Transcription
R.C. SPROUL: In this series of lectures, we're going to be considering the theme of building a Christian character, focusing our attention on practical steps that we might take in order to grow spiritually, and we'll begin as we open with prayer. Let's pray.
Our Father and our God, we know that there is nothing more urgent, nothing more needful, and yet nothing more exciting than to embark on a pilgrimage of faith as we seek first Your kingdom and Your righteousness in our quest to be conformed as Christians to the image of Christ Himself. It is our prayer that Your spirit of holiness, the Spirit of truth may teach us what it means to take on ourselves the image of Christ. For we ask it in His name, amen.
For years before I became a Christian I was familiar with some of the more basic, simple hymns of the Christian church. I attended church occasionally and particularly when social activities were planned by the church, like weekend retreats to camps -- which we look forward to with great anticipation -- and at those casual events we were introduced to somewhat simple hymnody and at times Negro spirituals, and there was one song that we used to sing repeatedly that had sort of a catching refrain to it that I enjoyed but certainly didn't understand. And I think most of you have heard it and sung it. It's called simply, 'Lord, I Want to be a Christian.' 'Enter my heart,' you know the song. You know, 'Lord I want to be more loving. Lord I want to be like Jesus," and I can remember singing that and having no idea what I was singing, but it was, as I said, an interesting song.
But once I became a Christian, then that song took on this sense of priority and urgency, and though I realized that I had moved now from paganism into the Christian faith and had passed that inerasable line of demarcation from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, nevertheless I understood very quickly that there was no magic in the Christian faith and that my new birth was precisely that -- a birth -- and that as I read the New Testament I realized that I was called not to childishness but that I was called to maturity, to grow up into the fullness of Christ. And I'm sure that's every Christian's experience. And so I was concerned, just as I'm sure you are concerned, with this whole question of spiritual growth, and I looked to teachers, to mentors, to books, to the Bible itself seeking ways to advance in my Christian life. And again, I had to adjust some of my expectations early because I started with such zeal, and I started with such excitement, and I was on that mountaintop of experience, and I just assumed that I would move rapidly from faith to faith, from strength to strength, from grace to grace, from glory to glory without any impeding moments along the way that might cast me into the Slough of Despondency or other things such as John Bunyan wrote of in 'Pilgrim's Progress.'
And I came also to rue the preaching that I would hear from the simplistic evangelists who would stand up and make glowing promises to the congregation by saying, "Come to Jesus and all your problems will be solved." You know, 'Try Jesus,' 'Turn on to Jesus' -- all of that simple stuff because really what I learned very quickly was that becoming a Christian brought a new dimension of complication to my life that I had never experienced before. In a very real sense life just became complicated when I put on Christ because now I realized that I was playing for keeps, and now I had a conscience and a new standard of excellence that even with my own capacity for self-delusion and my own ability to withstand the convicting power of the Holy Spirit, I still could see the enormous gap that existed between where I was and where I was called to be in Christ.
And now I'm happy to tell you that after 25 years in the kingdom of God that gap has been eliminated, has vanished completely out of my life because now I've attained it. No, but that's one of the problems of sanctification. As our reformed fathers teach us that one of the marks of our growing spirituality is an increased awareness of our own fallen condition, so that the complication grows more intense, in one sense, rather than less, and it can be a very frustrating experience as we see, compared to how much is left to do in our lives, how little it seems that we have progressed.
Just this summer I started a new avocation, and for those who know me they're not surprised because my avocations change with great rapidity. I'm a man who gets bored quickly, and I like, as the gadfly, to flit from extracurricular activity to extracurricular activity. But this year I decided to brighten up my life and to brighten up my yard by planting roses, and this was my first time to try to grow roses. Now, when I was in school our science teachers taught us some basic fundamental truths of the natural world. They told us, for example, that nature abhors a vacuum. Now, I don't know whether that's true or not. I suppose it is. I'm certainly not going to dispute it. But I've learned something else that nature abhors. Nature abhors a rose garden, and anybody who's ever tried to grow roses I'm sure understands what I'm saying, because there's a sense in which as soon as one engages in the enterprise of trying to grow roses, he understands very soon that he is involved in an international, intercosmic conspiracy. All of the forces of nature converge against the person who would grow roses. You think it's an -- I thought it was an easy thing. You know, just dig a hole in the ground, put the rose in there, put some water on it. I mean most plants need certain things to grow. They need water, they need sunshine, they need a little bit of fertilizer, and after that you don't have to worry about it. But there must be ten thousand insects that love roses -- not to mention a host of other bacterial infections that are out there, invisible to the naked eye, waiting to pounce on your rosebush as soon as it shows the slightest bit of growth and health. You can over-prune, you can over-fertilize, and all of the work that goes into producing one rose, in a sense, is an analogy, I believe, of the Christian life, because I've discovered that to grow roses is not recreation. It's war. It's a battle, a daily struggle -- not something that you can look after every three weeks. For by then, the weeds, the parasites, the insects come in and destroyed what you have tried to work on. But roses need attendance daily, and so it is in the growth of the Christian life.
