I’ve Been Asked to Preach on Acts 16:30: “What Must I Do To
Be Saved?”
I:
-- Two
decades ago Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the minister at Westminster Chapel, in
London
, was the best-known preacher in
Great Britain
. He addressed 2000 people
Sunday by Sunday, each year turning his sermons for the past year into
books that sold scores of thousands of copies.
Earlier in his life he had trained as a physician, as a
cardiologist, to be exact. Having
practised for several years as a specialist in
Britain
he left medicine – where he was a rising star among
England
’s medical fraternity – and entered the ministry.
He began by serving small congregations in
Wales
, and eventually became senior minister to one of
London
’s largest congregations. When
he was about to retire, decades later, someone gushingly remarked that
he had made a huge sacrifice in giving up his career in medicine.
(British clergy of the mid 1950s were paid even less than British
clergy are now; Lloyd-Jones was 52 years old before he could afford a
car.) “Sacrifice?” the
man said in bewilderment, “What sacrifice?
What greater privilege is there than being a minister of the
gospel that saves and therefore is humankind’s only hope?”
As important as cardiology is, its importance is relativised by
the importance of announcing the gospel.
Whenever I teach a course on the theology of John Calvin, my
first lecture is always on Calvin’s health; specifically, his ill
health, his medical problems: kidney stones, nephritis, haemorrhoids,
asthma, migraine headaches, pulmonary tuberculosis, intestinal
parasites, spastic colon. The
lecture amplifies each of these ailments in considerable detail.
When the class is beginning to turn green I say to the students,
“Why didn’t Calvin take it easier on himself?”
Then I quote Calvin himself from the preface to his commentary on
2nd Thessalonians, where Calvin says tersely, “My ministry
is dearer to me than life.” In
view of Calvin’s health problems and the atrocious suffering they
brought him he could have been easy on himself, could have excused
himself from his relentless work, could have spared himself the fatigue
and frustration his manifold responsibilities in
Geneva
brought him. Everyone would
have understood if he had said, “I’m not well: I’ll have to stop
now.” No one would have faulted him for easing up and reducing his
pain; instead, “My ministry is dearer to me than life.”
I understand Calvin. What
could ever be dearer to someone whom the crucified has called than the
ministry of that gospel which alone “saves” in every sense of the
word?
II:
-- The
gospel of Jesus Christ addresses us all, mired as we are in the human
predicament. “Mired” is
scarcely a neutral word. Other
words could as readily be used: “fixed”, “bound”, “sunk”,
“fastened”, “imprisoned”. Any
of these words would indicate that the human predicament isn’t
something humankind can alter. The
root human situation can’t
be remedied by human effort. This has to be made plain Sunday by Sunday.
It has to be announced again and again that the gospel uniquely
provides deliverance. Worshippers
must never be given the impression that “Christianity” merely puts a
religious “spin”, a religious interpretation, on the world’s
self-understanding, which self-understanding never goes so far as to
speak of a predicament.
The world has an unrealistically roseate view of the human
situation just because the world’s unbelief has blinded it to its own
condition. (“Their foolish
minds became darkened...” is how the apostle Paul puts it.)
The world views the human predicament in terms of social problems
(the fact of social problems is undeniable) or in terms of national
self-interest or in terms of corporate rapacity.
But individuals themselves are in fine condition, the world
thinks; we are mere victims; we are never perpetrators.
Not surprisingly, then, the world continues to worship the myth
of progress. “Every day in
every way we are becoming better and better” announced Auguste Comte,
the 19th Century “positive thinker.”
The presupposition of human progress appears everywhere in board
of education documents, for instance.
It’s taken as self-evident that culture in general and
education in particular are vehicles of a human amelioration that admits
no profound predicament, no innermost self-contradiction and outermost
manifestation of it.
On the one hand, the depredations of the century just behind us
-- particularly the depredations of the most educated nations -- should
find us laughing at the ridiculous naiveness of this.
On the other hand we shouldn’t laugh, since people who reject
the gospel’s cure and therefore the gospel’s diagnosis are left
believing in human progress (despite counter-evidence as unanswerable,
for instance, as the history of the western world in the 20th
century) as the only alternative to despair.
Of course there’s progress in the realm of technology, but only
in the realm of technology. Technology
is the human mastery of the less-than-human, the sub-human.
Therefore there is progress in humankind’s mastery of wind and
water and electrons and chemicals and atoms.
