Yesterday the final box of pictures was unpacked and put on the wall. Now our upstairs is totally free of boxes! Yea! We are learning our way around and settling in. I have many e-mails I need to answer, but that can wait until later. This morning I am rejoicing in the Lord's faithful love for me and my family. I do not always understand what He is doing, but I rest in His love to see me through.
Yesterday I posted concerning a book I am reading by John Piper and D.A. Carson. Today I wish to share one more passage from this book. This passage concerns the role and responsibility of a pastor to be a good scholar concerning the Word of God. I could not agree more with John Piper on this point. He states,
There is a phrase in Acts 20:27 that is very important in this regard. Paul says, speaking to the elders in Ephesus, "I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God." Now, what is this "whole counsel of God"? We don't have the space here to work out all of that, but one implication is clear; in order to give to our people the whole counsel of God, it takes tremendous mental effort to find it in the Bible.
In one sense, the Bible itself is the whole counsel of God. But that't not what Paul meant here. This is too big. He didn't just read the whole Bible to them. He taught them from the Bible (Acts 19:9). There must be a faithful way to sum this up in what's called a coherent and unified whole counsel of God. And my point is, it takes mental work to find what that is and to work it out in understandable, sharable ways.
We don't read through our Bibles once or twice or ten times and suddenly know the whole counsel of God. We have to ask hard questions about how the different parts of revelation fit together. That's called "scholarship." It doesn't have to be in school. It just has to be careful and honest and observant and synthesizing and constructive. It's head work. And it's meant to serve the heart of our people.
Piper, The Pastor as Scholar, 62-63.
I just moved from a part of the country where there was little respect or attention paid to knowing and understanding the whole counsel of God. There was an assumption that every believer should already know it by their common sense and a little Bible reading. Unfortunately what this led to was very shallow Christians and shallow churches. Many people had no clue what the Bible taught. Many others treated the Bible as a magic wish book where you pick out a passage, claim it as your own, and then expect God to fulfill our wishes. These tendencies also carried over to many of the pastors and to those in church leadership.
Why would people believe this? How did we get here?
I think many of these folks were very sincere in their faith. They were just led astray by our current world system. The worldliness that infected them was not "younger brother wildness" (in terms of the parable of the prodigal son), but unthinking acceptance of what our Western culture has deemed "truth".
For the past 220 years, Americans in particular have been taught and assumed that their common sense was the surest guide to knowing reality. We have also been taught and accepted that we should assume all of our spiritual knowledge and understanding is irrefutably correct because it is private knowledge or feelings. With these two assumptions, we have easily and joyfully rejected the teaching of "experts" as something that we judge by our understanding and feelings to see if their teaching works for us.
Thus, our religion is pragmatic but not deep, personal but lacking universal reason, and private in its determination of truth.
By the way, these traits also exactly match the worldly thought pattern concerning religion that was explained and presented in the Enlightenment. This thought pattern is pernicious and ultimately deadly for the true worship of God. It promotes radical individualism, superficial faith, and a Church that matches exactly to the world's definition of personally entertaining or meaningful but culturally irrelevant.
Against these tendencies, the whole counsel of God must be brought to bear. Against these tendencies true Pastor/scholars must lovingly, gently, and consistently teach and preach. Against these tendencies authentic spirituality must boldly stand with the grace and love brought by a transformed heart.
Here the balance of heart and head is needed the most. True spirituality and authentic grace always seeks to engage and transform the heart and mind. May each of us find such transformation as we walk in repentance and faith today!
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