A Test Any of Us Can Pass

Not long ago, I experienced an unexpected shock when I preached about God testing the faithful. It seems there were some in the audience who did not believe that God would ever test his children. The thought that He would led to a minor dust storm. To bring a clearing breeze, and to shine some biblical light on the subject, let me offer the following thoughts.

The biblical concept of God testing his children has nothing to do with entrapment. God does not tempt us to do evil, only to say "gotcha!" when we fail. The process of testing is actually one of love-- God searching for that which most delights Him. It is most akin to assaying or refining, or even panning for gold. When God tests us He is attempting to uncover and reveal the best that is in us, our delightful streaks.

God never sets out to prove our unworthiness; instead, he is highlighting what's good about us. Why would God do such a thing? It's not like he doesn't already know! Since he is omniscient and does know, our testing must be directed at some audience other than God. Who could that be? Angels, why yes, but also... us.

Our hearts are so contorted, we don't even understand ourselves. In moments when we honestly see ourselves (any of us not blinded by pride that is) we feel the painful awareness of our own multiplicitous failings. When God tests us he is allowing us to see something beyond that, something that he sees-- that in him we are becoming something more. Sanctified, and truly something wonderful to behold.

That God tests his children along these lines cannot be denied. It is attested to by scripture: Exodus 15:25; 16:4; 20:20 Deuteronomy 8:2,16; 13:3 Judges 2:22; 3:1,4 I Chronicles 29:17 Psalms 7:9; 11:5; 17:3; 26:2; 66:10 Proverbs 17:3 Isaiah 28:16 (even Christ was) Jeremiah 11:20; 12:3; 20:12 Daniel 12:10 Zechariah 13:9 I Thessalonians 2:4 Hebrews 11:17 James 1:2-4, 12 I Peter 1:6-7; 4:12 

So God absolutely tests his children, but don't let yourself get anxious about it, it's a test any of us can pass.

Why Leave A Church?

We live in a mobile society. Folks are shifting from one place to another constantly. I wouldn't think, given such a circumstance, that it would be unexpected that folk would be shifting churches in the shuffle. That's fine, it goes with the territory, but folk are also leaving churches they otherwise would not have to, and it raises the question: "Is OK to leave one's church?"

People leave their churches for all sorts of reasons and in all kinds of conditions. Some leave churches wandering out of a fog bewildered, some surf the edge of the blast wave after a big blow-up, some leave at the end of the left foot of fellowship, and some lose motivation or faith and fall off more than they depart. Some leave because they find another place more attractive, and some just want something new. Everyone that leaves has their reasons, I'm sure.

I doubt that many are legitimately motivated when they choose to leave a church, but I do think that leaving a church can be the right thing to do...

If that church doesn't uphold the Scripture as the infallible rule of faith and conduct;

If that church embraces universalism;

If that church becomes libertine or antinomian; 

If that church adopts legalism...

You get the point. There are practical and doctrinal issues that are so fundamental and non-negotiable, that if a line is crossed there, then we must cross ourselves off the roll. Even if this is the case, I don't think one should leave such a church without a fight. Not that one should seek to win an argument or engage in a turf war, but that one should contend for the faith and for the souls in that body. Don't let them wander off to hell without an effort to save their souls! However, if they won't hear, and won't stand on sound doctrine, then one must leave!

At times, a bone of contention arises between folk that, given the nature of the personalities involved, cannot be resolved. If continuing together in mission is impossible, separating unto mission is acceptable.  It is still unfortunate in the grand scheme, but as long as it is done on reasonable terms and doesn't result in an unending grudge it may be the preferable course of action. We can disagree without being disagreeable, even if it means one going one way and the other going another.

At times, folk are being appointed in the body according to the wishes of the Spirit of God, and leaving one congregation and going to another is precisely what God wants! It's easy to discern this if one is moved to a distant place; it's not so easy if this change takes place in the same town. Regardless, each of us is a gift to the body and we must understand that God gets to place us where he wishes. Actually, I wonder how much dissatisfaction people feel in church is actually just the dissonance in their souls caused by not discerning where God wants them.