Now, I don't want to start our course with pessimism, but there's a certain sense in which I don't know where else to start, because it would be untruthful of me to suggest that growth in the Christian life comes easily or by resting and sitting back and letting nature take its course, because if nature takes its course in the Christian life, the Christian, if he's truly a Christian he certainly won't let nature take its course -- but if by chance, or if by theory nature were allowed to take its course in the life of a newborn Christian, that Christian's spiritual power would atrophy in five minutes or less. And it's a destructive thing that we hear preached throughout the land -- again with an easy-believism type of mentality that suggests under the rubric of what's so-called quietism that says, "All you have to do is sort of float in the arms of Jesus. Let go and let God. Sit back and let God do the work because doesn't God promise that if He's begun a good work in you that He will bring it to fruition?" Doesn't God also say that we are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for God is at work within us both to will and to do in His good pleasure? And so yes, the Bible does teach us those things, and there are times innumerable in the Old Testament where God tells the people of Israel to sit back -- 'Behave yourself Moses. You just sit still. I'll take care of Pharaoh and the Egyptians right now. You just raise your hand. That's all I want you to do, and I'll take care of the enemies.' And there are times when Christ says to His apostles, 'Wait a minute, tarry. After the Holy Spirit comes upon you, then I can set you loose for action.' There are times to wait upon the Lord, but the basic accent of the New Testament call to sanctification, to growth in Christ, is an accent on disciplined struggle. And growth in Christ is not easy and we have to know at the beginning that we are in for a struggle and not only a struggle, but the struggle of our lives and the struggle for our lives and the struggle that lasts throughout our lives.
And so I want to start in this session by pointing out, so that we can understand, even if -- if you're a new Christian, you need to know this going in. If you've been in the kingdom of God for a long time, it won't hurt you to refresh it and to bring it to remembrance once again. Luther said it this way: that the three principal obstacles to Christian growth are the world, the flesh, and the devil. Now, how many of you have heard that expression at least -- see that's commonplace. We all -- the world, the flesh, and the devil. Have you ever thought about it? Have you ever thought about how the world stands as an obstacle to your spiritual growth, how the flesh stands as an obstacle to your spiritual growth, or how the devil stands as an obstacle to your spiritual growth? We say that Adolf Hitler almost conquered the world in this century but for one fatal, strategic error that he made, and that was by dividing his forces to carry on warfare on two fronts -- on the east and on the west -- falling prey to the most ancient of all military maxims, 'Divide and conquer.' But we have to have warfare not on two fronts but on three, and so to assume that the victory is easy when the warfare is that profuse is to make a ghastly mistake indeed. So it's a threefold war: the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Abraham Kuyper, the former prime minister of the Netherlands and the great theological leader of his day, the founder of the Free University, sort of translated Luther's concepts into another way. He said, "Really what the Christian has to struggle with is the fallen nature around us" -- the fallenness of nature itself -- "the fallenness of our own humanity, and the fallenness of spiritual beings who are called angels." Fallen nature, fallen man, fallen angels. It's nothing more than the same thing that Luther said -- the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Now, let's just look briefly at some of the ways in which these three dimensions -- the world, the flesh, and the devil -- bring the obstacles to growth that we need to be aware of. In the first instance there is the world. I was just talking to a comrade, a fellow Christian worker last week who was going through some trials and struggles in his own life, and we were talking about it, and I said to him, I said, "You know, as a Christian, ultimately, I must be optimistic. We are called to be more than conquerors because greater is that power that is in us than is in the world, but at the same time I cannot look at my life or this world through rose-colored glasses." There's a real sense in which as the Bible teaches us that life is filled with sorrow, and there seems to be no end to the troubles of man on this planet. And we could search philosophically and theologically for the root of that fact, and we don't have to look very far do we? We know, for example, that nature itself is fallen, that it plunged into ruination along with the fall of man who was created to have dominion over the earth, and that the earth itself experiences the curse that is placed against sin. I mean, from the very beginning of the Old Testament we are told that man's toil will now take upon it a struggling dimension -- that where he plants flowers he will have to deal with thorns and briars, that the very propagation of the race will be resisted by nature through the inflicting of unbelievable pain that comes in childbearing. The world is a beautiful place. It's my Father's world. It's a place of glorious majesty reflecting the invisible glory of God Himself; and yet at the same time we have to face the reality of the sober fact that the world out there is also a place of terror where death, destruction, disease, and violence lurk, ready to strike at any moment.
