Applying the Gospel

Christian churches seem naturally to gravitate in their Worship services toward one of two poles: transcendence or immanence. Churches that emphasize transcendence in Worship promote a sense of the divine, “other-worldliness,” majesty, awe, holiness (in its meaning of being distinct, set apart for God), et cetera. God is exalted as being quite different from anything or anyone in this world. Churches that emphasize immanence in Worship promote a sense of warmth, acceptance, intimacy, familiarity, and the like. God is known as a close friend. It’s easy to take either of these emphases to improper extremes.

In and of themselves, however, transcendence and immanence are both good. God is high and lifted up, and there is none like him. And God has come in the flesh to be a friend of sinners. We need to hold both of these together in worship. We need to be in awe (transcendence) of God’s presence (immanence). We need to be drawn into communion (immanence) with the divine (transcendence). We need a sense of “friendly transcendence” in Worship. We need love.

God is love, Three-in-One, One-in-Three, Being-in-Communion. So, love is divine. Love is holy. This love is unlike anything in this world. What/Who else is love? Love is transcendent.

God is love, three persons living perfectly for Other, always moving toward, always meeting. So love is warm. Love is intimate. This love invades the world. Love makes itself known. Love is immanent.

God is transcendent because he is Triune. God is immanent because he is Triune. In Christ, the perfect revelation of God, we have friendly transcendence. We need Christ, and we have him.

It would seem, generally, that the further down the stream of history one gets away from the origin of something, the more likely one is to lose a clear vision of that something. Think, a long game of “Telephone,” where a thought, an event record, a religion gets passed from one generation to the next. We generally expect there to be decay in the transmission, especially without the use of video/photographic records. We expect the original participants/thinkers to have the clearest understanding, and then things just get foggier and less reliable from there. We expect our children to forget important things that made up our lives, just as we have forgotten important things about our parents. We expect our disciples to have less understanding than we have.

Paul wrote, “What you have heard from me… entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2). Our job as disciples is to keep a really long game of “Telephone” going. Of course, we have the written Word of God to pass on to future generations, but the expectation here is that there would be no transmission decay in discipleship. And in fact, the history of the church has actually demonstrated improvement in discipleship in certain ways, especially in theological understanding. Rather than doctrinal concepts getting foggier with the movement of time away from the origin of Christianity, it appears that Christian thinkers have “stood upon the shoulders” of their predecessors and developed a clearer understanding of God’s Word than earlier disciples enjoyed.

Could this be a facet of the true relationality that stands at the center of Christianity? The Persons of the Trinity have known each other perfectly for all eternity. But God created his people at a finite point in time, and welcomes them into a relationship of knowing him that will last forever. We, as individuals, will never cease to grow in our relational knowledge of God. It would also seem that we, as the church, the corporate body of believers throughout history, together are growing in our collective knowledge of God. It’s taking a long time, but his bride is getting to know him better. So maybe, by God’s grace, we can expect that our children and our disciples will actually know the Lord better than we do. There’s something pleasant and hopeful about that thought.

“Worship music” is one element of worship on the Lord’s Day among several (e.g., prayer, confession of faith, giving of offerings, submission to God’s Word, etc.). The congregation sings together to the Lord. Musical accompaniment is meant to engage the whole person—heart, soul, mind, and body (voice)—in singing to God. And, really, it’s not just the person as an individual who is to be thus engaged, but the whole church together.

Yet it is inevitable that, in any particular church, not everyone will be moved by the same music to the same experience of worship. Some will find it easy to pour themselves enthusiastically into most of the songs a congregation sings. Some will find it difficult to resonate with any songs anywhere. Is it a failure of the style or performance of the musical accompaniment, that it doesn’t have universal appeal? Is it a failure of the musicians to consider the tastes of every individual who may be present? Is it a failure of the worshiper to appreciate what constitutes “good worship music”? Is it a failure of the congregation to unite in the Spirit and devote itself fully to praise?

