Come Alive by Listening to the Dead
I recently read ‘How to Bring Men to Christ’ and found that it met me where I needed spiritual guidance. The book was written to urge God’s people to have a love for souls and to help those whom God’s Spirit has awakened to personal evangelism. Torrey continually proclaimed Christ through preaching, evangelistic meetings, as well as many thousands of personal conversations. He was a man immersed in God’s Word.
Can we communicate with the dead? A lot of people seem to think so. They go to graves, make social media posts to deceased loved ones, perform rituals, and worship ancestors.
Christians should know that direct communication with the dead is impossible. Trying to do so is sin against God (Lev. 20:6; Deut. 18:10-11; 1 Sam. 28:3). But what if I was to tell you that in a certain sense, the dead can speak, and we can listen?
How, you ask? Through the medium of reading their writings.
Old Books and Communing with the Dead
There are ways to commune with those who have gone before. We can listen to the voices of those who have passed beyond this world through their writings or recordings. There are the Scriptures, those writings directly inspired by God. But there is more that God uses. When we read the works of faithful Christians, we can fellowship with them around the unchanging Truth that challenged and shaped them. When we know their acts of faith and the overall tenor of their life, we can approach these voices of the dead and expect to be encouraged in our own life journey!
Books written by now long-dead believers may be just what we need. Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that books written for Christians in different times aren’t for us today. Yes, there are some real issues with reading older books. You may have to deal with reading archaic language at times. There are vastly different cultural contexts represented. Denominational differences held by some writers can also be distracting. Having said this, don’t miss out on what godly writers in days past have left for us (like Richard Baxter)!
Sometimes we can allow our present life and ministry context to lull us to sleep. Some areas of our theology become dormant. Devotionally, we walk in circles. Reading sermons and books from believers of other times, especially when those writers have endured much for the sake of the Gospel, can be used of God to re-kindle our hearts.
I would like to draw your attention to two books that I have recently read that have stirred my soul about evangelism. The Lord knew I was desperately in need of this emphasis, so He led me to read some older works that have greatly helped revive me, including these two.
Words to Winners of Souls
Horatius Bonar was a Scottish preacher who lived through times of spiritual revival. He lived from 1808-1889. Bonar was well-known in his time as a preacher of God’s Word and leader in the Free Church of Scotland.
He was also a prodigious writer of books and hymns. He wrote over 140 hymns, including some more well-known titles, one of which is “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say.” I have seen him referred to as “the prince of Scottish hymn writers.”
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Transformation
It is not one that is produced via a man devised program. It is one that is the fruit of becoming a living sacrifice in which God develops the mind of Christ via his plan of mind renewal. I know that any Christian maturity that I possess is the work of God, by His grace, according to His will. I am only a δοῦλος of the Κύριον ᾿Ιησοῦν Χριστόν. Remember no one on their own path or the path of the enemy is on the path of true Biblical Transformation.
2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good and pleasing and perfect. Romans 12:2 (LSB)
Despite the fact that the unregenerate refuse to accept what I am about to say as being true, it does not change the fact that it is the truth. The true Christian walk is one of faith that results in faithfulness while the counterfeit or false Christian walk is one of works righteousness that results in a pragmatic form of religious works meant to counter failures of the flesh. The true Christian will be on a path of continual, progressive transformation unto Christlikeness that will result in God using him or her in doing His good works (Ephesians 2:10). On the other hand, the false Christian, not being regenerate, may still be fooled by their religiosity into believing that he or she is on that narrow path. They may even zealously do good works and call that a transformed life, but it is still nothing more than works righteousness. The enemy of men’s souls has produced a counterfeit version of Christian Transformation, but it is totally different and only produces temporal fruit while genuine Christian Transformation produces fruit that is eternal.
Carefully read the passage I placed at the top of this post. Here is that passage in Greek:
2 καὶ μὴ συσχηματίζεσθε τῷ αἰῶνι τούτῳ, ἀλλὰ μεταμορφοῦσθε τῇ ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοὸς εἰς τὸ δοκιμάζειν ὑμᾶς τί τὸ θέλημα τοῦ θεοῦ, τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ εὐάρεστον καὶ τέλειον. Romans 12:2 (NA28)
Notice that it is impossible for a Christian to be both conformed to this world and to be in the process of being transformed by the renewal of his or her mind at the same time. The Greek word translated here as “conformed” is συσχηματίζεσθε, which means to “be fashioned together.” However, Paul preceded it in this passage with the word μὴ, which mean “not,” therefore, we are being told to not be fashioned or conformed to this world or αἰῶνι, which could also be translated as “age,” and I think that is good way to understand what Paul is talking about here. If a person is fashioned together with this present age then he or she is not of God. He or she is not regenerate.
