Accustomed to an Artificial Gospel

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Transcript of an excerpt of a message by Voddie Baucham given at the 2022, Shepherd’s Conference:

I want to tell you a story. This story doesn’t originate with me. It’s a story that’s been used to sort of illustrate postmodernism, and I think if you’ll bear with me you’ll see how it relates to what we’re dealing with here tonight.

The story goes something like this: There’s a man and he’s walking with his son through a strawberry patch. He takes a strawberry, eats a strawberry, gives a strawberry to his son. The strawberry is good, beautiful, perfect, sweet. But something happens to strawberries over time. Eventually strawberries are chopped up and used in other foods. They’re put on top of cereal. Literally, strawberries are made into strawberry preserves and into strawberry jam. Eventually strawberries get messed with, processed, and put inside of things like Pop-Tarts.

Eventually you get into a laboratory where you have the essence of strawberry without strawberries. Eventually men don’t take their sons to strawberry patches anymore to give them strawberries. They go and get them strawberry slushes that don’t actually have any strawberry in them whatsoever. It’s just a combination of chemicals and colors and high fructose this and that. Then the kid loves the strawberry slush and he gets used to the strawberry slush.

One day the kid, who’s grown to love the strawberry slush that has no strawberries in it, is walking through a strawberry patch. He picks up an actual strawberry, eats it, and doesn’t like it because it doesn’t taste like the slush.

Brothers, I think that’s what we’ve seen happen to the gospel.

Just For Once (Sola Scriptura)

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SCRIPTURE ALONE?
“Just for once, I’d like to see Catholics and Orthodox engage with ‘Sola Scriptura’ for what Protestants think it is, not what Catholics/Orthodox think it is. Catholics/Orthodox treat Sola Scriptura as meaning that each private individual is free to determine purely for himself what Scripture means, in complete disregard of the ‘sensus fidelium’ (common understanding of the faithful), the ecumenical creeds, the historic view of theologians and exegetes across the centuries and traditions, and the judgment of linguistic experts about Hebrew and Greek.

But that isn’t what Sola Scriptura means. That’s a vainglorious delusion. Sola Scriptura simply means that Scripture is the only infallible authority in and over the Church. But how we understand and interpret Scripture, that’s where the help, guidance, wisdom, and expertise of other divinely provided means are essential. You can’t just sit by yourself under a tree with a Bible (a translation into English of variable reliability), and expect to figure it all out perfectly on your own. That’s not Sola Scriptura, it’s self-conceited madness.”

– Nick Needham

My commentary: Sola Scriptura should not be confused with solo Scriptura, as though Protestants mean “me, my Bible, and no one else.” The classic Protestant claim is that Scripture alone is the only infallible authority over the church, while creeds, confessions, church history, pastors, theologians, and language scholars remain valuable but fallible helps.

Roman Catholic and Orthodox critics may say this still leaves final interpretive judgment with individuals or Protestant churches, but Protestants answer that fallible human judgment is unavoidable for everyone, including those who choose Rome or Orthodoxy.

Blindness to the Depth of Sin

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This excerpt is a transcript of a sermon by Dr. Michael Reeves entitled “Getting Your Heart Right,” based on Matthew 15:1-28:

… the Pharisees could not understand the idea of the need for a new heart.

Well, that’s all a long time ago, but people haven’t changed.

And that enslavement to that view of reality, that failure, that blindness to the human condition, to the human heart, has just carried on.

And I’m going to give you an example of this from much closer to our day. I’m going to read you from the diary of an 18th-century man, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who first wrote the dictionary of the English language. A literary giant, enslaved man.

And I want to get inside his head and read you a few extracts from his journal. And you’ll just get inside his head.

This is very similar to what we’ve seen in the Pharisees.

Here we go.

September the 18th, 1738: “Oh Lord, enable me by your grace… enable me by your grace to redeem the time which I’ve spent in sloth, vanity, and wickedness. Enable me to lead a new life in your faith, fear, and love. And finally, enable me to obtain everlasting life.”

Nineteen years later, 1757: “Almighty God, enable me from this instant to amend my life that I may not lose the things eternal.”

Two years later, 1759: “Enable me to shake off idleness and sloth.”

Two years later, 1761: “I have resolved, till I am afraid to resolve again. Yet, hoping in God, I steadfastly purpose to lead a new life.”

