You Don’t Need to Do Better, You Need to Be Saved
Trust no more in your own weak efforts, and trust the efforts of the Savior. And when you trust Him, He will save you. His death on the cross is more than sufficient for all your sin. As Richard Sibbes has said, “There is more mercy in Him, than sin in us.”
I’m just trying to get right with God.
Working in the hospital, I heard this phrase so many times. Many had come face to face with their own mortality, and the thought of coming before God brought new introspection. So I’d ask the same question that Job asked: “How can a man be in the right before God” (Job 9:2)? And the answer I was given was almost always simple, predictable, and wrong.
“You know, I’m just trying to get back in the church, start reading my Bible, start tithing, get baptized, and start doing better.” And I’ll imagine that if you’ve spoken to anyone on the street you’ve probably heard something similar, as if the problem was that they just needed to do a little better and then they would be on God’s good side. But how terrifying to imagine standing before the Judge of all creation, and all you can say is, “I’m not quite as bad as I used to be. I’m doing better!”
Here’s the problem: You cannot be good enough. You cannot be “better” enough. Your good works will never outweigh your bad. James says, “For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it” (James 2:10). Every sin committed is equal to breaking God’s entire law. How many sins have you committed? How large is your negative balance? This is regarding your sin, but what about your righteous deeds? “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6). Even your best deeds are filthy before God. In our sin, we are unclean. Imagine standing before God in the judgement, and all we have to offer Him is a pile of unclean, filthy garments. You see, we don’t need to be better, because we can’t be better.
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The High Calling of the Pastor
While the public ministry of preaching is vital, most salvation and spiritual growth happens in the context of private ministry. Baxter noted that it is this private ministry that lends credence and trustworthiness to preaching.[2] This private ministry is so important that Baxter spends more than a third of the book discussing it. It is no less important today. In numerous parables, Jesus described the Kingdom of Heaven as starting small then growing slowly and gradually. If that is the way Christ will built His Church, then that is what all Christians—especially pastors—must focus on.
So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the unfading crown of glory.
-1 Peter 5:1-4, ESV
Recently, we have addressed the subject of church conflict. First, we saw that stirring up division in the church demonstrates a lack of love for the church and therefore a lack of love for Jesus Christ. Then, we looked at ways to approach conflict in the church, including circumstances in which church leaders are either straying from sound doctrine or committing sins that make them no longer qualified biblically to hold their office. Therein, I repeatedly referred to our obligation to honor our pastors, even when we must rebuke them for serious sins or doctrinal errors. I believe a major reason that we struggle with this is that we do not understand what the job of a pastor actually entails. If we truly understood this, we would have no trouble honoring our pastors as Scripture commands. A better understanding of their calling would also help us to discern when they are straying from that calling to the point where rebuke becomes necessary. My aim here is to help us all understand both the duty and high calling of the pastoral ministry so that we know how to strengthen and encourage them in this work as well as how to spot significant deviations from it.
The Job of the Pastor
What is the job of the pastor? Many people see the pastor’s role as little more than preaching on Sunday morning. This is very important, but it is only one small part of the pastor’s job. In simplest terms, the pastor’s job is to lead and care for the church. As I noted in my leadership paper, Scripture often uses the metaphor of the shepherd to describe what leadership should look like. Jesus then uses this metaphor by calling Himself the Good Shepherd in John 10 and then charging Peter to feed His sheep in John 21. Peter then extends this charge to all pastors: “shepherd the flock of God that is among you” (1 Peter 5:2a). He goes on to describe the manner in which pastors must do this. They must be willing and eager to serve in this capacity rather than being compelled to it. They must not do it out of greed for personal gain or in a domineering way, setting an example for everyone around them. We will discuss these more later, but it is important to note that all of this is prefaced by “exercising oversight”. In other words, the pastor must exercise oversight in the church. That oversight must be willing, eager, and neither greedy nor domineering, but it must be present.
