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Redeeming relationships by Christ’s power and Lordship.

Ephesians 5:22-6:9 is often presented in sermons or in church retreats as a marriage seminar, a child-rearing seminar, or advice for serving under a bad boss, or how to be a good one.

The seminar approach to this section overlooks something that, once you see it, the section is never seen just as good advice about marriage. It becomes amazing teaching about the love of Christ and his personal life in the Body of Christ, the Church.

Wouldn’t it be odd for Paul to write this incredible letter about the work of Christ, the person of Christ, the power of the resurrection, the fullness of God, and much more, and to take almost a chapter to fall back to some seminar teaching about marriage, parenting, and submission to employers (masters), that, perhaps, he’d neglected to give the church(es) while he was in the area? He wouldn’t do that. His purpose in this section (5:22ff) is to tell us more about Christ. He is challenging us, helping us, and giving us practical examples of what we ought to do, from the family and from work relationships.

I don’t think 5:22 is a new paragraph, but a continuation of the previous paragraph. In the Greek text the word “submit” is left out in 5:22, because the principle of submission is so strongly stated in 5:21. Verse 22 needs verse 21 to make sense. Let’s keep them together. No new paragraph at Verse 22.

We know that Paul thinks in complex sentences and long paragraphs, so we need to follow his thinking down the long path. Christ is said to “shine on” the church ( back in 5:14), Christ is the Sun that rises on his Church – what a beautiful picture. Futhermore, the Church is to be “filled with the Spirit (5:18), and then the rejoicing Church is led into worship with “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (5:19). Then, and this is where our section begins, they are told to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). The fear (Greek phobõ) of Christ is the reverence, awe, and respect that Christ has in and over the Church. His presence in the Church (the Body of Christ) is intimate and a strong connection, a bond that can’t be broken, like marriage perhaps. His love for the Church is redemptive and life-giving. This section, over and over, in this way then that way, it is repeatedly, and wonderfully about the love of Christ for his Church, his love for us who love him.

The principle that is carried into the practical instruction beginning in 5:22 is that Christ defines and directs every relationship we now have. The emphasis is not on marriage alone. It is about Christ as the core of our walk (life) with God and at the core of every relationship we have.

The instruction about marriage, considered as a marriage seminar, is meaningless if the teaching about marriage is separated from the person of Christ (who he is) and work of Christ (what he did and what he is doing in his people, the Church). Paul is building a case for Christ as the Lord of the Church.

Ephesians 5:21 — the principle of submission to one another out of reverence (fear) of Christ.

5:23, The church should submit to Christ as a wife submits to the husband she loves (there is no absolute or unconditional submission to human beings taught here). The principle of the church’s submission to Christ is illustrated by the wife following and submitting to her husband. The priniciple is that a submitting wife illustrates the way the submitting Church loves Christ. The church is not an example for every wife to submit to any husband. The comparison to Christ and the church falls apart completely at that point. But in the marriage seminars, that is clearly the message. They say that a wife should submit to her husband (any husband) because that is the way the church submits to Christ. But that is very different from showing by practical example that a wife’s submission illustrates the way the Church must obey Christ. To flip it back the other way doesn’t work. 5:22 doesn’t go on to explain the many ways the wife submits to her husband, it goes on to explain how Christ is the head of the Body of Christ and is himself its Savior. The primary principle is that the church shows how the wife submits, but even in the Greek text, AGAIN, the word “submit” is left out, and the word is implied from the phrase, “as the church submits to Christ. It continues, “so also wives in everything to their husbands” omitting the word “submit.”

The point is that the main focus for a Christian is Christ. That is essential and critical information for us. This section focuses on the relationship between Christ and his Church. The illustration, the analogy taken from marriage helps us to understand what submission should be, but the force of Paul’s teaching is for the Church to be in subjection to Christ.

The marriage relationship is impacted by Christ. As we are subject to Christ as the body of Christ, we can begin to understand real submission to one another, and to one another who are married. It isn’t that out of the marraige relationship that are taught about submission. It is that being in the Church of Jesus Christ that the Lord teaches us so much about submission — Christ’s submission to the will of his Father, his obedience unto death. His Lordship over the Church and his demand that we obey him if we love him – that is how we learn to submit in other relationships because we are members of a submitting-to-Christ Body. We learn about submission because we know Christ and see his life before the Father. And we learn to submit to him as Lord. Lordship demands our submission.

The marriage seminar is over (as great a need as there is for better marriages). This is a seminar about Jesus and his people. This is what we need today. Not a bunch of suggestions for relationships, but a relationship that is incredible, with God, by Jesus Christ. That’s what we need!

5:25, Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her… ” The husband’s love for his wife is to reflect the love that Christ has for the Church. The illustration is not giving 50 ways to love your wife. It is setting Christ as the lover of the Church and the husband submits to the King of the Church and learns about love from the Lover of the Church.

