R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 106

Grace-Fueled Obedience Is Absolutely Necessary for Christlikeness

Can you imagine a Christian couple actually praying about living together before marriage? Can you fathom a young woman who professes Christ even bothering to pray about whether she should marry an unbeliever? Can you grasp a Christian businessman having to pray about whether he should tell the truth in a transaction? When the Word of God is so clear, praying to discern God's will becomes a convenient excuse—or even a prolonged filibuster—to avoid doing what Scripture commands.

Many who profess Christ today emphasize a wrong view of grace that makes it a free pass to do whatever they please. Tragically, they have convinced themselves that the Christian life can be lived without any binding obligation to the moral law of God. In this hyper-grace distortion, the need for obedience has been neutered. The commandments of God are no longer in the driver's seat of Christian living, but have been relegated to the backseat, if not the trunk—like a spare tire—to be used only in case of an emergency. With such a spirit of antinomianism, what needs to be reinforced again is the necessity of obedience.

For all true followers of Christ, obedience is never peripheral. At the heart of what it means to be a disciple of our Lord is living in loving devotion to God. But if such love is real, the acid test is obedience. Jesus maintained, "If you love me,you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15). Genuine love for Christ will always manifest itself in obedience.

This does not mean that a Christian can ascend to sinless perfection. This will never be realized this side of glory. Neither does it imply that a believer will never disobey God again. Isolated acts of disobedience will still occur. But the new birth does give a new heart that desires to obey the Word. In regeneration, God says:

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. (Ezek. 36:26–27)

In this heart transplant, God causes the believer to pursue Spirit-energized obedience. The Apostle John agrees when he writes, "And by this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments" (1 John 2:3). In the new birth, the elect are granted saving faith, and they immediately begin to walk in "the obedience of faith" (Rom. 1:5). There is no timelapse between the time of conversion and when one begins to obey Christ. The exercise of saving faith is the first step of a life of obedience. When Jesus preached, "Repent and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:14–15), this was issued as an urgent imperative. The gospel is more than an offer to be considered—it is a word from God to be obeyed. John writes, "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life" (John 3:36). In this verse, believing in Christ and obeying Him are used synonymously. Simply put, true faith is obedient faith. Our obedience of faith is not the grounds upon which God declares us righteous, but it reveals our faith to be genuine.

At the moment of conversion, we transfer our allegiance from our old master, sin, to a new Master, Jesus Christ. Paul explains, "Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?" (Rom. 6:16). Here, the Apostle quotes a general axiom in life, namely, that slaves live in obedience to their ruling master. In conversion, there is an exchange of masters, a relinquishing of our old bondage to sin for a new loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul further stresses this truth: "You who were once slaves of sin have became obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, became slaves of righteousness" (Rom. 6:17–18). Everyone is a slave, either of sin or of righteousness. Before conversion, we were slaves of sin and lived in obedience to sin. But in conversion, we became slaves of Christ and live in obedience to Him.

Throughout one's Christian life, John claims that genuine believers will continue to "keep his commandments." "Keep" is in the present tense, indicating an ongoing obedience throughout the entirety of a believer's life. Here is the perseverance of the saints. All who are born again will pursue obedience to the end. "Commandments" is plural, indicating obedience to the full spectrum of the divine requirements. Following Christ does not allow for selective obedience. Rather, we must obey all the commandments of God, not merely the convenient ones.

When John says believers "keep" the commandments, this pictures a guard or watchman watching over a priceless treasure. In like manner, the one who knows God will keep a sharp watch over all that His Word requires. "And his commandments are not burdensome" (1 John 5:3), but they are a blessing (Ps. 1:1). Every step of heart-prompted obedience leads to experiencing abundant life in Christ. Conversely, every step of disobedience takes us away from the joy of divine goodness.

Far from being optional, grace-fueled obedience is absolutely necessary for Christlikeness. Is there any need to pray about whether or not to obey God's Word? You just need to obey.

This post was originally published in Tabletalk magazine.

The Essential Difference between the Protestant and Roman Catholic Views of Assurance

In this brief clip from his teaching series A Survey of Church History, W. Robert Godfrey examines the difference between the Roman Catholic and Protestant views of assurance. Watch this entire message for free.

