Category: Worship/Preaching

Q. Paul says in Romans that “faith comes by hearing the Word of God.” But some people don’t read their Bibles, and they don’t attend worship to hear the Bible preached, and then they lack faith. Are there other places in Scripture that tell of more things God uses to increase our faith?

What’s sometimes called “Bible intake”—reading the Word, hearing it preached, reflecting on it with others, etc.—is one of the “spiritual disciplines” by which we invest in our relationship with God and so build our faith. But there are many other spiritual disciplines that also serve this purpose, and they too are described in the Scriptures.

One of these is encountering God in the beauty of His creation. Many interpreters describe Psalm 19 as speaking of “the two books of God,” nature and Scripture. That psalm says that creation has a “voice” that we can hear, and that from it we can learn more about God. Romans says similarly that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” Not everyone heeds this “voice,” but it’s there for those who have ears to hear, and sometimes it surprises people.

Silence and solitude are also spiritual disciplines by which people can seek God. Psalm 131 is an example of this: “ I have calmed and quieted myself.” God says in Isaiah, “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.” Too often, as God also says in Isaiah, people will “have none of it.” But sometimes people experience involuntary silence and solitude, for example, when recuperating from an accident or illness, and they find that God meets them there even though they weren’t particularly looking for Him.

Devotional reading in books other than the Bible is something else that builds our faith (for example, biographies of people whose lives are an example to us, or the reflections of godly saints throughout the ages). I once argued, in the course of a sermon series I gave on spiritual disciplines, that Gideon’s faith had been strengthened by the equivalent in his day of devotional “reading”: he’d heard stories passed down through the generations about God’s works, so that he was able to reply to the angel, “If the Lord is with us, where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about?” Knowing what God has done in the lives of others in the past helps build our own sense of expectation of what God can do in our own lives and our own time.

Another spiritual discipline is journaling, recording the events of our lives and then looking back on them over time to recognize God’s hand in those events, which we might not have been able to see while living in the midst of them. The book of Nehemiah is arguably that man’s own journal, in which he records events and reflects on them, interspersing prayers in light of his reflections (“Remember me for this also, my God, and show mercy to me according to your great love”).

One more way I’ll mention of increasing our faith is to pray faith-sized prayers. That is, when we have a concern about a situation, or an ambition to do something for God in this world, we pray for as much of it as we currently have the faith to believe for. If God has truly prompted this concern or godly ambition, that prayer will be answered in such a way as to encourage us to believe and pray for greater and greater things. I think this is what Jesus meant when his disciples asked him, “Lord, increase our faith!” and he replied, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” In other words, rather than trying to get more faith, use the faith you already have and discover what great things it can accomplish.

I hope these suggestions are helpful. Really any spiritual discipline—any of the time-honored ways in which believers invest in their relationships with God—will help a person’s faith to grow. That’s because faith is ultimately trust and confidence in God, and the better we know God, the more we understand that we can safely trust in Him.

In this post, I’m chiming in on a comment that I read online, rather than answering a question that was specifically asked of me.

[The comment I read:] As a big fan of Wesley’s hymns (he was adamant about singing them “as written”), I’m upset that a modern hymnal changes the line in “And Can it Be” from “emptied himself of all but love and bled for Adam’s helpless race” to “emptied himself (so great his love) and bled for all his chosen race.” This appears to support predestination or a limited atonement. Wesley’s words are more in keeping with Scripture—the promise was to Adam and his descendants (his “race”). Altering “all but love” suggests that Christ retained other elements of his attributes as God even when “emptied.” What other motivation is there for a sacrificial, atoning death on our behalf than love incarnate? This change is very odd.

[My thoughts:]  When I first came to Christ and was introduced to this hymn, these lines spoke to me very powerfully. I was moved by the idea that Jesus “emptied himself of all but love” and “bled” for all of us.  I, too, have encountered the changes that have been introduced to this hymn recently, and I, too, am “upset” about them.

Apparently some hymnal editors have felt that the theology of Charles Wesley, the author of this hymn, needs to be corrected at a couple of points.  For one thing, it’s clear that these editors want the hymn to present the idea of a limited atonement, rather than an unlimited one.  In the original hymn, Jesus dies for the whole human race.  In the modified version, He dies only for his “chosen” ones.

