But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. . . I Corinthians 1:3
When talking about the Corinthians spiritual immaturity and their inability to handle the meat of the word, all Bible teachers seem to handle it the same way; The Corinthians couldn’t understand deep theology, or had no interest in it, therefore he couldn’t give it to them. I am starting to think that this interpretation may be missing Paul’s point completely.
What if his point was this, I cannot give you the meat scripturally because, you will become more inflated with pride and distort doctrine to your own ends. I have seen many of us theological types take doctrine and distort it by magnifying one truth and explaining away another A theologically astute fleshly Christian, can often do far more damage than an ignorant fleshly Christian.
Concerning the doctrines of Grace I like the way Spurgeon puts it.
“No man ever learns anything aright, unless he is taught of the Spirit. You may learn election, and you may know it so that you shall be damned by it, if you are not taught of the Holy Ghost; for I have known some who have learned election to their soul’s destruction; they have learned it so that they said they were of the elect, whereas, they had no marks, no evidences, and no works of the Holy Ghost in their souls. There is a way of learning truth in Satan’s college, and holding it in licentiousness; but if so, it shall be to your souls as poison to your veins and prove your everlasting ruin.”1
I agree with him thoroughly, doctrine in the hands of a fleshly man can wreak havoc. I have a personal theory that divine sovereignty and election may have been the very doctrines Paul avoided with the Corinthians for this very reason. When we zealous young Calvinists believe it is our God given duty to explain TULIP to every carnal Christian, and heathen we can find, and insist on working it into every presentation of the gospel, we often do more harm than good.
1. A Sermon (No. 5) Delivered on Sabbath Evening, January 21, 1855, by the REV. C. H. Spurgeon at New Park Street Chapel, Southwark
This is just a portion of the sermon of the century. If you have not heard this yet…you need to listen to the whole thing. However I though this was a great snippet from the sermon. God save us from flesh ran ministries. God save us from ourselves. I have nothing to add to this message, I can only pass on what I think needs to be heard and heeded.
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. II Timothy 2:15
We live in a speedy shallow, superficial age. And I am beginning to realize much of our Christian conduct has been infected by our attitudes. If we are content to go to church only as long as the pastor doesn’t talk too long, or dig too deeply into our lives, we are in trouble. I see a parallel between us and the TV Guide channel. When I was young it was just a scrolling list of what was on TV. A few years later they added advertisements to the top half of the screen, and a few years after that they started playing their own mini shows in between the advertisements.
Now, these programs on the entertainment industry and its performers are brief and superficial, but bright and boisterous enough to occasionally keep your attention on them and prevent you from finding out what’s coming on after M.A.S.H. Sadly our Christianity is often as shiny, short, and shallow as these show’s. Most people watching a 5 minute bio on Gilbert Gottfried would never presume they know everything about him, yet we do this with doctrine constantly. Many of us Calvary Chapelers are guilty of thinking or saying “Chuck said it; I believe it, that settles it.”
Where past generations labored in the scriptures and doctrine to find the truth, we will accept offhand pastor’s comments as gospel truth, and feel no need to search the scriptures or study theology on our own. Until we begin to study the word, wait on the lord, and pray, we should expect little more than TV Guide channel fruit in our lives.
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” James 1:22
I love discussing doctrine as much as anyone I know, but there is an inherent danger therein; when we assume that by agreeing with a truth, we must be obeying it. Putting most of our energies into knowing and little into doing is dangerous indeed. We are sometimes more zealous for being right than we are for being righteous. I will include an obligatory disclaimer here, we are not saved by doing good works, but we are called to conform to the image of Christ, and obey his commandments.
I have nothing against pouring over scriptures and theological writings, in order to rightly divide the word, it is one of my favorite activities; but we cannot stop with knowing, we must proceed to doing. Why? For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.1 Make no mistake, this is no mere thought of mine. James explicitly warns us of the danger of learning the truth but forgetting to obey it, forgetting to examine ourselves, and forgetting to do it.
