Hard to Leave, Part 5

6. What about genuine feelings? If I’m not giving the Lord the genuine heart-felt inner me, then I don’t think I am truly worshiping God, right?

The Lord Jesus Christ wants us to draw near to God with our lips and our hearts. Using both in the worship of God is important. But we battle with hypocrisy all the time; we find ourselves often trying to fake God. We say words in worship and our lives are phony. That’s wrong. But also, maybe because we don’t feel like being in worship or we don’t have interests and good feelings for a particular hymn, we think that excuses us. Oh well, I don’t feel much like worshiping, so I shouldn’t and I won’t. But here, we need to be a hypocrite to our feelings! Here we need to be different than what our feelings are telling us. Being a hypocrite to feelings that mislead is the obedient thing to do.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who said, “The head rules the belly through the chest.” Head=acting on factual understanding, Belly=acting on need and appetites, and Chest=acting with personal heart. This is true for worship and singing worship music, and these three are to work together.

Genuine faith is not mere knowledge about God in worship, knowing the right facts about His presence, promises, etc. Also, genuine faith expressed in worship is not merely the exercise of our will, that is, having zeal, enthusiasm and conviction in worship; and last, faith is not mere attitudinal, that is, personal heart-sincerity showing reliance and trust. All three of these must cohere and work together to make up faith’s expression in worship.

There’s the great danger of relying on feelings, especially tied to music, as the essential basis for being able to experience true worship. Feelings are not automatically wrong. But there is the danger of attaching spiritual significance to feelings apart from a faithful connection to God’s Word, the truth. The basis for genuine, Spirit-filled worship cannot be our feelings. That would lead us to a doctrine of self-help, self-dependence on feelings. Such teaching would say: my feelings determine if I am having and keeping a solid, growing relationship with God (i.e. that I am growing in the worship of Him). Having the right, sincere feelings does not open the way to Heaven. God has opened heaven to us through His Son. That is truth separate from the way I am feeling.

G. Mark Sumpter

Hard to Leave, Part 4

5. But perhaps with what you’ve said, aren’t you downplaying the role of experience?

Experience always has a role in worship. The point here is that it must be informed by Scripture. Words and music provide nurture, confrontation, comfort, training and discipleship (Colossians 3:16-17). That training and discipleship should be leading me to scriptural expressions of emotions and experience.

G. Mark Sumpter

Hard to Leave, Part 3

3. Pietism doesn’t sound too bad, what’s the issue?

With the stress on heart-warmth, one’s experience can easily become the standard for knowing God’s presence, truth and will. When Christianity starts to overemphasize the concerns of an individual soul and inner attitudes, frequently we next underemphasize doctrine, and promote subjectivism and even mysticism. In truth, it’s not that doctrine is neglected in pietism but doctrine becomes based on very personal and subjective standards.

Several times over the years, I have heard people speak of the hymn, He Lives! The chorus of the hymn continually puts forth this question, “You ask me how I know He lives?” and then it answers: “He lives within my heart.” Do we find the standard of heart-proof as the standard for proving doctrine in the Bible? The believer’s subjective experience of salvation is a very important feature of the Bible, but it is not used as a proof that Jesus rose from the dead. The New Testament apostles always pointed people to the historical realities about Christ’s bodily resurrection—the tomb is empty; they recorded the times of seeing His resurrected body, watching Him eat and touching His sides.

4. How does this relate to contemporary worship music?

In the practice of worship singing, Scripture itself must determine and give shape to our experience in the presence of God. Just to put forward one example, when I would sing words like this contemporary worship song from the Vineyard songbook, “I can almost see Your holiness as I look around this place,” a song reminiscent of the vision of the prophet in Isaiah 6, it would lead me to experience a sense of privilege and thankfulness. The song has the chorus, “Spirit of God lift me up, Spirit of God lift me up, fill me again with Your love.” But what does Scripture say Isaiah’s experience was? When Isaiah saw the Lord in His holiness, he did not see himself as being in a moment of privilege and in a time of thanksgiving concerning God’s awesome presence, but he said, “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King…” (Isaiah 6:5). Scripture is our training manual for our experience. Emotions of joy and emotions of terror, both, are fitting according to the specific subject matter of the Bible. Bible teaching expressed in faithful words and tunes of music guides us on this.

I am grateful to Michael Horton for his Appendix B in the book, In the Face of God. There are helpful insights in this volume of his.

