homeland and am happy to come back to the United States even after a blessed journey.
Even though I am glad to come back to America, I must admit that when I come home to my country, I long to be elsewhere. At the end of the day, the United States is but an inn, a place to rest on the way to my true home—the city of heaven. As a Christian, I realize that I will never be truly home until I am with my Savior in heaven. The old spiritual puts it well: “This world is not my home . . . I’m just a passin’ through.”
God’s people have always been what we would call a “pilgrim people.” The constitution of the old covenant church in the exodus gave the ancient Israelites the names pilgrims and sojourners. Living a semi-nomadic existence in the desert, they had no permanent place to call their own. Even their place of worship was a tent—the tabernacle—that had to be taken down when the Lord called Israel to move and put back up when they established a new camp. Later, John’s description of the incarnation picks up this theme. The Word of God who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) translates with the English term dwelt a Greek term with the same root that means “tent” or “tabernacle.” Christ literally “pitched His tent” or “tabernacled” among us.
Because of this, Christ is the ultimate Pilgrim revealed to us in Scripture. He became the supreme Sojourner in the incarnation, leaving His home in heaven in our behalf.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, September 6, 2024
The great danger is that we make ourselves the center of concern, and we steal the glory of God. In all that we do, the driving passion of the Christian must always be Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be the glory. And the only way for this passion to be realized is to honor God as God, to understand Him as He has revealed Himself in His Word and not according to the mere opinions of fallen creatures.

At the church I co-pastor, Saint Andrew’s Chapel in Sanford, Florida, we are deliberate about making sure that both our church members and visitors understand the doctrinal basis of our fellowship. As a small way of helping to further that end, we note in our church bulletin every Sunday morning that “we affirm the solas of the Protestant Reformation.”
By way of reminder, the five solas are five points that summarize the biblical theology recovered and proclaimed during the Protestant Reformation. As we note in our bulletin, these five solas are:

Sola Scriptura: The Bible is the sole written divine revelation and alone can bind the conscience of the believer absolutely.
Sola Fide: Justification is by faith alone. The merit of Christ, imputed to us by faith, is the sole ground of our acceptance by God, by which our sins are remitted, and imputed to Christ.
Solus Christus: Christ is the only mediator through whose work we are redeemed.
Sola Gratia: Our salvation rests solely on the work of God’s grace for us.
Soli Deo Gloria: To God alone belongs the glory.

Each sola is important, but the first four really exist to preserve the last one, namely, the glory of God. By sola Scriptura, we declare the glory of God’s authority by noting that only His inspired Word can command us absolutely. Sola fide, solus Christus, and sola gratia all exalt God’s glory in salvation. God and God alone—through His Son, Jesus Christ—saves His people from sin and death.
We need the glory of God to be reinforced because it is the hardest truth of all for people to accept. The refusal to glorify God in an appropriate and proper way is basic to our corrupt state. As Paul says in his penetrating description of human fallenness in Romans 1: “They did not honor him as God” (Rom. 1:21).
So often when we talk about God, we describe Him in such a way that He isn’t recognizable as the God of the Bible.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Tuesday, August 27, 2024
The Scriptures are concerned about three dimensions of the Christian life: the good, the true, and the beautiful. But we have cut off the third from the other two. In fact, sometimes Christians reduce their concern of the things of God purely to the ethical realm, to a discussion of righteousness or goodness. Others are so concerned about purity of doctrine that they’re preoccupied with truth at the expense of behavior or of the holy. But in fact, the biblical concern is for all three.

When we look at the role of art in the Christian life and community, we find that there are simple, foundational principles about the nature of beauty. If you were to look up every reference to “beauty” or “the beautiful” in the Bible, you would see that the word “beauty” in one form or another occurs frequently in the pages of sacred Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament. To set a framework for our investigation, let’s begin by looking at a psalm written by David, which we find in 1 Chronicles:
Ascribe to the Lord, O families of the peoples,ascribe to the Lord glory and strength!Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name;bring an offering and come before him!Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness;tremble before him, all the earth;yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved. (1 Chron. 16:28–30)
Two words in this psalm stand out. One is “glory.” The idea of the glory of God is pervasive throughout Scripture. It refers to His majesty, His heaviness, His weightiness, His worth, His significance. Closely connected with His glory is the concept of “holiness.” The psalm enjoins the people of God to worship God in the “splendor of holiness”; the holiness of God and the glory of God are conjoined here with respect to this idea of splendor or beauty.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Tuesday, August 20, 2024
The fact that we are fallen does not mean that we no longer have the ability to think. We are all prone to error, but we also can learn to reason in an orderly, logical, and cogent fashion. It is my desire to see Christians think with the utmost cogency and clarity. So, as a matter of discipline, it is much to our benefit to study and master the elementary principles of reasoning so that we can, by the help of God the Holy Spirit, overcome to a certain degree the ravages of sin upon our thinking.