Transcript

Here is the embodiment and summary of what had generally been taught in the Middle Ages but it had never been officially defined that God loves the lovely. “For God to love you, you need to become a different person. You are not loved because of the external righteousness of Christ imputed to you. You are loved because Christ comes into you and changes you so you're a different person so that you can be loved by God.”

That’s a rather brief summary of a rather long document but that's the very heart of it. Rome defines itself now as committed to this proposition that you are only justified by being changed into a different moral person by the grace of God. And this is so important because it remains the essential difference between Protestantism and Rome. And it relates very much to this matter of assurance that we talked about. If you have to be a morally better person to be accepted by God, how much better do you have to be? How do you have any confidence that you've gotten there? And of course, Rome’s pastoral position is you shouldn’t be confident, you ought to be worried. You’ll try harder if you're doubting. It is not good for you to have assurance. That’s just Protestant arrogance.

One of the great Roman Catholic theologians of the late 16th, early 17th century, Robert Bellarmine said “The essential Protestant heresy is the arrogance of assurance.” You'll get lazy if you are assured. You won’t try hard if you're assured. It's good to be doubting and fearful and uncertain. So you have really two quite different religions at work here. Calvin said, “The assured heart in Christ will live for God out of gratitude.”

Is God Justified in Punishing Us for Adam's Sin?

Through our union and corporate solidarity with Adam, the punishment for his sin has been passed to the whole human race. From one of our Ask R.C. events, R.C. Sproul articulates the biblical doctrine of original sin.

Do you have another biblical or theological question? Ask Ligonier is your place for answers. Just visit Ask.Ligonier.org.

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What Does the Word “Gospel” Mean in the New Testament?

The gospel is the possession of Jesus, but, even more, Jesus is the heart of the content of the gospel.

We use it so glibly in the church today. Preachers say they preach the gospel, but if we listen to them preach Sunday after Sunday, we hear very little gospel in what they are preaching. The term gospel has become a nickname for preaching anything rather than something with definitive content. The word for "gospel" is the word euangelion. It has that prefix eu-, which comes into English in a variety of words. We talk about euphonics or euphonious music, which refers to something that sounds good. We talk about a eulogy, which is a good word pronounced about someone at his funeral service. The prefix eu- refers to something good or pleasant. The word angelos or angelion is the word for "message." Angels are messengers, and an angelos is one who delivers a message.

This word euangelion, which means "good message" or "good news," has a rich background in the Old Testament. There, the basic meaning of the term gospel was simply an announcement of a good message. If a doctor came to examine a sick person and afterward declared that the problem was nothing serious, that was gospel or good news. In ancient days when soldiers went out to battle, people waited breathlessly for a report from the battlefield about the outcome. Once the outcome was known, marathon runners dashed back to give the report. That is why Isaiah wrote, "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good news" (Isa. 52:7). The watchman in the watchtower would look as far as the eye could see into the distance. Finally, he would see the dust moving as the runner sped back to the city to give the report of the battle. The watchmen were trained to tell by the way the runner's legs were churning whether the news was good or bad. If the runner was doing the survival shuffle, it indicated a grim report, but if his legs were flying and the dust was kicking up, that meant good news. That is the concept of gospel in its most rudimentary sense.

When we come to the New Testament, we find three distinct ways in which the term gospel is used. First, we have four books in the New Testament that we call Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These books are biographical portraits of Jesus. Gospel in this sense describes a particular form of literature. During the earthly ministry of Jesus, the term gospel was linked not particularly with the person of Jesus but with the kingdom of God. John the Baptist is introduced as one who comes preaching the gospel, and his message is "repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" (Matt. 3:2).

Jesus did the same in His parables, proclaiming, "the kingdom of God is like . . ." On the lips of Jesus, the gospel was about the dramatic moment in history when, through the long-awaited Messiah, the kingdom of God had broken through in time and space. The good news was the good news of the kingdom. By the time the epistles were written, particularly the Pauline epistles, the term gospel had taken on a new shade of understanding. It had become the gospel of Jesus Christ. Gospel had a clear content to it. At the heart of this gospel was the announcement of who Jesus was and what He had accomplished in His lifetime.

