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The Church Should Mind Its Spiritual Business

The Church Should Mind Its Spiritual Business

April 17, 2024

by:

Alan D. Strange

The True Calling of the Church

The calling, or mission, of the church as the church is to proclaim the gospel to the ends of the earth, not to be another merely (or even chiefly) political, social, or economic institution. The church, in its full-orbed existence, may have political, economic, or social concerns that develop out of its mission, but those aspects are not what primarily mark and define it. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is head and King of the church, made it clear in his marching orders to the church—what we’ve come to call the Great Commission—that he intended the church to go to every people group (often translated “nations”) and to evangelize and disciple them (Matt. 28:18–20), enfolding them into his kingdom, which is “not of this world” (John 18:36), a kingdom that does not have the transitory but the eternal at its heart (2 Cor. 4:18). It is Christ himself, our heavenly King—since he is with us even now by his Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45)—who gathers and perfects his church (Westminster Confession of Faith 25.3) through the appointed means.

The gospel is not about worldly success in any proper sense, then, but is rather about deliverance from the penalty, power, and ultimately the presence of sin, a message that comes to permeate the whole of the lives of those transformed by it. We can rightly say that the message of the church is a spiritual one, coming to people of every sort in every land to bring them here and hereafter into the spiritual reality of the kingdom of Christ. Therefore, Paul encourages the Christians in Corinth, “In whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God” (1 Cor. 7:24). Paul makes clear that the bondservant may and should avail himself of the opportunity of freedom (1 Cor. 7:21). He also makes clear, however, that whatever condition one finds himself in, even whether one is married or not, is not paramount: what is most important is not one’s vocation or life circumstance but being called by and coming to Christ, being a new man or woman in Christ. Paul’s concern is that his readers are Christians, whatever else may be true of their lives. His concern for them, to put it another way, is chiefly spiritual.

This is the spiritual message that the church is privileged to herald to the world (salvation by grace alone), the good news—the meaning of gospel—without which there is no good news. The story of the world after Adam’s fall is nothing but bad news since all is sin, darkness, and hopelessness without the good news of the gospel. The gospel of salvation in Christ, however, is the good news that transforms the worst into the best, seen particularly at the cross, where humanity at its worst not only fails to defeat God but where God uses humanity’s attempt to do so as the centerpiece of our salvation. Christ has overcome the world. This is the message that the church joyfully preaches to the world. It does not preach itself, nor does it promote some sort of political, social, economic, or cultural utopia to be achieved in this age.

The church preaches that we are to live in this age not for this age but for the coming age that has broken in on this age and beckons us to a new heavens and a new earth that await all who trust in Christ alone. This is no “superspirituality” and certainly not any form of gnosticism but simply the recognition of what is central—the spiritual message of the gospel—out of which all else radiates and from which the full-orbed Christian life, with all its consequences, emerges. This is the great message given to the church to proclaim to the world (faith alone in Christ alone), not some lesser political, social, or economic message that addresses only the things that pertain to this world and not to the world to come.

The gospel is a spiritual message for a world whose greatest need is spiritual: redemption from sin and new life in Christ. This is not to say, however, that the effects of the gospel do not have consequences for the world in which we live. Indeed, the effects of the gospel, when the church obeys the Great Commission and the gospel is taken worldwide, is that the nations, in the comprehensive obedience taught to the faithful, come to have among them those who both trust (fundamentally) and obey (consequentially); thus the Christian faith and its fruits do, in fact, profoundly change the world because those touched by the gospel are new creations and because that spiritual rebirth affects them and those around them.

The task of the church as such is not to transform the world at large or any society in it. The task of the church is to transform lives: to proclaim the gospel as the person and work of Christ applied by the power of the Holy Spirit in the means of grace so that men and women come to Christ by faith and are justified, adopted, and sanctified—all a gift of God’s grace. Such changed lives typically affect the lives of others in the various societies in which the saints find themselves. We as God’s people, the church, must certainly be ready to give an answer for the hope that we have within (1 Pet. 3:15) to all those we encounter in their profound spiritual need—chiefly, salvation in Jesus Christ. That we are concerned primarily for the spiritual vitality of those around us, however, does not mean that we as Christians are to be indifferent to the nonspiritual needs and sufferings of those around us, but we are to love and help them as we have opportunity, as did the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), a responsibility with implications reflected even in the final judgment (Matt. 25:31–46).

Christ has overcome the world. This is the message that the church joyfully preaches to the world.

Let the Church Be the Church

All that constitutes such obedience, however, does not play out in the life of the corporate, or institutional, church. The church can be variously conceived: as an institute, on the one hand, or as an organism, on the other.1 While it is the mission of the church as institute to evangelize and disciple all her members among the nations of the world, it is not the mission of the church as institute to incarnate the Christian faith in all of life. It is the call of the members of the church as organism to live the whole of their lives from the standpoint of faith and obedience, taking the ethics taught them by the church, for instance, and employing Christian ethics in their businesses, politics, culture, and so on. The church as institute must remain the church, a spiritual entity, and does not become the state, a civil entity, or the family, a biological entity. It does not even seek to do as institute what its members may do, singly or collectively, in the ordinary living of their Christian lives; this latter imperative is the task of the church as organism.2

Throughout history, and again in our times, challenges have come from a variety of corners to the church as church—or, as just noted, the church as institute—pushing it to be something that it is not called to be. Some say that if the church is to have any value to society, it must be or become a political, social, or economic entity, as quarters of the church in the United States became in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when figures like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden promoted the social gospel.3 This pressure that the church become like other earthly agencies or institutions stems from the conclusion that some agenda other than the one to which the church is called is really the most important thing in the world.