What does it mean for pastors to be shepherds exercising oversight? In rebuking the Jewish leaders for their failure in this area, God lays out what a good shepherd looks like in Ezekiel 34. Based on this passage, second-generation reformer Martin Bucer divided the responsibilities of the pastor into five categories: lead lost souls to Christ, restore those who are straying, assist saints who are in sin, strengthen the spiritually weak, and protect all saints from sin and error—all of which generally fall into the category of soul care.[1] In other words, to properly shepherd the flock is to care for each individual soul in the church in a way that ministers to each person in his or her particular context. This means that in addition to preaching and public evangelism, the responsibilities of the pastor include counseling and private evangelism, meeting with people in their homes, visiting the sick, and church discipline. This requires really knowing people and meeting them where they are in their lives, which cannot happen without pastors descending from the pulpit and entering into the messy lives of those in the congregation…all of them. Puritan Richard Baxter says this:
“To this end it is necessary, that we should know every person that belongeth to our charge; for how can we take heed of them, if we do not know them? We must labour to be acquainted, not only with the persons, but with the state of all our people, with their inclinations and conversations; what are the sins of which they are most in danger, and what duties they are most apt to neglect, and what temptations they are most liable to; for if we know not their temperament or disease, we are not likely to prove successful physicians.”
-Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust: 2020 (orig. 1656): 65.
Is Baxter really saying that pastors need to know every person in the church? Yes. In our day, this may seem impossible, but perhaps that is because our view of the pastorate has deviated substantially from Scripture. We often think of a church having as single lead pastor, but if that pastor should know everyone in the congregation, that will severely limit the size of the church. Certainly it is impossible for megachurch pastors to know every person in the church, but it is just as difficult for a pastor to do this in medium sized churches. This drives home the point that with the exception of very small churches, a single pastor cannot adequately shepherd the flock God has entrusted to him. The biblical model instead calls for a plurality of pastors who can share this load between them. Whether this takes the form of a lead pastor with associate pastors or a combination of full-time and bi-vocational elders, it is absolutely essential. Just as Moses was unable to lead the nation of Israel alone (Exodus 18), so pastors should not expect (nor be expected) to lead their churches alone. When discussing tithing, I suggested that an adequately tithing church should be able to support a full-time staff member for every fifteen households or so. Coincidentally—or rather providentially—this is similar to most conventional secular wisdom on the appropriate scope of oversight that any one leader is capable of. Such a high pastor-to-household ratio may seem like a pipe dream, but the closer we get to it, the healthier our churches will be.
Even in churches that understand this, there can be a split between preaching and other responsibilities such that there is one main pastor who preaches while all of the other pastors or elders are charged with everything else. This is not the biblical model. It is true that Peter, Paul, and the other apostles focused on preaching the Gospel, but they also visited the sick and ministered to families in their homes. Furthermore, the personal references in of Paul’s letters indicates that he had a close relationship with various people in those churches. So while some pastors may focus on preaching while others focus on the other aspects of ministry, all pastors are charged to labor in all aspects of ministry.
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Hope in a Time of Secular Despair
As Snell admits, Christianity and Judaism, with their critique of paganism and rejection of idolatry, played a big part in banishing the “magic” and “enchantment” from nature. And yet, while God is transcendent, He is also immanent. Indeed, Christianity is all about how the transcendent God entered the “immanent frame.” The church would do well to emphasize the doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Sacraments, and Vocation, all of which should resonate with those who have an “immanent frame.” Snell thinks Christianity may well come back.
“Humans are not well-suited to radical immanence.” After all, those who believe only in what they can see are still made in the image of God and possess a supernatural purpose even when they reject any kind of transcendent reality. But such a disconnect creates anxiety and malaise. As a result, substitutes for transcendence are pursued, which only make things worse. So says R.J. Snell in his new book, Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope, a penetrating analysis of contemporary secularism.
Snell is building on the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose book A Secular Age argues that humans tend to think and perceive things through a “frame,” which, like a picture frame, limits what they can accept and imagine. Today, people tend to operate within what Taylor calls an “immanent frame” that fixates on the tangible and the immediately perceivable. There was a time, however, when people had a “transcendent frame,” through which everyone discerned a reality beyond the tangible and that gave the tangible meaning. The physical world was “enchanted,” that is to say, to one degree or another, it was “porous” to the supernatural, to gods or to God.
