Pastoral Ministry, Part 2: False Accusations
Written by John V. Fesko |
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
If God does truly ordain everything, even when the hairs on our heads fall to the ground (Matt. 10:30), then nothing in our lives happens by chance. God uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines, and in this case, he uses false accusations to conform you to the image of Christ. There may be occasions when you must respond swiftly and firmly when someone falsely accuses you of sin. On other occasions, however, you may have to wait on Providence to resolve the situation.
As a pastor, you hope that people in your church will love, respect, and value your service to the church. This pattern marks, I believe, of the vast majority of the people in the church. At the same time, there will be some who dislike you and your ministry to the point that they will level false accusations against you. What should you do when this happens? And how do you handle this situation in a Christ-like manner?
As you can imagine, handling false accusations calls for wisdom and patience. Far too many people look at sin in rather binary terms: if someone wrongs you the only remedy is immediate restitution. Depending on the nature of the false accusation, wisdom might call for a patient and calm response rather than immediate action, such as church discipline. On one occasion I conducted a pastoral visit with a family and they decided they were going to light into me. The couple was yelling at me at the top of their lungs and accused me and the session of running the Sunday School like a concentration camp. I don’t take kindly to being likened to a Nazi and so I immediately but politely confronted them on the sinful nature of their statements. They were free, I told them, to register their discontentment with my ministry but drew the line at such comparisons. I could have demanded an immediate apology but wanted to give the situation time. Things simmered down and I was able to leave without further incident, but I did not receive an apology. I decided to wait to see what would happen. Blessedly, the next day the couple called me to apologize for the way they treated me, and I was grateful to have things resolved.
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Seeing God’s Love is Central to Living the Christian Life
Written by Amy K. Hall |
Saturday, February 26, 2022
If, as Christians, the fuel that fills us with “the fullness of God” and transforms us into humble, gentle, patient, tolerant people is our comprehension of the love of God (who saved us on the basis of nothing but his grace), and if to know that love, we must see that love, how then, after praying as Paul did, do we endeavor to see God’s love? By reading the entire Bible. Repeatedly.In last week’s post, I encouraged you to simply read the Bible repeatedly (as you’ve done with other lengthy book series you’ve enjoyed) in order to know it deeply and allow it to change you, so now I want to give you a more specific example of the benefits of this.
Consider the first half of Ephesians. In the past, I assumed Paul’s command in 4:1 to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called” referred generally to acting in a way that reflected well on God, but in context, he’s actually referring to something more specific—something you’ll see if we quickly walk through the text up to that point.
After describing how “in love [God] predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ…according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace” in Chapter 1, and then explaining even more carefully in Chapter 2 that this is all by his grace—that though we were “by nature children of wrath,” deserving only punishment, “because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, [God] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)”—and that, in this way (i.e., by God’s loving grace), even Gentiles can be reconciled to God together with Jews through the cross, “for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father,” he then, after marveling at God’s wisdom and the “unfathomable riches of Christ,” comes to this prayer:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. (Eph. 3:14–19)
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Jonathan Edwards and 5 Spiritual Habits for 2023
What spiritual habits are you going to develop in 2023? Each year brings new opportunity to grow to be more like Christ. Thankfully, God has left us many examples of godly men and women throughout history who have pursued Him and His glory. Let us learn from such examples what it means to seek and serve the Lord.
As the year starts, I find it useful to take stock of what spiritual disciplines are consistent in my life and what specific spiritual habits I need to grow in. Thankfully, I was able to open up the year reading an excellent essay/sermon by Donald S. Whitney on the spiritual disciplines of Jonathan Edwards. The essay is entitled “Pursuing a Passion for God Through Spiritual Disciplines” and it is published in the book “A God Entranced Vision of All Things.” If you can, give the essay a read as the year starts to get your mind thinking about developing good spiritual habits for 2023.
Today, I want to share my own takeaways and thoughts from reading this essay. Every time I read about how disciplined Johnathan Edwards was in his pursuit of the Lord and his use of time, I am humbled and motivated to become more disciplined myself. For the remainder of this article, I want to discuss five spiritual habits I want to focus on in 2023 based on reading about Jonathan Edwards.
Habit 1: Remembering it is the Spirit who bears the fruit.
Every time I start thinking about spiritual disciplines, I tend to focus on the disciplines themselves rather than their purpose. It is easy to do: you and I live in a very pragmatic, check-the-box culture. The problem of importing that thinking into spiritual disciplines is you end up, as Whitney says, feeling that you can become automatically godly simply by doing different spiritual disciplines. For example, starting the year with the goal of reading through the entire Bible is a good discipline. However, the end goal should not simply be checking the daily reading boxes. Rather, the discipline is for the greater purpose of knowing God.
Any spiritual habits you and I want to develop in 2023 should all have a Godward focus and goal. The Holy Spirit is the one who bears fruit in our lives. You and I are dependent on God for the growth that can accompany spiritual disciplines and habits. So, resolve this year to not simply “add more boxes to check” in your spiritual disciplines. Resolve also to become more aware and dependent on the Holy Spirit to conform you to Christ.