There are acceptable, justifiable, and quite spiritual reasons to leave one church and go to another. 

And then there are reasons which are neither expedient nor justifiable.

It is not justifiable to leave a church for selfish reasons. Church is about Jesus being Lord, not about the churchgoer getting what he or she wants. Christians are not customers, the church is not a business and spiritual ministrations are not consumer goods. To treat this God-ordained endeavor as if any of these things were true is an insult to grace. And leaving a church for greener pastures is unacceptable for clergy or laity.

It is not expedient for those who have been appropriately corrected, or who have been properly spiritually directed, to leave a church rather than humbly submitting to that which has been rendered for their spiritual development. The flawed natural constitution of humans beings means that we grow as Christians only to our lowest level of incorrigibility. That cannot excuse a lack of obedience to the Word or to the brethren. Escaping correction or rejecting direction in one body doesn't give one a blank slate to start in another (regardless of whether one is clergy or laity).

There are occasions where the godly will be justified in leaving a church. At times it will be the absolutely right thing to do. Even if it is, it's never something left merely to our discretion or preference. Jesus is head over the body, so he gets to plant us where he wants. 

As for us, we need to stay where we're planted, grow and blossom.

Why Go to Church?

Why should believers go to church? There are a lot of excuses one could give for blowing it off, such as:

• Church folk are nothing but hypocrites
• Their idea of worship is not my idea
• All they do is ask for money
• It's too irrelevant, too loud, too impersonal, too ________...
• I am not genuinely needed, wanted and won't be missed
• I've got better things to do
• When else can I shop or do my household chores?

There are some reasons, which traditionally have been offered, as to why we should go:

• to maintain social cohesion
• because of necessary, clerically performed rituals within the context of structured liturgies
• to derive a benefit from what is offered there
• because it's the "right" thing to do.

I submit that none of the suggested excuses for not going, nor most of the traditional reasons cited for doing so are valid. They are mere rationalizations without any spiritual merit.

The scriptures tell us that together we are the body of Christ, and the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. So we gather as the church because:

• We are connected with unseen bonds 
• We acknowledge the truth of how God sees us (as one in Christ) 
• We need the gifts of others and we need to be the vector of gifts for others
• The Bible tells us to do so.

If someone is so disillusioned with church that he or she doesn't want to go anymore, that one should do some serious soul searching. Has he or she been going for the right reasons in the first place? Has that one given his or herself fully to being a benefit to the church rather than deriving a benefit from it? Does that person believe that God changed his mind about this whole issue?

If someone is not motivated enough, or too occupied or distracted with discretionary things to go to church, he or she needs to change. Church exists because God selflessly loved us enough to do something about our lostness. Christ has called us to himself and to each other for all eternity. If we're not grasping that and are capable of treating church like we treat the choice of which grocer to use, we don't understand Jesus--not his plans for us, not what he calls us to, and not what he's making us to be.

Perhaps we don't truly believe in Jesus at all! 

I am a pastor committed to church, but I have also been a lay person going to church reluctantly. I know what it's like to go to church hoping for inspiration only to find frustration. I know what it's like having a bad week and wanting to hibernate, or what it's like to have an option that seems better to the flesh. I even know what it's like to feel as if you've disappeared into the background of an impersonal institution and that it's of no use anyway.

I also know that the trying of our faith brings forth a peaceable fruit. In life on this side of eternity nothing is perfect. Church is not, church people are not, and pastors are anything but. Despite all that brokenness, perseverance in church attendance is God's will for us. When we faithfully commit to it, despite the drama and flaws, we become a blessing to others and blessing comes back to us.

Blessing in the midst of brokenness... that sounds exactly like something that's of Christ should look like on this side of eternity.

Count the Cost

I was 19, lost in the fog of drug abuse and crushed under the weight of self-loathing, when I remembered something I had once known about Jesus. I picked up The Way and started reading the Bible between bong hits. About 3 weeks later, a knock at my door revealed two Campus Crusaders doing their witness thing.