Secularism is not a matter of modern science replacing religion, Taylor shows, since religion has continued to flourish during modernity. The immanent frame allows for an “open-world” in which the transcendent remains accessible, though modern-day believers still embrace their faith as only one option of many and exercise it through an immanent lens.
But the immanent frame also allows for a “closed world,” the notion that the interior and material realm is all there is. Says Snell, drawing on Taylor, belief in a closed world is not a conclusion from rational or scientific argument. Rather, it is “a moral stance, an ethical commitment. … Secularity is demanded by a commitment to certain ‘values’” held by the person who insists on independence, nonconformity, resistance to authority, and refusal of the “consolations of an enchanted world.”
The coming apart of the “premodern” transcendent frame with the Enlightenment era resulted in an Age of Reform, a confident time of revolutions, social and political changes, and the new ideas of “modernism,” all celebrating a sense of liberation from the supernatural and otherworldly. But such reforms were often built on the unacknowledged remnants of the transcendent order. If matter is all there is, and matter can be reduced to physics and chemistry, meaning is impossible. “A universe of matter in motion reduces humans to matter in motion, ‘wet robots’ as we are sometimes called.”
If the universe isn’t “porous” to the transcendent, human beings aren’t either. We become the source of meaning, but that meaning is pretty much pointless, having no relationship to the outside world, which is also pointless. The result is what Taylor calls the “buffered self” in which we are self-enclosed, separated from others and the world, and autonomous. Today postmodernism has finished off any sense of transcendence. As Snell says, “Postmodernism and its progenitors critiqued and deconstructed any and every claim of order, harmony, or rationality as nothing more than projections of power and force.”
This allows for no hope of any kind. Life itself is no longer necessarily considered a good thing. Along with the decline in the number of marriages to the lowest level in history is the rejection of parenthood. Children have always been the sign of hope, Snell says. But today many young adults are getting sterilized on the grounds that it is immoral to bring children into this world. Coupled with the acceptance of abortion, the conclusion is that “it is not good to be, not worth giving life to another.”
So what can anyone do in this climate of despair? Snell examines three options. The first is “frenzied activism.” He notes the difference between “natural rights,” grounded in objective reality and transcendent morality, and today’s “human rights,” grounded only in the buffered self. The latter have no content. “They are formless aspirations to equality rather than substantive claims about the good.” They are purely negative: freedom as the absence of limits; autonomy as the lack of interference by others; diversity as nonconformity and nonuniformity.
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Take “Rich Men North of Richmond” Seriously
If the counties (and states) north of Richmond were red instead of blue and treated the working men south of Richmond with magnanimity rather than neglect or contempt, there still would be a problem because what those men need isn’t patronage; it’s control over their own lives and a say in the fate of their own communities. No wage ever will be high enough if the men who earn it aren’t free. “Rich Men North of Richmond,” like populism itself, is about control, not wages.
You don’t need a college degree to understand what’s happening in our country.
Oliver Anthony, the Virginia songwriter and singer behind the viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond,” didn’t even finish high school. But his song is the most intelligent political commentary of the year. [The viral song debuted Monday at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.]
That’s because there are two parts to it, though most critics and many admirers have picked up only on one.
The song isn’t simply a class-war complaint. The trouble with the rich men north of Richmond isn’t that they’re rich; it’s that “they all just wanna have total control/Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do.”
Anthony, real name Christopher Anthony Lunsford, is a throwback to the folk libertarianism that gave us the American Revolution.
There’s a social and spiritual level to the song beyond its obvious economics.
Maybe that’s easy to miss because Anthony’s biography, which he summarizes on Facebook, sounds like something Hollywood would dream up for a working-class troubadour.
He lives in a trailer in Farmville, Virginia.
He cracked his skull working in a North Carolina paper mill, spent six months unemployed, plunged into depression, and tried to drown his suffering in alcohol.
And he can really sing: “Rich Men North of Richmond” has poignant lyrics, but its appeal lies as much in the simple catchiness of its sound, and Anthony’s voice puts autotuned pop stars to shame.
It would make a great movie, but Anthony’s life shouldn’t be reduced to a caricature, and neither should the message of his song.
Look at the first verse: “Overtime hours for bulls— pay” is the line that catches everyone’s attention.
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