In addition, these editors apparently feel that Wesley has taken the idea of Jesus “emptying” himself a bit too far.  The Bible teaches clearly that He “emptied himself by taking the form of a servant^, being born in human likeness.”  But it’s generally understood that while Jesus gave up the so-called non-communicable divine attributes (the ones that humans cannot share with God) such as omniscience and omnipresence, He retained communicable attributes such as holiness.  So, for these editors, saying “all but love” wasn’t strictly true. Love wasn’t the only attribute He retained.

It should be noted that various groups change the words to hymns all the time, to words that they find more suitable.  Or at least they try to.  A few years back, the new hymnal of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. got into the news for leaving out the hymn “In Christ Alone.”  It turns out that its editors wanted to change the ending of the line “till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied” to “the love of God was magnified.”  But the copyright holder wouldn’t grant permission, and the editors didn’t want to include the hymn as it was originally written.

To give a further example, I have an otherwise lovely Christmas CD on which another of Charles Wesley’s hymns is altered.  In “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” the line “offspring of a virgin’s womb” is changed to “offspring of the chosen one.”  Somebody obviously didn’t believe in the virgin birth.

I personally have no problem with the theology that Wesley originally expressed in “And Can It Be?”  I believe in an unlimited atonement, and I think the phrase “all but love” is simply a beautiful poetic overstatement, meaning that Jesus came to save us out of pure love.  Nevertheless, what upsets me most is not that some people are singing different words to the hymn these days, because I know this kind of thing happens.  Rather, I’m more distressed by the way this change has been introduced.

“Bled for all his chosen race” is simply bad English.  It should be either “bled for all of his chosen race,” or “bled for his whole chosen race,” or something like that, some correct expression that would fit the music.  It’s also bad theology.  The “elect” or “chosen” (for those who think in such terms) are not a race, they’re a host.  They’re gathered one by one.  You don’t become one of the elect by being born to people who are elect.

I find that the other change has also been introduced awkwardly.  There’s already an interjection in the stanza: “So free, so infinite his grace!”  If you put in interjections too often, they lose their force, and so they should be used sparingly.  I doubt that a poet of Wesley’s caliber would have introduced another one in the very next line: “So great his love!”  For that matter, the change reflects the mistake of taking a poetic overstatement literally.  It’s like listening to the Hollies sing, “All I need is the air that I breathe, yes, to love you” and asking, “Don’t you need food, too?”

So I have one suggestion for anyone who dislikes these new words, as I do, on theological and literary grounds, and another suggestion for hymnbook editors.

I think that if a hymn gets changed like this, you can legitimately go ahead and sing the original words that you have come to love and admire, even while others in your current church are singing the new words.  I say this as someone who was a pastor for twenty years and always wanted both oneness of spirit and freedom of conscience in worship.

I encountered what I think is a good model for this in the church I served as an associate pastor early in my ministry.  This church would would provide optional words in the bulletin for older hymns that used masculine terms for people in general.  That way people who no longer “heard” these terms as inclusive of women could sing words that were meaningful for them and that also captured the original intention of the hymn (since the original writers did not see the terms as exclusive).  Those who still “heard” the original terms as referring to both men and women, for their part, could sing those words out of the hymnal at the same time.  Different words, but sung with the same meaning and in the same spirit.

To give an example from a different liturgical practice that I think provides a good further analogy, a young Catholic woman once came to the service in one of my churches, as the guest of a friend, and asked me if it would be all right if she took communion with us believing in her own heart (as she knew we didn’t quite) that the bread and wine would become the actual body and blood of Christ.  I said we would love to have her join us on that basis.  After the service she made a point of telling me, perhaps for the sake of her own conscience, that she had indeed taken the communion elements with that understanding.  I think having her join us that way was much better than me forbidding a fellow Christian to share the sacrament with us.  Oneness of spirit and freedom of conscience.

So I think a person could sing the original words to “And Can It Be?” in their own church the same way, respectfully and in a spirit of unity.  (You can bet that if I’m ever in a Christmas service where the phrase “offspring of the chosen one” is substituted in the bulletin or hymnal, I’m going to sing “offspring of a virgin’s womb.”  Respectfully.)

