January 2013

Everybody's Doing It - Part Five

By James Boice

 

That is why we need the Deliverer. That is why we need Jesus Christ the Redeemer to break the fetters of our sin. Any Christian ought to know that. If you have come to Jesus Christ as Savior, you know that you are a sinner. Not only do you know you need the forgiveness of sins, you need deliverance from your sin. Paul says, "Then how can one who has known Jesus Christ as the Redeemer, the Deliverer from sin, enter lightly once again into sin’s clutches?" That is the point I am making. This is the opposite of another characteristic of this secular age: the belief that man is self-sufficient and perfectible.

Everybody's Doing It - Part Four

By James Boice

 

Before the age of modernism, when people believed there was a God in the universe, the character and the law of this God was the law of man as well. We may not like it. We may fight against it. But that law stands, and we are not autonomous when there is a moral law in the universe. But when you push God out, you not only have a different view of man, you have a different view of man in relationship to law. The standard for law comes, therefore, not from God or even from nature but from within man, himself. Whatever I want to do becomes the standard.

Everybody's Doing It - Part Three

By James Boice

 

I think to understand why immorality has invaded evangelicalism, we have to see that there has been an enormous change in the Western world. It was ushered in with what we sometimes call "modernism," and sometimes call "secular humanism." We have had a remarkable change in recent history. We have moved from belief in "an open system," where God, though invisible, is nevertheless acknowledged to exist, to what is called "a closed system," where all we see is all there is, where the only thing that exists is the matter in the universe of which we are a part.

Everybody's Doing It - Part Two

By James Boice

 

Still another issue is ecumenism. Ecumenism is the desire to get all Christians together under one umbrella, whether or not they hold to the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. Schaeffer refers to a meeting of The World Council of Churches held in Vancouver, British Columbia, that by all objective accounts was a disaster. So much so that even the secular magazines, Newsweek and Time, in particular, said how ironic it is for these men to be calling upon the name of Christ while issuing the kind of proclamations they did. Yet strikingly, there were so-called evangelicals present at the meeting who wrote favorably about it and backed that up with published articles.

Everybody's Doing It - Part One

By James Boice

 

One of the most significant books I have read is The Great Evangelical Disaster, written by Francis Schaeffer. It speaks out against the failures of evangelicalism, particularly the unconscious, but nonetheless tragical, compromises of some of the great standards of the Word of God. The word he uses for this is "accommodation," which is the theme of the book.

The Litigious Church - Part Five

By James Boice

 

At the very end of this section, Paul begins to talk about how Christians must then live. He uses strong words. We have such a temptation to water them down because we believe in the doctrine of justification by faith. It is a great, foundational doctrine and we do not want to mix in works with justification. But notice what Paul says: "Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God?" He did not say, "The ‘unjustified’ will not inherit the kingdom of God," but "the wicked," those who are wicked, those who act wickedly.

The Litigious Church - Part Four

By James Boice

 

I want to say something about the role of the state because although Paul does not develop it here in 1 Corinthians 6, considering another context will give us a more complete picture of this issue. What is the role of the state? Does the state have legitimate authority over the lives of Christians? One of the great illustrations of the proper role of the state is found in the trial of Jesus Christ. It was significant, not simply because it was Jesus on trial, but because Jesus stood in that position as the head of the church before Pilate, who was the representative of Caesar, the greatest power in the Roman world at the time.

The Litigious Church - Part Three

By James Boice

 

Now concerning this matter of being cheated, we must understand that there is a difference between what you will endure as an individual in terms of personal conflict, and what you should endure on behalf of someone else. It is quite different for somebody to cheat me and for me to say, "Well, all right, he’s a Christian brother. Even though I'm in the right and he is in the wrong, rather than pursue this, I’ll allow myself to be cheated. He can take that and go. I’ll just count it a loss. I’ll write it off. I will trust God for the outcome." That is entirely appropriate on an individual basis.

The Litigious Church - Part Two

By James Boice

 

Let us look further at this third problem in the church that Paul discusses in chapter 6. Apparently, Christians in Corinth were taking each other to court. We have to be careful not to get the idea that somehow the courts are utterly illegitimate, because they are not. All you have to do is read the Bible to discover the contrary. In Israel God himself established judges who were to hear cases that came from the people and to deal justly in those affairs. We are also reminded that the Apostle Paul, when arrested in Jerusalem and brought before the the Roman courts, did not hesitate at all to appeal to Caesar because he was a Roman citizen, and as a result had certain rights in a Roman court.

The Litigious Church - Part One

By James Boice

 

The word litigious is relatively new in common speech. It means "prone to litigation" or "prone to go to court." The reason this is somewhat of a new word is that a proneness to go to court is something relatively new, at least in American life. Generally, when there was a dispute between people several generations ago, it was settled in an informal way by neighbors helping the opposing parties work out their differences.