G. Mark Sumpter

Hard to Leave, Part 2

1. Why do you say that the contemporary worship music movement was hard to leave?

My personality and heart are thoroughly painted over with pietism. I’m an experience oriented person. The light rock, soft rock, popular radio-kind of contemporary sound and singing found in some reformed churches, and many evangelical ones, is so very attractive to me. Emotionally speaking, I easily melt with the contemporary sound. It was hard to leave it behind.

2. What does Pietism have to do with it?

Pietism, as a teaching and practice of Christianity, was handed down to us from the old Lutherans who started to fear that the Christian faith had become too academic and intellectual. In the 1670s there was a push to deal with the cold, doctrinaire kind of Christian worship and preaching that had come out of the Reformation period. This push invited authors, pastors and Christian lay-folk to promote a living faith and a personal heartfelt piety and devotion. As the years went on, pietism touched down in Colonial America. Men like John and Charles Wesley and Jonathan Edwards stirred many with heart-application for Christianity and revival; they breathed life and unction into worship, preaching, obedience and service.

G. Mark Sumpter

Hard to Leave, Part 1

Why was it hard to leave the contemporary worship music movement? I learned to play the steel string guitar in high school, and in 1976 I began to provide the accompaniment for popular praise music for a college Bible study at a campus ministry in Wisconsin. For about 22 years in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, with varying amounts of involvement, my wife and I served in music ensembles as instrumentalists and singers for contemporary worship music. These ensembles accompanied the public worship services at three different OPC congregations.

The instruments included strings, winds, brass, percussion and piano and organ. I do not have music training, but gladly volunteered to lead the the contemporary worship service at (back then) Covenant OPC in Burtonsville, MD for five years. At the time, we used music from several publishing groups including Sovereign Grace Ministries and Marantha! Music. We followed, and in some cases, used the traditional re-write music of Indelible Grace and other artists like Bob Kauflin, Mark Altrogge and Graham Kendrick; we also tapped into others from the 90s, e.g. Twila Paris, Michael W. Smith and Michael Card, and et al.

Being up to my ears, whole-heartedly so, in the movement was a genuinely merry thing, and that made leaving it especially hard.

G. Mark Sumpter

The Place of Pleading

Jeremiah pleads, “Righteous art thou, O LORD, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow, yea, they bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far from their reins. But thou, O LORD, knowest me: thou hast seen me, and tried mine heart toward thee: pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter” (Jeremiah 12:1-3).

There's the place of pleading with God that grace particularly knows, exclusively knows, the communion of covenant loyalty and God to man closeness. It's like the time you're at the city park and you're both sitting quietly at first. You've know the guy sitting across from you for the past 8 years. The bond is solid. The words start to come out. You look into the back of the eyeballs of this dear friend. He has come to meet you and confess his adultery against God and his wife, and he genuinely wants help. It's a confession that soon turns to prayer. It's pleading, in anguish, and aimed at repentance and restoration. But this trainwreck will take time, and a lot of it. Can there be grace in this black night sky? This Land of the Midnight Sun, doubly-long, dark black night sky? Can there be pleading, talking with the Lord, with a heart of spoil, wondering, questioning, doubt and fear? Of course. Do we like that place of grace? No. But darkness is not darkness to Him.

G. Mark Sumpter

Remembrance

The U.S. Marine Corps Memorial is silhouetted against the early morning sky during the Memorial Day holiday weekend, Sunday, May 24, 2009, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/J. David Ake)

G. Mark Sumpter

Bulimia Matters.12

“Does the Bible begin with exhortation; does it begin with a program for life? No, it begins with a doctrine. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That is the foundation doctrine upon which everything else that the Bible says is based.

The Bible does present a way of life; it tells men the way in which they ought to live. But always when it does so it grounds that way of life in truth.”

J. Gresham Machen in his The Christian Faith in the Modern World, p. 98

G. Mark Sumpter

On the Father Front

From the pulpit yesterday we learned that the genealogy in Genesis 5 does not include a standard Old Testament call to a named prophet to bear the Word of God to a given people. There is no missionary call to the foreign field; there are no sons of the covenant who receive a call to outreach and to go preach to a far off nation. Let's say it this way, as an example, we won't read in Genesis 5, And it came to pass that the Word of the Lord came to Jared, the son of Mahalalel, saying, “Arise, go to Egypt.” Why no missionary call? Because the family, the household, the line of faith is the locus for the movement of the gospel; gospel work primarily happens according to the genealogical line of the covenant. Therefore, fathers, you're calling, ordination and commission to the mission field is a calling to your household.