And to hymnbook editors I would say, if there’s a hymn that’s so eloquent and lyrical that you want to sing it even though you disagree with parts of it, please think twice about changing the words.  I feel it’s a shame that in this case Charles Wesley’s magnificent poetry has been turned into, frankly, something average at best.  If you really don’t like what he says in his hymns, why not write your own?

Q. I’ve been looking for a church in my area for some time now and I’m starting to get discouraged. The pastors of the churches I’ve visited haven’t gone very deep in their preaching.  I haven’t yet heard anyone preach exegetically through a passage, for example, and they often get sidetracked talking about superficial matters. Some of them actually seem to get their sermons off the Internet and then just adapt them with personal anecdotes. I’ve talked with some of them about my concerns and they’ve told me they’re “trying to keep it basic” for the sake of new believers. But it seems to me that this is just keeping everybody in perpetual immaturity.

My main point of frustration is that pastors either don’t seem to take their roles very seriously and seem to be just providing entertainment, or they teach really basic stuff super dogmatically but don’t really challenge their congregations. My understanding of what a pastor should be is someone who is there to equip and guide the congregation in terms of what the Bible really teaches, how to apply it to one’s life, and then how to understand our culture in order to engage it. As it is, half the time I stay home and listen to podcasts by people whose vision and style I appreciate such as Tim Keller. I know Christianity is about community and about giving back and being part of the change, but I don’t know where to begin.

In my first post in response to this question, I described what I thought was reasonable and fair for a person to expect from the sermons in their local church: that they be original (not pulled off the Internet and dressed up with a bit of local color), biblical (based on a passage carefully worked through), coherent, and challenging.  Now let me share some thoughts about what a person shouldn’t necessarily expect from the sermons in their church, in the hopes that this will help you be more open to some particular churches near you than you might be otherwise.

Let me begin with a story.  When I was no more than a few months into my first solo pastorate after seminary and graduate school, a longtime member asked to meet with me.  She took a few minutes to describe how she listened to Charles Stanley on television on Sunday mornings before coming to our service, and then she got right to the point:  “I wish you would preach more like Charles Stanley.”  (I thought to myself, “I wish I could preach more like Charles Stanley!”)

But an interesting thing happened after that.  Several months later, I was speaking with this same woman again, and she admitted, “For some reason, I now enjoy listening to your sermons just as much as to Charles Stanley’s, and I get just as much out of them.”  I knew that the reason wasn’t that in those few months I had somehow caught up in preaching ability with this naturally gifted speaker who has years of experience before a national television audience.  There was a different reason, which I’d like to explain by way of an analogy.

The classic definition of a sacrament is that it’s “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”  But there’s another definition that I find just as meaningful:  “A sacrament is the community bearing witness to God’s work in an individual life.”

When you commit yourself to following Christ, for example, you don’t baptize yourself.  You share your testimony of faith with the leaders and members of your local church, and when they are convinced that your commitment is genuine, they will baptize you.  If you feel called to the ministry, you don’t ordain yourself.  You make the case that you are called before the leaders of your church and of the other churches it is in fellowship with, and likely after a period of testing and training, they will ordain you.  Similarly you don’t perform your own wedding, or eat the Lord’s Supper all by yourself.  In all these sacramental instances the community of Jesus’ followers is bearing witness to God’s work in individual lives.

A sermon can be thought of as a “counter-clockwise sacrament,” that is, an instance when things flow in the other direction:  A sermon is an individual bearing witness to God’s work in the life of a community.  When preparing a sermon, or a series of sermons, the pastor considers carefully what God has been doing in the life of the community (discerned by walking as a shepherd among the people and sharing their journeys of faith), and then chooses a biblical passage or book that will speak to that activity, encouraging the people in the progress that has already been made and challenging them to press on further.

I think the woman who was such a big fan of Charles Stanley came to appreciate my sermons just as much as his not because they were delivered with equal polish and eloquence, but because she sensed that they were speaking to and about the life of faith we were all living together in our church.  She saw her own journey depicted and addressed in my sermons, and she felt right at home in them.