Several years ago, I was asked to give a convocation address at a major theological seminary in America. In that address, I spoke about the critical role of logic in biblical interpretation, and I pleaded for seminaries to include courses on logic in their required curricula. In almost any seminary’s course of study, students are required to learn something of the original biblical languages, Hebrew and Greek. They are taught to look at the historical background of the text, and they learn basic principles of interpretation. These are all important and valuable skills for being good stewards of the Word of God. However, the main reason why errors in biblical interpretation occur is not because the reader lacks a knowledge of Hebrew or of the situation in which the biblical book was written. The number one cause for misunderstanding the Scriptures is making illegitimate inferences from the text. It is my firm belief that these faulty inferences would be less likely if biblical interpreters were more skilled in basic principles of logic.
Let me give an example of the kind of faulty inferences I have in mind. I doubt I have ever had a discussion on the question of God’s sovereign election without someone quoting John 3:16 and saying, “But doesn’t the Bible say that ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life’“? I immediately agree that the Bible says that. If we were to translate that truth into logical propositions, we would say that all who believe will have eternal life, and no one who has eternal life will perish, because perishing and eternal life are polar opposites in terms of the consequences of belief. However, this text says absolutely nothing about human ability to believe in Jesus Christ. It tells us nothing about who will believe. Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). Here we have a universal negative that describes ability.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Tuesday, July 23, 2024
In spiritual growth, we tend to follow a generally upward trend in which our ups and downs, over time, become less severe. As we grow in maturity, we settle into a more consistent pattern of spiritual behavior. But rebirth is merely the beginning point of this process that goes on until we’re glorified in heaven. The struggle continues from the day of rebirth until that day in heaven when we reach the fullness of maturity in Christ.

Regeneration is the first step in the total experience of redemption that God takes us through. When people say that they’re born again, they often think that their rebirth is the same thing as their new life. After all, the New Testament says that the person who is in Christ is a new creature: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). The fact that someone is a new person, a new creation, means that he has a new life, but his new life is not the same thing as his new birth. Rather, his new life is the result of his new birth, in the same way that each day of his life is the result of his physical birth. Each of us has a birthday each year, but we are not born each year. Birth happens once, and it indicates the beginning of one’s existence as a person in this world. So we make a distinction between the beginning and the life that flows out of that beginning, both in terms of natural (physical) birth and with regard to supernatural (spiritual) birth, which is what we’re describing by the term regeneration.
When I became a Christian, I found I strongly related to 2 Corinthians 5:17. I was one of those people who had a very sudden and dramatic conversion. During the first two months of my Christian experience, I was on an emotional roller-coaster ride with respect to my spiritual life. I went from spiritual ecstasy to profound spiritual depression. It was very like my experience with the game of golf. I don’t know how many thousands of times I’ve said to my wife: “I’ve found it.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Monday, July 22, 2024
We don’t come to church to hear a commentary on the latest political issues in America. If we want that, we can turn on CNN or Fox News. We come to church to hear a word from God. We don’t want your opinions. We want to hear a prophetic ministry that prefaces the sermon with the words, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’” This is how Luther and Calvin understood the task of the minister. The greatest awakening in the history of the church took place when, after darkness had eclipsed the truth of the gospel and hidden the Word in obscurity, the light burst forth and awakened Christendom in the sixteenth century. That light was carried to churches by men who saw it as their task to present the unembellished, undiluted, unvarnished Word of God and were bold enough to do just that.