G. Mark Sumpter

He Wounded His Heart At Buried Knee

“Earnestness may be sincere, serious, ardent, and persevering. It goes at a thing with good will, pursues it with perseverance, and urges it with ardor; puts force in it. But all these forces do not rise higher than the mere human. The man is in it -- the whole man, with all that he has of will and heart, of brain and genius, of planning and working and talking. He has set himself to some purpose which has mastered him, and he pursues to master it. There may be none of God in it. There may be little of God in it, because there is so much of the man in it. He may present pleas in advocacy of his earnest purpose which please or touch and move or overwhelm with conviction of their importance; and in all this earnestness may move along earthly ways, being propelled by human forces only, its altar made by earthly hands and its fire kindled by earthly flames.

It is said of a rather famous preacher of gifts, whose construction of Scripture was to his fancy or purpose, that he “grew very eloquent over his own exegesis.” So men grow exceeding earnest over their own plans or movements. Earnestness may be selfishness simulated.

What of unction? It is the indefinable in preaching which makes it preaching. It is that which distinguishes and separates preaching from all mere human addresses. It is the divine in preaching. It makes the preaching sharp to those who need sharpness. It distills as the dew to those who need to he refreshed. It is well described as:

A two-edged sword
Of heavenly temper keen,
And double were the wounds it made
Wherever it glanced between.
'Twas death to silt; 'twas life
To all who mourned for sin.
It kindled and it silenced strife,
Made war and peace within.

This unction comes to the preacher not in the study but in the closet. It is heaven's distillation in answer to prayer. It is the sweetest exhalation of the Holy Spirit. It impregnates, suffuses, softens, percolates, cuts, and soothes. It carries the Word like dynamite, like salt, like sugar; makes the Word a soother, an arranger, a revealer, a searcher; makes the hearer a culprit or a saint, makes him weep like a child and live like a giant; opens his heart and his purse as gently, yet as strongly as the spring opens the leaves. This unction is not the gift of genius. It is not found in the halls of learning. No eloquence can woo it. No industry can win it. No prelatical hands can confer it. It is the gift of God -- the signet set to his own messengers. It is heaven's knighthood given to the chosen true and brave ones who have sought this anointed honor through many an hour of tearful, wrestling prayer.

Earnestness is good and impressive: genius is gifted and great. Thought kindles and inspires, but it takes a diviner endowment, a more powerful energy than earnestness or genius or thought to break the chains of sin, to win estranged and depraved hearts to God, to repair the breaches and restore the Church to her old ways of purity and power. Nothing but this holy unction can do this. ”

From The Power of Prayer by EM Bounds, a chaplain in the War Between the States

G. Mark Sumpter

Our Seeking God and Pastoral Initiative

“In a shepherding relationship the pastor seeks after the lost. The Good Shepherd searches out the strayed, the lost, and the fallen. The pastoral act of visiting a parishioner in the hospital communicates that seeking quality of God.

This seeking characteristic provides the imaginative basis for the practice of pastoral initiative. The right of initiative is unique to the pastoral role. Other professions do not claim it as a right. In fact, in the practice of other professions, it might well be considered unethical.

Initiative is a mixed blessing for pastors. Pastors may feel that their uninvited visits are intrusive. There is certainly an ambiguous quality and perhaps a presumptuous quality to initiating a visit not explicitly requested. As pastors we can only anticipate what some of the reactions might be. It is no wonder that clinical pastoral education students and many pastors are reluctant to initiate such visits.

Pastoral initiative suggest the covenant nature of the relationship between the pastor and parishioner. As a member of the church, the body of Christ, the parishioner has entered into a relationship with a community of faith and care. That care is personified in the person of the pastor. Implicit in this covenant is the parishioner's willingness to receive the care of a seeking God through the care of others.”