When Jesus was ministering he never told anyone to merely understand the truth. He commanded them to act on the truth. His message was consistently “repent and believe”2. We needto take his warning seriously, for “blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”3
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that it was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called night.” -Genesis 1:1-5a
Why must the Spirit of God deem it noteworthy to tell us that light came out of darkness? Is this a physic’s technicality? Is this merely history? Should we even care? It seems to me that light cannot be defined apart from darkness. Light, from the first few verses of Genesis, was set in contradistinction to darkness. God then separated the two into phases of night and day. We can hardly understand light except by its absence. Surely we also know now that darkness is really nothingness, for it is simply the lack of light. This is a common way the bible defines words that are hard to understand. The physics of light is amongst some of the most difficult concepts in nature to grasp, being both a particle and a wave, many physics students have groaned when trying to grasp this antimony, I know because I was one of them. In its most simple terms however, darkness is the absence of light.
Peter used this same tool of contrast to define another complex word, “Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit; let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it. For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” I Peter 3:10-12. Righteous here is defined through its contradistinction to, “those who do evil.” In essence, they will be the opposite of this. Do you do evil? Then there may be a question as to whether or not you are among those to whom the Lord looks. Is God’s face hidden behind a veil of mystery for you? Is he lost amongst the conflagrations of your sins? Surely saints do sin, we fail, but we are not defined by a life of sin. The apostle John boiled these two concepts of light and righteousness together to present a wonderfully simple statement. “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” I John 1:7
Remember, the next time you see the sun rise out of the darkness of the deepest night, the Son of God has commanded, by the life he lived, for you to come out of darkness and walk in the light. May the Day Star arise in your hearts.
For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Galatians 1:10
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other . . . Matthew 6:24
Few things bring more chaos and confusion into spiritual life, than attempting to gain mans approval. Paul makes the point abundantly clear, “If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.” He is not saying that no one will ever approve of you if you are serving Christ, rather, if you are seeking mans approval you will not be serving Christ.
The word translated servant here δοῦλος , literally means slave; it is not the Greek word for servant, it is not one of the six Greek words for servant. Why is this important? When Christ taught that no slave can serve two masters, his audience instantly understood. A slave is not an employee; you cannot have a part time master on the side. A slave is completely subjugated to his master, as a Christian is to Christ.
Where is this leading? I am leading to the opposing truth of my first point, just as pleasing man adds confusion, the pleasing only of Christ removes confusion. It makes decision making radically simple. When you aren’t trying to posture yourself in a position where everyone likes and agrees with you, but simply seeking Gods leading, and obeying his word, confusion will be virtually eliminated.
. . . I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. John 15:31
Every believer eventually reaches a point of profound love for God without obvious expression. When worship alone cannot fully display your love, what is a saint to do? Paint a painting? Plant a tree? Sing really loud? To show love for your wife you can buy flowers and chocolates. To show love for a child, offer them ice cream. But how do you show God your love? Jesus tells us howhis love for the father is evident . . . obedience. I know this is a four letter word among Christians today, but I bring it up because Jesus did.
Please do not misunderstand me, we are never told that it is possible to earn a spot in heaven, but we are repeatedly told to live a life that pleases God. Our hearts are wrong when the idea of living a holy life causes us to recoil in horror. According to Jesus, obeying God is of the best ways of expressing our love for God.
Using Christ’s measurement for love, our love for God should not be hard to gauge because its fruit is visible, obeying gods commands. Much obedience = much love, little obedience = little love, no obedience = no love.
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” John 14:21
If you have ever been caught in a back-eddy, after having been tossed from a raft, then you know the terror of struggle, and the panic you feel when all of your effort is required to get back into the current again. Metaphorically this is the same result as a conversation between believers that I hear not infrequently. Without fail there will be a brother or a sister who is grieving over the current state of things in the church and they will lament that we need to get back to the way things were during Christianities formative years. The more “mature,” wineskin will respond to this requiem cynically by asking, “Which early church would you like to get back to…the Corinthian church with all its carnality…or how about the Galatian believers with all of their legalism? Or what if we were more like the Thessalonian church; they were a bunch of louts and layabouts…” Bla bla bla, around the death eddy the conversation swirls until hope is suffocated and the old wineskin cavorts away, skipping with glee, while his twin daggers of discernment and rebuke reflect a glimmer of pale light as he twirls and sheathes them.