I think this is what you can and should reasonably expect from the sermons in your local church.  But you will need to become part of its ongoing shared life before you will hear your own story being told in the sermons.  Perhaps there’s a church you’ve visited whose people and programs you really like, but you’re just not so sure about the sermons.  Well, an awful lot of local church sermons will suffer by comparison with the Tim Keller podcasts you’ve been listening to at home.  Let’s face it, there aren’t too many Tim Kellers or Charles Stanleys out there, and it’s not fair or reasonable to expect any given local church pastor to preach and teach at that same level.  The purpose of preaching is not to give the parishioners a Bible school education from the pulpit—there are other times and places to get that kind of instruction.

So I’d encourage you to give such a church a fair try, particularly if the sermons seem to have the potential to meet the basic expectations I outlined at the beginning of this post.  You may find before long that a “counter-clockwise sacrament” is bearing witness, every time you hear a sermon in this church, to the life you’ve come to share with those people, and you’ll feel right at home.

Q.  I’ve heard you relate how you once went to church and when the first words out of the worship leader’s mouth were something like “How ‘bout them Yankees?” you felt like shouting back, “How ‘bout that Jesus?”  I have the same frustration.  My pastor often gets sidetracked into talking about sports during his sermons.  Why do preachers and worship leaders talk so much about sports these days?

I can think of at least two good reasons to talk about sports during a worship gathering of Jesus’ followers.

For one thing, sports provides many illustrations of the perseverance and dedication that are required to live as followers of Jesus.  The Bible itself models using sports as a metaphor in this way.  In writing to the Corinthians, for example, Paul said, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”  Paul wrote similarly to Timothy, “Anyone who competes as an athlete does not receive the victor’s crown except by competing according to the rules.”  And Psalm 19 even celebrates God’s creation by comparing the sun to “an athlete eager to run a race.”

A second legitimate use of sports, as I see it, is to “contextualize” the gospel by situating the message of worship and preaching within the milieu in which the hearers live.  When I came to pastor a church in the city where Michigan State University is located, at first I didn’t know any better than to wear my favorite yellow fleece jacket with blue jeans to informal gatherings, thus inadvertently donning the maize-and-blue colors of its arch-rival, the University of Michigan. Some people had such a hard time with this that I had to swap the yellow fleece for a green-and-white MSU sweatshirt, signaling that I was identifying with the community and its popular culture. This set people at ease, creating receptivity and an openness to my ministry.  I believe that carefully chosen verbal references to sports in worship and preaching can signal the same kind of intentional identification.

But this can easily be taken too far. We have to be careful not to use the spiritual authority behind worship and preaching to suggest, even implicitly, that God is on the side of one team and its fans and against other teams and their fans.  I like the answer a priest from Notre Dame gave when asked what God would do when Notre Dame played another Catholic school like Boston College, with the priests at both schools praying that their team would win.  “In that case,” he said, “I think the Lord would just sit back and enjoy a great football game.”  We need to convey this same sense of divine neutrality (and divine interest in a great game, as both teams strive to do their best) when we talk about sports.

I think the greatest danger is to imply that being a fan of a certain team is somehow a legitimate defining aspect of a person’s identity.  The spiritual authority behind worship and preaching can convey this message as well, if the local sports team is absorbed as part of the faith community’s identity.  Sometimes I’ll watch a game show on which the players are asked to say three or four defining things about themselves.  Very often they’ll say what kind of work they do, mention their spouses and children, and then say, “I’m also a big fan of such-and-such a team.”  I believe that unless a person is actively involved in promoting a team’s efforts in some practical manner, it’s a dangerous illusion for them to allow their fandom to become a defining aspect of their identity, when they really have nothing to do with how the team (or their favorite NASCAR driver, etc.) performs.  It’s perhaps even more dangerous for a community of Jesus’ followers to let this happen, because then they’re allowing an idol to share the place of honor that belongs to Jesus alone.

This is what I felt happened in the worship service you heard me describe attending.  It was actually Palm Sunday, when we would expect the worship leader to call out something like “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!” and have the people respond, “Hosanna in the highest!” to Jesus.  Instead, the worship leader extolled the recent success of a favorite sports team.  I really was tempted to shout back, “How ‘bout that Jesus?”  But that would have been disruptive and disrespectful of the spiritual authority of the worship leader, so I didn’t shout anything back.  But I thank you for your question, which has given me the opportunity to share these reflections.  Sports is one of the greatest idols of contemporary American culture and we need to be very discerning about its presence and influence.