God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.
— John 4:24
Preaching Christ is generally, and correctly, held to be the purest, noblest ministry in which any man can engage; but preaching Christ includes a great deal more than talking about Christ in superlatives. It means more than giving vent to the religious love the speaker feels for the Person of Christ. Glowing love for Christ will give fragrance and warmth to any sermon, but it is still not enough. Love must be intelligent and informed if it is to have any permanent meaning. The effective sermon must have intellectual content, and wherever there is intellect there is creed. It cannot be otherwise. This is not to plead for the use of the historic creeds in our Christian gatherings. I realize that it is entirely possible to recite the Apostles' Creed every Sunday for a lifetime with no profit to the soul.
The Nicene Creed may be said or sung in every service without benefiting anyone. The standard creeds are a summary of what the Christian professes to believe, and they are excellent as far as they go yet they may be learned by rote and repeated without conviction and so be altogether stale and unprofitable. While we may worship (and thousands of Christians do) without the use of any formal creed, it is impossible to worship acceptably without some knowledge of the One we seek to worship. And that knowledge is our creed whether it is ever formalized or not. It is not enough to say that we may have a mystical or numinous experience of God without any doctrinal knowledge and that is sufficient. No, it is not sufficient. We must worship in truth as well as in spirit; and truth can be stated and when it is stated it becomes creed.
thought
Perceiving God's truth enables me to verbalize that truth. That stated truth becomes my creed. That creed will be revised and refined as I learn more of the Word and seek to practice it. The Spirit will teach me, often through other believers.
prayer
I want to worship You in truth, O God. Give me understanding of Your truth that I may live by it and share it with others.
Beyond all question, the mystery of godliness is great: He appeared in a body, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.
— 1 Timothy 3:16
Among certain Christians it has become quite the fashion to cry down creed and cry up experience as the only true test of Christianity. The expression "Not creed, but Christ" (taken, I believe, from a poem by John Oxenham) has been widely accepted as the very voice of truth and given a place alongside of the writings of prophets and apostles. When I first heard the words they sounded good. One got from them the idea that the advocates of the no-creed creed had found a precious secret that the rest of us had missed; that they had managed to cut right through the verbiage of historic Christianity and come direct to Christ without bothering about doctrine.
And the words appeared to honor our Lord more perfectly by focusing attention upon Him alone and not upon mere words. But is this true? I think not. Now I have a lot of sympathy for the no-creed creedalists for I realize that they are protesting the substitution of a dead creed for a living Christ; and in this I join them wholeheartedly. But this antithesis need not exist; there is no reason for our creeds being dead just as there is no reason for our faith being dead. James tells us that there is such a thing as dead faith, but we do not reject all faith for that reason. Now the truth is that creed is implicit in every thought, word or act of the Christian life. It is altogether impossible to come to Christ without knowing at least something about Him; and what we know about Him is what we believe about Him; and what we believe about Him is our Christian creed. Otherwise stated, since our creed is what we believe, it is impossible to believe on Christ and have no creed.
thought
In 1 Tim.3:16 Paul may be quoting an early creedal hymn. A creed is intended to be a terse, succinct statement of what one believes. That statement is a basic affirmation of one's principal beliefs, not an exhaustive one. As believers can we be creedless
prayer
Father, enable me to identify eternal truth from Your Word and the application of that truth to my life. Help me to major on the majors and not the minors. In Jesus' name.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.
— Romans 6:11-12
The Lord becomes to him [the believer] not one of several rival interests, but the one exclusive attraction forever. That we accept Christ in this all-inclusive, all-exclusive way is a divine imperative. Here faith makes its leap into God through the Person and work of Christ, but it never divides the work from the Person. It never tries to believe on the blood apart from Christ Himself, or the cross or the "finished work."
It believes on the Lord Jesus Christ, the whole Christ without modification or reservation, and thus it receives and enjoys all that He did in His work of redemption, all that He is now doing in heaven for His own and all that He does in and through them. To accept Christ is to know the meaning of the words "as he is, so are we in this world" (1 John 4:17). We accept His friends as our friends, His enemies as our enemies, His ways as our ways, His rejection as our rejection, His cross as our cross, His life as our life and His future as our future. If this is what we mean when we advise the seeker to accept Christ we had better explain it to him. He may get into deep spiritual trouble unless we do.
thought
One with Christ through faith. As A.B. Simpson declared: "One in His merits I stand, one as I pray in His name; all that His worth can command, I can with confidence claim. One in His faith and His love, one in His life I may be. Sealed by the heavenly
prayer
Forgive me, Lord, for living in spiritual poverty when by faith I may identify with Christ and experience abundant living.
