I recently read an interesting article entitled Eight Confessions of Church Spies. Churches can hire a consulting outfit to send “spies” (like “mystery shoppers”) to evaluate and critique them. It’s thought provoking article and a helpful reminder that we need to put ourselves in the shoes of visitors and be considerate of showing them the Lord’s hospitality. In a nutshell, the 8 confessions were:

1. Church websites are often outdated, boring … and useless.

2. Churches are not friendly.

3. Church facilities are not generally marked well.

4. Churches aren’t prepared for guests.

5. Churches are poorly equipped for protecting children.

6. Worship through music often needs improvement.

7. Preaching is often weak.

8. Churches are not always clear in “what to do” in response to worship.

I think #2 is especially where a congregation like ours can easily deceive itself. We love one another; we enjoy fellowshipping with each other; we each have friends in the church. But if a person is a visitor, especially if he or she is a bit shy about inserting himself or herself into a conversation, such friendliness may be perceived as hard-to-break-into cliquishness. It may not be intended that way, but it can feel like unfriendliness to outsiders. I believe that our Lord would have his redeemed children take the initiative to welcome newcomers and introduce them to others. So put your antennae up every Lord’s Day; keep a sharp lookout for visitors; consider how you might serve them and make them feel welcome; and mean it. Or, in other words, love your neighbour as yourself.

J.I. Packer writes:

The Holy Spirit’s distinctive new covenant role, then, is to fulfil what we may call a floodlight ministry in relation to the Lord Jesus Christ. So far as this role was concerned, the Spirit “was not yet” (John 7:39, literal Greek) while Jesus was on earth; only when the Father had glorified him (see John 17:1, 5) could the Spirit’s work of making men aware of Jesus’ glory begin.

I remember walking to a church one winter evening to preach on the words “he shall glorify me,” seeing the building floodlit as I turned a corner, and realizing that this was exactly the illustration my message needed.

When floodlighting is well done, the floodlights are so placed that you do not see them; you are not in fact supposed to see where the light is coming from; what you are meant to see is just the building on which the floodlights are trained. The intended effect is to make it visible when otherwise it would not be seen for the darkness, and to maximize its dignity by throwing all its details into relief so that you see it properly. This perfectly illustrates the Spirit’s new covenant role. He is, so to speak, the hidden floodlight shining on the Saviour.

Or think of it this way. It is as if the Spirit stands behind us, throwing light over our shoulder, on Jesus, who stands facing us.

The Spirit’s message is never,

“Look at me;
listen to me;
come to me;
get to know me,”

but always

“Look at him, and see his glory;
listen to him, and hear his word;
go to him, and have life;
get to know him, and taste his gift of joy and peace.”

~ from Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God

The “Christian Curmudgeon” writes:

The church is too often a place where we “play pretend”, because we dare not do otherwise. [KEEP READING]

D.A. Carson writes:

EVANGELICALS REGULARLY DRAW A LINE BETWEEN JUSTIFICATION AND SANCTIFICATION.

Justification is God’s declaration that an individual sinner is just—a declaration grounded not in the fact that he or she is just, but in God’s accepting Christ’s death instead of the sinner’s, in God’s reckoning Christ’s righteousness to the sinner. It marks the beginning of the believer’s pilgrimage. From the believer’s vantage point, to be justified is a once-for-all experience bound up with God’s good purposes in Christ’s once-for-all death.

By contrast, sanctification in the Protestant tradition has normally been understood to refer to the process by which believers progressively become more holy. (Holy and sanctified/sanctification have the same root in Greek.) This is not a once-for-all experience; it reflects a lifelong pilgrimage, a process that will not be finally complete until the onset of the new heaven and the new earth. It is not what God reckons to us; it is what he empowers us to become.

Failure to distinguish between justification and sanctification frequently ends up with a blurring of justification. If justification takes on a shading of personal growth in righteousness, pretty soon the forensic, declarative nature of justification is lost to view, and we start reimporting some kind of works-righteousness through the back door.

Historically, of course, the warning is well merited. One must always be vigilant to preserve Paul’s emphasis on justification. But the SANCTIFICATION word-group has not always been well-served by this analysis. Those who study Paul have long noted that sometimes people are said to be “sanctified” in a POSITIONAL or DEFINITIONAL sense—that is, they are set apart for God (POSITIONAL), and therefore they already are sanctified (DEFINITIONAL). In such passages the process of progressively becoming more holy is not in view.

Most of the places where Paul talks about being “holy” or “sanctified” fall into this POSITIONAL or DEFINITIONAL camp. That is certainly the case in 1_Corinthians 1:2: Paul writes to “the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy.” The Corinthians already are sanctified; they have been set apart for God. Therefore, they have been called to be holy—that is, to live life in line with their calling (which, by and large, they have been failing to do, quite spectacularly, judging by the rest of the book).

Of course, there are many passages that speak of growth and improvement that do not use SANCTIFICATION; for a start, meditate on Philippians 3:12–16. If we choose to use SANCTIFICATION as a term drawn from systematic theology to describe such growth, we do no wrong. But then we should not read this meaning back into Paul’s use where his focus is elsewhere.

Pastor Larry Wilson will be away this Lord’s Day. The Rev. Kuldip Gangar will be our guest minister.

25 August 2013 — 10 AM Worship

25 August 2013 — 3 PM Worship