This is a repost from October 2008

Again, a lot of this stuff I have picked up from Tim Keller and worked it over in my head. I’ve done so much Keller stuff I actually got a letter at church addressed to “Tim Keller, Living Stones Church”. This is both flattering and troubling at the same time.

We agree that certain preaching traditions have their difficulties. Many of us have experienced the “Where’s Waldo” school of preaching where we look for Jesus under every OT rock. We’ve also seen the American revivalist make every sermon an evangelistic altar call approach. That approach has within it usually a very rote approach to gospel articulation which I also resist as a reduction of the real deal. The seeker movement brought us a dearth of wisdom sermons. Count how many seeker services pick texts from Proverbs. In the seeker movement sales events they taught you to name your sermons things like “5 keys to a healthy marriage” or family or sex life or community or whatever itch the neighborhood needs to scratch. Then there’s the emergency sermon that cries out for some sort of expression of outrage or indignation. You get these on the right and the left. Right now in CA some pastors are fervently telling us what way to vote on 8. In Costco today I was behind a a pick-up truck that had a hand-written sign in the back that said “A vote for 8 is a vote for HATE”.

Behind some of what David and Ginger (on Voices) have posted I hear (whether or not they intend two say it) the rather bashful complaint “I don’t really want to hear the gospel every week. I’ve heard it before, it’s the basics of Christianity 101. As far as I’m concerned that is something I’ve settled in my mind long ago, I don’t intend to turn back and I’d really rather get on with something a bit more interesting like sermons that move me emotionally, sermons that give me comfort, sermons that present things to me about God or from the Bible that I’ve never heard before, something that I can find helpful in living the Christian life.” Whether or not David and Ginger think that I think a lot of people do. I certainly have felt that way.

There are at least a couple of elements behind this idea.

1. Belief is saying “yes” to the sentence: “Jesus died on the cross to save me from my sins and to promise me heaven.”

2. Now that I am a Christian I need to find all kinds of different ways to do good things, Christian things, think Christian thoughts, help other people think and do Christian things (for some, whether they like it or not) and somehow participate in this “Christian witness” thing to some degree or another.

This is why it feels a bit perfunctory to end each sermon, wedding or funeral with the 4 spiritual laws and an altar call. At some point after you’ve looked out over the same group of people every week for years you have to say “why bother”. For some this tradition is an article of faith, but fortunately I’m CRC so it isn’t.

The second part requires even more examination, and this was something that Keller really helped me a lot with. We CRC folks have gotten a bit bashful about election in the last couple of generations but still we can pretty much say “God chose me”. We tend, however, to really apply that to our justification. When it comes to sanctification we tend to be right there with the rest of the pack. Once we’ve selected, been selected, identified with the Christian herd the scrubbing part of our lives is pretty much identical to other Christians or even other moralists of any religious stripe out there.

It was Keller who introduced me (or re-introducted me, I might have been presented with it before but never caught on) to the idea from Luther that the gospel is both for our justification (this we get more easily) but also for our sanctification. If this is the case, then the same gospel is in fact useful in the same sermon both for the person who’s been in church for 50 years and the person who isn’t a Christian at all.

Luther states in the first of his 95 theses that all of life is repentance. My justification and my sanctification come from the same source, and that source is not my will. In a way it is embodied in our notion of the purpose of the Lord’s Supper and of worship. My sanctification proceeds as I remember and re-experience my justification and both come by grace. When I partake of the Lord’s Supper I remember my justification, but this is spiritual food for my sanctification as well. What this also means is that whenever I sin I am not just taking a step back in sanctification but I am also denying my justification. There is a deep unity between them. An example of this is this little piece by Keller: http://www.greentreewebster.org/Articles/All%20of%20Life%20is%20Repentance.pdf
For this reason how I think we tend to pursue sanctification in the church as will based and via carrots and sticks is actually also a denial of our justification.

One of the first things I needed to work on if I wanted to preach the gospel every week and to not do as the Baptists do was to have a much clearer vision of the gospel and at the same time a greater realization of its many forms. That sounds contradictory but it is not. Keller recently put a piece on this in CT. http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2008/002/9.74.html (He’s even got a Bavinck quote in there.)

When I am working on a text I work hard to try to spot the gospel in it. I am not so much looking for words but more looking for gospel relationships, movements and resonances. They come to their purest, starkest relief in Jesus, but they are found again and again throughout the Bible. Sometimes they are in contrast, sometimes they are in harmony. Then in the sermon I want to tease them out and try to make them vivid for the congregation.

But this unity between the advancement of faith in the truth (of God’s love through the work of Jesus) and the recession of the lie (that it is up to me to save myself) is fundamental in working on justification and through it also sanctification in the same sermon, at the same time. The recognition that there is one gospel in many forms helps keep you from getting wooden with the 4 spiritual laws (Keller has a nice treatment of that in the CT piece and in other places) while also helping to find the fingerprints of the gospel in many different places.

Maybe this whole thing I wrote is disjointed, rambling and confusing. I work to get it clearer in my head, and sometimes that is fuzzy, but to make it clear on paper is tougher still, but a good exercise for me. Thanks for the indulgence. pvk