What’s It There For?

Jason’s next chapter is “The Bragging Calvinist,” and the basic principles he lays down are very good. He sticks close to the text of Scripture, and shows how bragging in your own autonomous glory apart from the Lord is excluded, and how the new covenant opens up new freedoms in which we may voluntarily submit ourselves to situations that God did not require of us, and boast righteously in that. And ultimately, of course, let him who boasts do so in the Lord. But the devil is in the details, and differences arise when we come to application.

Ironically, speaking of application, Jason cites a problem when it comes to application in preaching. When the congregation asks for applicatory preaching, they are asking to be taught how to live. “This request is often tantamount to a desire for law instead of gospel, a hunger to be told what we can do for God rather than resting in what He has done for us” (p. 160).

“But the gospel is never an assumption from within but always an announcement from without, which is why we need to be trained to long for gospel rather than law” (p. 160).

Now I actually agree with this, as far as it goes, but I think Jason is not being cynical enough about the propensity of human beings to turn anything whatever into law. They can even do this with the words of grace, and the higher the octane of the grace, the greater the wrong kind of pride when the twisting comes. The thing that saves is actual grace, not grace formally noted and applauded. Our trust in Christ is found in the heart of the prayer, and not in whether or not the footnotes of the prayer are doctrinally proper and according to Turabian. The Pharisee who went down to the Temple to pray gave credit where credit was due. He prayed a soli Deo gloria prayer, did he not? “I thank thee, God, that I am not like other men . . .”

Whenever you preach practical application — like Paul consistently does at the conclusion of his letters — it is quite possible, and depending on the people, highly likely, that they will turn this into a new law and then impale themselves on it. Yes, people do that, and they do it when the Holy Spirit is not active in sparing them from that particular folly. But you can’t get away from this tendency by knocking off the applicatory preaching. In order to knock it off, you have to urge one another to knock off the application so that we are not distracted into works righteousness, and whenever you urge people to do something like that, a bunch of them will apply what you say. And we all know how dangerous application is.

This is not cute word play, incidentally. I was talking to a woman one time about this principle, and she told me sheepishly about her first reaction to that great grace question hypothetically presented at the pearly gates — “why should I let you into heaven?” The right answer of course is a variant of “because of the blood of Jesus Christ, plus nothing.” She told me that her first instinctive reaction was, “Gee, I hope I remember to say that.”

Do you see the principle? For a legal heart, everything is law. For a gracious heart, everything is grace. When the Spirit is moving among a people, you do not stumble them by telling them how to love their wives, bring up their children, work hard at their jobs, and so on. No reason to snip out the last three chapters of Ephesians. And if the Spirit is not moving among a people, you cannot keep them safe in “grace” by insisting upon no ethical obligations whatever. What could go wrong with that, right?

The proclamation of grace without an actual movement of the Spirit’s grace is nothing but tiny works, cerebral works, the work of sitting on your butt listening to sermons about it. That’s a work . . . for the wrong kind of heart. The experience of grace is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ actually saving people. Of course, we tell them about it — how will they hear without a preacher — but salvation is not found in the telling, the hearing, the willing or the running. Salvation is found in the saving; salvation is as salvation does, and salvation does what God tells it to. And when salvation comes, the Reformed reform, and evangelicals get born again.

One other thing. Suppose we listen to the good news proclaimed about a salvation accomplished outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and outside of me and all my straining efforts. Suppose we listen to it, hear and heed. And suppose further that my life still has sixty years left in it — now what? Practical teaching from the Scriptures is teaching that is grounded in the text of Scripture, and is therefore protected from becoming a false gospel to the extent that the last three chapters of Ephesians — do this and that — are grounded in the first three chapters. The most important word in that book is therefore, right at the beginning of chapter 4. Therefore, do these things. People who do them, or preach doing them, but who don’t therefore do them, are disobeying the gospel. And those who luxuriate in the redemptive historical sweep of the first three chapters, and the sermon series never gets into labor relations, Christian marriage, Christian education, church government, and so forth is also disobeying the gospel. Whenever you see a therefore, what’s it there for?