“May these precious seasons make me fruitful.” These words, found in the diary of a certain Isaac Staveley, who worked as a clerk for coal merchants in London during the 1770s, were written after he had celebrated the Lord’s Supper with his church, Eagle Street Baptist Church, in 1771.

In the rest of this diary, Staveley makes it evident that the celebration of the death of the Christ at the Table was a highlight of his Christian life. In the evening of March 3, he recorded that he and fellow members “came around the table of our dear dying Lord to feast on the sacrifice of his offered body, show his death afresh, to claim and recognise our interest therein, to feast on the sacrifice of his offered body as happy members of the same family of faith and love.” How many today view the Table this way?

Packed into these few words, Staveley reveals his conviction that the Lord’s Supper was a place of communion — communion with Christ and with his people. It was a place of spiritual nurture and of witness. And it was a place of rededication, both to Christ and to his church family.1

Unprized Means of Grace

I suspect that Staveley’s words sound strange to the ears of many modern evangelicals, who might think they are reading the diary of a Roman Catholic or High Anglican, not that of a fellow Reformed evangelical from the eighteenth century. Indeed, the oddity of Staveley’s words to the ears of evangelicals today reveals how much we have lost over the last two centuries. We are out of touch with a tradition that highly prized the ordinances as vehicles of spiritual grace.

“We are out of touch with a tradition that highly prized the ordinances as vehicles of spiritual grace.”

It is not simply that we have come to use mainly the word ordinance for the Lord’s Supper and baptism, rather than the word sacrament, whereas many Baptists like Staveley would have been quite comfortable with the latter term in the eighteenth century. Rather, under the impress of the rationalistic mindset of Western culture, we have lost a sense of mystery about the dynamics of the Table.

John Calvin (1509–1564), who stands at the fountainhead of the tradition of which Staveley was a part, was quite content to leave it as a mystery as to how the emblems of bread and wine are employed by the Holy Spirit to make Christ present at the celebration of his Supper. And roughly down until the opening of the nineteenth century, anglophone evangelicals followed in his stead, treasuring the presence of Christ at the Table without feeling pressured to explain exactly how this worked.

Diluting the Wine

How did this understanding of the Lord’s Supper lose its way?

During the nineteenth century, church services became primarily places of evangelism. But the Lord’s Table was not a converting ordinance, and thus great evangelistic preachers like Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) — though not C.H. Spurgeon (1834–1892), it needs to be noted — came to regard the Table as a rite of little import in the Christian life. The emergence of the Oxford Movement in the Anglican Church — with men like John Henry Newman (1801–1890) and John Keble (1792–1866), who revived the doctrine of transubstantiation — also served to push evangelicals toward downplaying the importance of the Lord’s Supper.

Finally, the revivalist nature of much of evangelical life in the nineteenth century, shaped as it was by altar-call preachers like Charles Finney (1792–1875), Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874) and D.L. Moody (1837–1899), served as another key factor that led to the loss of a richer view of the Lord’s Supper. Indeed, for some, the altar call became an alternate ordinance/sacrament (in fact, Finney posited it as such, as part of his so-called “new measures”). Rather than the Table being the place where sinners met with God and heard reassuring words about the saving work of Christ that dealt definitively with their sins (making the Table a place of rededication), it was the altar call that came to function as such.

Retrieving the Old Tradition

These events in the nineteenth century reveal how we came to the point where the Table is no longer a significant part of the spiritual life of many evangelical churches. Yet how desperately we need to confess our sins together with God’s people and hear afresh, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). In the busyness of Western culture, and even church life, do we not long for an oasis of quiet, where we can commune with Christ by his Spirit with our brothers and sisters? Indeed, I would say, with Calvin and Spurgeon, that this needs to happen on a weekly basis (but be that as it may).

“Do we not long for an oasis of quiet, where we can commune with Christ by his Spirit with our brothers and sisters?”

One of the richest texts from our past as evangelicals is the Second London Confession of Faith (1677/1688), which was drawn up by the English and Welsh Particular Baptist community and was based on the Presbyterian Westminster Confession (1646) and the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration (1659). This confession not only served as the main confessional text of the Particular Baptists in England, Wales, and Ireland into the nineteenth century, but it was also adopted by the oldest Baptist associations in America, where it became known as the Philadelphia Confession (in the north) and the Charleston Confession (in the south). Indeed, it was the Charleston Confession that was used to draw up the confession of faith — the Abstract of Principles — of the seminary where I serve, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville.