This last week I was in Michigan, and I called home, and I tried to listen to my daughter talk to me on the phone, and it was -- she was speaking so quickly I could barely make out what she was saying to me, and she was going on. She was saying, "Dad, you can't believe the storm we had here," and she began to describe the tornado that came through here a week ago and the violence. She said there was one tree that was uprooted where it was ten feet from the ground to the top of the base of the roots that were pulled up, and another tree that was ten feet across that was just ripped up out of the ground. Imagine the violence and the force of nature that can do that. And she said all of that damage -- that she went out and took a ride and saw all the trees that were down and the destruction that had been caused, and it had happened in less than five minutes. We think that our sophisticated age of technology, that we've mastered nature. We haven't. Nature still resists us. There's a sense in which nature hates us. It rebels against us because it is because of us that the world has been plunged into ruin, and the New Testament tells us that the whole created order groans together in travail, using the image from birth -- waiting for the day of redemption.
But behind nature -- nature itself has no power in and of itself. Nature is a creature, is it not? And over nature stands the God of creation, and this may be hard for the new Christian to understand, but God has willed that nature resist man until the final moment of the consummation of the redemption of this world. That doesn't mean that we're supposed to surrender to it. We are supposed to continue to seek to fulfill the creation mandate to have dominion over the earth, to make our land safe, to conquer disease and famine, and the rest that we do through the modern enterprise. But there is a sense in which God has appointed nature to struggle with us, and that also is for our sanctification. We struggle against death, against disease, and a host of other things.
But not only does the growth in the spiritual life involve warfare with the forces of nature which are impersonal, but perhaps even more despicable is our struggle with the fallenness of mankind. The papers are filled with stories of warfare and of threats of even worse wars that can come upon us. Twentieth century man lives with a nuclear sort of Damocles over his head, worrying about whether or not he's going to be able to exist for another generation, lest warfare -- man's hatred for man and the violence that comes out of that -- can destroy us. But not only do we have to see it in its zenith point of warfare, but the very things that contribute to war take place on a much smaller scale every day at the level of interpersonal relationships. How much has your life been wounded or hurt by the anger, the hostility, or the insensitivity of another person? And God is profoundly concerned about that. The great commandment is not simply to love God but to love each other, and as we grow in grace we are called to grow in that direction of the establishment of human relationships that are whole, rather than fractured, that are edifying rather than destructive. It's hard to grow spiritually when you're estranged from your husband or from your wife or from your parents.
But not only is the problem of the fall of human nature a problem for my spiritual growth because I have to live in a company of people who are hostile towards my spiritual growth, who are rooting for me to fail, who rejoice when I stumble, but the biggest enemy of my own spiritual growth is who? Me. You've heard the axiom, you know, "You're your own worst enemy," and we should add to it, "and what a formidable opponent." Who knows your weaknesses more than you do? Who knows where to attack yourself inwardly more than you do? And so we talk about the warfare that goes on, as the Apostle Paul talks about, between the flesh and the spirit -- that's not between the body and the soul. That's between the disposition of the heart of the old man -- that's your pre-regenerate desires. When you are converted to Christ you are not instantly cleansed of sin or healed of the desire and disposition for sin. That old man is putting up a death struggle now with the new man that has been quickened within you by the Holy Spirit.