Marxism or other economic or social ideologies are seen by such who ill-regard the true calling of the church as most needful for the problems that currently beset us. These all-comprehensive ideologies demand that the church, along with the family, the university, the state, and any other institutions, if they are to be worth anything, join them in their conviction, as was Sigmund Freud’s, that all reality is sexual/psychological—or, in Karl Marx’s case, economic; in Charles Darwin’s, biological; and so forth—especially manifested in the fluid genderism left in Freud’s wake that outpaces our best attempts to keep up.4

Martin Luther’s theology has been portrayed as teaching, “Let God be God!”5 It is my burden to say, “Let the church be the church.” A variety of competing claims threaten to overrun and overwhelm the institutional church in our times. The call of the Lord to the church, the mission that he has given to the church, is an essentially spiritual one. If the church loses that, she has nothing to offer the world, or as D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones reportedly said, “The church does the world the least good when she seeks to be most like it.”6 The world does not need the church to echo all its utopian schemes for a better life. The world needs the church to preach the gospel to it. Yes, when that gospel is faithfully preached and received, men and women throughout the world not only come to Christ but also live in ways that better everything about them. If the church fails to do that, however, as she is called to do it, she suffers and the whole world with her.

Notes:

Abraham Kuyper, Collected Works in Public Theology, vol. 3, Common Grace: God’s Gifts for a Fallen World, ed. Jordan J. Ballor and J. Daryl Charles, trans. Nelson D. Kloosterman and Ed M. van der Maas (1904; repr., Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2020), 36–43.

In his book Political Church: The Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ’s Rule (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2016), Jonathan Leeman is critical of aspects of this distinction between the church as institute and organism (378–88) and finds more useful distinctions in church polity having to do with the nature of church power (380–82). Like others, Leeman believes that Kuyper ultimately developed his concept of church as organism at the expense of the church as institute. I think Kuyper did have this tendency, though Leeman himself appears to consider the “Christian” political position on given issues as more discernible than I do. I think a fair amount of legitimate political differences exists within Reformed confessional bounds.

For a favorable view, see Christopher H. Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion: A Histor (New York: New York University Press, 2017), esp. 107–34. Even when positively presented, the net effect of the social gospel’s impact on the churches of the time was, in my view, subversive of the church’s true calling.

One of the best recent books to illuminate the historical roots of the current sexual crises that confront the church, given the all-pervasive influence of figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and others who have shaped contemporary views on gender and various sexual aberrations, is Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020).

Philip S. Watson, Let God Be God! An Interpretation of the Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1949).

I heard this quote attributed to D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones many years ago, and though I have searched for the source, I have not been able to find it. This sentiment certainly rings true to what Lloyd-Jones says elsewhere; see D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, A First Book of Daily Readings (Epworth, 1970), excerpted in “April 18 Daily Devotional: A First Book of Daily Readings, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones,” Orthodox Presbyterian Church (website), accessed March 22, 2023, https://opc.org/.

This article is adapted from Empowered Witness: Politics, Culture, and the Spiritual Mission of the Church by Alan D. Strange.

Alan D. Strange (PhD, University of Wales) is professor of church history at Mid-America Reformed Seminary, a conference speaker, and the author of various works, including The Doctrine of the Spirituality of the Church in the Ecclesiology of Charles Hodge.

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10 Things You Should Know about Biblical Typology

10 Things You Should Know about Biblical Typology

April 16, 2024

by:

Vern S. Poythress

This article is part of the 10 Things You Should Know series.

1. The Old Testament is all about Jesus.

In Luke 24:44–47 Jesus himself says that the Old Testament is about him:

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.”

2. There is only one way of salvation all the way through the Bible, namely Christ himself.

The Bible says in 1 Timothy 2:5 that there is only one mediator:

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus . . .

So all the people and other objects (animal sacrifices, tabernacle) that serve a mediatorial function in the Old Testament point to the one mediator. People in the Old Testament did not fully understand the way we understand. But God gave them a hope in the promise of the one mediator. They were saved in basically the same way that we are, though they knew less, and they looked forward rather than backward to the time when Christ would accomplish salvation.

Jesus confirms that he is the exclusive way to the Father in John 14:6: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

3. We need God’s help to see how the Old Testament is about Jesus.

Jesus taught the disciples on the road to Emmaus, as recorded in Luke 24:13–27. Before that, they were discouraged and confused. They did not understand (Luke 24:25). Afterward they were transformed: “did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32). Jesus also promised the gift of the Holy Spirit to teach them the truth (John 14:26; John 16:13).

4. God gives us the help we need through the teaching of the apostles and the illumination of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.

How do we come to understand how the Old Testament is about Jesus? Jesus’s own words in Luke 24 and elsewhere in the Gospels are relevant. But Jesus also commissioned the apostles and gave the gift of the Holy Spirit to them so that they could preach with his power and explain the meaning of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:8). We see this preaching taking place in Acts. And in the writings of the New Testament we have a permanent written word of God, which includes writings from the apostles and from “apostolic men” like Luke who were associated with the apostles. With Christ’s authority, they instruct us about the ways in which the Old Testament points to Christ.

5. One key element in the Old Testament is the presence of “types.”

“Types” are symbols that point forward to a fulfillment. The climactic fulfillment is found in Jesus Christ himself. Subordinately, because the church and its members are united to Christ, there is fulfillment in us. Finally, there is fulfillment in the consummation, the new heaven and the new earth, when it will be fully displayed that Christ is “all in all” (Eph. 1:23).