If we give our testimony to our neighbors, saying, "I became a Christian last year. I gave my heart to Jesus," we are bearing witness about Jesus, but we are not telling them the gospel, because the gospel is not about us. The gospel is about Jesus—what He did, His life of perfect obedience, His atoning death on the cross, His resurrection from the dead, His ascension into heaven, and His outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the church. We call those crucial elements the objective aspects of the New Testament gospel of Christ.

In addition to the person and work of Jesus, there is also in the New Testament use of the term gospel the question of how the benefits accomplished by the objective work of Jesus are subjectively appropriated to the believer. First, there is the question of who Jesus was and what He did. Second is the question of how that benefits you and me. That is why Paul conjoins the objective account of the person and work of Jesus (particularly to the Galatians) with the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which is essential to the gospel. In preaching the gospel we preach about Jesus, and we preach about how we are brought into a saving relationship with him.

The gospel is under attack in the church today. I cannot stress enough how important it is to get the gospel right and to understand both the objective aspect of the person and work of Jesus and the subjective dimension of how we benefit from that by faith alone.

Recently, a Protestant seminary professor, supposedly evangelical, was quoted to me as having said that the doctrine of imputation—by which our sins are transferred to Christ on the cross and His righteousness is transferred to us by faith—is of human invention and has nothing to do with the gospel. I wanted to weep when I heard that. It just underscored how delicate the preservation of the gospel is in our day and how careful the church has to be in every age to guard that precious good news that comes to us from God.

This excerpt is adapted from Romans: An Expositional Commentary by R.C. Sproul.

$5 Friday: Assurance, Salvation, & Sanctification

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People inside and outside the Church Need to Know Who God Is

“God allows us to participate in the greatest work in human history, the work of redemption.”

You may have heard Dr. Sproul say that. He frequently reminded us of this great work, namely, the honor and privilege of carrying out the evangelization and discipleship of the nations under the authority of Jesus Christ and in the power of His Word and Spirit. It’s breathtaking if you stop and think about it.

You and I carry out this great work as we serve the Great Commission’s purpose to go and make disciples of all nations. And here on the cusp of a new decade, one way you can assist in carrying out this work is by supporting the urgent and needed outreach of Ligonier Ministries.

Your support today is critical for extending our outreach into the next decade and beyond. Standing with us now by giving a donation of any amount to Ligonier’s work will help us meet our year-end need and start 2020 strong.

No doubt, 2020 will be a landmark year. While much of the world’s attention will be given to upcoming elections, you and I know that Jesus Christ is King, actively working to build His church. Out of a love for God and for those who are lost, we must uphold the cause of truth and the clear proclamation of the gospel. People inside and outside the church need to know who God is. We need you to step with Ligonier into this new year of ministry opportunity.

We know that both the root of humanity’s turmoil and the answer to it are primarily theological, not political. All around us, we see the fruit of lives lived without sound doctrine directing them, including the deterioration of human dignity and the loss of compassion for the most vulnerable among us, especially the unborn. Because Jesus is the light of the world, Christians will shine as a light in the world, and the church will be a refuge for the weary, humble, and contrite in spirit—but only if we understand God’s Word rightly and trust in Him for solutions to our problems.

At times like this, it can be easy for the people of God to lose confidence and grow anxious. I’m sure that you, like me, have wondered what the years ahead will mean for the next generation in the church. But we need not lose hope. We must “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:23).

Scripture reveals to us a God of towering majesty who is working out His perfect will, a sovereign God whose purposes can never be thwarted. Our confidence and comfort will only be as great as our view of the Lord and His plan. We need an immense theology—a grand view of God—in order to not be shaken and to hold out hope to our neighbors.

Ligonier Ministries has proclaimed this big theology of the sovereign, holy, and gracious God in 2019, and, by His grace, we’ll do the same in 2020 and in the years to come to even more people.