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Science and Theology
A universe governed by chance gives us no foundation for science. Without God’s promise to preserve the natural order, we have no reason to be certain that we can make predictions about the past or future. And if we cannot do that, we cannot trust that the results of our experiments can be repeated, making it impossible to test the experiments of others, which is vital to scientific advancement. God’s revelation alone gives us a basis for science.
Genesis 2:19, “Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
We have been considering the doctrine of the sovereign providence of God, His active control and direction of all that happens in creation. Generally speaking, this control is invisible to us. That is, we do not see the Lord directly superintending the universe; rather, we see the effects of His control, the visible results of what He has planned and purposed as we look on the events of history, the movement of planets and stars, and other phenomena. In turn, that raises the issue of how we explain visible phenomena in the natural sciences as well as how various scientific theories are related to the reality of divine providence. So that we will better understand providence and its relation to science, we will now spend some time considering this issue with the help of Dr. R.C. Sproul’s teaching series Creation or Chaos.
For at least the past one hundred years, the natural sciences have held a privileged place in Western society. It is not hard to understand why; after all, advancements in medicine, physics, chemistry, and other areas have all improved our overall quality of life in many ways.
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How to Respond to Deconstructionist Social Media
Your life-on-life discipleship of those in your charge is the more compelling witness the Spirit will use to save and grow and keep them. You don’t need a social media presence. You don’t need a clever strategy. You just need to be around them. That will be your greatest and most Spirit-laden apologetic against which no question can stand.
Last week, a young adult I pastor came into my office to ask about something he’d seen. It was a video of a deconstructionist influencer on TikTok “proving” that the Gospels are unreliable. He wanted to know what I thought. The video had shaken his faith. Videos on social media like these have millions to hundreds of millions of views. If you pastor younger generations, you’re likely already aware of this new reality. If you’re not, welcome.
The thought of those in our ministries being drawn away by a stranger through a screen is gut-wrenching. As I’ve talked with friends who pastor junior high through college-age students, many feel daunted by this new trend. “We’re only with them a few hours a week, these accounts are available to them all day every day!” “Should we start accounts where we combat these videos?”
What is a pastor to do? How do we who’ve been charged with shepherding younger generations respond to this new reality and the threat it poses to those in our care? Before I try to answer that, let me first tell you what the answer is not.
As much as we might feel the need to, the response is not to go on TikTok or Instagram and watch every video we can find to know all the gauntlets being thrown. One reason is because the sheer amount of content out there is just too much for any pastor to try and get a hand on. To try to do so will only exhaust and discourage us. While some familiarity with the posts is wise, too much focus on them will distract us from who truly needs it—our students and young adults. Rather than the trend, they must command our attention.
Moreover, focusing on the content isn’t the right response because the questions being asked aren’t new. Sure, there are new angles and implications because of the new realities of our day–like LGBTQ+ issues; but the foundational questions underneath every point being raised by Exvangelical, deconstructionist, or atheist influencers are ones the Church has been asked and answered for nearly 2,000 years. It’s the medium that’s new, not the questions. The Church has a treasure trove of answers in its attic. We just need to open it up and familiarize ourselves with them.
At the same time, while old answers are what we have, new ways of putting them are what we need. Pastors should seek fresh presentations of old answers to fresh spins on old questions. Thankfully, we have contemporary resources just for that. There are plenty out there that you can find via YouTube or TikTok. These resources are a great help to both pastors and students because they answer the questions being raised in ways that most resonate with our context.
All of that being said, I strongly believe that familiarizing ourselves with the available resources is only secondary work. Worth a measured dose of our time? Absolutely! The most vital response we should have? Not by a long shot.
A Tried and True Response
So, what should we do? I want to propose the blueprint Paul gives in 1 Thessalonians 2:8:
“We cared so much for you that we were pleased to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives, because you had become dear to us.”
This latest Christian-adverse social media trend is tricky to deal with, but I am convinced that the primary response must be life-on-life discipleship. What this moment demands of pastors of younger generations is that we keep doing what pastors have done since the dawn of the church. In our teaching, across coffee tables, at In-N-Out, by hospital beds, on drives home from youth group, we give the gospel and we give our own selves. The “answer,” as it has always been, is life-on-life discipleship.
Why is this the particular solution to deconstructionist social media? Because we have something the influencer on a device doesn’t: physical proximity.
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