The full meaning of the symbols of the Old Testament becomes available only when we see the fulfillment in Christ.

A symbol already has a special meaning when God first presents it in biblical history. For example, the revelation through Moses sets up a system of priests. The priests are symbolic personages. They symbolize that the people of Israel, as a sinful people, need to access God through the priests. The priests serve as mediators who are especially consecrated and made holy so that they can approach God’s presence. Hebrews 5–10 discusses extensively how the Old Testament priests were symbols on earth, shadows or prefigures of the final priesthood of Christ. It is Christ who is holy, not merely on the level of symbol, but the level of reality. It is Christ who has ascended to the right hand of God and who grants us access to God’s heavenly presence:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water (Heb. 10:19–22).

6. The meaning of a type is revealed progressively.

The whole system of priesthood already had symbolic meaning in the time of Moses. But its meaning is more fully revealed when Christ comes, and we see the person for whom the symbolism was designed. Christ fulfills it spectacularly, beyond what anyone might have expected. The shadow or prefigurement, in this case the Old Testament priesthood, genuinely shows the meaning of Christ’s priesthood by depicting it beforehand. At the same time, by God’s own design, it is inferior to Christ. It thereby says to Israelites that it is incomplete, even inadequate, when viewed in itself. It needs something more. Something greater is to come. Israelites can be stirred up for longing for that completion. But it is not possible fully to discern everything about the fulfillment until the fulfillment actually comes. What was formerly in shadow becomes fully manifested in Christ. The glory therefore belongs to Christ, not to the Old Testament priesthood.

The progress of revelation makes sense because God has a plan of salvation that spans all of history. God reveals his instruction gradually, over time. The full meaning of the symbols of the Old Testament becomes available only when we see the fulfillment in Christ. But we also know that God has planned the whole of history from the beginning. So in God’s mind the meaning is already there, even though the full disclosure is spread over time.

7. We need to pay attention to what God said to people in Old Testament times.

God communicated effectively to people in Old Testament times. Some people, of course, were hard hearted. But others believed, as Hebrews 11 reminds us. What God said to them is not something that he later abandons. Rather, he adds to it, over time, until the great time of fulfillment in the New Testament: “on whom [us who belong to New Testament times] the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor. 10:11). So it is wise when we study the Old Testament to consider carefully what God was saying back then and there. He was speaking first of all to them. It is also written for our instruction:

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. (Rom. 15:4)

The Old Testament is going to instruct us properly only if we pay careful attention. And that means understanding what God was saying in order to instruct and nourish the people of previous ages.

8. God makes more meaning available to us now.

Christ has accomplished his work, and that accomplishment is explained in God’s own authoritative words in the New Testament. So, as a second step, we can consider how God adds to the earlier instruction over time, and how the whole plan of salvation comes to its climactic fulfillment in Christ, and then in us who are united to Christ.

9. The Old Testament applies to us, here and now, we who are believers in Christ.

Through faith, the Holy Spirit unites us to Christ. So we benefit from who Christ is and what he has done in history, in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Therefore, the types in the Old Testament can be applied to our Christian living, once we see how they point to fulfillment in Christ.

10. You can grow in your discernment of Old Testament types.

To understand and discern more deeply, you can follow points 7–9 (just above) in succession. First, ask what the symbol meant in its own time period (point 7). Then, ask how its meaning is fulfilled in Christ, given the themes like mediation and salvation that run through the whole Bible. Pay attention to the instruction in the whole New Testament (point 8). Third, ask how the meaning applies to you, if you are united to Christ (point 9).

Vern S. Poythress is the author of Biblical Typology: How the Old Testament Points to Christ, His Church, and the Consummation.

Vern S. Poythress (PhD, Harvard University; ThD, University of Stellenbosch) is Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Biblical Interpretation, and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he has taught for four decades. In addition to earning six academic degrees, he is the author of numerous books and articles on biblical interpretation, language, and science.

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Discover God’s Vision For Your Life

You were made for this.

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Podcast: What Makes You Long for Heaven? (Cameron Cole)

Podcast: What Makes You Long for Heaven? (Cameron Cole)

April 15, 2024

by:

Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Earthly Sorrows and the Longing for Heaven

In this episode, Cameron Cole shares how God used the unexpected and tragic death of his firstborn son to dramatically shift his daily focus heavenward, revealing the joy-inducing power of an eternal mindset.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

An Eschatological Problem

A Heavenward Mindset

The Punctuation Mark of the Christian Life

Misconceptions of a Heavenward Mindset

Sustaining a Heavenward Mindset

01:24 – An Eschatological Problem

Matt Tully Cam, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Cameron Cole Hey! Glad to be here.

Matt Tully You open your new book with a pretty bold, definitive statement. You write, “The primary problem in the spiritual lives of modern Christians is eschatological in nature.” I wonder if you could unpack what that word means. It’s kind of a big, scary sounding theology word. And why do you say that?

Cameron Cole So eschatology has to do with theology of heaven or theology of the end times. And so I really do believe that the primary theological problem in the spiritual lives of modern Christians is a lack of a real-life, practical theology of heaven. And so I think what you see in the culture is that the prevailing eschatology—the prevailing view of heaven—is YOLO. You only live once. And I know that’s a very cliché and trite statement—YOLO!

Matt Tully What does that look like, even if someone’s not saying that, because most of us are probably too old to say that in normal life.

Cameron Cole We’re too cool.

Matt Tully What does that maybe look like in people’s lives?