In the mid-twentieth century, a full-length film was made about the life of Martin Luther. It included a scene that I found particularly provocative. The scene took place after Luther’s historic meeting with the authorities of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Roman Catholic Church at the Diet of Worms. When Luther was called upon at Worms to recant of his teachings, he made his epic stand, stating: “Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason . . . my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise. God help me.” He then left the assembly hall and was taken on horseback by his friends to Wartburg Castle, there to be hidden and protected from the authorities, who were soon to put a price on his head. At the castle, Luther grew a beard and disguised himself as a knight known as Sir George. Then he set to work on the task of translating the Bible into German.
While Luther was hidden away in the castle, his colleague, Andreas Carlstadt, in his zeal to promote the Reformation, went to churches and smashed stained-glass windows and other pieces of art. It was a reckless work of vandalism in the name of reformation. When word of Carlstadt’s destructive activity got back to Luther, he was horrified, for this was not what he intended by the Reformation. Despite the fact that Luther was wanted dead or alive, he got on his horse, left the castle, and came back to the church in Wittenberg. The scene in the movie shows Carlstadt, Philip Melanchthon, and others meeting quietly behind closed doors. Suddenly, Luther enters, dressed as a knight in chain mail. They look at him and ask: “Brother Martin, what are you doing? Why are you here?” Luther replies, “I want my pulpit.”
I don’t know whether that event actually took place in church history or whether this represented the director’s creativity in producing the film, but that scene thrilled me because it captured the spirit of Luther. One of the most significant things about Luther’s life is that after the Reformation began and he had become a celebrity throughout Western Europe, he did not spend his time traveling around the Continent trying to consolidate the movement. Rather, he returned to the primary vocation to which he had been ordained. He spent his years teaching and preaching in Wittenberg, just as John Calvin did in Geneva. So when Luther writes and comments about what a preacher should be and about the task of preaching in the church, I listen. Surely we all can be instructed from his insights.
One of the great gifts to the church is a large book titled What Luther Says. The corpus of Luther’s Works consists of fifty-five thick volumes, so I utilize this anthology to survey Luther’s writings topically. In this book, one can find collected statements from the various works of Luther regarding the preacher and preaching. What follows is the distilled essence of that collection.
The Preacher: Apt to Teach
The first thing that is required of a preacher, according to Luther, is that he be “apt to teach.” At this point, Luther is simply echoing the apostolic qualifications set forth in the New Testament for the position of elder (1 Tim. 3:1–7). The person who is elevated to a position of leadership in the church of God, and is given oversight and supervision of the flock of God, must be able to teach. Luther saw this as the primary task of the minister.
This concept is all but lost in the church today. When we call ministers to our churches, we frequently demand that they be administrators, skilled at fund-raising and project management. We also hope that they might know a little bit of theology and a little bit of the Bible, and we expect them to preach interesting and often entertaining sermons. But we often don’t make it a priority that pastors be equipped to teach the congregation the things of God.
Not only is this tendency contrary to Luther’s admonition, it is against scriptural teaching. Think of Jesus’ confrontation of Peter following Peter’s three public denials of Jesus:
So when they had eaten breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?”
He said to Him, “Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.”
He said to him, “Feed My lambs.”
He said to him again a second time, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me?”
He said to Him, “Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.”
He said to him, “Tend My sheep.”
He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me?”
Peter was grieved because He said to him the third time, “Do you love Me?”
He said to Him, “Lord, You know all things; You know that I love You.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed My sheep.” (John 21:15–17)
Three times Jesus instructed the Apostle to be engaged in the tending, leading, and feeding of His sheep. Why? It was because the people of God who are assembled in the congregations of churches all over the world belong to Jesus; they are His sheep. Every minister who is ordained is entrusted by God with the care of those sheep. We call the position “the pastorate” or “the pastoral ministry,” because the pastor (from the Latin pastor, meaning “herdsman” or “shepherd”) cares for the sheep of Christ. What shepherd would so neglect his sheep that he would fail to feed them? It is the feeding of the sheep, according to Luther, that is the prime task of the ministry. And that feeding comes, principally, through teaching.
I make a distinction between preaching—which involves exhortation, exposition, admonition, encouragement, and comfort—and teaching, which involves the transfer of information. I practice both in my own ministry, and sometimes I obscure the distinction. The students in my seminary classes will testify that sometimes, in the middle of my lectures, when I’m trying to communicate certain doctrines and information about theology, I’ll start preaching, because I’m not interested in the mere transfer of information. I want that information not only to get in their heads but in their bloodstreams. In fact, I warn them at the beginning of each course: “Don’t think that I’m in this classroom as a professor in a state of neutrality. I’m after your mind and your heart. I hope not only to instruct you, but to persuade you. I want to move you to grasp not only the truth of this content, but also the importance and the sweetness of it, so that you will take it with you for the rest of your lives. It is not my goal simply to transfer information from my brain to your notebook, because learning doesn’t take place until it gets in your head and into your life.” Likewise, when I preach, I often sprinkle some conceptual education into the content of my sermons. So I have a tendency to skate back and forth across the line between preaching and teaching. However, I’ve always thought that the primary thing, as Luther understood, that I’m responsible to do as a minister is to teach the people the things of God.
The Content of Teaching
Here we may well ask Luther: if the top priority of the minister is teaching, what is he to teach? Luther would reply: The Bible, the content of Scripture. Calvin wrote commentaries on almost every book of the Bible, and those commentaries grew out of teaching seminars he gave to his congregation in Geneva. Luther also wrote many commentaries based on his lectures to his congregation and students in Wittenberg. These Reformers gave much of their time and effort to teaching the Bible, and all pastors should do the same.
Some years ago, when I was on the faculty at a theological seminary, we reviewed the curriculum. We asked ourselves: what does a man have to know in order to be a godly pastor? We decided that the main thing was the content of Holy Scripture. So many seminary courses are designed to answer academic questions of background, of authorship, and technical problems that we never get around to the English Bible. Our future ministers are coming out of seminaries not fully conversant with the content of the Bible. So we began to develop a curriculum from ground zero. We said, let’s step out of the academic world for a minute and design the curriculum not to train professors in the areas of their specialties, but to serve the church and thereby to serve Christ.
Many ministers are frankly afraid to teach the content of Scripture to the people because they haven’t learned it themselves. The people of God need to say to their pastors, or to their prospective pastors, “Feed us the Word of God.” Congregations must be careful to choose pastors who will open up the Scriptures to them.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Saturday, July 20, 2024
Although we rejoice in Christ’s victory over the grave, we nevertheless fear death. Christians are not guaranteed exemption from a painful death. Nevertheless, the thought of death often brings fear for Christians and non-Christians alike. That fear is bound up with the question of what happens after death. For the Christian, there is a promise from God, a promise that allowed Paul to say, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” We are promised that we will enter the presence of God. But there are questions, even with this promise.