The seminar on marriage would stop and tell the husband how he should love his wife. But a much bigger point is how greatly Christ loves his Church. Just reading through this section, notice who is mentioned again and again: it is the Lord, then Christ, followed by Savior, then Christ again, and again Christ, then he shifts over to “he” (Christ), and again he (Christ), back to Christ, and once more Christ. The emphasis, let’s say it again, is not on marriage. Marriage is an analogy, an illustration of the way Christ loves his people. When that is kept at the center of this passage, these verses become a song of praise to the King and Master of the Church to which we belong.

This is what Paul says about this very section in 5:32. If you are teaching the marriage seminar on this section, this verse doesn’t fit in very well, because you’ve been giving 8 ways to make your marriage better, and this passage is giving you great reasons to trust Christ and love him with all your heart. Paul gives his take on what he wrote in this section about Christ, in 5:32, “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the Church.” The illustrations from marriage could get us off the central theme, maybe that’s why this section is almost always a marriage seminar. But it is is so much more.

Ok, I’ll admit there is much in the marriage relationship that is picked up on in the union between Christ and the Church. The Church is the Bride of Christ (Revelation 19:7). But the lesson for us HERE is that we are the Bride. Christ is the one who loves us. We are in submission to him. He is our Lord. Our loves and marriages find their meaning through the person and work of Christ. But Christ’s love is not helped by the wife who submits or by the husband who loves. Christ is the one these pictures are telling us about.

To let the text speak, OK, marriage is important. But it becomes much clearer how we love and care, how we submit and follow, when we have Christ at the center of our lives as part of the Body of Christ, the Church. Christ living in us, Christ filling us full of the fullness of God! The Church is the focus of the love of God. The focus, the center of his redemption. We receive the fullness of Christ to dwell in us (see Ephesians 3:19, “and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (ESV), all these great principles not only make our marriages outstanding, they make our lives amazing and God-filled.

Paul was not lauding a good husband, he is extolling our glorious Savior for his amazing love for us who believe. John 17:22-23, “that they may be one,” Jesus said. He wanted our unity to be not merely about how great our kids are or how wonderful our marriages are (and those are great things to want), but that people have a significant connection with God by Jesus Christ. Something that is able to make a husband love better, and a wife to trust her wonderful husband more.

Ephesians 5:22ff is about Christ first and most. When we grasp that with our minds and hearts, and begin to live as the Body of Christ, our connection with Christ becomes stronger, and that connection changes everything.

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Worship styles versus worship content

The “Music Wars” are raging across the land. Those who love and insist on contemporary worship music and a more relaxed approach are pitted against those who hold with determined, unflinching devotion to the hymns, creeds, and liturgy. The fight is fierce. 

Music Wars describes how churches fight and some of them are destroyed over the battle of what kind of music and how loud is it to be played. But it is not just the style of music that is at the center of this war. Something much more important is at stake:  The Content of Worship and the Way we offer Praise to God are what matter.

Music Wars really boils down to much more than a battle over about musical taste or the casual approach to worship, with un-tucked shirts and jeans versus tradition hymns with coats and ties; dresses not shorts for the ladies, button-down shirts and not tee-shirts for the men.

The issue is not about the kind of music so much as about the content of the music and the quality of the music that is selected. It is not about the casual approach to the worship experience. It is about being focused on the Biblical content of God’s commands for his people in worship. That is where the battle lies.

God-honoring worship could contain any “style” of music, contemporary, country, bluegrass, classical, barbershop, you name it. But that music must be filled with Biblical content. That is what matters. But the music must also be melodic: it must be singable, regardless whether it was written by Chris Tomlin or J. S. Bach.

So much of contemporary music and many of the old hymns are, frankly, vapid. Their content is meaningless or silly, or in some cases, they are unbiblical in content or doctrinally imbalanced. In addition, some contemporary songs and many of the old hymns are either so simple as to be infantile or their melody or rhythm is so complex as to be utterly unsingable.  

Music for worship should meet a few tests if it is to benefit God’s people as we seek to praise and worship God together:

  • Are the words of the songs consistent with the Biblical Gospel? This would be fairly easy to test. Just line up some passages from Scripture that support the aspiration contained in the hymn.
  • Is the music beautiful? Here again the matter should be fairly easy to figure out. Is the music melodic? Does the meter and timing of the song lend itself to congregational singing?

Bad contemporary music and poor hymns fail in the content of the words they use. Or they fail by being too difficult to sing. Some of the old hymns have odd timings and very difficult melodies; contemporary worship often fails when it uses “jazz” style timing and a cadence that is really impossible for a congregation to sing. You can tell whether a song is singable simply by looking around the congregation when the music is being sung. If most of the people are not singing, the music fails the test.

  • Does the music inform, or teach the content and impact of the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Those who have sung the old hymns know that some of those songs are just “bad poetry sung to worse music” (something like a comment that C.S. Lewis quipped after a particularly distressing worship experience in the Church of England). 

A song that is selected must pass the test that it is melodic. A key to this is the ease with which the congregation can learn the song, and the ability that people have to find harmonies within the melody. This test of harmonies is a good one. If the congregation has trouble simply singing the melody and cannot rise to harmonies, there is something missing. 