Cameron Cole I think what it looks like is people have this sense of urgency that is not an urgency necessarily for evangelism and missions but an urgency to complete their bucket list and to try to pack everything in because you only live once. YOLO is a deeply eschatological statement in the sense of there is no afterlife. YOLO—you only live once—so you better pack it all in. And so what it really, and I talk about this quite a bit in Heavenward, is that the prevailing modern mindset is in some ways what you’d call epicureanism. Epicureanism was a Greek and Roman mindset where they believed that there was no afterlife. And so the response was to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. And so a lot of people are familiar with the phrase carpe diem—seize the day—which was really kind of a mantra of epicureanism. But what people aren’t familiar with is what comes right after that, which is trusting in the future as little as possible. Seize the day, trusting in the future as little as possible.

Matt Tully That’s the end of that statement.

Cameron Cole That’s the end of the statement, yeah. And so you can see how the eschatology that there’s no afterlife drives this hedonistic lifestyle where the aim is maximize pleasure, minimize pain. And so it leads to a very self-focused life. And so I think that’s true in the culture. I think most people are trying to pack it all in, and they’re trying to maximize their pleasure. Well, I think that really has permeated a lot of the mindset of a lot of Christians. And you can see it in things like casual divorce. And a lot of people say, You know, I only have one life to live, and I just want to be happy. And so they enter into an unbiblical divorce. That is a decision that’s based in an eschatological worldview. I think it’s why a lot of believers have a tough time finding meaning in life. A lot of believers aren’t necessarily as willing to make sacrifices for the sake of missions and evangelism and the kingdom. And a lot of it is this notion of this life is it. But if you believe that your highest pleasure will be heaven and that it will be for eternity, and you believe that this life is actually very, very short, that has a very refining effect for a person.

05:08 – A Heavenward Mindset

Matt Tully As you said, your new book is called Heavenward, and in the book you’re trying to help Christians embrace this mindset that does look towards heaven. It is a future oriented kind of mindset. I want to dig into some of the facets of that, but maybe before we get there, your last book with Crossway was called Therefore I Have Hope. In that book you shared a little bit about your own family’s story of grief and loss, but also the incredible hope that God brought to your family through that season of pain. I wonder if you could just briefly summarize that story because I think it’s a helpful starting point for understanding why this topic of cultivating a heavenward mindset is so important to you.

Cameron Cole Both of these books flow out of the death of my son when he was three years old. On November the 10th, 2013, our oldest child, Cam, started asking us questions about heaven and talked about how he wanted to go see Jesus and can we get in the car and go see Jesus.

Matt Tully You were playing Legos I think, if I remember correctly.

Cameron Cole Yeah, we were playing Legos. Exactly. He asked if he would see Adam and Eve in heaven, and he pledged that he was not going to eat from the tree. And we’re like, Well actually, we all eat from the tree. And the conversation ended with him saying, Jesus died on the cross. Jesus died for my sins. It was really like a three-year-old profession of faith. That night, he just mysteriously died in his sleep. It was our worst nightmare, and yet one, we had this confidence that he was in heaven and that we would see him again, as a product of his faith in Christ. And two, this is where my child lives now. My child lives in heaven. I can remember when I went to college, I went to college at Wake Forest in North Carolina, and my mom had never cared about Wake Forest. But then I’m at Wake Forest, and my mom has the sweatshirt and the bumper sticker on her car and she’s checking the website and she’s following when Wake Forest is playing basketball or football or whatever it is, she’s watching it. It’s because her child lives there, and so now her heart is there. And the same thing happened for me with regard to heaven. My son lives there. That’s all I could think about was him and his life and wanting to be with him there. And just this natural heavenly mindedness was pervading my life, and I was thinking about heaven all the time. I don’t know if that would have been sustained if I hadn’t met a very important friend, and the important friend is the apostle Paul. I kind of felt a little crazy because I was thinking about heaven so much and I would forget to pay a bill. And I would think, Thirty dollars isn’t going to matter in heaven. It was to a point where it was impacting the day to day.

Matt Tully Maybe in a negative way?

Cameron Cole I mean, some would say. My wife might say so on the forgetting to pay a bill part.

Matt Tully You’re saying you became consumed with thoughts of heaven?

Cameron Cole Yeah, it was just on my mind all the time. and it was having a really positive, hopeful, refining effect in my life. And like I said, I don’t know if it would have been something that was sustained after the season of grief, but I started reading Paul’s letters. I just started to notice in a new way how much Paul talks about heaven and how he integrates it into everything. And not just this is what happens when you die, but this is what drives your sanctification. This is what drives moral decision. This is what drives your sense of hope and comfort. This is what gives you a sense of focus and motivation for missions and evangelism. Heaven is central to everything in the Christian life in Paul’s letters. And so what I started to realize and what really became the basis of the book Heavenward—how eternity can change your life on earth—is seeing that the basic facets and principles of our salvation that you particularly see emphasized in Paul’s letters should make us all just organically heavenly minded. And I create this progression where I talk about heaven. You know about heaven. You have the information, the facts. Then, you have heavenly mindedness, which is an intentional discipline whereby you think about things above, in line with Colossians 3:1: “Since you’ve been raised with Christ, set your mind on things that are above where Christ is seated.”

Matt Tully Those are passages that we so often just breeze right through. We almost don’t even notice it’s a command.

Cameron Cole Right! It’s an imperative. And not only is it an imperative but it’s a present active comparative, which means that it’s something that you’re continuously doing. It’s not a one-time command. This is a posture. This is an ongoing, habitual state. And so the hope is that what I would say I experienced was it wasn’t just that I was heavenly minded in the sense that I was making an effort to think about eternity; it’s just that God did something in my life where—then and still now—eternity is just the backdrop of life. And so my hope with this book is that the next component of that progression is to be heavenward, which is where heaven’s just the air you breathe. It just is to the point where you’re not having to try to think about it. It’s just the backdrop of your life and it gives you so much hope, so much more contentment, so much more meaning, so much more focus on the things of the kingdom.

10:50 – The Punctuation Mark of the Christian Life

Matt Tully The metaphor that came to my mind, and maybe you said it in the book but I don’t remember, was heaven becomes almost a lens through which you look at the whole world as well, where it colors everything. You can’t help but be thinking about heaven because it’s the lens through which everything else is viewed. Another thing that you highlight is how the second coming of Christ is so important for us. And you call it a punctuation mark. What do you mean by that?

Cameron Cole Another way that I characterize this is I talk about how if you are watching a basketball game or a football game, you have in mind that there’s a clock, and the clock is unwinding. You’re constantly paying attention to how much time is left. How much time is left? Are we going to be able to hold on to this lead, whatever it may be? And so your head is, in a sense, on a swivel. And so in the Christian life, the second coming of Christ is the punctuation mark. That’s the end of the sentence. That’s the punctuation mark on our life and on human history. And so the idea is that we’re constantly living with our head on a swivel, looking to the second coming.

Matt Tully Not in the sense of trying to predict when it’s going to happen—

Cameron Cole Oh, no, no, no.

Matt Tully So you’re not getting at that. You’re just talking about the awareness that there is an end coming.

Cameron Cole Yeah, and that’s where this story is headed. A lot of people like to watch the same movies over and over again, and I like to watch YouTube videos of old Alabama football games. And people will be like, Why do you want to watch it if you already know what the outcome is going to be? That’s the whole point! That’s the whole point! I know the end of the story. I know the end of the story, and so I can watch things unfold with the comfort of knowing the outcome. I know that we win this game.

Matt Tully When we watch a scary movie or an intense movie, a lot of the fear, the anxiety, and the tense nature of it is really cut down when we know the end of the story. We’ve seen it before.

Cameron Cole Exactly. Exactly right. There’s a visceral rush when you don’t know the end of the story. And that can be fun for a movie, but in terms of your life, living perpetually in a horror movie is not very comforting. And so there is just this stability and security when you’re aware that I know where this story is headed. I know that this story is headed to a day when Christ returns and he eradicates the world of pain and evil and suffering, and where I see him face to face and I have perpetual joy in my communion with God.

13:31 – Misconceptions of a Heavenward Mindset

Matt Tully What are the most common misconceptions that people might have when you start talking about the idea of cultivating a heavenward or a heavenly mindset?

Cameron Cole I think a lot of people will go back to this quote that people are so heavenly minded that they’re of no earthly good. C. S. Lewis talks about how you see in church history that the people who are the most prolific, in terms of ministry, were actually people who were the most heavenly minded. I think that there’s a fear that if we’re so focused on heaven, then we’re going to become detached and we’re going to become aloof. The reality is that actually, when we start to think about going before Christ, it’s incredibly refining in terms of us thinking about, What’s the point of my life? This life is short compared to eternity. I’m going to have total contentment when I am with Christ face to face. So what’s the point of this life? And it points us towards Christ. It points us toward Christ and in service of Christ.

Matt Tully You have this great line in there that stood out to me: “Eternal time spurs earthly urgency.”

Cameron Cole Absolutely. I think about how it’s just very sad for my wife and me to be separated from our child. and to think that we could be separated however long the Lord has us on this earth. We could be separated from him for another forty or fifty years. And I’m going to be with my son for trillions of years in heaven. I think that everything that is lost on this earth is going to be restored and regained in eternity. And so this is no way to take away that grief or to try to dismiss that lament. That’s a healthy, godly thing to do, to lament the loss in this life. And in terms of not being defined and completely devastated and overcome by this loss, just that mathematical reality of how much we’re separated here but how much we had to look forward to an eternity with our son is incredibly helpful.

Matt Tully Cam, for those of us who have lost someone close to us, someone that we loved dearly and someone that we know is in heaven now with the Lord, I think it can be easy for the thought of seeing that person again to become the main thing that we think about when we think of heaven. The thought of being with that person again can almost be more compelling to us than the thought of being with Jesus. How have you thought about that and wrestled with that as you think about seeing your son again versus seeing Jesus?

Cameron Cole I would think in the early days of my grief that I did think more about seeing my son again. But there’s just this reality that, like Irenaeus said, the end of life is the vision of God. The pinnacle of human experience for the believer is seeing Christ face to face. Everything beautiful and everything good that we have ever experienced and that we have ever seen is consummated in the vision of God and his glory. And so the reality is when I get to heaven, I am going to be fixated on Jesus. I’m going to be super excited to see my little boy, but I think the way I kind of illustrated it in the book is I’m probably going to have my arm around him, but we’re both going to be looking at Christ. And so I think that that’s really important because we want to think about what are the principles of what make heaven heaven. And part of that is that we’ll see the Lord. Part of it is we’ll be in perfect union with Christ—unimpeded and without any influence from sin or the fallen world. And so with that being said, that’s what we want to set our lives on here and now is seeing God in his word, seeing God in his work, and drawing as close to Christ as possible. That is a heavenly life on earth.

17:48 – Sustaining a Heavenward Mindset

Matt Tully That relates to another question I had. As the months and years have rolled on since your son’s passing and maybe that the way that God used that situation to sort of force you to be heavenward in how you thought and saw the world, as that has worn off a little bit, perhaps, and normal life has maybe returned a little bit more, are there some practices or habits that you’ve instilled in your life that help to cultivate this heavenward mindset?

