Daily Meditation

Being Clothed in His Righteousness

Ligonier Ministries

The church is our mother, but it is Christ’s bride. In this role, we are the objects of Christ’s affection. We, corporately, are His beloved. Stained and wrinkled, in ourselves we are anything but holy. When we say that the church is holy or refer to her as “holy mother church,” we do so with the knowledge that her holiness is not intrinsic but derived and dependent upon the One who sanctifies her and covers her with the cloak of His righteousness.

As the sensitive husband shelters his wife and in a chivalrous manner lends her his coat when she is chilled, so we are clad from on high by a husband who stops at nothing to defend, protect, and care for His betrothed. His is the ultimate chivalry, a chivalry that no upheaval of earthly custom can eradicate or make passé. This chivalry is not dead because it cannot die.

The bride of Christ is soiled but will one day be presented spotless to the Father by the Son who bought her, who loves her, and who intercedes for her every day. If we love Christ, we must also love His bride. If we love Christ, we must love His church.

Coram Deo

Ask God to rekindle your love for members of the body of Christ, the true church.

Passages for Further Study

Revelation 3:5
Psalm 111:3
2 Peter 3:14

Urbane or Prophetic

Paul at Athens

When Christians engage in the public square--that is, in any public debate, whether in the local community or the parliament--some counsel we must become as secular as everyone else.  We must win over the opposition using their frames of  reference.  We must appeal to natural law, reason, and common sense.  We must check in our Christian guns before riding into town to the OK Corral. 

Some claim biblical and apostolic warrant for such an approach.  They argue from Acts 17 where Paul was in Athens, debating with Greeks in the agora, that this is precisely what the Apostle himself did.  Consider the following:

What can we glean from this encounter?  St. Paul, without compromising his message, tailored it to his audience.  He spoke in Hellenistic rather than Judaic terms, as a philosopher more than as a Christian theologian, in a manner that engaged them rather than repelled them.  He relied on common grace rather than on the knowledge and acceptance of Christian doctrine.  "I have become all things to all men," he says in the book of Corinthians, "So that by all possible means I might save some."   [Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Chicago: Moody Press, 2010) p. 117.]

This is a simplistic, unsatisfactory reading of the text.  It is not an uncommon one, however.   A careful reading will quickly show the error of Gerson's and Wehner's view.

The Holy Catholic Church

A Shame We All Must Bear

The Apostles Creed is arguably the most universal of all Christian creeds and confessions.  It is an organic creed, by which we mean that it was not written or constructed by any ecclesiastical body or one author or group of authors.  Very early in the history of the New Covenant, church congregations, separately and also co-operatively, developed what was called a rule of faith.  A rule was a summary of the salient points of Christian doctrine  and understood to be an accurate reflection of apostolic teaching.

It turned out that the the rules, as developed and used in churches from Italy, to North Africa, to Persia were pretty much all the same.  Over time the rules became the Rule--a commonly held statement of faith,  authenticated not so much by any ecclesiastical body, but by universal acceptance and use.

Powerful Ancient Traditions

Gaining Traction in a Post-Modern World

In a world falling apart, universal, timeless tradition has traction.  In the 1960's the opposite applied.  Western culture was basking in the victory over Germany and the Axis powers; there was a distinct sense that the "good" had triumphed over the "bad" in World War II.  History was on a right course.  The fifties were a decade of the universal and conventional. 

Beneath popular culture, however, scepticism was bubbling away, about to burst forth into the public square.  Post-modernism had taken deep root in the intellectual institutions.  Along came the Beatles with distinctly unconventional haircuts and strange musical idioms.  Almost overnight being "square" did not cut it; change, change, change was the new normal. 

Fifty years later the Western world has been "narrativised" and "perspectivised" to cynical boredom and jaded detachment.  The only "ism" that has traction is the view that nothing has traction.

Ancient Wisdom

Breaking and Re-Making the World

One of the conundrums surrounding the early Church is how the Gospel spread sufficiently powerfully to where Constantine established Christianity as the Empires official religion in the early 4th century.  Recall how Christianity was a persecuted religion, a radical minority belief during the second century.  Experts estimate that not more than two percent of the population were Christians by the end of the second century.

From the time of the apostles onwards until Constantine there are few records of any missionary activity, or celebrated missionaries.  Yet the Gospel spread and gradually began to make significant progress to where the Roman Empire became officially Christianised.  How did this come about?

A Revolution By Other Means

Violent, sudden and calamitous revolutions are the ones that accomplish the least.  While they may succeed at radically reordering societies, the usually cannot transform cultures.  They may excel at destroying the past, but they are generally impotent to create a future.  The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels--the only real revolutions, that is to say--are those that first convert minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow the tyrannies within the soul.

Christianity, in its first three centuries, was a revolution of the latter sort: gradual, subtle, exceedingly small and somewhat inchoate at first, slowly introducing its vision of divine, cosmic, and human reality into the culture around it, often by deeds rather than words, and simply enduring from one century to the next. 
[David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.183.]

Just-So Stories About the Early Church

 Passing On the Apostolic Faith

One of the myths perpetrated by modern Unbelieving New Testament scholars is that orthodoxy in the early church is a myth.  The thesis is that there was no orthodoxy--only a plethora of different, competing, and contradictory theologies.  "Orthodoxy" only came about with certain factions subsequently winning control of the Church, which then proscribed and repressed competing (earlier) theologies. 

This thesis is yet another case of a good story unsupported by the facts.  The data shows that right from the beginning, the Church operated with a Rule of Faith--which was a summary of the teachings of Scripture.  Andreas J. Kostenberger puts the record straight: