The Posture of Listening to God's Word - Part 3

In The Meaning of Revelation, H. Richard Niebuhr points out that by “revelation,” we must mean more than just the “historic Jesus” (Barth) or the egocentric “self” (Descartes). We must mean the centrally radiating reality of a revealing, eternal God. Niebuhr wrote, "When we say revelation we point to something in the historic event more fundamental and more certain than Jesus or than self. Revelation means God, God who discloses himself to us through history as our knower, our author, our judge and our only saviour. “All revelation,” Professor Herrman writes, ‘is the self-revelation of God’ (Der Begriff der offenbarung, 1887)…it is the peculiar activity of God, the unveiling of his hiddenness, his giving of himself in communion.”  

Eugene Peterson writes that two of the greatest enemies of the Christian faith are (and always have been) moralism: “dishonoring the Son” (or legalism) and gnosticism: “dishonoring the Father” (or “spiritualism”). The third enemy that he identified was sectarianism: “dishonoring the Spirit” in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places he writes, “Gnosticism is a virus in the bloodstream of religion and keeps resurfacing every generation or so advertised as brand new, replete with a new brand name. On examination, though, it turns out to be the same old thing but with a new public relations agency”. And later, “moralism works from a base of human ability and arranges life in such a way that my good behavior will guarantee protection from punishment or disaster. Moralism works from strength, not weakness. Moralism uses God (or the revelation of God) in order not to need God any longer. Moral codes are used as stepping stones to independence from God” 

When Susan Wise Bauer wrote her June 16, 1997 Christianity Today review of the two new books on the life of King David by Eugene Peterson (Leap Over A Wall: Earthy Spirituality for Everyday Christians, San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997) and Chuck Swindoll (David: A Man of Passion and Destiny, Waco, TX: Word Books Publishers, 1997), she made note that the major difference between the two books was that Peterson took the story of David seriously as Scriptural narrative, while Swindoll reduced the story (and the Scriptures) to a set of moralisms. She writes, “topology creeps into Swindoll’s stories: David’s life is a series of moral lessons...to flatten story into principle takes away a vital dimension of revelation.”

The Posture of Listening to God's Word - Part 2

God has shown himself to be a God of revelation. This does not mean that he has revealed all knowledge, but merely that he has chosen to initiate the revelation of his nature and his will himself, by initiating revelatory speech. God initiates and his people respond. God speaks; his people listen. As Alister McGrath points out, “Revelation” does not mean merely the transmission of a body of knowledge, but the personal self-disclosure of God within history. God has taken the initiative through a process of self-disclosure, which reaches its climax and fulfillment in the history of Jesus of Nazareth.

God’s self-revelation is his Word. His Word created everything. His Word came to his chosen people, through his chosen leaders. His Word to and through his chosen prophets was recorded and regarded as Scripture. Later, his Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. This Word was witnessed and proclaimed by the apostles. The people of God are the people who come together to listen to the Word of God. God’s Word defines them. It draws God’s people into relationship with him. As Eugene Peterson writes, "The very essence of “word” is personal. It is the means by which what is within one person is shared with another person. Words link spirits...when a word is spoken and heard, it joins speaker and hearer into a whole relationship...The intent of revelation is not to inform us about God but to involve us in God."

The primary role of the Christian leader, then, ought to be to lead people to pay attention to God’s initiating revelatory speech. The leader must position God’s people to a place and posture of receiving God’s Word. Paul Barnett points out that the role of God’s leader is often described as that of a “shepherd” who leads God’s flock (Num. 27:15-18, 2 Sam. 5:1-4, Jer. 3:15, 23:4, Jer. 50:6-7, Eze. 34:23, Zec. 10:2-3, Jn. 21:17, Act. 20:28, 1Pet. 5:2 NIV).

            

God is not in some faraway country, to which leaders must take the flock of the people of God. Rather, he is the radiating center of all existence. God is ever present and ever revealing. The Christian leader’s task is to help people pay attention to God’s self-revelation. This is not a matter of humans initiating searches or opinions about God, but an active leading of God’s people to listen to God’s personally initiated revelation to his people and his Word. A leader does not gather God’s people to listen to his ideas about God, but to listen to God revealing himself.

            

It is essential that leaders begin by being formed themselves by listening to God’s Word through careful exegesis and study, and that they publicly direct their congregations in such a way that the Word is heard regularly and clearly. The act of preaching cannot merely be a lecture of human opinion. It must be more than a talk from a topical series on people’s perceived needs. It surely moves beyond the repetition of introductory evangelism or apologetics. It ought never to be the simplistic reciting of legalistic platitudes that uses God’s Word as merely an encyclopedia of morality. Nor ought it ever be an Ouija board-like use of Scripture for the spiritualistic practice of personal, esoteric experience. The first and most important principle must be the fundamental posture of any leader of God’s people, to see himself, above anything else, as leading God’s people to pay attention to God’s radiating revelation. God’s revelation must be set as the center of attention, rather than all of the competing human centers, which call for attention, both inside and outside the Church.

The Posture of Listening to God’s Word - Part 1

It can be demonstrated that the authentic definition and approach to the content of Christian Spiritual formation for every generation has always been shaped through the public proclamation of the texts of the Holy Scriptures. Preaching can be seen throughout the panorama of the entire story of God’s redemptive history, recorded in the Scriptures, as the greatest work of the shepherds of God’s flock. Authentic Christian preaching, in every generation, has always been the act of God’s representative messenger, paying attention to logos of God’s revealed Word and proclaiming the meaning of that Word to the people in their contemporary context. 

The leaders of Christian communities must give precedence to the text of God’s Word, and defer to it for the authority and context of their messages. They must preach the Word. They must not begin with themselves. They must read the text, exegete it, understand it, and proclaim it to their gathered audience, in their language, history, and culture. They must then apply it to their existential reality.

God wants to form us, reform us and transform us. He formed all that is. He has been reforming a people for himself through all of history. He is transforming individuals to fit them into his reformed humanity. This is a Spiritual formation, and it comes through his revealed Word. 

Guard Against Conforming

The postmodern context offers us many strange and enticing ways to substitute authentic Christian worship for entertaining, exciting, selfishly fulfilling experiences. The Church must guard against conforming to the patterns of this or any era. God does not change, and his mandate for the Church remains the same. Authentic Christian Spiritual formation comes through careful listening to and proclamation of the logos of the Word of God, in the ethos of our contemporary context, with valid pathos. Dr. Stanley Grenz died suddenly in 2005. One of his last interviews contained this answer to a question about his thoughts on the next 25 years of the Church in this postmodern setting. He said,

As I look to the future I am profoundly hopeful – not because of what I believe we will accomplish, but because of the God in whom I believe. Although the problems we face are enormous, we stand under the mandate of Jesus Christ who is the Lord of Creation. We are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And, we are children of the Creator of the universe. For this reason, I am convinced that just as the gospel has gone forth with power in every era and to every generation, so also the gospel will sound forth in the postmodern context in which we live. And the God who promises to bring creation to its divinely intended goal invites us to participate in the divine program. May we, therefore, empowered by the Spirit, be faithful to the mandate Christ has entrusted to us, to the glory of God! 

One will do well to heed these words as one endeavors to be God’s faithful steward, listening to his logos – exegeting it, believing it, and living it with authentic pathos – and truly exposing it to the genuine ethos of this postmodern generation.

Dumbing Down the Story

Ralph and Gregg Lewis wrote a helpful volume called Inductive Preaching, which emphasizes the need for good storytelling in postmodern preaching. They make an excellent case for the fact that this is the essential means of faithful biblical preaching. They stress the fact that the Scriptures come to us primarily as narrative and are, therefore, story. The Bible is basically one long story; God’s story. This is his revelation of himself through his own story about himself and his personal revelation through the lives and histories of his people. The art of good storytelling is an essential skill one must master to strike authentic pathos as a proclaimer of God’s Word. Jesus primarily asked questions and told stories. The Church today tends to give answers and lectures. In this postmodern culture, there is especially a vital need for the skills of good storytelling.

One of the sensitive issues in this contemporary climate is the popular rebellion against any kind of institutional authority. If one is perceived to be a paternalistic, archaic, hierarchical, bigoted Church spokesperson, spouting dead, theoretical rhetoric, one will have a small audience of postmodern listeners. But, if one tells a story with real contemporary pathos, one will be perceived as being captivating, real, and relevant. Then one will find a waiting audience who will listen, be fed, and come to hear the truth of God’s Word.

There are some ways that one must resist a compromise with a kind of pathos that is not biblical. Marva Dawn brings her witty and insightful mind to bear on the controversial issue of worship in today’s churches in her book, A Royal “Waste” of Time. She makes a very good case for the value and necessity of historic, traditional liturgy in Christian Spiritual formation. In this postmodern setting, there is a growing interest in tradition, mystery, and sacred space. There has been a growing distrust and distaste for the sometimes antiseptic, rationalistic, deductive, and linear approach to church life that some Evangelicals have taken during the modern era. It can be argued that, after swallowing modernism completely, the evangelical Church lost a crucial sense of sacredness.

Dawn argues for a renewed sense of being the Church in its most basic purpose: worshipping God. This worship will have no other value or purpose other than to glorify the Triune God. Though there is constant temptation and pressure to make the Church’s worship do something or be something for some sake other than purely worshipping, Christians must resist this Satanic magnetic pull and refrain from using worldly trained skills to make the worship accomplish something other than “wasting” time with God.