Cameron Cole For sure. And I would say that what has sustained it is knowing the principles of my salvation that you see highlighted in Paul. Knowing that heaven is here and now through the coming of Christ. The kingdom of heaven is here and it is with us. Knowing that I’m in union with Christ here now, that I was unified with Christ in his ascension.

Matt Tully That’s a big topic—the already-not-yet nature of the kingdom of God and of our salvation. I think it’s one of those topics that can be a little intimidating if someone hasn’t really spent time thinking about it, but it’s a really powerful doctrine for our own lives as Christians.

Cameron Cole Oh, absolutely. The primary reason that Paul was so heavenly minded is because in the Old Testament, they were looking to the day of the Lord. In the way that we’re looking to the second coming of Christ, they were looking to the day of the Lord. And so the day of the Lord was primarily a divine visitation where God would come to the earth, there would be a final judgment, there would be an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and there would be a resurrection of the dead. And so for Paul, when he meets Christ on the road to Damascus, he sees, Oh wow. Jesus was God. He has risen from the dead. So this means there’s been a divine visitation. There’s been a resurrection of the dead. Oh, and then next there’s the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And oh, on the cross there was a final judgment. Paul realizes that, in a partial sense, the day of the Lord has occurred. So in 2 Corinthians 6 when he says, “Now is the day of salvation,” he’s saying that the day of the Lord is now. And so what would follow the day of the Lord was the age to come, which was heaven on earth. And so basically, what Paul is saying is that we are in the age to come now. And this isn’t just Paul. This is in the Gospels. This is throughout the New Testament. So now this new heavenly age has been initiated. And the big thing is that as a believer, and you see this in Colossians 1, he says that you have been delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. So what Paul is saying is you now have had a transfer in the realm in which you live. You are now a citizen of heaven. And that’s what he says in Philippians 3: “our citizenship is in heaven.” He’s saying that’s actually where we live now. And so back to you the question of what are practices in your life that kind of keep you heavenly minded, remembering these truths is really helpful. But for myself, when I find myself anxious and I’m thinking about going into a day where I feel some sense of threat or I know there’s going to be some conflict or some difficulty or some things I’m just a little bit nervous about, it is so helpful for me to remember, Where am I? Where do my feet lie? My feet lie in the kingdom of heaven. That’s where I am. And in the kingdom of heaven, in the new creation where I live, I am safe because the Holy Spirit is in me, and I live under the Lordship of Jesus, who is the new Adam and the King of the new creation where I live. And that just gives me a sense of safety and security to enter into some of the difficult things in life. It doesn’t lead me to retract from them or to avoid them, but it gives me a sense of security that enables me to actually walk into the fallen world. That’s the now and the not yet. Yes, the age to come has been initiated, but the present evil age, the fallen age, is still around. There’s an overlap in the ages now, but that present evil age will end at the second coming, and then it will just be purely heaven on earth. But Belinda Carlisle, a pretty good theologian back in the 80s: “Ooh, baby, you know what I’ve heard? Heaven is a place on earth.” It is. It absolutely is.

Matt Tully That’s such a helpful thing, that this heavenward mindset is not less than looking to the future and seeing our future hope in Christ for the full redemption of our world and of our bodies and our whole souls, but it also is something that we are, in a certain sense, experiencing now. Now that Christ has been raised and the Spirit is inside of us, we are experiencing that heavenly reality, even today.

Cameron Cole Absolutely. That’s why writing this book, Heavenward, and thinking about these things is so joy-inducing because these are realities that I can’t say that I was super familiar with prior to my son’s death.

Matt Tully It seems like we don’t talk a lot about heaven.

Cameron Cole When I started teaching about this in my church—I’ve taught a lot about heaven since 2013—I sent around a table, like a little survey, in a Sunday school class that had about 100–120 people. And I had people write down how many years have you been attending a church on one side. Then, the number of lessons on heaven you have been taught on the other side. I did the math and basically found that people averaged being taught a lesson on heaven once every eighteen years.

Matt Tully Wow.

Cameron Cole People went lifetimes and had never been taught anything about heaven. And yet the majority of our human existence is in eternity.

Matt Tully And it is the motivation for so much of what we’re called to do in this life.

Cameron Cole Exactly. For Paul, one of the primary drivers for sanctification, for repenting from sin and living a godly life, was that you live in a new place. You live in the kingdom of heaven. So don’t act like you still live in darkness, like you live in the old creation or you live in the kingdom of darkness. You need to live like you’re going to live when you’re actually in heaven, because you are. You’re there now. And so it drives so much. We have this call in Colossians 3, this imperative, to seek things that are above and live with a heavenly mindset. Well, it’s very hard for a person to do that if they don’t know anything about heaven. And so that’s why I kind of do just a little brief overview of the basics of heaven at the very beginning of the book, so that people have some of that substance to meditate on. And then it gets a lot deeper in the middle of the book when we talk about the heavenly realities of our salvation here and now. But this is part of why I’m really passionate about this book because my life has benefited so much from having a greater heavenly mindedness and from having the biblical substance and grounding to just enhance and solidify that eternal mindset. And I just want that for other people. There’s such a greater ability to persevere in suffering when you know that the sufferings of this life, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, are “light and momentary.” And there’s just such a greater willingness to sacrifice for Christ, to be more generous for Christ when you know that you can’t take anything with you, and when you know that there’s reward for work’s done. And I think that in particular, most people live mundane lives that aren’t glamorous. And I think a lot of people struggle to find meaning in the mundane life. And so as a result, a lot of people what they’re working towards is retirement. No! There’s so much meaning in everything that you do because there is a day when the Lord rewards us for anything done and done for his glory. And so I think about the parent who’s taking care of young children and they’re changing diaper after diaper after diaper, doing all kinds of things like that where it’s never seen and they get no recognition. And you’re kind of like, What is this all for? The Lord sees that, and it has heavenly implications. It has heavenly meaning and reward for you.