With all of the precision and diligence of a grammatical Samurai, Arthur Katz dashes headlong into this vicious circle of puerile reasoning, hacking its foolish carnal logic to tatters. The issue, he tells us, is with the term Apostolic, a term which was little more than an entitlement to me before I read this book. Men like titles, so by nature when we see one, we automatically think in terms of hierarchy. It takes a few hundred pages, but once done, Brother Katz has completely waylaid all misconceptions you may have had about this hierarchy whatsoever.
Early on in the book he says, “There is no man more qualified than the one who believes in his deepest heart that he is without qualification. The whole preliminary work of God is to disqualify us before we can be qualified.1“ He would then go on to point out that Moses was at a pinnacle in life when at 40 he had everything going for him, God would have nothing to do with it though as brother Katz would go on to say, “and yet God does not think it lavish, wasteful or extravagant to give Moses another forty years of waiting in the wilderness until he is completely emptied out–and then He calls him.2”
You may be thinking…uhhhhh wait, Moses wasn’t an Apostle, and what does he have to do with the term Apostolic? Everything! Art had great concern that people today have no idea what it means to be sent by God, rather than sent by themselves, or their own efforts. In a world of fast food, fast love, and quick religion, the joy of patience and the glory of Godly contentment has been lost. Brother Katz takes off his kimono and drops the sword in favor of playing a violin with a rose in his teeth as he romances deeply with the idea of being patient for God’s calling. Taking every discipline the Father sends for the joy that it itself is worth. He asks, “Will we be willing to submit to waiting and to conditions of trial and preparation for true service when the whole religious world clamors for action?3”
While ruminating upon Leviticus 8:15-17 he points out that: “God is not interested in the outer hide and the flesh; He counts that along with the dung. The inside, in the inner man, worked by Him in the hidden places, born of inward wrestling, are the offerings of a sweet and pleasing savor before God. We have been guilty as contemporary Christians of offering our personalities, our winsomeness and our fleshly abilities to God, simply because we do not have the inward parts to offer, never having learned to rest or wait before God. We have despised the suffering, reproach and obscurity in which alone the sweet offerings are formed deep within us. We have not esteemed such things as God esteems them, and have preferred to do without them. We need the obedience and vision that will enable us to take our hide and flesh outside the camp and to exclude it from the holy place, as well as from the pulpit.4”
If you have read many of our posts, you can obviously see that this man is right up our alley. I have to thank sermonindex for first placing a sermon from Arthur Katz on my iPod. After nearly having to pick myself up off of the floor because of the forcefulness and earnestness of his message, I soon started reading all that Google could muster about this man. I bought his autobiography, “Ben-Israel, Odyssey of a Modern Jew.” Having read it in only a day or so, it left me pacing to know what happened to him after he was born again. Apostolic Foundations answered that question for me. I would suggest that this was probably his Opus. Not having read any of his other books, I find it hard to believe this book could be topped.
There is no way this book could have been written, had it not been lived. I am suspicious that Apostolic Foundations was only a perpetuation of what Arthur lived out.
I definitely recommend “Apostolic Foundations” to anyone at all who has a care to serve God in any capacity. I would also suggest placing this book into the category of revival. I do not know if that was exactly his intent, but I see revival written on every single page. I was sent to my knees in prayer so many times reading this book that it took me a month to read. I could hardly get through a paragraph without having to repent and ask for God’s grace to help me overcome. I hope this review will inspire even one person to purchase this book and pray for its application. Arthur Katz was a burning man with a precise vocabulary. May his words catch others on fire. You can order the book here. I only wish I had had the opportunity to hear him preach in person before he went home…
How then can man be in the right before God? How can he who is born of woman be pure? Behold, even the moon is not bright, and the stars are not pure in his eyes; how much less man, who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm!” Job 25:4-6
I am becoming more and more aware of the necessity of humility for the believer. In American Christianity we place such emphasis on ability, and education while giving humility mere lip service. But the problem is that education and skill alone produce mountains of pride, and prevent Gods blessing from fully coming.