There is a strange yet popular idea today of making worship into an evangelistic endeavor. The theory is: invite the unconverted person into a worship service, and, as he experiences the “presence of God,” he will be converted. Dawn addresses this misguided, experientially based, gnostic-like program in her other book, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down. Another troubling trend is to see worship as a means to the end of “bringing people into the presence of God.” This of course misses the biblical point that one is always in God’s presence, and again uses worship as a device to create a self-centered, subjective experience.

One more strange development in worship today is the emergence of the non-leading leader. In many postmodern churches, the musician at the front may be having his own little personal worship experience, which the congregation is invited to join in on if it knows the tune. There is very little “leadership” in this. It fits the postmodern, individualistic, private religious desires of those who want the common church experience that is a popular replacement today for authentic Christian worship. But it is not authentic pathos.

The Responsibility of Congregants

The following was written by great Presbyterian preacher Floyd Doud Shafer in an issue of Christianity Today dated March 27, 1961. It addresses the responsibility of congregants to demand nothing less than a hearing of God's Word. What congregants must do to their leader is:

Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail on the sign “study.” Take him off all mailing lists. Lock him up with his books, his typewriter, and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts and broken hearts and the flick of lives of a superficial flock and a holy God. Force him to be the one man in our surfeited communities who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Engage him to wrestle with God all the night through. And let him come out only when he is bruised and beaten into being a blessing. Shut his mouth forever spouting remarks and stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence, and bend his knees in the lonesome valley of prayer. Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry for God. And make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical records. Put water in his fuel tank. Give him a Bible, tie him to the pulpit, and make him preach the Word of the living God. Test him, quiz him, examine him, humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good comprehension of finances, game scores, and politics. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir, raise a chant, and haunt him with it night and day “Sir, we would see Jesus.” When at long last, he dares assay the pulpit, ask him if he has a word from God. If he doesn’t, dismiss him. Tell him you can read the morning paper and digest the television commentaries and think through the day’s superficial problems and manage the community’s weary drives and bless the sordid baked potatoes, green beans add infinitum, better than he can. Command him not to come back until he’s read and re-read, written and re-written until he can stand up worn, and forlorn, and say, “Thus saith the Lord.” Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with demands for celestial wisdom. And give him no escape until he’s back against the wall of the word. And sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left: God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down street gossip. But give him a chapter and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward, until he says about it all things that ring with the truth of eternity. And when he’s burned up by the flaming word, when he’s consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, and when he’s privileged to translate the truth of God to men, and finally transferred from earth to heaven, then bear him away gently and blow a muted trumpet and lay down softly, place a two-edged sword on his coffin, and raise the tune triumphant. For he was a brave soldier of the Word and ere he died he had become a man of God.

Just deliver the message!

The fundamental task of the Christian Spiritual leader has always and only been to listen to God’s Word, understand God’s meaning, and proclaim it to his contemporary community. The Christian leader is to lead his people to pay attention to God. In these last days, God is paid attention to through the text of his spoken Word, the Bible (Heb. 1:1-3). The primary call of the Christian leader, then, is to continue to exegete God’s Word and teach it to his community. John Stott points out that when the Church has neglected to execute its first duty to authentic, exegetically based, expository preaching, it has experienced its eras of decline and weakness in strength, numbers, and vitality.

                        

Imagine I had to suddenly leave my home for a foreign country without a chance to say good-bye to my family. But, before I left, I dictated a letter for my family to a friend and charged him with the task of delivering my message to my family. Suppose though, on the way to deliver this message to my family, my friend decided that what my family really needed to hear was a series of lectures on his opinions of the perfect family. He then delivered these lectures, using quotes from my letter, taken out of context, to back up his points. If I found out he had done this, I would be furious at my friend! I gave him a message for my family. His task was to deliver it to them with no embellishments or distractions. I would say, “Just deliver the message! Only ad what you need to say, to help them understand it because they weren’t there when I dictated it!” I believe God is furious over what passes for preaching in many churches. He has given a message to his family and has appointed teachers and preachers to “just deliver the message!” and to only ad what they need to ad to help God’s family understand it because they are in a new context. His message is his transformative Word. It is to be listened to, understood and obeyed. This is the fundamental task of Christian attention.

Some may assert, “Of course the content of Christian proclamation is the Scriptures. That’s obvious.” If it is obvious, why is it so often not practiced? Why do we find, in so many gatherings of God’s people, that there is so much topical, human opinion being proclaimed, while God’s plain message to his family is ignored or changed? The fundamental task of making sure God’s Word is heard, is not just the responsibility of Christian leaders. The people of God must take responsibility for their own spiritual formation. They must demand that their leaders expose them to an authentic hearing of God’s authentic message.