From the book, The Pastor and The Patient by Kent Richmond and David Middelton, p. 22

G. Mark Sumpter

The Body, Baseball and Entertainment

Dodgers All-Star ball player Manny Ramirez and his 50-game suspension for the use of human growth hormones splattered the news yesterday. Talk has focused on how long it will take for the fans to forgive and forget the drug-happy antics of the entertainers on the diamond and get back to the game. Concerns about the HGH sins of Major League Baseball will last about 30 seconds. Romans 1: 22-24 tells us the first thing to go, to spin out of control downward in degradation, is the body. Apart from grace, for ball players, dancers, doctors, students, rockers, truckers, teachers and more, the first thing to go is the body. Lusting, abusing, killing, and tattooing all line up and take a number. Sins of the body are the opening chapter telling the tale of paganism and idolatry in the church and the world. Want to see worship of the creature? Look at the body. And as well, at the opposite end with respect to help, hope and renewal, getting rid of bodily sins is the toughest thing; it's the last for full, final and total sanctification---Romans 7:24, O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Entertainment and bodily sins can easily go hand in hand. Sinful man, tied as he is to the sins of the body, can't fight his way out of a bodily paper bag. Ball players need Jesus. The fans need Jesus. We all need Jesus. Deliverance from the flesh only comes by submission to Jesus. Romans 7:25 I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!

G. Mark Sumpter

The Communion of the Saints

“All saints, that are united to Jesus Christ their Head, by His Spirit, and by faith, have fellowship with Him in His grace, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory: and, being united to one another in love, they communion in each other's gifts and graces...” That's part of Chapter 26 Of the Communion of Saints, found in the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Newer publications on the doctrine of the Trinity have brought about focus to Christian community. God is one God, who exists in three persons, and these three are the same in substance and equal in power and glory. Maybe you remember the spiritually rich, traditional hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy...God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.”

Heeding the importance of and good gift of genuinely connected godly relationships cannot be emphasized enough. Too easily we go along in life stringing loose acquaintances together, one after another, like pearls on a string, and we're satisfied with this low-level acquaintance necklace. One specific danger of the loose string of acquaintances is how we're disconnected from one another in our day to day roles. If we're only living at the acquaintance level, then we'll miss the other community aspects of who we are as husband, wife, mother, father, welder, homemaker, grandparent, painter, cab driver, girl scout volunteer, elder, coach, music teacher, student, gardener, coin collector or what have you. Often we're only known in one role. But we have many roles, and those roles overlap. Working at our wider, more thorough connections in life with their multifaceted applications takes effort. We are given to settle for the splintered approach knowing one another in one safe, most-often acknowledged, and self-protected role. We like our freedom. The Trinity shows us both the oneness in being, who God is, and oneness in doing, what He does. For us, being together and doing things together is the work of a lifetime.

G. Mark Sumpter

Fuss Over Politicization

It's been newsy for the past 30-40 years that ethical issues for our everday living have become politicized. The Supreme Court and Capitol Hill are the sole gatekeepers of right and wrong, and therefore, unjust actions by the powers that be leave Christians without recourse and hope. Politicization, we are told, gives muscle and leverage for the agenda of the unfaithful professing church, the unbelieving media outlets and the wrong-headed legislation on the part of those at the state and federal levels. I fail to see the concern over this. It's only showing us what the Bible affirms. Issues and practice are made law (legislative and judicial government) and reported on (media) and therefore, matters are politicized very naturally because life falls out of, stems from, God's image in man. Dogs bark and cats meow. Man bears the imago religio, the mark and image of being a religious creature. Man cannot help but name (Genesis 2:19), decree (Daniel 3:1-7) and legislate (John 19:1-7). And it's always plainly and inescapably done morally, religiously. The fact that the realms of corporate ethics, federalism, education, and bio-medical research and practice, to name a few, snatch and use the state-craft and political activity of proposed, evaluated, debated, and eventually regulated law only makes the line in the sand clear. Everything is politics, but politics is not everything. We're being shown once again that God is good to provide His restraint so that man does not go his full way into sin, via God's providential watch care and the conscience of man, and at the same time, we're seeing that our God is good, showing us the commission to preach, teach and evangelize. The executive, legislative and judicial branches of public office in the USA need to be confronted with Jesus Christ and Him crucified. If anything, the politicization of issues gives leverage to the Christian. The line in the sand is telling: enmity, division, morality, man's autonomy, God's law, and the gospel. Put me in coach, I'm ready to play. Man is either for Jesus or against Him. Politicization of issues reminds us of the church's primary calling: God's worship, preaching His Word and administering the Sacraments. We either bow to God or we bow to Satan and unbelieving man.

G. Mark Sumpter