I remember when I was asked in High School, “Why is pride a sin? What is so wrong with feeling good about yourself?” I was tongue tied! I found it impossible to spit out a good answer at the time, but now I can explain it fairly well. The Bible tells us some things about pride: it goes before destruction 1, God hates it 2, and it keeps us from seeking after God 3. If a sin is hated by God, leads to destruction, and keeps us from seeking after God, this is pretty damning. Nothing will ruin your walk faster than pride because it gives you boldness to break all the commandments. The thrusting up of mountains of pride should be a self evident problem for the believer.
But there is another grievous effect of the prideful life, it prevents Gods blessing from fully coming upon us. Paul tells us that God has chosen the foolish things . . . base things . . . things which are despised . . .and the things which are not . . . that no flesh should glory in His presence 4 , Pride restrains Gods hand of blessing for he will share his glory with no one.
Pride bars the door of the vault in which Gods blessings reside; becauseHumility comes before honor 5.
As soon as I was able to crack the spine of a book with legitimacy and authority, based upon the virtue of the fact that I was going to imbibe the words contained within it, I found myself consuming, “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.” My mother must have put me on phonic steroids when I wasn’t looking, because I remember reading it when I was between kindergarten and 1st grade. My mother was always faithful to make sure I had plenty to read and for her persistence, I am eternally grateful.
In my last year of High School, I became gripped with a terrifying doubt about the validity of Christianity. Post modern reasoning wormed its way into my brain and began to create a mash of my faith. I do not remember how many nights I wept while my mind raced through all the maddening scenarios that would occur in my life should I choose to disbelieve. Sleep, in those days, was like a long distance relationship to me, and I could hardly afford a calling card. Most of the tears I cried flowed from fear and loneliness while the nature of my doubts were not really relatable to anyone I knew. These doubts were so ghastly to me; in fact, I hesitated to talk to anyone about it for fear that I would infect them with the same plague that dominated my every waking thought. If I ever did, God please forgive me.
Eventually, by God’s grace, I was granted the gift of faith and all my doubts washed away, but that is jumping ahead a bit. Before the gift was granted however, my weak colander of faith was filled over and over with the thoughts and musings of C.S. Lewis. He was not able to answer all of my questions, but many of the things he said in Pilgrims Regress, Mere Christianity, and Surprised by Joy kept me tethered and sane. Every time I began to slip into the terrors of my doubts I would remember something he said which would counteract my dark brooding.
If I am granted the privilege of meeting him in the after, I think it will be difficult for me to respect British propriety, for I suspect I will hug the wind from his lungs. He was a Father who nurtured me into true faith. As he would have worded it in: “The Great Divorce,” he blew on the little glimmer of a coal within my soul till the heat of life began to spark. I have had many teachers in my life, but very few Fathers (1 Cor 4:15). I suspect that his writing, combined with my Grandmother’s prayers, and the passion my Mother instilled within me for the written word, (God’s sovereignty notwithstanding) granted me the right environment where God eventually flooded my doubts with the light of Hebrews 11:1.
As a belated thanksgiving post, I offer gratitude up to the Father of Lights, who has blessed me over and over again with the writings of this powerful thinker. I was heavily reminded about it all as I read “The Great Divorce” last weekend in one interupted sitting and was gripped all over again and lead to weep in a new way because of his writing. During this second foray into his real solid land I was confronted by the depth of my sin, and overwhelmed by the Grace of Jesus Christ. These tears were much more welcome, praise be to God, who is able to keep me from falling.