Worship should be the center of our Christian lives. It should be filled with gloriously beautiful music and these songs should be sung by an engaged and focused congregation that loves the songs and benefits from them. Other parts of the traditional worship experience have been ejected as being irrelevant or arcane to the modern worshiper. But confession of sins, assurance of pardon, even reciting a creed, can all be done with freshness and they can result in the encouragement of the worshipers. Even in a strenuously contemporary service, things can get stale if they are done the same way over and over again. 

Worship is for God, not us. But when God is glorified we are transformed by his presence and by the glory of his Person, his Word, and his Redemption. 

There really is not a “Music War.” There is a content and purpose war that those who love the Word of God and who have been changed by the Gospel desire to win for the Glory of God when his people gather to worship.

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The requirement and impossibility of holiness in man, worshiping God.

Man, bereft of his holiness, is also bereft of beauty and excellency. Beauty and excellence are essential qualities of the glory of God. Holiness, therefore, is required of those who rightly give God glory. So if man is to glorify God, his holiness must first be restored. Holiness and glory are causally related to one another: holiness is the interaction, the interplay, the self-consistent expression of those elements of the divine character, balancing and supporting each one (love and justice, mercy and wrath, e.g.); glory is the demonstration of God’s holy character.

God desires to be merciful and redemptive. He is also just and rejecting of every human virtue. Every characteristic of God is bound by his nature to act, with all the power of divinity, in defense of his glory. As we long for the beauty and excellencies of the nature of God—as we desire to abandon our ambitions and hopes so that we may be consumed, lost in those qualities for which we so deeply yearn, from the best parts of our redeemed human souls—we begin to know God.

Our desire as restored man is not merely to observe God’s beauty and wonders; it is to be identified with those excellencies, to know them in a way that knowing is not sufficient to describe. We need more and better words, songs, paintings, deeper friendships, more courageous experiences, higher, grander, clearer insights, if we are to know and love God as we ought. Our tools of speech and human language, our arts and sciences, do not give us the sufficient vocabulary to express what we know of God. The longing we have in our souls about God cannot be contained. Neither does our world seem very substantive to us in comparison to the solidity, the eternity, the profundity of God. Something more real has come to us and now is in us.

So worship is to participate in the holy; it is to know God’s glory face to face; and it is to find our longings and aspirations fulfilled in his presence. Lewis wrote lyrically about this longing, not only to understand but to be joined with God’s glory:

“Ah, but we want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of. But the poets and the mythologies know all about it. We do not want merely to see beauty, though God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.” (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 12–13).

By engaging in a direct quest to know and to extol the virtues and actions of God, we find true and abundant life and a glimpse of the life that is ahead. Then we will see clearly and can say exactly what we mean and we begin to praise God without omission, delusion, or distraction. We are stirred by his gracious invitation to examine his glory without shadow or cloud. All of these realities flow from his loving heart and result in our greatest good forever.

Excerpted from More Glory, W. Thomas Warren (2013).

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The weakness of the glorious church.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

2 Corinthians 12:9

The glorious church is weak when measuring the skills, competencies, abilities, talents, and intelligence of those who make it up. People are frail, broken, crushed, incompetent, foolish, stupid, and they make terrible decisions. They go in the wrong direction. They cannot perceive what God’s will is for them. And they do the opposite of what God instructed them to do. People are weak. People are wrongly motivated. And people misunderstand.

But the glorious church is also victorious, wise, gifted, amazing in capacity, generous, even rich, and incredible in vision and in accomplishment. But these qualities come only through Jesus Christ and they are gifts of his grace to the weakest of people. These qualities of victory and wisdom, wealth and success, do not rest in men, they are not from men, and they don’t come naturally to men. They are God’s.

Paul declared his frailty, his weakness. He said that when he was weak, then God was most strong in him. The opposite is also true:  When we think we are strong, or wise, or smart, or that we know what we are doing, then we are the most incompetent, wasteful, foolish, and ridiculously ineffective.

The glorious church is strongest when it knows how weak we as people are. We don’t depend on human capability or the blessing of human wisdom, knowledge, or intelligence. That is a certain formula for utter catastrophe. A church that brags about what they have accomplished or how they have  prospered, is doomed. Everything done in the flesh will be destroyed. None of what was done by the insights of human wisdom will be allowed to stand. God hates it. Be on guard for those who are strong, competent, and smart. They are standing against the principle that only in weakness can we conquer.

The glorious church only succeeds when it is utterly weak. We should only do incredible things, attempt amazing conquests, when we are certain of our weakness and are assured of the power of God in us who believe. We decry and declare our weaknesses, and we renounce them so that we may be strong in God’s power and can rejoice in our weaknesses.

When Christ is our wisdom and our strength, then we are strong. When Christ is our victory and our conquering power; when he alone is our Guide to the will of God, then we will always, always, be successful. And only then is God praised and glorified. He is only pleased with what is done by faith in him, and in nothing else we have or offer.

The church is only competent when it acknowledges its utter and categorical weaknesses. And then, by grace, the power of God, the competency of God, the will of God, the wisdom of God, is ours. In our weakness are we strong. Then we can boast even in our weakness so we may learn to rest upon the power of God.

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