The Blog of Hobbes

The church’s destiny is to be a bridal community characterised by an affective, not just cognitive, knowledge of the divine lover. When the church loses her passion for the Son of God, there is lamentation in heaven. Even if the church is doing well in issues of behaviour and belief, it is already on the road to death if holy affections has become a thing of the past. Christianity, as Jonathan Edwards often used to say, is a religion of the heart. God is after our affections, not just our works. Christian revival is a divinely initiated process in which a dying church is revitalised through the power of the Holy Spirit, leading to a new love affair with Jesus Christ, which in turn transforms the community, region and even nation in which that church is situated. While revival often involves a challenge to the church’s doctrinal and behavioural impurities, it is primarily focused on whether the church is in love or not. From a loving heart there flows a living faith and a holy life.

[Mark Stibbe, in Walker and Aune (eds.), On Revival: A Critical Examination (Paternoster 2003), p28]

Jesus must be my saviour, delight, strength, propitiation, joy, hope, treasure, light, redeemer, guide, among many other things. If Jesus is not these things to me, then my life will display a perversion of Christianity. The Christian life is necessarily and radically Christ-centered.

Every church must avoid the danger of putting eccesiastical practices and forms at the center of the Christian life, with Christ at the side, merely providing the impetus and direction for the practice of church life. I delight in sound, biblical teaching and preaching. But, I must never delight in preaching about Christ more than in Christ himself. Does fellowship with the saints bring joy? Of course! Yet, beware if the joy of fellowship eclipses your joy in your saviour.

The church must never be church-centered. If she is to be the radiant bride Christ intends, she must be obsessively groom-centered.

In his Institutes, Calvin defines “knowledge of God” as:

“that by which we not only conceive that there is a God but also grasp what befits us and is proper to his glory, in fine, what is to our advantage to know of him. Indeed, we shall not say that, properly speaking, God is known where there is no religion or piety” (I.II.1)

The word “piety” has fallen out of favour, but Calvin provides a good definition:

“I call ‘piety’ that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces. For until men recognize that they owe everything to God, that they are nourished by his fatherly care, that he is the Author of their every good, that they should seek nothing beyond him, they will never yield him willing service. Nay, unless they establish their complete happiness in him, they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him.” (I.ii.1)

Later, he says:

“… although our mind cannot apprehend God without rendering some honor to him, it will not suffice simply to hold that there is One whom all ought to honor and adore, unless we are also persuaded that he is the fountain of every good, and that we must seek nothing elsewhere than in him.”

To drive the point home, Calvin poses a question that must ring in our ears every day:

What help is it, in short, to know a God with whom we have nothing to do?

Indeed.

Hunger pain is a blessing, so long as food is available. To not feel hunger is to die. It is tragic, therefore, to meet so many who are apparently unacquainted with a hunger for God. They do not realise that their soul is starving to death. Nor do they realise that “doing church” is not the food they need - it is simply the “utensil” that God uses to feed us with himself. John Piper eloquently expresses the need for preachers in this feeding process:

Christian preachers, more than all others, should know this truth - that people are starving for God. If anyone in all the world should be able to say, ‘I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory,’ it is the herald of God. And as we look out over the wasteland of our secular culture, must we preachers not ask, Who but us will say to this people, ‘Behold your God!’? Who will tell the people that God is great and greatly to be praised? Who will paint for them the landscape of God’s grandeur? Who will remind them with tales of wonder that God has triumphed over every foe? Who will cry out above every crisis, ‘Your God reigns!’? Who will labor to find words that can carry the ‘gospel of the glory of the blessed God’?

If God is not supreme in our preaching, where in this world will the people hear about the supremacy of God? If we do not spread a banquet of God’s beauty on Sunday morning, will not our people seek in vain to satisfy their inconsolable longing with the cotton candy pleasures of pastimes and religious hype? If the fountain of living water does not flow from the morning of God’s sovereign grace on Sunday morning, will not the people hew for themselves cisterns on Monday, broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer. 2:13)?

John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, p107-9.