Thomas said to him, "My Lord and my God!"
— John 20:28
Allowing the expression "Accept Christ" to stand as an honest effort to say in short what could not be so well said any other way, let us see what we mean or should mean when we use it. To accept Christ is to form an attachment to the Person of our Lord Jesus altogether unique in human experience. The attachment is intellectual, volitional and emotional. The believer is intellectually convinced that Jesus is both Lord and Christ; he has set his will to follow Him at any cost and soon his heart is enjoying the exquisite sweetness of His fellowship. This attachment is all-inclusive in that it joyfully accepts Christ for all that He is.
There is no craven division of offices whereby we may acknowledge His Saviorhood today and withhold decision on His Lordship till tomorrow. The true believer owns Christ as his All in All without reservation. He also includes all of himself, leaving no part of his being unaffected by the revolutionary transaction. Further, his attachment to Christ is all-exclusive. The Lord becomes to him not one of several rival interests, but the one exclusive attraction forever. He orbits around Christ as the earth around the sun, held in thrall by the magnetism of His love, drawing all his life and light and warmth from Him. In this happy state he is given other interests, it is true, but these are all determined by his relation to his Lord.
thought
Thomas got it right. Pushing aside doubt he recognized the Risen Savior as his Lord and God. Each of us must bow to Christ's lordship in all of life, all of life. Have we?
prayer
Lord, by Your Spirit, expose to me those areas of life I have not yet surrendered to Your Lordship.
They replied, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved?you and your household."
— Acts 16:31
To the question "What must I do to be saved?" we must learn the correct answer. To fail here is not to gamble with our souls: it is to guarantee eternal banishment from the face of God. Here we must be right or be finally lost. To this anxious question evangelical Christians provide three answers, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ," "Receive Christ as your personal Saviour," and "Accept Christ." Two of the answers are drawn almost verbatim from the Scriptures (Acts 16:31, John 1:12), while the third is a kind of paraphrase meant to sum up the other two.
They are therefore not three but one. Being spiritually lazy we naturally tend to gravitate toward the easiest way of settling our religious questions for ourselves and others; hence the formula "Accept Christ" has become a panacea of universal application, and I believe it has been fatal to many. . . . The trouble is that the whole "Accept Christ" attitude is likely to be wrong. It shows Christ applying to us rather than us to Him. It makes Him stand hat-in-hand awaiting our verdict on Him, instead of our kneeling with troubled hearts awaiting His verdict on us. It may even permit us to accept Christ by an impulse of mind or emotions, painlessly, at no loss to our ego and no inconvenience to our usual way of life. For this ineffectual manner of dealing with a vital matter we might imagine some parallels; as if, for instance, . . . the prodigal son had "accepted" his father's forgiveness and stayed on among the swine in the far country. Is it not plain that if accepting Christ is to mean anything there must be moral action that accords with it?
thought
Believing in Christ is not merely an intellectual exercise though it involves the mind. Believing in Christ is a heart and life commitment to the Savior, the King of kings and Lord of lords, very God of very God. Moral action results.
prayer
Thank You that You have received me; forgiven me; made me a new person; come to live in my heart. May my heart commitment to You deepen and grow day by day.
Seek the LORD while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the evil man his thoughts. Let him turn to the LORD, and he will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.
— Isaiah 55:6-7
Many a lost man is putting off the day of salvation, vaguely hoping that time is on his side, when actually the likelihood of his ever becoming a Christian grows less day by day. And why? Because the changes taking place in him are hardening his will and making it more and more difficult for him to repent. "Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." See the change-words in this text: "seek... call... forsake... return." These all denote specific changes the returning sinner must make in himself, acts that he must perform.