Matt Tully Cam, thank you so much for helping us to think a little bit more like Paul, a little bit more like you as we think about our lives and then set our hope on this heavenward perspective. We appreciate it.

Cameron Cole Well, thanks for the opportunity. It’s been incredibly life-giving and joy-inducing for me.

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The Posture of a Man of God

The Posture of a Man of God

April 14, 2024

by:

John Currie

Leading from Your Knees

Jeremiah Lanphier was a businessman who served as a missionary to New York’s Lower East Side. He was earnest in door-to-door evangelism and tract distribution, and as he made his evangelistic rounds each day, he would pray regularly, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”1 Lanphier decided to begin a noon-hour prayer meeting once a week for businessmen. One noon hour in the fall of 1857 he opened the upper lecture hall at Old Dutch Church on Fulton Street and knelt to pray—alone. Thirty minutes later he heard footsteps on the stairs and was joined by others.

The number grew to six. Over the next four weeks attendance at the prayer meeting grew incrementally until, by mid-October 1857, one hundred people (including unbelievers experiencing conviction of sin) came every day to the church for prayer. Noon-hour prayer meetings spread around the city in churches, fire houses, police stations, stores, and a theater. One newspaper was compelled to call the noon hour in New York the hour of prayer!2 The movement spread beyond New York throughout the nation, effecting a widespread work of God that resulted in the conversion and moral reformation of multitudes. It came to be known as the revival of 1857–1860.

I recall hearing a respected Scottish preacher reminisce about a prayer meeting started in Scotland in the middle of the twentieth century. A couple of ruling elders in the Church of Scotland covenanted to meet together every week to pray for revival in their church. The sad state of the Church of Scotland today might cause one to question what effect their prayers had. But in the latter part of the twentieth century the Church of Scotland was served by some great evangelical pastors. As the story is told, the weekly prayer meeting never grew beyond those two elders, and after a couple of years of weekly meetings, their burden lifted and the prayer meeting disbanded—without any observable signs in answer to their prayers. However, some years later, it was calculated that many of those great evangelical pastors in the church were called and trained for the ministry during the period those elders were praying.3

Early in my ministry God granted me the blessing of seeing the transformative effect of concerted prayer. I served as a youth pastor in a church that had experienced dramatic decline due to an economic crisis in the community. The church’s youth group had once been known throughout the denomination for its discipleship of young people, many of whom became pastors and missionaries. In the first weeks of my ministry there the youth group consisted of three to five young people attending a weekly event. In desperate dependence on God, we initiated a weekly prayer gathering for youth leaders and the young people. The prayer group developed a list of names of unbelieving friends they desired to expose to the gospel.

The gathering grew in numbers, and young people on the list of unbelievers also began to attend the prayer meeting. A couple of them came to faith through the prayer group. God’s blessing on the preaching of the word at weekly gatherings and evangelistic events became evident. When God called me to another pastorate several years later, disciples were multiplying and maturing significantly in the youth group. The spiritual fruit was beyond what we could have asked for or imagined, and I’m convinced the soil was cultivated in that weekly prayer meeting.

The history of the church is stitched through with examples of God using his people’s prayers to extend Christ’s kingdom and mission in the world. That history testifies to a scriptural pattern that forms the first of our practices in pastoral leadership. The church is led to maturity on her mission through intentional, earnest, persistent intercessory prayer. A man of God leads from his knees!

The Apostolic Pattern

The apostles both practiced and prescribed leadership through intentional, earnest, persistent intercessory prayer. And they learned it from Jesus. Ephesians 3:14–21 is one conspicuous example of how the apostles understood prayer to work in the leadership of the church. Paul’s prayer in chapter 3 serves as the pivot from precept to practice in his leadership of the mission at Ephesus. In the first two chapters of Ephesians the apostle discloses what God has done for his people, solely by grace. In the last three chapters he emphasizes how the church must now live in that grace.

Ephesians 3:10 discloses the glorious end goal of the church, which should serve as the great motivation of a man of God as he leads God’s people on Christ’s mission: that through the church’s growth in maturity, God’s manifold glory might be cosmically displayed. It is with that inspired vision in the immediate rear view that Paul prays as he does in Ephesians 3:14–21, and as he is about to tell the church how to live in order to realize that vision (Eph. 4–6). Paul makes the pivot from precept to practice in the life and mission of the church through prayer.

The history of the church is stitched through with examples of God using his people’s prayers to extend Christ’s kingdom and mission in the world.

This is deeply significant for pastoral leadership in Christ’s church. The apostle is very purposeful in what he is doing; notice his words “for this reason” (Eph. 3:14). He has just proclaimed the gospel to the Ephesians and is aware of what he is about to call them to do, as those who, in Christ, have received “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3), so he bows his knees before the Father. A full exposition of the prayer would show that the goal of the prayer is expressed in verse 19: that the believers might be “filled with all the fullness of God.” That essentially means “you would grow to full maturity in the character of God in the likeness of Christ.” Paul is praying for nothing less than the very purpose of God for the life of the church in Christ, that as Christians worship, work, and walk together, they would be conformed to the character of Christ for the glory of God (cf. Rom. 8:29; Eph. 1:6; 3:10; 4:13, 15). In other words, the apostle has delivered the propositions about what is true of them in Christ, and he wants them to grow into the fullness of what God has purposed for them in Christ. For this reason, he adopts the posture of prayer. The leader of Christ’s mission among the Gentiles is leading from his knees.