They wanted to "share" a little booklet with me that would tell me how I could receive Christ. I may have been a burn out, but that didn't mean I wasn't polite to strangers. I invited them in and listened with interest. At the end of their presentation they asked me if understood all they had shared, "yup," I answered.

"Did I believe it?" they wondered. "Sure," I said, "and added, "that's the coolest thing I've ever heard!" "Then let's pray to receive Christ right now!" they pressed. "No," I said, "can't do that." Why?" they asked incredulously. "Because I'm not willing to give up everything to follow Christ," I answered naively. I had been reading the Bible and I knew one couldn't follow Jesus just by acknowledging him mentally and not changing the direction of his life. I wasn't ready to do that.

They thought going through everything again would shake my reticence, and so, pencil in hand marking the words on the page as we read, we did it all again. They asked again, and I resisted again. We discussed, I resisted, they got upset, I kicked them out. I didn't receive Christ for another two years. Thank God my life didn't end before my resistance to Christ did.

Could they have handled the situation differently and been successful with me? Perhaps... if they had met my objection straight up with a challenge to stop piddling around when I knew the way, turn my life over to Christ and start following him. Instead, they relied on the "just receive Christ" (i.e. pray the prayer) and it will all come out in the wash. That's nothing but wishy-washy and flew in the face of the Bible which I had been reading.

I wish that we would stop playing the "bait and switch" game; that we would stop, in blatant distrust of Jesus, sugar-coating the gospel thinking that we're helping the cause!. This non-evangelistic evangelism is demeaning to Christ, to the cross, and to all those who have faithfully gone before. This is not some frivolous social club, it's the kingdom of God. It comes at a price and those saved need to count the cost-- at least that's what Jesus said.

Evolution: Not A Chance

"The fool says in his heart there is no God."         Psalm 14:1

If not God, to whom or to what is our existence attributable?

Evolutionists posit chance as the mechanism that first strung together the chemicals of life and then sparked life itself from them. Add billions of years of natural selection working on chance mutations and the evolutionary formula handily creates the astounding variety of life that we see today and observe in the fossil record. All this from the simple mechanism of chance! Fortunately, chance is a statistical concept that can be treated mathematically and if we do so we can test the hypothesis.

The oddsmakers in Vegas make a living doing that kind of a thing. So let's do likewise and ask ourselves what is the likelihood that life arose by chance by doing a simple statistical exercise. Since virtually everything within the living cell is one kind of protein or another (no proteins = no life), our statistical query can concentrate on the probability of one such protein forming by chance.

Proteins are formed by linking amino acid residues into polymeric chains, most of which are hundreds of residues long, some thousands. Due to their chemical structure, amino acids form in two varieties that are mirror images of one another, one called left-handed the other right-handed. For whatever reason, all the proteins in living things are constructed of only left-handed varieties of the 20 amino acids found in life.

Living things use these proteins in very specific ways, so shape and content are very important to function. A protein chain which is not shaped (folded) properly, with the appropriate chemicals in the appropriate places, will not function as needed. Either a deficiency in (as in many diseases) or a cessation of function will result if that is the case.

So our query, as simplified as possible, will be: “What are the odds of a small, specific protein forming by chance in a chemical soup which has endless supplies of all the various amino acids necessary for life, all in their left-handed forms?” We pick a relatively small protein for this exercise, since by the evolutionary framework the first proteins would have been smaller on average than those we find in today’s lifeforms. For ease of calculation and visualization, we will use the number 100.

This calculation does not take into account that amino acids formed outside of living things are 50% right-handed, nor is any consideration given to the decay rate of a protein chains due to water, radiation or heat. The actual abundance or availability of necessary chemicals in any proposed schema for the primordial earth is not considered as well. This exercise can be likened to drawing colored balls from a box filled with 20 different colored balls supplied in infinite amounts, equally available at any given instant, in order to attain a certain sequence of colors.