But this is not enough. "Have mercy... pardon"; these are the changes God makes in and for the man. To be saved the man must change and be changed. To enter the kingdom of God, our Lord explained, a man must be born again (John 3:3-7). That is, he must undergo a spiritual change. . . . The initial change, however, is not the only one the redeemed man will know. His whole Christian life will consist of a succession of changes, moving always toward spiritual perfection. To achieve these changes the Holy Spirit uses various means, probably the most effective being the writings of the New Testament. Time can help us only if we know that it cannot help us at all. It is change we need, and only God can change us from worse to better.
thought
There is a time to wait and a time to act. We sometimes confuse the two. When we know God's will it is always the time to do God's will. Are we changing?
prayer
You, Lord, would I seek and rise up to do Your will. Change me, Lord, change me!
But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hands.
— Psalm 31:14-15a
Saul the Persecutor became Paul the servant of God, but time did not make the change. Christ wrought the miracle, the same Christ who once changed water into wine. One spiritual experience followed another in fairly rapid succession until the violent Saul became a gentle, God-enamored soul ready to lay down his life for the faith he once hated. It should be obvious that time had no part in the making of the man of God.
My purpose in writing this little piece is not to engage in an exercise in semantics but to alert my readers to the injury they may suffer from an unfounded confidence in time. Because a Moses and a Jacob lost the impulsive, headstrong sins of their youth and in their old age became gentle, mellow saints we tend to take it for granted that time wrought the transformation. But it is not so. God, not time, makes saints. Human nature is not fixed, and for this we should thank God day and night. We are still capable of change. We can become something other than what we are. By the power of the gospel the covetous man may become generous, the egotist lowly in his own eyes. The thief may learn to steal no more, the blasphemer to fill his mouth with praises unto God. But it is Christ who does it all. Time has nothing to do with it.
thought
God acts within time. He sometimes uses time. But He is not limited by time nor chained to it. The time we have left does not determine the transformation we may experience. Our response to the Spirit within time does.
prayer
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
— 2 Peter 3:8
Sin has done frightful things to us and its effect upon us is all the more deadly because we were born in it and are scarcely aware of what is happening to us. One false concept to which we cling tenaciously is time. We think of it as being a sort of viscid substance flowing onward like a sluggish river, bearing upon its bosom nations and empires and civilizations and men. We visualize this sticky stream as an entity and ourselves as helplessly stuck in it for as long as our earthly lives endure.
Or again, by a simple shift in our thinking we picture time as a revealer of the shape of things to come, as when we say "Time will tell." Or we imagine it a benign physician and comfort ourselves with the thought that "Time is a great healer." All this is so much a part of us that it would be too much to expect that the habit of referring everything to time could ever be broken. Yet we may guard against the harm that such thinking carries with it. The most harmful mistake we make concerning time is that it has somehow a mysterious power to perfect human nature. We say of a foolish young man "Time will make him wiser," or we see a new Christian acting like anything but a Christian and hope that time will someday turn him into a saint.
The truth is that time has no more power to sanctify a man than space has. Indeed, time is only a fiction by which we account for change. It is change, not time, that turns fools into wise men and sinners into saints. Or more accurately, it is Christ who does the whole thing by means of the changes He works in the heart.
thought
Time does not change us, God does. He changes us as we walk by the Spirit.
prayer
Forgive me, Lord, for trusting time rather than You. Change me, ever change me as I walk with You. For Jesus' sake.
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
— 1 John 3:2-3
The Christian is a citizen of heaven and to that sacred citizenship he acknowledges first allegiance . . . He cheerfully expects before long to enter that bright world above, but he is in no hurry to leave this world and is quite willing to await the summons of his Heavenly Father. And he is unable to understand why the critical unbeliever should condemn him for this; it all seems so natural and right in the circumstances that he sees nothing inconsistent about it.
The cross-carrying Christian, furthermore, is both a confirmed pessimist and an optimist the like of which is to be found nowhere else on earth. When he looks at the cross he is a pessimist, for he knows that the same judgment that fell on the Lord of glory condemns in that one act all nature and all the world of men. He rejects every human hope out of Christ because he knows that man's noblest effort is only dust building on dust. Yet he is calmly, restfully optimistic. If the cross condemns the world the resurrection of Christ gthought
We shall be like Him! That seems altogether impossible to those who know us now and to ourselves. But we are in the process of transformation. Complete fulfillment of His promises are still in the future but in the light of those promises we can live now.
prayer
Father, I see darkness all around me but you provide a laser beam that leads to home. May that beam of light reflect through my life to those about me. May You shine through me