Or is this dynamic an opportunity to join with our spiritual siblings in an element of worship we don’t find entirely instinctive? Is it an opportunity to be stretched and, potentially, to stretch others? Is it an opportunity to question our expectations and resist our consumeristic culture? Is it an opportunity to exalt the love of Christ that compels us to set aside our preferences and commit to something that we may not find entirely gratifying?

1. Fear of dealing with your own soul can make you utterly self-absorbed. You will spend every ounce of energy to feel okay about yourself, to avoid actually becoming okay.

2. In pursuing autonomy, we have made ourselves slaves. But, “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” In submitting to him, we find true freedom.

A poem.

~

I am somebody
because
I am lovable
because
I am good enough
because
I can be good
because
I want to be good
because
I have to be good
because
I want love
because
I am not loved

Because
I disbelieve God
because
I despise God
because
I want to be God

A poem. Listen here to the reading by my good friend, Robert.

~

What do you do
when arrested by

steel cuffs clapped on the wrist bone?

her eyes?

notice of severance?

the sweet, gurgling brook?

her death?

a stranger tapping your shoulder?

the fangs of the beast?

baby’s coo?

your failing heart?

the shotgun crack of strong words,

or some other weapon?

a sidewalk bakery?

wounded hands, feet and side?

Have you learned
a response?

Do you reject
the ache
of unbidden reality?

Do you ignore
the possibility
of life
interjecting?

Or
are the gray days
redeemed
by a
starker
color?

We always have reasons for doing what we do. This is true whether we think consciously about those reasons or not. In fact, most of the time we just feel our reasons, acting intuitively and without deliberation. In other words, our motives often fly under the radar of our minds while moving us to action.

Now, if our motives were always and only good, maybe this wouldn’t be a problem. After all, allies flying under our radar pose no threat. But what if our enemies were flying under our radar? What if those enemies were our own sinful motives, like self-advancement or self-justification? What if those motives were really good at concealing themselves from our awareness? What if those motives effectively took out our radar, enabling a whole host of evil motives to operate in stealth? Or, worse still, what if those motives scrambled our signals, convincing us that they were our allies to be welcomed instead of our enemies to be repelled?

That could be bad.

“This book is an invitation to explore the dividedness that infects the Christian heart. Singleness of Heart investigates the ways in which this dividedness is exhibited and probes behind it to concealed and unacknowledged motives… If the exploration is not made, the reward may never be obtained. Healing requires that the condition needing healing be brought to light” (p. xi).

Clifford Williams writes to Christians who sense that they lack singleness of heart “to possess eternity” (p. 3). His readers have a longing for God, but do not pursue him wholeheartedly. Our dividedness, Williams asserts, is not because of some external force compelling us to ignore our dominant passion. Rather, we are divided because we distract ourselves, we suppress the longing for grace, we evade eternity intentionally. We love God and we resent God. We want grace and we reject grace. We love others selflessly and we use them to build our self-esteem. This kind of dividedness Williams labels ambivalence, of the sort displayed in the supplication, “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24; p. 8).

There is a more frightening kind of dividedness, however, which Williams calls illusion:

“In it, our real motives for acting are different from the motives we think we act from. If we engage in volunteer activities, thinking that we do so in order to help needy people, but really do so in order to be noticed by those whose esteem we value, we are in a state of illusion. We are also in a state of illusion if our submerged motive for greeting acquaintances with large and friendly smiles is to be known as outgoing, or if we join a prayer group merely to demonstrate to others that our Christianity is not deficient. The dividedness in these cases consists of a public posture that is at variance with an inner reality. We seem to others and to ourselves to be one thing when in reality we are something else” (p. 9).

The hard part is that we would prefer not to know this about ourselves. We are broken people with mixed motives who cannot bear the thought that our motives are mixed, so we conceal those motives from ourselves. It is exceedingly difficult to examine ourselves honestly, but this is what the author helps us to do, for our good.

Williams provides many examples of ambivalent or illusory motives at work to show how deep the problem runs, teaching us to recognize the kinds of things going on unnoticed inside us. His description of the divided heart is so stinging that in reading I found myself often literally clutching at my chest, wishing I could cast my heart away from me. My dividedness is just the kind of thing I never wanted to know about myself! Yet I desperately need to know it in order to have a truer acceptance of God’s grace, a more single-hearted pursuit of eternity.