We need to draw a specific color sequence from that box 100 balls long. What are the odds of doing so? The mathematics of probabilities tell us that the answer will be 1 in the total number of varieties of balls available raised by the number of balls in the sequence, or in our case 1 in 20^100. That can be restated in scientific notation as 1/(1.268 X 10^130), the denominator representing the total number of different 100 ball sequences possible without repetition. Those are some mighty small odds, some might say vanishingly small.

Just to put these incredible numbers into some context, let’s interpose time into the problem. Let’s assume it is possible to draw six billion different 100 ball sequences every second. How long would it take in “chance time” to draw the specific sequence we were looking for? We take the odds above, 1/(1.268 X 10^130), and divide them by 6 X 10^9 sequences per second, which results in odds that the one sequence desired would occur in 2.11 X 10^120 seconds, or about 6.69 X 10^112 years.

According to most evolutionary scenarios the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Even if it was 7 billion years, probabilities suggest that even that age would have to be raised to over the twelfth power to achieve the likelihood that one specific 100 amino acid protein chain would be produced by chance. And that is assuming that 6 billion chains could be formed per second during that duration. The odds are so overwhelming, it seems to me, as to suggest the impossibility that chance produced even one usable protein, let alone life.

A very simplistic exercise, for sure, and there are evolutionists who would argue with the use of probabilities in this way. I haven’t found their arguments convincing in the least, especially since getting to a useful protein by means of RNA and DNA is only orders of magnitude more difficult with much longer odds. The statistical problem with using chance as the mechanism for the emergence of life on earth remains despite their objections and cannot be mitigated by time—billions times billions of years do not, realistically, make the odds any better.

When we consider the number of proteins that even the most basic single-celled organism uses to do what it does, including the cellular machinery used for gene expression, it just gets worse and worse and worse. With odds such as we have demonstrated here, is it even possible to claim serendipitous evolution as the source of all the wonders of life? Not even a chance!

Special thanks to Dr. Michael Behe, Dr. Stephen Meyer, the contributors of "In Six Days," and a host of others whose have proposed similar statistical analyses.

Did Jesus Speak In Tongues?

Did Jesus speak in tongues? Of all people, as our supreme example, why wouldn't he if it really mattered? He did experience the Spirit coming upon him, he performed all kinds of miracles, and prophesied incredible revelation. That is astonishingly rich spiritual life, no doubt, so where are the tongues?

To our knowledge, Jesus never spoke in tongues.

We have so little insight into his personal life, it is difficult to say anything definitive about his private practices. If he did speak in tongues for his own edification, no one was there to witness it. If some one did witness it, no biblical author was ever impressed by the Holy Spirit to record it. Although if someone had witnessed him doing so, I feel fairly certain it would have been recorded in light of Acts 2.

As far as his public ministry goes, we have no recorded incidence of Jesus ever speaking in tongues. We do have incidences of him speaking in Aramaic, but that was his native language, not the supernatural occurrence of speaking in tongues. Again, in light of Acts 2, had he spoken in tongues, I feel fairly certain one of the gospel authors would have recorded it. Something so seminal in the birth of the church would have surely had a precedent in the life of Christ recorded if there was one.

Regardless, I think the real issue implied by this question is that if Jesus never did, why should we? The answer is that regardless of what Jesus' experience was in this respect, at its beginning the church unanimously spoke in tongues, and the experience was promised to all that followed. For the disciples and those selected to be Apostles by Jesus, the clear choice of God was that every one of them spoke in tongues upon their baptism in the Spirit, even though Jesus never did.

So, the particular experience of Jesus in regard to speaking in tongues is not the controlling precedent for those who follow him. Instead, it is the experience of those who first followed Jesus which is the model for Christian experience. Jesus may have not spoken in tongues, but his followers did, and so can we!

What About Those Who Don't Speak in Tongues?

Many folk at my church, and at other Pentecostal churches, have not spoken in tongues... yet. I say that because it is my desire that every one of them would. It is not something that can be forced or enforced, but I believe that each Christian who hasn't spoken in tongues... yet, would be blessed and more in line with biblical practice if he or she did.