Death is the greatest problem human beings encounter. We may try to tuck thoughts of it away in the far corners of our minds, but we cannot completely erase our awareness of our mortality. We know that the specter of death awaits us.
The Apostle Paul writes:
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses. (Rom. 5:12–14)
We see that there was sin even before the law was given through Moses, and this is proven by the fact that death occurred before the law was given. The fact of death proves the presence of sin, and the fact of sin proves the presence of law, which has been revealed inwardly to human beings from the beginning. Death came into the world as a direct result of sin.
The secular world views death as part of the natural order, whereas the Christian sees death as part of the fallen order; it was not the original state of man. Death came as God’s judgment for sin. From the beginning, all sin was a capital offense. God said to Adam and Eve, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16–17). The death God warned about was not only spiritual but also physical death. Adam and Eve did not die physically the day they sinned; God granted them grace to live for some time longer before exacting the penalty. Nevertheless, they eventually perished from the earth.
Every human being is a sinner and therefore has been sentenced to death. We are all waiting for the sentence to be carried out. The question then is what happens after death.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, July 5, 2024
If we want to love God more, we have to know Him more deeply. And the more we search the Scriptures, and the more we focus our minds’ attention on who God is and what He does, the more we understand just a tiny little bit more about Him and the more our souls break out in flame. We have a greater ardor to honor Him. The more we understand God with our minds, the more we love Him with our minds.

The human mind is one of the most incredible aspects of creation. It is more powerful than the largest supercomputer and can solve great problems and make great discoveries. That makes the noetic effects of sin especially tragic.
The noetic effects of sin describe the impact of sin upon the nous—the mind—of fallen humanity. The faculty of thinking, with which we reason, has been seriously disturbed and corrupted by the fall. In our natural, unregenerate state, there is some-thing dramatically wrong with our minds. As a consequence of our suppressing the knowledge of God in our sin, we have been given over to a debased mind (Rom. 1:28).
It’s terrible to have a reprobate mind, a mind that now in its fallen condition doesn’t have a scintilla of desire to love God. But that is the kind of mind we chose for ourselves in Adam, so in our natural fallen condition, there is nothing more repugnant to our minds than the love of God. While we remain unregenerate, we have such an antipathy to loving God by nature that we choke at the very thought of Christ’s command to love God with our minds (Matt. 22:37).
Our minds have been corrupted by sin, but that does not mean our ability to think has been annihilated. The best pagan thinkers can still spot errors of logic without being born again. You don’t have to be regenerate in order to get a Ph.D. in mathematics. The fallen mind retains the ability to follow formal argumentation to a degree, but that ends when discussion about the character of God begins because that is where bias is so severe and hostility so great that many of the most brilliant people stumble. In fact, if a person begins their thinking by refusing to acknowledge what they know to be true—that there is a God—then the more brilliant they are, the further away from God their reasoning will lead them.
Any consideration of the human mind, therefore, must begin with the understanding that by nature the mind does not love God at all, and it will not love God at all unless and until God the Holy Spirit changes its disposition immediately and sovereignly to set the affections on Him. Regeneration is the necessary condition for loving God with our minds. Without it, there is no love of God. So, we must get rid of this idea that’s pervasive in the evangelical world that unbelieving people are seekers of God.
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