Spiritual disciplines should grow our dependence on Christ, not make us feel more dependent on ourselves.
Habit 2: Having a Scripture to chew on throughout the day.
If you are like me, there is always about three dozen moments each day when you are waiting on something. You might be in line at a store, stuck in traffic, or waiting for food to cook. The modern tendency (and Christians are far from immune) is to fill those “waiting moments” with entertainment or distraction. It is easier to pull out your phone to fill an empty moment than it is to redeem that time for God’s glory. Whitney makes the point that Edwards spent extensive time throughout the day not just reading Scripture, but meditating on Scripture.
What if after your morning quiet time or Bible reading you chose one verse or sentence to carry with you throughout the day? Instead of pulling out your phone during your quiet moments, you could pull out that verse or sentence and spend time thinking through it. What does it really mean? What are the implications? Are there any other Biblical verses that come to mind? I want to spend more time thinking deeply about Scripture like Edwards did this year, and I think this is a great habit to do just that. Pack a verse with you as you pack your lunch for work. Take a sentence from Jesus or Paul with you on your shopping trip. Let us fill our free moments in 2023 with truth instead of entertainment.
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Fear God, Honor the Emperor
The most pressing civic duty for Christians is to insist upon the lordship of Christ. We must witness against the idols of this world. As was the case in the early years of the Church, when the cult of the emperor demanded loyalty, so today our most powerful witness will be the act of refusal. Christians are called to obey the magistrate. But we must first honor God, never bending the knee to civil authorities, institutions, and movements.
Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement urged resistance to laws that enforced racial discrimination. They appealed to natural law and God’s law, with the aim of reforming our civic order in accordance with transcendent standards. In our time, the rule of law denies nature and usurps the authority of God, making the powers of this world into the supreme lawgivers. In 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States took political possession of the institution of marriage, redefining it so that men may marry men and women may marry women. The same has been done in other jurisdictions in the West. More recently, the Court adopted the view that men who wish to be regarded as women, and women who want to be seen as men, must be accorded protection against discrimination.
This refusal to acknowledge nature and recognize divine authority puts Christians, and all citizens, in a perilous position. For when transcendent truth is denied, whether natural or revealed, the once fitting and proper instruments of civil authority become absolute. They are deified as all-powerful idols.
Secularism encourages political absolutism. It removes religious authority from public life. In doing so, it claims to secure neutrality in civic affairs. We are told that this ostensible neutrality brings religious freedom and allows for a social contract based on needs and interests shared by everyone, without regard to theological convictions. Yet secularism’s promise has shown itself to be hollow. It is a metaphysical project with political consequences, engaging in soulcraft by another name.
A society that makes no reference to God implicitly claims that all the goods worth pursuing can be found in this life. Consequently, it sponsors a regime that privileges—and at times imposes—its purely immanent and this-worldly projects and ambitions. On the one hand, therapeutic ideals of self-invention insist that individually determined projects and modes of self-expression have final authority. Our social policies must pay homage to the sovereign self, even if it means violating the sanctity of life and denying the moral truth inscribed upon our bodies as male and female. On the other hand, the regime accords our bodies a defining role. Powerful ideologies concerning race, intelligence, and sexual desire insist that we are defined by our biology.
This seems a contradiction: A self-chosen identity that denies the authority of the body is privileged alongside an identity politics that accords the body supreme significance. But these two understandings of identity have in common a repudiation of transcendent authority. The expressive self rejects the demands that moral truths place on our freedom; God’s creation must not hinder self-creation. Identity politics rejects God’s transcendent call and bids us accept our place in the prisons of race, gender, and sexual orientation.
In Genesis we read: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him” (1:27). We are not simply bodies; the human person is stamped by the image of God. But neither are we purely spiritual beings who transcend our physical condition. Our souls animate our bodies, which are formed in accord with the divinely ordained difference between men and women. We are at once capable of transcendence and firmly rooted in God’s creation.
When political authority no longer serves something deeper—the moral order—or something higher—the promise of transcendence—it becomes sheer power. Liberty becomes grandiose self-invention, an ideal that masks our captivity to anxiety and our vulnerability to social control. In a world unable to acknowledge the laws of nature and nature’s God, traditional limits on state power fall away—and without moral authority or divine authority to anchor human affairs, we turn to the state as our only hope, inviting it to become all-powerful in order to hold everything together.
As Evangelicals and Catholics, we regard our political inheritance as noble. The best of our constitutional and civic traditions draw upon Christian sources. But secularism has spent down the Christian inheritance of the West. It is urgent, therefore, that we recover a biblical understanding of government and of our duties as citizens. The Christian tradition affirms two sources for the right ordering of human affairs: Temporal authority ensures peace and tranquility in the civic realm, and spiritual authority guides and governs souls toward the end of their salvation in Christ. The two authorities—“two swords,” as the Christian tradition sometimes puts it—are distinct. But both are required. A political community that does not accord proper scope to political judgments about our temporal well-being becomes a theocratic parody. A society that refuses to acknowledge God’s call for us to cleave to him in faith cannot sustain the authority of men, and will devolve into anomie and ceaseless struggles for power.