Jude, in his brief epistle, says that we build up our faith by praying in the Spirit. The Apostle Paul said in his letter to the Romans that the Spirit is able to pray that which we can't find the words to utter. The phrase: "praying in the Spirit" is just another way to describe tongues, which are incomprehensible speech inspired by the Spirit. Clearly, the Bible highlights the benefits to the believer of praying in the Spirit, and I see no possible downside to speaking with other tongues when the scriptures testify to the upside.

Of course, what really matters is what Jesus wants for us. He told the first believers to wait until they were baptized in the Spirit before going off and trying to fulfill the Great Commission. They waited, were baptized in the Holy Spirit, spoke in tongues as a result, and then proceeded to go out and turn the world upside down. Why would anyone expect a different pattern for those who came after them? Certainly, only really bad interpretation musters 1 Corinthians 13 for that duty.

Evangelism and church planting took off globally when Pentecostals began to follow that pattern early in the last century. More has been accomplished toward fulfilling the Great Commission by tongue-speaking charismatics in the last 100 years than has been accomplished by the cessationist church for the entirety of its 17 centuries of history. Honestly, this is the definition of a no-brainer.

We need to be baptized in the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. If someone hasn't received it... yet, he or she should not be treated badly or ostracized, but should merely be encouraged to continue waiting in faith. The only division this experience needs to cause within the family of God occurs when someone tries to prevent folk from speaking in tongues. That is clear disobedience to the Word and is awful, but trying to force someone to do so who doesn't... yet might be just as bad.

Why Do We All Speak In Tongues?

Pentecostals believe that every believer who has been baptized in the Holy Spirit can speak in tongues. It's the initial physical evidence that the experience has in fact occurred according to their reckoning. Charismatics don't necessarily concur, and so I ask, "Are tongues the only initial evidence of being baptized in the Spirit?" Beyond doubt, tongues are one of the possible evidences found in the scriptures, but what about the fruit of the Spirit or prophecy and visions?

People wonder, perhaps you do too, why this fixation upon tongues among the Pentecostals? Simply, it is biblical. Except for the experience of Christ (as dealt with in this post), speaking in tongues is either directly associated or can be inferred to have occurred in every incidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit recorded in the Bible. In Acts 2, 10, and 19, tongues are specifically referenced; in Acts 8, it is clear that the baptism in the Holy Spirit was anticipated to have some physical, visible sign. Given the facts of what they accepted as evidence in chapter 10, what would that evidence be but tongues?

Even though it's not mentioned in Acts 9, we know that Paul could speak in tongues after his baptism (filling) with the Spirit (as noted in this post). Minimally, it was widespread, if not universal (as I believe) in Corinth. That other signs, like prophesying, may manifest in conjunction with tongues should not seem incredible, but that tongues is associated with every scriptural account of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit cannot be reasonably disavowed.

The earliest church had an experience that then became precedent for the church that followed. The first church used that first occurrence as a rough template to judge that which happened in their time, we should do the same. For the vast stretch of time that the historical church did not follow suit, there were no tongues and precious little other miraculous manifestations. In 1901, when that which became the Pentecostal Movement rediscovered this pattern and embraced it as normative, tongues and miracles resurfaced with vigor.

I think we can know the tree by its fruit in respect to this doctrine. Those who believe it experience what is found in the scriptures, whereas those who don't clumsily scramble about trying to explain why they don't practice what is found in the scriptures. Why would anyone attempting to abide by the Bible as instruction in godly living not want to speak in tongues?

There is, however, a big difference between the evidence for birth by and the evidence of baptism in the Holy Spirit. The fact of conversion is evidenced initially by the Holy Spirit inwardly inspiring an awareness of God as Father and Jesus as Lord. Over time, it expresses itself outwardly by a lifestyle of holiness and the fruit of the Spirit. The initial evidence of baptism in the Spirit is speaking in tongues. Ideally, a Christian will evidence both.