God has blessed me with some significant mentors in my life and ministry, particularly in the practice of prayer. Victor was forty years my senior and had a habit of breaking into prayer in the middle of my conversations with him. We would be addressing a pastoral or personal issue, and he’d start praying as though the Lord was part of the conversation. When I interned with him, he would invite me into his study to kneel with him and pray if he had encountered a difficult pastoral situation.

Another mentor was a seminary professor who was respected by the student body for (among many other things) his prayers. When a fellow student asked him what he remembered of our seminary’s esteemed founding faculty, under whom he had studied, he said without hesitation, “their prayers!” The dependence on prayer that had been modeled for him was now being modeled by him for us. However, as profoundly formative as godly mentors in prayer are, and as thankful as we should be if God has given them to us, they all have their limits. The apostles’ mentor in prayer had no flaws, failings, or limitations. They learned about the priority and pattern of prayer from Jesus.

Notes:

Samuel I. Prime, The Power of Prayer (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991), 5.

Iain H. Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750–1858 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994), 343.

I recall hearing this story at a conference at College Church, Wheaton, IL, in 1994 and have since confirmed the sources contemporary to the movement.

This article is adapted from The Pastor as Leader: Principles and Practices for Connecting Preaching and Leadership by John Currie.

John Currie (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is professor of pastoral theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he teaches preaching and leadership. As a pastor, he has led churches in Canada and the United States with a commitment to the priority of expository preaching. John lives near Philadelphia with his wife, Rhonda. They have two grown sons and eight grandchildren.

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7 Questions That Teens Need to Answer

April 13, 2024

by:

Paul David Tripp

Be Alert

You are a teenager: that means you are in one of the most exciting and most important times of your life! I want to alert you to seven questions you will face that will influence the shape and direction of the rest of your life.

1. What will be the meaning and purpose of your life?

So far, your values—the things you think are worth living for—have been shaped by your parents. You begin to make that critical decision for yourself during your teen years. What will be the thing that will capture your heart and shape the direction of your life?

2. Will you internalize the faith you have been taught?

There is probably no more significant decision in life than this one. Everyone believes something. Every home has religious convictions, whether or not they consider themselves religious. Every home seeks to instill their “faith” in their children. In the teen years, you will decide what you will believe about God, about yourself, about right and wrong, about what is true and what is false, about the gospel of Jesus Christ, and about how you will live out your beliefs in everyday life.

3. What significant decisions will shape your future?

Wow, there are huge decisions ahead of you! What are your gifts, interests, and passions? What do you see as your life’s work? Where will you go to college? Will the church be an essential part of your life? If you could have your dream future, what would it be?

4. What will you do as you begin stepping outside of daily parental protection?

During the younger years of your life, your parents made all of your decisions for you. During the teen years, you begin to make more and more of those decisions for yourself. I don’t mean that you no longer need parents. However, you are moving into a stage where rather than exercising total control over your life, your parents will offer you wise counsel, while you will bear more and more of the burden of making the decisions that will shape how you live.

5. What kind of community will you surround yourself with?

This is a big one. Until now, your mom, dad, grandparent, or guardian have chosen the community they felt comfortable having you in. They were the gatekeepers, vetting the friends that came into your life. But now, you will increasingly have the responsibility. Who will you allow into your life? Whose advice and counsel will you listen to? Who will you entrust with the important things in your life? Who will you allow to influence the way you think and the way that you live? You will surround yourself with others, and those people will significantly impact who you become.

What will be the thing that will capture your heart and shape the direction of your life?

6. How seriously will you pursue your relationship with God?

Most teens were first exposed to God, his will, and his way in their homes and by their parents. My mom and dad thought a relationship with God was the most important thing for me, but I had to decide that for myself at some point (which I did during my teen years). No one can make you love God. No one can make you willing to surrender your heart and life to him. No one has the power to produce faith in you. Will you make God the center of your life? Will you pursue him every day?

7. What kind of success will you value most?

Every human being runs after some type of success. Everybody defines what a successful life is. Will you live for material success? Will you live for career success? Will you define success in money terms? Will success be determined by how many people love and respect you? Will success be defined as living a life pleasing to your Creator? You will define success somehow, and how you define it will determine how you live.

Since you will be asked to grapple with life-shaping issues in your teen years, you will need reliable, true, and trustworthy guidance. What will be your life GPS? Whose plan for life will you follow? I love what the Bible says in Psalm 119:105, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” God gave you his word to be a guide to you. As you walk through the forest of life, often dark with roots that will trip you up, the Bible has been given to you to light the way so you can be sure of where to go and how to get there. The central theme of the word of God is the story of the transforming grace that is ours because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Be reminded of the truths of God’s word day after day. May it cause you to admit how much you need the forgiving, reconciling, and transforming grace of Jesus. And may it give you wisdom from God’s word to live by. There is no better way to prepare for all the significant issues that will shape your future than to spend time every day meditating on God’s truth, remembering his grace, and recommitting yourself to a life shaped by following him.

This article is adapted from New Morning Mercies for Teens: A Daily Gospel Devotional by Paul David Tripp.

Paul David Tripp (DMin, Westminster Theological Seminary) is a pastor, an award-winning author, and an international conference speaker. He has written numerous books, including Lead; Parenting; and the bestselling devotional New Morning Mercies. His not-for-profit ministry exists to connect the transforming power of Jesus Christ to everyday life. Tripp lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Luella, and they have four grown children.

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