God is Doing A Glorious Work in You, and in the World!

Some weeks back our pastor preached on these verses in Colossians 2:

⁶ Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, ⁷ rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

The sermon was tremendous, especially because it was framed from a Reformed perspective that puts our hope in this walk with Jesus firmly in God’s sovereign power, not our own striving. As I wrote recently, the Christian life is one of pursuit; we must ask, seek, and knock, but it is God himself who roots and builds us up in Christ, who establishes us in the faith. That is a supernatural work of God beyond our abilities, and as the pastor rightly said, “Christ is building something glorious in you!” He is the builder of this new temple by the power of his Holy Spirit. But for me, something in the sermon was lacking, which brings me to a consistent bogey man of mine: Pietism.

As I always have to remind people, I’m not talking about piety, but about a movement started in Lutheran Germany in the 17^th century that developed as a response to a cold and overly intellectualized Christian faith. The intentions were good, but in teaching a more passionate faith it turned it into a completely personalized one which ended up turning Christianity into an irrelevant cultural force in the West. What was once a Christian Western civilization out of which flowed innumerable blessings, became a secular West where those blessings disappeared. So, given my perspective when the pastor said Christ is building something glorious in us, in my mind I shouted, and in the world! Unfortunately, for the Pietistic mindset Christian influence in the world, in culture and society in general, is if not irrelevant, because every Christian would love a better more peaceful God-honoring world, but beside the point. And for many, working for Christian cultural influence is a distraction from the only thing that counts, our relationship with God through Christ.

Pietism makes the focus of our faith almost totally on the individual and our personal salvation, justification and sanctification. It completely enervates Christianity’s cultural influence because lay people have no vision whatsoever of cultural transformation, that their faith is supposed to transform the world, thy kingdom come . . . Enervate is the perfect word for the Pietistic effect on the church because it means to deprive of force or strength; to destroy the vigor of; to weaken. Over the last several hundred years the church and Christianity have become completely culturally irrelevant in the West and there has been much suffering because of it. With Christianity comes blessing, as God promised Abram 4,000 years ago, that through his offspring, i.e., Christ, all peoples on earth would be blessed. When Christianity’s influence wanes, suffering follows.

Russian dissident, novelist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn knew first-hand the consequences of the waning of Christian cultural influence in his country. In an address accepting the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1983, he identified what happens when God disappears from a society and culture. Speaking to the death and destruction wrought by communism in Russia in the twentieth century “that swallowed up some 60 million of our people,” he said he “could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this happened.’” He used phrases like, “deprived of its divine dimensions . . .” and “lacking all divine dimensions . . .” and “our Godless age . . .” and “The entire twentieth century is being sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction.”

A better description of secularism, and its implications, and lack of Christian cultural influence, could not be found: “Men have forgotten God . . .” Speaking of Russian history he said:

Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the nineteenth century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.

Later in the talk, he spoke of “the destructive spirit of secularism.” Destructive indeed.

Which brings me to a phrase that came to my mind as I was leaving church that day.

Where There is No Vision, The People Perish
If you’ve been a Christian any length of time this verse will sound familiar. It comes from Proverbs 29:18. The entire chapter is filled with warnings and reminders of two directions a person and a people can go, one filled with peace and righteousness and justice and blessing, or the opposite. What I quoted is from the King James Version, and is the first half of the verse. Here is the entire verse, and also in several different versions.

KJV
Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

NASB
Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained,
But happy is one who keeps the Law.

ESV
Where there is no prophetic vision the people cast off restraint,
but blessed is he who keeps the law.

NIV
Where there is no revelation, people cast off restraint;
but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom’s instruction.

These four English translations capture well the nuance of the meaning in Hebrew. The word vision comes from a word meaning a mental sight, seeing with the mind. One of the frustrating things I learned very early in my Christian life is how most of the Evangelical church sees the Christian faith solely in personal terms. What counts, what is important, is that the gospel is all about my personal relationship with Jesus and my personal holiness. Of course it is very much about that, but it’s not only about that. The point of the gospel, of Jesus coming to earth, God becoming man to die for the sins of the world, wasn’t just to transform individual people, but to transform the entire world. Yes, I know, that will only happen fully at the Second Coming and Christ returning for the consummation of all things, the final enemy to be defeated being death. And prior to that, Paul tells us what Christ will be doing, is doing since he ascended to the right hand of God (I Cor. 15):

²⁵ For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.

Paul is confirming what the Lord revealed through the Psalmist in Psalm 110:

¹ The Lord says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”

Peter further confirms this started happening at Christ’s first coming by quoting this verse in the very first Christian sermon in history in Acts 2. Christ isn’t just reigning in our hearts or in the church, but in the world! The world the Father gave him all authority over, in heaven and on earth. Victory is the vision, not fruitless battle against evil, and the justification for victory is God’s covenant promises to his people.