But what of humankind’s self-mastery?
There’s no evidence of this at all.
And as a matter of fact it is humankind’s misused
mastery of the sub-human that has brought unspeakable suffering,
especially in the past 150 years. It’s
humankind’s misused mastery of the less-than-human (why does no one
ask why it’s forever being misused?) which proves that humankind’s
self-mastery is a fable more ludicrous than anything a four year old
believes in.
Progress? Think of
some of
Russia
’s greatest names from the last 150 years: Doestoievski, Tolstoy,
Tchaikovsky, Chekhov. Then
think of
Russia
’s history from 1900 to the present.
Progress? Think of
some of
Germany
’s greatest names: Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schweitzer,
Grass, Einstein. Then think
of
Germany
’s history from 1900 to the present.
Progress? I listen to
the radio while I eat my lunch. A
noon-hour phone-in program invited listeners to comment on the reduced
sentence recently imposed upon a man who had raped his stepdaughter.
Because the man had raped his stepdaughter anally
it was argued in court that he had preserved her virginity. In
recognition of the man’s thoughtfulness the judge reduced the
sentence. Is this progress?
in a society whose
midday
radio programming turns a young woman’s lifelong devastation into
public entertainment?
Only the gospel saves. Only
the gospel tells us that we need
to be saved. Only the gospel
tells us from what we need to be saved.
III:
-- Then
from what do we need to be saved?
(i)
We need to be saved from ourselves.
Have you ever noticed how off-handedly (it would seem) Jesus
refers to our polluted hearts and heads?
“You, evil as you are...” he says to his disciples; to disciples,
no less. “Out of the heart
of humankind bubbles up all manner of depravity...” he says so
matter-of-factly, as though it were so obvious that no one could think
of disagreeing with him. Our
Lord simply assumes that the root human condition is obvious to anybody
with one eye open. Were he
among us today in the flesh he would say, “
Serbia
? Kosovo?
Iraq
? What’s extraordinary
about them? What else would
you expect from people like yourselves?”
To those who are religiously fussy about what they eat he
declares, “It isn’t what goes in that defiles you; it’s what comes
out.” Then he lists some
– but only some – of the everyday depravities which he regards as
undeniable. Undeniable, to
be sure, yet just as certainly incurable -- apart from that radical cure
of an ailment he presupposes everywhere but argues for nowhere.
Our Lord never attempts to build a case for his understanding of
the human predicament; he simply states it, assuming that anyone who
disagrees with him demonstrates, by her disagreement, that the human
head and heart are every bit as perverse and folly-ridden as he
maintains.
In speaking so matter-of-factly about the state of the human
heart our Lord is simply endorsing what has since been labelled
“Original Sin”. We
aren’t going to finesse all the subtleties of the doctrine this
morning or attempt to correct all the misunderstandings that surround
it. But we must say this
much about it. We must
understand that sins (small “s”, plural)
are the outcropping, the effervescence, of Sin
(capital “S”, singular). Our
behaviour is an outflow of the condition.
Our thinking, willing, doing are symptoms of our innermost
ailment. To treat the
symptoms (or think we can treat the symptoms) while overlooking the
condition is not only to find the symptoms unaltered; it’s also to
persist in blindness, shallowness and folly concerning the condition.
When next someone says to us, “Have a good day”, we should
ask ourselves in what a good day would consist.
Good day?
The world-at-large tells us that a good day is a day when we feel
so good about ourselves it’s as if we were slightly “high” on
whatever it takes to make us slightly “high”.
Our Lord tells us, however, that a good day, a really
good day, is the day our Sinnership
comes home to us with a conviction that is equal parts horror and
disgust.
On the day of Pentecost many people had a “good day”; that
is, a Godly day. Peter
preached; the Spirit of God drove the message home; dozens cried,
“What are we going to do?” Whereupon
Peter told them what they had to do: they had to repent, cast themselves
upon the mercy of God, look to God in saving faith every day, and pursue
that road of discipleship which is narrow because it has to be narrow,
just as the cutting edge of a knife has to be narrow if the knife is to
be of any use.
It isn’t the case that we need our sins
laundered, as though we needed an injection of something-or-other to
bring about moral improvement. At
bottom we need our Sinnership,
the underlying condition, dealt with, for we need innermost Godwardness
more than we need anything else.