The Church is a community in exile. Justin Martyr observes: “Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world.” We journey as pilgrims toward the final consummation of the created order, when Jesus, whom the Father has raised from the dead and seated at his right hand, will return in glory, with all things under his dominion (Acts 2:22–36; see, also, Ps. 110). As Christians, therefore, we recognize no worldly authority as ultimate. The words of St. Peter before the priestly council in Jerusalem must serve as the foundation of any Christian understanding of citizenship: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
Our constitutions, governments, civic traditions, and institutions do not operate independent of God’s authority. Even now Jesus is Lord. Human affairs are ordered in God’s providence toward their final end in Christ, to whom all things have been made subject. Christians cannot accept the secular conceit that the legitimacy of government stems solely from a social contract or the consent of the governed, however useful such concepts may be as part of a fully developed political theology. St. Paul is unequivocal: “There is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1).
The particular purposes for which God has instituted temporal authority are not transparent to our understanding. We are not privy to God’s designs. As believers, we must resist shallow judgments that too quickly baptize (or demonize) political movements and public personalities: “For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (Rom. 11:34; Isa. 40:13). Moreover, the Church has functioned in a remarkable variety of regimes. There is no Christian system of government. Nevertheless, Scripture and the Christian tradition offer a general account of the legitimate purposes of civil authority.
After insisting that every person is rightly subject to governing authorities, St. Paul explains that governmental authority is ordained by God for the sake of restraining sin. Civil authorities exist to promote good conduct and punish bad conduct. They bear the sword of coercion as agents of God’s judgment against the actions of wrongdoers, chastising the wicked. This is an important office. A society that fails to deter murder, theft, and other crimes does not deserve our loyalty. This does not mean that a regime must be perfect. Insofar as wrongdoing is prohibited and grave transgressions of the moral law are not overlooked, we must provide our support, according the respect and honor due to civil authority (Rom. 13:1, 4–7).
The First Letter of Peter makes a similar argument: “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right” (2:13–15). God has given the power of the temporal sword to those who rule so that wrongdoing is met with firm rebuke and the wicked do not lead others astray. History has seen governments that rage against God’s law. If the rule of law perversely turns against morality and justice, civil disobedience may be required, and even rebellion may be justified. But if temporal power is used properly, Christians are called to be the most loyal of citizens. Christians need not be blind to the injustices that characterize all regimes in our fallen world. We may be active in efforts of reform. Yet when the temporal sword seeks to honor God’s intentions, however imperfectly, we must not foster rebellion or simmering dissent.
Restraint of sin allows civil authority to secure the good of peace. As Augustine makes clear, the peace of the earthly city does not rest in the harmony of wills that comes about when we honor and worship God in one accord. This peace is found only in the City of God, when love of God has conquered love of self. In our pilgrimage toward that end, we can experience a foretaste of this peace, most often in the life of the Church, but also in civil affairs, when we join together to achieve common ends. But Christians recognize the limits of political ambition. We accept that we must function in political, economic, and social structures that presume a preponderance of self-love. Often, the only realistic alternative is to moderate the destructive effects of self-love “by a kind of compromise between human wills” (City of God, XIX.17).The well-regulated marketplace can control greed. The rule of law can constrain the powerful. The pain of want, if allowed in proper circumstances, can motivate the indolent. As St. Paul reminds the Thessalonians, “For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: If anyone will not work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:10).
Too often, modern Christians chafe against the limits of earthly peace. We undervalue its relative good, disparaging it in comparison to the ideal of true harmony and integral solidarity that characterizes the City of God. Some fall into a theologized activism, urging the inauguration of the New Jerusalem here and now. But the Church is the sole custodian of God’s heavenly peace that passes all understanding—not governments, constitutions, civic institutions, or legal traditions. A failure to recognize the limits of earthly peace can lead to the exasperated refusal to countenance God’s delay of the final consummation. The result is a social Pelagianism, a political works righteousness that seeks to confect heavenly peace out of human movements, ideologies, and efforts. Some of the greatest crimes of the modern era have been committed by those who imagined themselves capable of transcending, through social engineering and revolution, the mediocrity of the earthly city, which is always hobbled by self-love.
The Pelagian rebellion against the limits of earthly peace is mirrored by a social Donatism, a perfectionism that will not be sullied by worldly loyalties. We wash our hands of the sin-infected institutions that govern society, insisting that our civic covenants make no legitimate claims upon our soul. Like the zealous social activist, the Christian purist often makes correct judgments about the inadequacy of even the best governments. Augustine observes that as the peace of the earthly city rests in the absence of violence, it is not a true peace. But we must not scoff at the negative peace of the earthly city. Rather, as Augustine teaches, we are called to make good use of the relative tranquility of a well-ordered society, neither disturbing it with utopian dreams nor spurning our duty to honor and protect its limited but genuine goods.
Our different traditions have different views of the degree to which faithful Christians can exercise the office of the magistrate. Some of us believe that a life of discipleship forbids the use of lethal force, which backstops civil authority. But we agree that civil authority is ordained by God. And we agree that our commitment to the triumph of Christ’s peace need not contradict our loyalty to the civic order, however imperfect that order may be.
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