In Chapter 30.1 of this Baptist confession, it is stated,

The Supper of the Lord Jesus was instituted by him the same night wherein he was betrayed, to be observed in his churches unto the end of the world, for the perpetual remembrance, and shewing forth the sacrifice of himself in his death, confirmation of the faith of believers in all the benefits thereof, their spiritual nourishment, and growth in him, their further engagement in, and to all duties which they owe unto him; and to be a bond and pledge of their communion with him, and with each other.

Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper for five reasons, according to this paragraph. The Supper serves as a vivid reminder of and witness to the sacrificial death of Christ. Then, participation in the Lord’s Supper enables believers to grasp more firmly all that Christ has done for them through his death on the cross. In this way, the Lord’s Supper is a means of spiritual nourishment and growth. Fourth, the Lord’s Supper serves as a time when believers recommit themselves to Christ. Finally, the Lord’s Supper affirms the indissoluble union that exists, on the one hand, between Christ and believers, and, on the other, between individual believers.

Rich Means of Grace

One cannot come away from reading these paragraphs on the Lord’s Supper without the conviction that those who issued this confession were deeply conscious of the importance of the Lord’s Supper for the Christian life.

The London Baptist preacher Benjamin Keach (1640–1704), who signed this confession, speaks for his fellow Baptists when he states, probably with reference to the Quakers, who had discarded the observance of both baptism and the Lord’s Supper,

Some men boast of the Spirit, and conclude they have the Spirit, and none but they, and yet at the same time cry down and vilify his blessed ordinances and institutions, which he hath left in his Word, carefully to be observed and kept. . . . The Spirit hath its bounds, and always run[s] in its spiritual channel, namely the Word and ordinances.2

In other words, the Spirit uses the Scriptures, the word of God, and baptism and the Lord’s Supper to strengthen his people on their spiritual pilgrimage in this world.

In this hearty appreciation of the Lord’s Supper, these early Baptists were firmly in the mainstream of Puritan thought. The Puritans generally regarded the Supper as a vehicle that the Spirit employed as an efficacious means of grace for the believer. The seventeenth-century Baptists and their heirs in the eighteenth century, like Isaac Staveley, would have judged the memorial view of the Lord’s Supper — the dominant view among today’s evangelicals — as far too mean a perspective on what was for them such a rich means of grace.

Indeed, in seeking to articulate a richer and more biblical view of the Lord’s Table, contemporary evangelicals may do no better than to listen afresh to what is written in chapter 30 of the Second London Confession.

Audio Transcript

Holy works and filthy rags. It comes up time and time again, and it’s the topic of a question from Hanley in New Zealand. He’s onto the topic. And it’s a timely one as he reads Nehemiah 13 — and as many of us read Nehemiah 13 — to finish out the book in our Bible reading today. Here’s his email: “Hello, Pastor John! I’m a young believer from New Zealand and I thank God for his work through you. I am confused as to why the saints of the Old Testament regularly pray to God to regard them according to their own righteousness. Most notably for me right now are Nehemiah 13:14, 22, 30–31. Is this a practice for us today? Do we bring to God our righteous deeds and ask him not to forget them? I’ve never prayed that way. Never even considered it. I guess my default is to think of ‘all’ my ‘righteous deeds’ as ‘filthy rags’ (Isaiah 64:6). Do you remind God of your righteous deeds? Should we? And why do we need to?”

Okay, Hanley, let’s buckle up because I’m going to pack a lot into a very short space here — a kind of mini-theology of good works, how they relate to faith, how they relate to rewards, how they relate to prayer.

Filthy Rags or Holy Deeds?

Let’s start with Isaiah 64:6. You are not alone in thinking that this verse teaches that all Christian good works are filthy rags in the sight of God. That is a profoundly mistaken reading of that verse. The verse just before, Isaiah 64:5, says, “You meet him who joyfully works righteousness, those who remember you in your ways.” This is a commendation of righteousness in the people of God. God does not despise the righteous deeds of his children done by faith. What verse 6 is referring to in calling righteous deeds “filthy rags” is the hypocritical works that flow from nothing. They have an outward show of righteousness, but inside, dead men’s bones rooted in pride, just as Jesus referred to it (Matthew 23:27).