That’s the ultimate goal of the book. Williams doesn’t want to expose you to yourself just for the sake of honesty, which can actually lead to despair if you don’t like what you find. He wants to help restore you to singleness of heart. He shows what it means to be open to grace, commending true contrition and acceptance of God’s love (ch. 6). He describes life in a community of grace, all of us being in need of grace and able to give grace to one another (ch. 7). He holds up self-forgetful praise to God and awareness of moral beauty in others as sealing the rift in our souls (ch. 8). He offers the joyful hope that “from the perspective of eternity, our true nature consists of desires that are unmixed with impulses of self-justification and self-admiration” (p. 135), and that one day we will be freed forever from the dividedness that now burdens us.

Williams has done us a great service in wrestling a difficult topic into accessibility. When I say the topic is difficult, I do not mean too intellectual or complex to understand (though if it were, one would not notice for the clarity of his writing). I mean that we all have a strong natural aversion to understanding the topic because of the dividedness of our souls. Normally when our sinful motives are brought to light, we shut our eyes, cover our ears, and sing something distractingly loud in order to avoid being confronted with the truth. But Williams writes in a disarming way. He is humble. With the content and tone of his writing, he constantly places himself alongside the reader under his own scrutiny. “Singleness of Heart is as much confession as it is description of the interior life” (p. xii). The topic becomes accessible because the reader does not have to overcome a sense of cold judgment by Williams as a further impediment to self-examination. Rather, the reader feels he has an empathetic companion along for the journey. (There is certainly a lesson to be learned from him here.)

Some might complain that Williams largely waits until the very end of the book to sum up his concepts with an explicitly biblical worldview; “major motifs in Christianity – creation, fall, and redemption – may also be thought of in terms of desires” (p. 135). Why didn’t he start from there, unfolding his ideas with more biblical terminology and citations? Speculation isn’t necessarily helpful here. Rather, I offer my judgment that the content of Singleness of Heart is in fact tremendously biblical, whether or not Williams used the language of Scripture at a level satisfactory to all. His insights into our motives are consistent with this biblical truth: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). And his prescription for healing amounts to none other than this biblical command: “Keep yourselves in the love of God” (Jude 1:21). My only substantial complaint is with the regular use of general phrases like “the love of God” or “the grace of God,” where a description of the Gospel of Jesus Christ might be more profound.

This is a book to which I will return many times in my life for personal renewal and ministry. I probably would have underlined every sentence, if that didn’t defeat the purpose of underlining. I’m going to require it for leadership training in our church, and would love to give a copy to every Christian I know. I recommend it very highly to those who are called to help people know themselves and accept the grace of God in Christ Jesus. Of course, like all good books about the Christian life, it will never work if you only treat it as a ministry tool to be used on others. You must read it with an eye to applying it to yourself first. It might hurt, but it will be worth it.

You cannot train yourself to live as a Christian without having to think as a Christian. Sanctification requires conscious attention. There is no such thing as autopilot when it comes to faith.

Christian good works are always fueled by active reflection on the Gospel. We have to do more than simply assume the Gospel and no longer think about it. We have to constantly, deliberately, actually meditate on it.

Daniel served in the administration of one of the most wicked governments in history. He went to a pagan school that would appall American Christians. He let himself be renamed after the false god of Babylon. His book wasn’t a rant against the evils of Babylonian society. Daniel’s book was a tribute to the presence, authority, and grace of the King of kings.

Jesus is Immanuel, God with us. He is the risen Lord, with all authority in heaven and on earth. And he loves us, and laid down his life for us. If God is for us (and he is!), who can be against us? It’s not the end of the world until he says it is, and even then you shouldn’t be afraid, if your faith is in him. We live in a peripheral, temporal nation; Jesus’ Kingdom is central and eternal. Christian, don’t ascribe so much significance to a single election. Let the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ’s presence, authority, and grace give you peace and endurance as sojourners in a strange world.