(ii)
In saying that we need to be saved from the root human condition
we are saying as well that we need to be saved from the judgement of
God. You have heard me say
many times that God’s judgement is medicinal or surgical; that is,
it’s meant to heal. True.
God’s judgement is
medicinal or surgical; and it will
heal -- as long as we submit to it.
To flee it, however, is to forego what alone
will heal. Judgement
welcomed means restoration to God and recovery within ourselves;
judgement dismissed means alienation from God fixed
and self-alienation unaltered.
We are delivered from
the judgement of God by welcoming
the judgement of God. Let me
repeat. To flee the
judgement of God is to be stuck in
it; to welcome the judgement of God is to be delivered from
it.
IV:
-- It all
happened like this for the prison guard in the city of
Philippi
. The guard had been charged
with ensuring that his prisoners, Paul and Silas (apostles), didn’t
escape. A few hours earlier
Paul and Silas had been beaten up by mobs egged on by magistrates; then
they had been thrown into jail. The
prison guard knew, of course that the apostles were Christians.
During the night an earthquake rumbled through the city.
The earthquake broke open the prison doors.
The guard knew that his Roman overseers would execute him if his
prisoners escaped. He was
about to commit suicide when Paul spoke up: “Don’t bother killing
yourself; we’re still here.” Whereupon
the guard cried out, “What must I do to be saved?”
The apostles’ reply was quick: “Believe in the Lord Jesus,
and you will be saved.…”
To believe in the Lord
Jesus is to commit ourselves to him.
To believe in the Lord Jesus is to commit ourselves to him whom we now know to be God
incarnate. Note Paul’s
instruction: “Believe in the Lord Jesus....”
Then note how the story concludes: “[the guard] rejoiced with all his
household that he had believed in God.”
Plainly, to give ourselves to Jesus Christ is to give ourselves
to God.
We need to say more about the prison guard who now rejoiced
that he had believed in the Lord Jesus and now knew himself saved.
What had happened to him? What
had happened to him to render him saved?
(i)
He was now newly related to God, rightly related to God.
The moment he clung in faith to Jesus Christ; that moment he
became as much a child of God as he could ever be.
Because there was now faith rather than unbelief in the depths of
his heart he had moved from being a creature of God to a child of God.
The profoundest description of him was “alive” unto God
rather than “dead, inert”. The
most important activity in his life, when alone, was prayer; when with
others, worship. The truth
about him concerning God the judge was “pardoned”; the truth about
him concerning God the father was “reconciled”.
(ii)
Yet the prison guard, in his new-born faith, was given more than
a new standing before God; he was also given a new nature from God.
This is not to say he was rendered sinless instantly.
Not at all. In fact
he would have to contend with his “old” nature until life’s end.
But at least he could
contend with it and wanted to.
And he wanted to
contend with his old nature just because he had been given a new nature
and knew it.
One of the weaker spots in my 37-year ministry, I feel, has been
right here. I think I have
understated the profoundest difference
that faith in our Lord makes to the total person.
Not merely the difference it makes to our intellectual furniture
(I’ve never understated that), but the difference it makes now
to the total person. You
see, the one question which seekers put to me over and over is, “What difference
is faith in Christ going to make tomorrow morning when our feet hit the
floor and we have to contend with a world that is as foreign to the
gospel as cannibalism is to a Canadian?”
The prison guard in
Philippi
knew it had made a difference within him so telling that he would never
doubt it. It will never make
any less a difference to any of us.
Think for a minute: we live in a relationship with God that can
never be adequately described but is always intimately known; we are
informed by truth that we could never find for ourselves but will always
be given to us; we are secure in our Lord not because of the strength of
our grip on him but because of the strength of his grip on us; we have
been flooded with the a love that Jesus himself calls “living
water”.
(iii)
The prison guard knew one thing more: he knew what future his
faith would bring him. His
future was what scripture calls “glorification”, or the
consummation, the full flowering of his life in God.
I am not embarrassed to speak of the life-to-come.
I am not embarrassed at finding comfort in the fact that the end
of all who are named Christ’s people is a glorious end: we are going
to stand forth resplendent on day of our ultimate deliverance.
The apostle doesn’t hesitate to encourage the Christians in
Philippi, doesn’t hesitate to encourage the congregation which the
prison guard himself now joined, by reminding them, “I am sure that he
who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of
Jesus Christ.” (Phil 1:6)
Victor
Shepherd
January
2007
