NFC: 6/26/07 evening session

by Dan Phillips

ore liveblogging!

We opened with a favorite hymn, "How Firm a Foundation," accompanied by piano, guitar, organ and violin. Even a single violin adds a surprising depth to the instrumentals.

Pastor Tom Ascol provided some of the history of the Founders Ministries organization. It was born of five men praying and talking in 1982, sharing their concerns about the health and wellbeing of the church. They were convicted that holding to the theory of inerrancy was of no value if we did not go on to ask what the Word actually teaches, and what impact it must have on our lives. So they decided to hold a conference, which they ended up naming the Founders Conference, since early founders of the Southern Baptist Convention held to the truths affirmed in the Baptist Confession of 1689.

The purpose of the Founders ministry, Ascol stated, is the recovery of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the Biblical reformation of local churches. Their great concern is not so much to make everyone into Calvinists per se, but to glorify God, honor His Gospel, and strengthen churches by a recovery of the importance of Biblical doctrine to Christianity. The problem is not so much Arminianism as it is non-theology, pragmatism over concern for God's truth. Churches must become Word-centered. None can glorify Jesus Christ if God's revelation is removed from center stage.

After more singing, Tom Ascol read Psalm 110, prayed, and introduced Dr. Wells. Following a song by a quintet, Dr. Wells took the pulpit.

David Wells brought the message: "Preaching the Truth of Christology for the Modern Age."

First, Wells confessed to being a non-Southern-Baptist. (I think he's from well east of here.) He also mentioned that he had not been told what his time limit was, which, he said, was a "strategic blunder" (to much chuckling).

He said we do not always know the line between Christ and culture, as it has been crossed seriously and repeatedly. The person of Christ has been reconstructed often through the ages, to fit individuals' desires or needs. Thomas Jefferson, in the White House, razor literally in his hand to cut out the portions of the gospels that offended his deistic sensibilities, is an example. Liberals re-mold Jesus into a great social worker. Or Jesus has been made a business executive, who found twelve individuals and took control of the market. Arthur Blessit, saying not to drop acid, but to drop Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The fundamental question should be how we fit into Jesus' ministry and world, not how we can fit Him into ours. It is not how we choose to see Him, but how He is in Himself.

Wells says his basic argument is that today there are two families of spirituality in conflict with each other. The one family is historic, Christian spirituality, and it begins above and comes below. The contemporary spiritualities begin below, and try to access God, or the Sacred, for their own benefit. "This is the crux, the heart, the center of the conflict between Christ and our postmodern culture," Wells asserted.

While there are still pockets of Enlightenment thinking, something new has been forming right before us. It is the emergence of spiritualities originating in the self and trying to reach out to "something bigger."

The spirituality from below. This is many of the 8 out of 10 Americans who say they are "spiritual." These look to a power from within, a truth that comes from private experience, as contrasted with an external truth from Scripture. So, these many say they are spiritual, but not religious (i.e. accepting doctrines and rules devised by others, or belonging to an organization that puts expectations on them).

Wells believes that this spirituality is the major competitor of Christianity.

It has arisen because of who we are by creation, and because modern life is harsh and difficult, and because we are losing our categories for understanding life.

First, we were created to know and serve God; our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God, as Augustine confessed. This disconnection from God is what lies behind these spiritualities.

Second, the harshness of modern life. A book named The American Paradox said we have so much, yet so little. Never before have we been better off than right now, and at the same time so depleted, and so empty. We live longer, have more, are surrounded by more options and opportunities -- yet we're less happy, more depressed, less committed, less secure, and have more demoralized children.

Third, the costs to the human spirit for living in this kind of world are immense. Most of us are migrants, constantly moving from place to place, job to job, church to church. We have no secure connection to anything that lasts. All is transient. Loneliness is the modern plague of the unconnected and rootless.

This is why the self-movement has taken root in America. It speaks to the pains, wounds and confusion that people actually do feel. But we who set out in search for our self, have found that that self is fragile, broken, unhappy, and unfulfilled -- if we find it at all. The self-movement is not giving real answers to these real pains.

The Bible makes the point that our issue is actually God. It is His authority we defy, His laws we break, His target we miss. Only 17% define sin in relation to God, so inevitably they trivialize it. "Not to understand sin is to misunderstand God. to misread ourselves, and to misunderstand the world in which we live," he observed.

Most people do not believe that we are born sinners, including about half of those claiming to be born again. In other words, most people are Pelagians. And so, we approach God as we approach the marketplace, shopping for what we want, for therapeutic benefits, which we think we can have for the swipe of a credit card. And too many evangelicals respond obligingly by "marketing Christ" as if He were a means for therapy.

In the mall, I am sovereign; before God, He is sovereign. In the mall, I buy things for my own use; before God, I am bought for His service. In the mall, I don't commit myself to the product I buy; before God, I commit myself, yield my sovereignty, repent of having seized and misused it.
This is becoming the most serious competitor to historic, Biblical Christianity.

Second, the spirituality that comes from above. This is God in His grace and love reaching down to us, not because we are lovable or have reached up to Him, but even as sinners who are as unresponsive to Him as is a dead body to the mortician.

The NT frames this message eschatologically, Wells says. We encounter it in the language of the Kingdom of God in the Synoptics; in John it is above/below, glory/flesh; in Paul, this age/the age to come.

The Kingdom of God in the Synoptic Gospels. It is not merely a kingdom, but the kingdom of God. We can wait for it, look for it, seek it, pray for it, inherit it, enter it, work in it -- but it is God's to give, and His to take away. It is God reaching down, breaking into life, not perfecting our work but creating afresh and anew something that was not in the human spirit before.

John reinforces this by his above/below contrast. John 3 contrasts the one of the earth with the one from above. John 6:33, the bread comes down from heaven (cf. 6:38). He was sent into the world, came from above, was sent into the world (cf. 17:8).

Paul (Wells thinks) sees the future as penetrating the present, in contrast to the hopes of the Jews. The spirituality is found only in Christ, because of Him and because of grace. It is all about God doing for the sinner what he cannot do for himself. The human spirit is not sufficient, but insufficient. That is the condition of receiving God's grace in Christ. Men do not rise up on mortal human wings of longing. Rather, we receive life as a pauper would.

New spiritualities talk, because no one has spoken to them. In Biblical faith we listen, because God has addressed us in His Word. New spiritualities work and strive; Biblical spirituality is all about grace, and about Christ, to the exclusion of these modern spiritualities. God is to be had on His own terms, not on the sinner's terms.

The NT writers are staggered by God's grace, by the fact that there is grace at all, and by the astonishing cost of that grace. The hymn-writers who use the word "amazing" about God's grace catch this correctly.

To our postmodern generation, beset by isolation and brokenness and rootlessness, this word of grace is a sweet word. It is the word of God's sovereign, redemptive love incarnate.

"This is our message," Wells said in closing. "It is the message of Christ."

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