One man put it this way: that a Christian life is like a chicken with its head cut off. Have you ever see a chicken with its head cut off, or heard of what happens to the chicken with the head cut off? You chop off that chicken's head, and what does it do? Just flop over? A couple flutters of the feather, and it's dead? No. The involuntary muscles -- that chicken starts running, squawking all over the barnyard without a head -- blood everywhere. It's a mess -- creating all kinds of chaos and all kinds of destruction. Now, for all practical purposes that chicken is dead. Everybody knows it but the chicken, and that's what happens in your regeneration. Once you become a Christian, the old man, in a very real sense, now comes under the death sentence, it has been put to death, but its death is not instantaneous. It dies daily. Oh, but the squawking it puts up before it succumbs ultimately. It's going to fight and resist against that newborn principle in you all of your days, and just when you think you've mastered the power of the flesh, is when it manifests itself in its most destructive force; and so we have to be understanding that what we're involved in is not just a question of discipline. It's warfare.
You've seen the movie, read the book -- Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that dreadful struggle that went on between those two personalities. Dr. Jekyll, the benevolent, upright citizen who brings his gifts of love and healing to the community, but once he drinks that potion he turns into this grotesque monster who has a lust and a thirst for human blood and for killing, and he seems to reign without control on a mad frenzy of horror. I don't mean to make an exact parallel there because none of us are Dr. Jekylls on our best day. We're more on the side of Mr. Hyde. Alright? There's a sense in which the capacity for any -- almost any -- thinkable evil still exists in your heart. Christians are capable of murder. David did it. They're capable of adultery. They're capable of forms of blasphemy. They're capable of slander. They're capable of robbery. What aren't they capable of? Very few things. Final and full, yes, they won't -- you know, we hope that if a person's truly in Christ that he's not going to fall finally and fully, but the dreadful reality of the abiding power of sin in the life of the Christian is recorded on every page of holy Scripture so that we never can say that we've arrived in this world.
Now, the danger is, particularly for those of you who are in positions of Christian leadership in the ministry of one sort or another or elders among the people of God -- people who have been Christians for 20 years or 30 years --the rest of the people look to you, and they say, "Here is a person of great spiritual power and vitality," and that may be true in comparison with where they are; but I've said repeatedly the difference between you in your spiritual growth and Adolf Hitler is negligible if you compare the difference between you and Jesus, and you are one minute away from the betrayal of Peter, the treason of Judah. As we remember Christ's warning to Simon Peter, "Simon, Simon. Satan would have you and sift you like wheat."
And it gets me to the third enemy -- the Devil. I say that at the risk of ridicule in this day and age, when we consider in this world of scientific understanding that it is no longer sophisticated to believe in the Devil. In fact, for years and years and years the idea of Satan was dismissed, not only from the pagan mentality, but also from the church. It came through a revival in the culture of the western world in the 70's with the reintroduction of preoccupation with the occult, and it seems to me that if Satan is going to have his way with people he's going to try to deceive them in one way or the other -- either by convincing them that he doesn't exist, which is his most effective way because then who's going to be on guard and who's going to be worrying about something that doesn't exist; or to get people so preoccupied with him that he's already the chief star of attraction. I just want to say this -- my time is up. I just want to say this about Satan: in the mind of Christ and in the teaching of Jesus, Satan is communicated to us as a potent reality -- not as God. He's not omnipotent. He's a creature. He can't be at more than one place at the same time, but he has legions of fallen angels at his command to cast upon you what Luther called the 'anfectum' -- the unbridled assault -- an attempt to slander you, to corrupt you, to tempt you, to bring you to ruin.
Why do you suppose that your Lord, when He taught His disciples how to pray said, "When you pray, say -- pray about these things," and included in that list was this: "Lead us not into temptation" -- that is, don't allow us to wander into the place of tempting -- of where we are tempted. Let us be like Job. Let us hide behind the hedges. Let God put a hedge around us lest we be exposed and vulnerable to the attacks of the enemy. "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." That's a bad translation. Most of you know that, I think, that to "deliver us from evil" suggests that we should be led away from the power of nameless, faceless, amorphous power of evil that's sort of hanging in the clouds somewhere. If that were the case the word would be in the neuter gender, but it isn't. It's in the masculine, and the literal translation of that is "deliver us from the evil one" -- 'poneros' -- which is clearly in the New Testament a biblical title for Satan himself.
So that's our struggle -- the world that resists us from the cradle to the grave, the flesh that hates the smallest victory of the new man of the spirit, and Satan, an intelligent, personal, created, fallen being, far more powerful than you, far more clever than you, who goes around masquerading as light, seeking to seduce you throughout your life. All that you have to withstand these enemies is Christ and His Holy Spirit, and His church, and the means of grace -- which things we will be exploring, on what steps we must take to be able to grow in a hostile world.