Just look at some of the ways your support of Ligonier’s gospel outreach has enabled expansion:

You have helped us activate ministry projects in forty languages now. In fact, the growth of the dedicated Arabic outreach we launched in the spring and the launch of a dedicated outreach in Farsi just a couple weeks ago is remarkable. This secures a strategic foothold to equip Christians in the Arab world and in Iran with key discipleship resources. The response is overwhelming. Iran is said to have “the fastest-growing evangelical church in the world.” Many new converts from Islam listen to Dr. Sproul regularly.
You advanced the colossal translation project of a Spanish edition of the Reformation Study Bible . With this translation recently completed, we’re preparing to launch this key resource in one of the world’s most spoken languages in summer 2020.
You enabled us to hold conferences and pastor training events not only in the United States but also in London and Toronto, bringing needed reinforcements to Christians in areas where many believers are under siege by aggressive secularism.
You played a significant role in Reformation Bible College’s welcoming its largest incoming class of freshmen and opening its new building, including more classrooms and a large library, debt free. Dr. Sproul’s vision for the college continues to flourish as we raise up a generation of knowledgeable and articulate Christians.
Your visionary support gave us the confidence to meet the recent explosive interest in podcasts by strategically expanding our team and resources. This year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Renewing Your Mind , an outreach used by God to reach millions of people with life-transforming truth. We also launched the Simply Put podcast to help Christians understand key theological terms and apply them to daily life, and we’re preparing to launch additional podcasts in the months and years to come.
You bolstered the production of several new teaching series and the publication of many new books, including the new single-volume edition of Dr. Sproul’s Truths We Confess . Ligonier’s rich library of trusted teaching deepens every week, all thanks to your support.

That barely scratches the surface. I wish I could sit down with you over a cup of coffee and talk about all the doors that the Lord is opening for Ligonier around the world. We give thanks to God for you and for the way you enable this unique ministry to equip growing Christians with His answers to the most important questions people ask and to help churches continue to advance the Great Commission.

We need your support now to make the most of these opportunities to reach a dying world and to ground Christians in a view of God that is as massive as the Bible presents. Something else R.C. often said is that if someone donates $100, we can do $100 worth of ministry—but what we cannot do is $101 worth of ministry.

We will grow and expand as the Lord allows through the support of His people. We rely on His faithfulness to sustain us. All of us at Ligonier count on ministry supporters such as you who understand the value and eternal impact of this critical work. Unless people like you stand with us, we cannot do what we do.

We believe that God has great things in store for Ligonier Ministries in 2020 and beyond. Your support will send trusted teaching to millions of people near and far. Never underestimate the reach of your gift, no matter the size. The Lord is mighty, and He does mighty things with the generosity of His people.

Thank you for your support now for this vital outreach.

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Our Triune God

Here’s an excerpt from Our Triune God, Burk Parsons' contribution to the December issue of Tabletalk:

It is becoming increasingly popular for people to speak in terms of their version of truth. They use phrases such as “my truth” and “your truth,” as if there are different versions of truth. I have heard people speak of “my truth” in reference to all sorts of things, including history, ethics, science, and religion. While we are certainly entitled to hold our own opinions, we are not entitled to hold to our own versions of truth, for it is impossible for more than one version of the truth to exist.

This way of thinking is not merely the relativism of the past or postmodern pluralism or religious syncretism. This new way of thinking embodies conceptualism. The philosophical mind-set of conceptualism has emerged as a necessary consequence of the post-postmodern zeitgeist (the spirit of the age) as a way for us to engage with other people with whom we disagree and yet get along. Conceptualism provides people with a way to create their own personally conceived realities of truth so that they can believe whatever they want to believe and deny whatever they choose to deny in accordance with their own concept of truth—even if their own conceived reality has no basis in what is in fact reality. Now people can have their own self-conceptualized realities in which they claim to possess their truth while others (with whom they disagree) possess their own truth, with neither truth being true for all people. All this is done so that they can get along in their shared environment of the classroom, the workplace, the internet, and the church.

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What Is the Name That Is above All Names?

In this brief clip from his teaching series What Did Jesus Do?, R.C. Sproul reflects on the name that is above all names.

Transcript

Remember when Jesus was in the upper room the night before His execution? That night that He established the Lord's Supper and He went through that lengthy prayer—the High Priestly Prayer it is called. Do you remember one of the things that Jesus asked for in that prayer? He asked the Father to restore to Him the glory that He had with the Father from the beginning. He said, “I've done my mission. I've been obedient. Now Father, glorify your Son with the glory that He had with you from the foundation of the world.” And this is exactly what God does with Jesus at the completion of His work. There is an endpoint to His indignity. There is a completion to His humiliation that starts so starkly with His birth.