Three years later, 1764: “I have made no reformation. I have lived totally useless, more sensual in thoughts, more addicted to wine and meat. Grant me, oh God, to amend my life… my purpose from this time to avoid idleness, to rise early, to read the scriptures.”

A few months later: “I’ve now spent 55 years in resolving. Oh God, grant me to resolve aright and to keep my resolutions. I resolve to rise early, not later than six, if I can.”

1765: “I purpose to rise at 8 because though I shall not rise early, it will be much earlier than I now rise, for I often lie until two.”

1775, ten years later: “When I look back upon resolutions of improvement which year after year have been made and broken, why do I try to resolve again? I try because reformation is necessary. I try in hope of the help of God.”

Oh dear. Isn’t it tragic? Isn’t it familiar?

It’s a life of the flesh, of fleshly pleasure, and then fleshly attempts to make himself a new man. It’s all self-effort, with prayers chucked up, asking God to chip in and help him do what he needs to do.

You can hear it here, and he’s even more explicit elsewhere. Johnson went through life ground down with guilt. He just didn’t realize his greatest problem.

He refused to accept the free pardon and welcome of God.

And so he tried to deal with his guilt by self-improvement.

And whatever your theology teaches, isn’t it easy to think, “I don’t have a big problem with sin. I can sort myself out. I resolve to do better. I can do better. And I will do better.”

And that is one of the clearest indicators of a Pharisaical blindness to the depth of sin. The sense that sin is just a behavior problem we can sort out with a bit more effort, with a bit of work by the flesh.

Possibly a tell here would be – have you ever been in this situation? I think it’s so easy for us today in our culture of self-affirmation to believe, “I’m not a deep sinner.”

And even if my theology tells me that we are all – we’ve all fallen short of the glory of God—it’s easy to forget that.

And I think a good tell on that is, have you ever been in a situation where, I don’t know, maybe it’s you’re late for something? You’re stuck in traffic. You’re stressed, you’re anxious. And then someone does something to really annoy you, and out of your mouth come these words. Or if you’re so good you managed to keep your mouth shut, but into your head come all these vicious thoughts. And sometimes they’re so vicious you think, “Whoa, where did that come from? ‘Cause I’m lovely. Where did that come from?”

You’ve forgotten the sewer of sin that bubbles up in all of us.

So I must ask you, dear friends, how much of a sinner do you think you are? How blind are you to the depth of your sin?

Because if you don’t see yourself as a great sinner, what has Christ got to offer you? Christ will never be a great Savior to you. You’ll never love him much unless you see how much he does for you.

So if you think of yourself as a pretty good person, you’ll never really know the joy of treasuring an all-sufficient Savior. You’re trapping yourself in self-identity rather than knowing the joy, the liberation of forgiveness.

And I say this however long you’ve been walking with Christ.

My mentor when I was a very young man, I pastored with him. He was on church staff with me. He was maybe the most godly man I knew. Some of you may have heard of him. He was a great preacher. His name was John Stott. And he was the most wonderfully humble, godly man.

And I remember once seeing him, coming in, he was in private, didn’t know anyone was going to see him. And he was on his knees in tears at his own sin.

And I remember thinking, I was young, I was thinking, “I’m not aware that there’s any sin left in this guy.” Here he is in tears at his own sin.

Because when the Spirit works in your heart, he is a Spirit who’s grieved by sin and he makes you ever more sensitive to sin.

And so those who’ve been walking with Christ a long time, they will find they feel ever more sinful, though actually the Spirit makes them look ever more glorious. They’re ever more sensitive to their sin.

So friend, are you sensitive to your sin? If you’re not, you’re sharing the Pharisees’ blindness, not the Spirit’s sensitivity.

God is so much more thorough than us. Where we would seek to change by putting a thin layer of paint on ourselves and painting ourselves neat and clean, God deals with us all the way down in the foundations of our hearts.

And this is his great promise of the new covenant—to give us new hearts of flesh, transforming not just the symptoms of our behavior but transforming the very desires that drive our actions.

Because the essence of our problem is, while we were made to love the Lord our God, we were created as lovers. And even when we sinned in the fall, we remained lovers. To be human is to love.

But our loves turned. And from turning from being lovers of God—as Paul says it—we became lovers of self, lovers of money, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. That’s been our problem in sin. We still love, but we’ve turned to love the wrong thing. And that’s our real problem.

And we need our hearts turned to love aright. We don’t just need our behavior corrected. We need our very desires turned back to the Lord our God so that we love, adore, cherish him just as once we cherished sin.