Considering the Pattern of Piety

In the third chapter of The Hole in Our Holiness, Kevin DeYoung looks at the pattern of piety found in Scripture. It is not enough to know we are called to holiness, but we also need to know what it looks like, and doesn’t look like.

Holiness means separation. That is the bottom line. God sets us apart from the rest of humanity in two ways. First, we are definitively set apart at justification. We are set apart as Gods’ people. So, every Christian is sanctified. But God continues to set us apart from the world morally. This is progressive sanctification. You don’t have one without the other. Both of these are a result of grace.. The first is an act of grace (one time event) and the second is a work of grace (a process) according to the Westminster Confession of Faith.

What Holiness is Not

It is not rule keeping. Holiness certainly includes obedience. People often get off course by thinking about non-biblical rules. We are set apart for God. We are to obey his law. Jesus was not too keen on the Pharisees for neglecting God’s law from man-made traditions. It is not about dancing, whether or not you drink a beer with dinner, or have the occasional cuss word slip out when you smash your thumb with a hammer. It is about gentleness, not getting drunk, and having lips used to edify and express gratitude.

“Holiness is more than middle class values. … checklist spirituality is highly selective.”

It is not generational imitation. Some people think it is having the standards and practices of an earlier generation. It could be the 1950′s in Amercia, Calvin’s Geneva or the Puritan’s England. This is what got the Amish in trouble. DeYoung notes that the 50′s may have had a better standards of sexual decency. But when it came to race relations, not so good. Just an example. We are trying to apply the timeless law in our time, not recreate another time.

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Considering Our Continued Sinfulness

Treasure trove of counsel

I am still slowly making my way through The Letters of John Newton (you can read the Introduction here).  In his letters to Lord Dartmouth, he opens up his life a little with regard to the reality of our continuing struggle with sin and sinfulness.  Even in this he is guarded in some ways.  We could write it off to him being a Brit, but I suspect there is some wisdom to it as well.

“Permit me to tell your lordship a little part, (for some things must not, cannot be told,) not of what I have read, but of what I have felt, in illustration of this passage.”

He is referring to Galatians 5:17.  He focuses on the experiential side of Christianity here, not just some book learning.  He unveils his heart o so briefly.  He wants Lord Dartmouth to know the reality of his struggle, but not necessarily the specifics of his struggle.  This is the wisdom, lest his sins be used against him at some later date.  It does not matter what sins Newton is struggling with (since this is not a James 5 moment of confessing his sins to another).  He is attempting to console him, and this should be enough.

He begins with allusions to the Proverbs:

“I would not be the sport and prey of wild, vain, foolish, and worse imaginations; but this evil is present with me: my heart is like a highway, like a city without walls or gates.  Nothing so false, so frivolous, so absurd, so impossible, or so horrid, but it can obtain access, and that at any time, or in any place: neither the study, the pulpit, nor even the Lord’s table, exempt me from their intrusion.”

I know of what he speaks.  I’ve had too many of those moments, in the unlikeliest of moments.  “Where did THAT come from?” since it seemed so disconnected to my task or circumstances.  One evidence of our continuing sinfulness is our thought life.  Particular the spontaneous thoughts, and what they reveal about us.

“In defiance of my best judgment and best wishes, I find something within me, which cherishes and cleaves to those evils, from which I ought to start and flee, as I should as if a toad or serpent was put in my food or in my bed.”

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Considering Steve Brown and Dan Allender

Steve Brown interviews Dan Allender on leadership and his book Leading with a Limp.  Here are some snippets to pique your interest.

“There is a lack of truth in all of us.”

He discusses how the double life created by posturing acts like an acid that destroys faith.  That lack of truth leads us to deny the difficulty of our crises, betrayals etc.  We pretend we have it all together, largely because we give people too much power over us.

“I’m honest, but only about what I want to share. … Honesty is part of the grace of the hound of heaven, …”

“I got to a point (in reading leadership books) … there were a lot of glorious trees cut down unnecessarily for alot of leadership stuff.”

“The gospel is about good sex.  The gospel is about good drinking.  The gospel is about what you smoke and how well you smoke it.  So the question ultimately becomes how do the pleasures that God have given us in the world, how do we bring to him our pleasures as we engage his pleasure. … It changes how we live it and offer it to others.”

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Considering Word and Spirit

Finally I’ve had some more time to make progress in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.  He spends some time interacting with a Roman view of Scripture and then images.  While discussing Scripture, he also exposes the folly of the extreme anabaptist view that created problems during the Reformation.

The authority of Scripture comes from its origin in God.  Often some will say that the Church confers authority on the Scriptures by its recognition of them as God’s Word.  But Scripture is authentic and authoritative even if we don’t recognize it as such.  The issue is whether or not we will submit to God as He has spoken in the Scriptures.

“… the testimony of the Spirit is more excellent than all reason.  For as God alone is a fit witness of himself in His Word, so also the Word will not find acceptance in men’s hearts before it is sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit.  The same Spirit, therefore, who has spoken through the mouths of the prophets must penetrate into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully proclaimed what had been divinely commanded.” (I, VII, 4)

God spoke through the prophets by the Spirit.  The same Spirit must work in our hearts that we accept those words as God’s.  Bare reason is insufficient due to our fall into sin.  God must illumine us (2 Cor. 2-4).  So the Spirit speaks and authenticates God’s Word.

The authority of God’s human messengers, the prophets, was strengthened by the miracles they performed.  Here we see the idea of miracles as authentication of God’s true messengers.  This idea is behind the Reformed view of cessation of the gifts.  Not all Reformed people affirm this view, nor does Calvin go there.  But the roots of Warfield and Gaffin’s views are here.  Fulfilled prophecy is another basis for affirming the authenticity and authority of Scripture.  These are things the Spirit will illumine for us as we read that we might believe that Scripture has divine origins and is authoritative.

But what captures my attention is Calvin’s joining Word and Spirit.  This emphasis is lost in our day and age.  On the one hand there are those who think that bare reason is sufficient to understand Scripture.  On the other there are those who think that the Spirit thinks apart from Scripture.  Calvin argued that we only rightly understand Scripture through the work of the Spirit, and that the Spirit speaks thru the Scriptures.

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