That misunderstanding of Isaiah 64:6 has caused many Christians to believe that it is impossible for a Christian to please God. If their best works are filthy rags, there’s nothing they can do to please him. This is a profoundly unbiblical notion through and through.

For example, consider how Paul commends the Philippians: “I have received . . . from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent, a fragrant offering, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God” (Philippians 4:18). Their generosity to Paul was pleasing to God. It was not filthy. Or Hebrews 13:16: “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.” Hebrews 11:6 holds the key: “Without faith it is impossible to please [God].” But Christians have faith. We have faith. And that faith in God’s blood-bought grace, with all its fruits — the fruits of faith and grace — pleases God because it depends on God, not the self, for doing good.

Think what a horrible thing it would be to say that the fruit of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life is filthy rags. I can hardly stand to even think about it. They are not filthy rags. They are God’s precious gift and work in us.

Rewards for Faithful Labor

Let’s take it a step further. If God, in fact, in his grace and power enables us to do things that are good, he is going to reward them, not ignore them. He’s going to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Matthew 25:21). Works of faith are going to be rewarded, not thrown away as filthy rags.

And God intends for us to hope for and expect these rewards. Second Corinthians 5:10: “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.” Or consider Matthew 10:42: “Whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” Or Ephesians 6:8: “Whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord.”

There’s no thought in these texts of anybody earning salvation or even earning rewards. The idea of earning is not present. In order to earn something, you supply some labor that someone needs so that they’re now in your debt to pay you wages. God has no needs, and he pays no wages among his people. He bought us by grace; he sustains us by grace; he enables us to do good works by grace. And we do the works trusting that grace. And in that way, we confirm (as Peter says) our “calling and election” (2 Peter 1:10).

Essence of Uprightness

Now we’re in a position to see what’s really going on in the Old Testament when, over and over again, God’s righteous servant pleads his own integrity, his own uprightness, to claim his help from God.

I think Psalm 25 is one of the best places to see what’s going on in the psalmist’s mind concerning his own integrity and his own righteousness, his own upright behavior. In Psalm 25:21, he says, “May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.” Now, clearly, he does not think that his integrity and uprightness are filthy rags, and he doesn’t think that they are performed in his own autonomous strength, because he says, “[because] I wait for you.” The essence and root of his integrity and his uprightness is that he’s looking away from himself to the mercy and the power of God.

“God does not despise the righteous deeds of his children done by faith.”

He’s not sinless though. Psalm 25:7: “Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions.” Psalm 25:11: “For your name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great.” Psalm 25:18: “Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.” And after confessing his sins three times at least (I think there’s one more verse), Psalm 25:21 says, “May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.”

He’s just confessed his sin three times. He called his transgressions great. There is real sin left in the lives of the saints — in all of us. There is also real contrition and real confession and real forgiveness and real lives of integrity and uprightness. And David prays and asks that his integrity and his uprightness would preserve him.

Praying Like Nehemiah

So, when Nehemiah — finally got to your text — prays four times something very similar about his obedience to God’s commands, he’s doing something similar to what David is doing. He says, “Remember this also in my favor, O my God, and spare me according to the greatness of your steadfast love” (Nehemiah 13:22). He’s not doing anything essentially different from what David does in the Psalms or doing anything different from the way the New Testament treats our good deeds as Christians. He’s saying, “I’m not perfect, but I have trusted you, and I wait for your steadfast love, and I have acted in my integrity, and I have sought to be obedient to your commandments. May this be remembered before you at the day of salvation.”

Should we pray that way? Should we call to mind regularly our integrity, our uprightness before God? And here’s a guideline that I would say, because I don’t do that very often either, just like you. I think a safe guideline for when we should pray this way is that this kind of praying comes to the fore in times when we are embattled and accused of things that we did not do. So, we pray, “O Lord, you know my heart. You know I am being accused unjustly. I pray that you will remember my integrity and my truthfulness, and vindicate me before my enemies. And if not in this life, O God, vindicate me and reward me according to your mercy in the last day when you remember how I walked in my integrity.”

So, I think that’s the way we should pray from time to time when we are embattled the way the psalmists were and the way Nehemiah was.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15772249/tough-love-toward-idle-people