I am convinced of the centrality of the covenant in God’s dealing with humanity. The Triune God made a promise to himself in eternity that when the fall happened, he himself would redeem his creation, and turn it from the Devil’s playground to the means of his blessing the nations, paradise restored. Because I see the Christian faith through this lens, I always go back to the promises God made upon which we are to stand, to live and proclaim. Our confidence isn’t in us or our abilities, but in God who blesses those to bear fruit for his glory and our good.

These verses should constantly come to our mind as we “contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Genesis 3
God to Satan:
¹⁵ And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

Genesis 12
God to Abram:
³ I will bless those who bless you,
and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
will be blessed through you.”

Genesis 15
God to Abram:
⁵ And he brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

Genesis 18
¹⁷ Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? ¹⁸ Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him.

Genesis 22
The Lord to Abraham after he sacrificed Isaac:
¹⁷ I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, ¹⁸ and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

Genesis 26
God to Isaac:
⁴ I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.

The word bless or it’s variations is used some 65 times in the first book of Scripture, the foundational work upon which our faith is based. And as these verses indicate, it’s not merely blessing to God’s people, to the church in New Testament terms, but to nations. Never was our faith meant to be solely for us. Even Jesus in giving his disciples a charge before he ascended to the right hand of God indicated what he had accomplished was not merely for individuals or the church, but for the nations. We’re all familiar with it:

¹⁸ Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

And no, this does not mean to just disciple individuals within nations, but to baptize the nations themselves, to see Christianity permeate every nook and cranny of the society and culture.

A Vision of Victory
We can look at this in any variety of ways. If we want our nation to truly be blessed, then evil must be defeated. And I will qualify this yet again, all evil will not be defeated on this side of the Second Coming, but Christ is even now putting all his enemies under his feet. As Christians, we don’t look at the suffering, dysfunction, and sin in our world as if it’s inevitable, and there is nothing we can do about it. That’s called defeatism. God’s covenant promise is blessing, not the proliferation of evil and it’s horrible effects. Over the last several hundred years because of the rise of Pietism, Christianity has become insular and culturally irrelevant, and our societies have suffered for it. The sexual revolution of the 1960s happened because while Christians were primarily attending to their souls, secularism became the dominant worldview of the West, and our societies went to the proverbial hell in a handbasket. Proverbs 29:18 tells us why.

Let me ask you a question. Do Christians want societies with crime and poverty and broken families, suffering, misery, and premature death? What is the answer to this, so societies are not disarray? The gospel! Christ, God’s law, a Christian worldview, Christians loving and serving others, men leading their families and building things, all men and women fighting for goodness, beauty, and truth, because where they are, so Christ is whether the people in every instance acknowledge him as their author. We must have a vision of all these blessings as fruit of the gospel. We have to learn as I said above how to develop the mental sight, seeing these blessings with our minds as the inevitable fruit of the gospel. We’re not here to lose, to give the devil the default victory because things look a bit challenging at the moment. It’s like your team is down a bunch of runs, and since you’re a time traveler you know the outcome of the game already, and your team wins. Are you going to pout and cop an attitude when everything is going wrong and everyone is thinking defeat is inevitable? No! You know without a shadow of a doubt it’s not, even if at the moment things look bad. So you fight on, work, play, proclaim, create, and be a source of blessing to those in your circle of influence.

Let’s not settle for half a gospel that applies only to the narrow sphere of our personal lives. I read a wonderful book by Ken Gentry called, The Greatness of the Great Commission. He explains how the discipling work of the Great Commission goes beyond just us:

[It] aims at the comprehensive application of Christ’s authority over men through conversion. As the numbers of converts increase, this providentially leads to the subsuming under the authority of Christ whole institutions, cultures, societies, and governments.

The authority of Christ isn’t just for the church! The proclamation that Jesus is King in the New Testament church had political and cultural ramifications.

Because our commission is great, we know God isn’t just doing a glorious work in us, but in the world. The fallen world was never meant to remain the same after Christ came, rose from the dead, ascended to heaven, and sent his Holy Spirit to earth in his people. And it isn’t. The reason is that Christians throughout history never saw their mission as merely personal, and their lives reflected that. In writing his book about the greatness of the Great Commission, Gentry asks some questions hoping his answers would “be hope inducing, vision expanding, and labor encouraging.” As Christians we would should have a theology of great expectations. For me that’s postmillennial eschatology, but regardless of our eschatology, we must see ourselves as part of something as big as it gets, even if our part in the process is tiny, as for most of us it is. The Puritans were world changers because they believed, as Ian Murray writes in The Puritan Hope “that the church, despite all the odds set against her, was yet to be an instrument of blessing on a scale far surpassing all that has been previously seen in history.” The expectation of success drove their missionary efforts. As Murray writes:

With this belief in the church’s future the Puritans gained energy and resolution. Had they adopted the short-term view, the problems of the church in their day might justifiably have seemed hopeless, but they faced them with an unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity.

That says it splendidly, “an unflinching sense of their duty toward posterity.” That is our call as Christians because God is indeed doing a glorious work in us, and in the world.