Knowing the Answers versus Believing the Answers

II Timothy 1:12b

For I know the one in whom I have placed my confidence, and I am perfectly certain that the work he has committed to me is safe in his hands until that day.  (Phillips)

I know Him and I have put my trust in Him. And I am fully certain that He has the ability to protect what I have placed in His care until that day.  (The Voice)

I know the One I have believed in. I am sure he is able to take care of what I have given him. I can trust him with it until the day he returns as judge. (NIrV)

For I know him in whom I have trusted and I am fully convinced that he is able to guard my deposit until that day. (Mounce)

I couldn’t be more sure of my ground—the One I’ve trusted in can take care of what he’s trusted me to do right to the end.  (Message)

I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day. (KJV)

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I Corinthians 2:2

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. (ESV)

For I resolved to know nothing (to be acquainted with nothing, to make a display of the knowledge of nothing, and to be conscious of nothing) among you except Jesus Christ (the Messiah) and Him crucified.  (AMP)

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I’m currently reading The Pastor’s Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity by Barnabas Piper. Although I’m not a PK myself, many of his words resonate; especially in terms of the expectations often placed on a kid to be something spiritually that he or she is not. It can be easy to pretend. It can be easy to act the part — the background meaning to the word hypocrite, and fool the people in your spiritual community, or even though the broader community, though the latter may in fact be more likely to see through the facade.

I think a portion of scripture that should horrify all of us, even those who “know that they know that they know”  is Matthew 7: 21-23:

²¹ “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. ²² Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ ²³ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

I mean, doesn’t that just make you go “Yikes!” And yet, The Twelve, after spending three years in Jesus had no assurance of themselves spiritually and so in Matthew 26: 21-22 we read the account:

And while they were eating, he said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.” They were very sad and began to say to him one after the other, “Surely you don’t mean me, Lord?” (NIV)

Barnabas Piper writes about hiding his true self under layers; he compares it to the layers of an onion:

I spent all those years knowing all the right answers about everything, convincing everyone I was all good.  But at no point did I know what I believed.  I knew answers, but not reality.  I knew cognitive truth, but not experiential truth.  I was an internal mess.  I knew right and wrong.  I knew Jesus and His saving work.  I knew my need for a savior and grace.  But I didn’t believe these things.  I didn’t know them like I know my wife or my children – real, experiential, proven.  And so, after twenty years as a Christian, sin took over my heart and then my life.  It nearly cost me my marriage.  It did cost me that job.  I was broken.  All because I knew answers about everything but didn’t truly know what I believed.  All because what I showed the world was ‘right’ but inside me was a whole lot of wrong.

It is only grace that has restored me.  It was the awful power of God’s grace that peeled back layer after layer of hypocrisy, my onion self, to expose my heart to what I knew answers about but truly needed to believe.  It wasn’t the first time I had fallen, and it wasn’t the first time God had exposed my sin and His grace, but the other times I had moved on, lesson unlearned.  So He peeled me to save me.

More than anything I want my breaking to be the freeing of others.

Lord Jesus; help me not just to be someone who knows all the answers about you, but help me to truly be someone who is placing my trust in you, truly believing you, for everything. Amen

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Today’s bonus item (from Twitter)

F – forwarding
A – all
I – issues
T – to
H – Heaven

 

 

 

An Often Neglected Qualification for an Elder

From Blog and Mablog, this piece by Douglas Wilson will take you in a couple of different directions. I encourage you to read it at source where it appeared under the title  Leaving the 99: Church Government – Elders of the Church.

Over the years I have written a good deal about one of the great neglected qualifications for the ministry, which is the spiritual state of the minister’s family and home. Paul tells us plainly that a man whose house is not in order is not qualified to be a steward in the household of God. The stewardship abilities required in the one setting are comparable to those which are needed in the other. The texts seem plain enough.

“If a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work . . . One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?) (1 Tim. 3:1,4-5)

“Ordain elders in every city . . . the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly. For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God” (Tit. 1:5-7)

Having stated the hard center of the position, let us go on to acknowledge that life is messy and the texts are not plain enough to apply themselves. Somebody has to make decisions about it, and there will be complications. For example, the requirements have to do with making someone a minister — sacking a minister two years before his retirement is not in view. We also have to decide where the enforcement line for others might be. A man might have one line for what would require his own resignation, another one for how much he would say if a friend asked his advice, and yet a third for what he would fight about at presbytery. Another question concerns what scale of blameworthiness we are using — do we wait until excommunication? Or is the line crossed as soon as the wife of the head deacon sees the teenaged son of the minister sneaking into the back room of the video rental store? And what about the pastor whose natural kids are all thriving spiritually but the crack cocaine baby they adopted has had nothing but struggles? Okay, so life is messy, and we have to make decisions, and we have to do so non-legalistically, and do so without treating personal pastoral problems like we were stacking no more than five wooden blocks. Got it.

That said, I want to offer another consideration for men who are in such messy situations, and who truly desire to know what the Lord would have them do. I do not offer them a rule, and certainly I am not handing a rule over to the self-appointed chairman of their lynching party. I don’t want to lend encouragement to any “tag, you’re disqualified” factions within the church. Sometimes people confuse settling scores with holiness. I simply offer something to consider, and here it is.

Not all disqualifications are the same. Some men are disqualified from the ministerial office down to the bone. Given the nature of the case, they are probably disqualified in other areas as well, but when it comes to the Christian family, they don’t have a clue. Many years ago, back in our Jesus people days, when I was a very young pastor, a gent rolled into town, and “felt led” such that he wanted to join in with us on the leadership team. Only problem was, he had been married six times — and the last two wives were in his Christian phase. Um, let us think about it, no. So say a pastor has six kids, all of them hellions, from the three-year-old, whom the child care workers at the church have affectionately named Demon Child, to the eldest boy, who is sixteen and has already gotten three girls in the youth group pregnant. How all this could possibly be happening is a grand mystery to Dad, and he feels greatly put upon if anybody is legalistic enough to bring it up. Whatever happened to grace? This is disqualification simpliciter.

But there is another sort of qualification issue that is in a different category entirely. It is not the revealing of an utterly unpastoral heart, but is rather closer to what I would regard as one of a pastor’s final qualifying exams, an advanced test. A pastor has a number of grown children, walking in the Lord, and one black sheep. Does the Bible give directions to shepherds about the sheep who can take care of themselves for a bit, and the one who obviously can’t? Yes, it does.

“What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing” (Luke 15:4-5).

There are two elements here — the obvious one is finding the lost sheep. But the other element is that of leaving the ninety nine. In this scenario, with this consideration, the disqualification would not be in the fact of the sheep wandering — that does happen from time to time. The potential disqualification comes in not going after the wandering sheep. The “reveal” is not found in the fact that a pastor’s kids can sin, sometimes grievously. I would want to argue that a pastor’s kid can sin grievously without disqualifying his or her father from the ministry. But what happens after that? When a child sins in this way, it is not so much a disqualification from ministry as it is a drastic invitation to radical ministry.

So this is just a consideration. When should a good pastor leave the 99? “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). The answer is some form of “when there are just 99.”

~Douglas Wilson