“Therefore, hath God highly exalted Him and given to Him a name that is above every name.” (Phil. 2:9)

Now in that we've done, we've looked carefully at the names and titles that are used for Jesus in the New Testament, which are rich indeed and inspiring to us. But so often when Christians read this passage, they assume that what is being said here is that the name that is above every name is the name Jesus. But that's not what the text is saying. What the text is saying is that God has highly exalted Him to such a degree that at the name of Jesus, when you hear the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and every tongue should confess what? That He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. The name that is above every name is that title that belongs only to God. That title Adonai that refers to God as the sovereign one—that is the title that is revealed that belongs to Christ. Because of His humiliation, because of His perfect obedience in the role of a slave, God moves heaven and earth to exalt His Son, gives Him the name that is above every name, so that when you hear the name of Jesus, your impulse should be to be on your knees and confess that He is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

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The Real Meaning of Christmas

One of the most remarkable stories of Christmas comes from one of the darkest moments of modern history. World War I ravaged a continent, leaving destruction and debris in its wake. The human cost, well in the millions, staggers us. But from the midst of this dark conflict comes the story of the Christmas Truce of 1914. The Western Front, only a few months into the war, was a deplorable scene of devastation. Perhaps as if to give the combatants one day to breathe again, a truce was called from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day.

As darkness settled over the front like a blanket, the sound of exploding shells and the rat-tat-tat of gunfire faded. Faint carols, in French or English voices on one side and in German voices on the other, rose to fill the silence of the night.

By morning, soldiers, at first hesitantly, began filing out of the maze of trenches into the dreaded and parched soil of No Man's Land. There was more singing. Gifts of rations and cigarettes were exchanged. Family photos were passed around. Soccer balls appeared. Up and down the Western Front, soldiers, who only hours before had been locked in deathly combat, now faced off in soccer games.

For one brief but entirely remarkable day, there was peace on earth. Some have called the Christmas Truce of 1914 "the Miracle on the Western Front."

Anxious to print some good news, The Times of London reported on the events of the Christmas Truce. Soldiers recorded the day in letters home and in diaries. Some of those lines made it to newspapers, while others remained unknown until later brought to light. Here's one such line from the diary of a German infantryman:

The English brought a soccer ball from the trenches, and pretty soon a lively game ensued. How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.

"Friends for a time," "the celebration of love," "peace on earth"—this is the meaning of Christmas. But these celebrations, these truces, don't last. After Christmas Day, the soccer balls and the soldiers went back into the trenches. The Christmas carols subsided and the war carried on. And even though World War I eventually ended, a few decades later, Europe's countryside and cities became the field of battle once again, as did Africa and the Pacific, during World War II.

Events like the Christmas Truce are worth celebrating. But they lack something. They lack permanence. Such impermanent peace is what we often find in our quest for the real meaning of Christmas. If we are looking for permanent and ultimate goodwill, love, and peace, we must look beyond our gift-giving, get-togethers, and office parties. We must look to no other place than to a manger.

We must look to a baby born not with fanfare, pomp, and circumstance, but to poor parents in desperate times. Joseph and Mary, and the Baby Jesus for that matter, were real historical figures. But in a way, Joseph and Mary extend beyond themselves, beyond their particular place and time. They represent all of us. We are all poor and living in desperate times. Some of us are better than others at camouflaging it. Nevertheless, we are all poor and desperate, so we all need the promise bound up in that baby.

We are in need of a way out of our poverty of soul and the desperate state of our human condition. We find it in this child lying in a manger, who was and is Jesus Christ, the long-promised Messiah, Seed, Redeemer, and King.

The birth of Jesus so many centuries ago might have been a slightly-out-of-the-ordinary birth. Even in ancient times, stalls didn't typically double as birthing rooms and mangers didn't typically double as cribs for new-born babies. And that newborn baby was very much out of the ordinary. Of course, in some respects, He was perfectly ordinary. He was a human being, a baby. He got hungry. He got thirsty. He got tired. When He was born, He was wrapped in swaddling clothes—the ancient equivalent of Pampers.

An infant. Helpless, hungry, cold, and tired.

Yet, this child was the Son of God incarnate. He was Immanuel, which translated means "God with us." According to the Apostle Paul's account, this infant created all things. This infant created His own manger. And this infant, this King, brings peace on earth, ultimate and permanent peace.

An excerpt from Peace: Classic Readings for Christmas by Stephen Nichols.