NeoZine

Practical Christianity

by Lambert Dolphin

Back in the 60s Francis Schaeffer spoke here at Stanford, and spent a day with the Palo Alto Think and Pray Group. ¹ I did not understand what he was saying at the time, but now I do! Since then I have watched many of his prophetic insights come true.

For instance, more than once I heard Schaeffer telling Christians that modern-modern man was no longer able to hear truth as we in the Christian church had been presenting it. He said we had to understand how existential despair was rising. Then we could find the cracks and learn how to slip true-truth² into those cracks so that it could be heard in the heart. And we also had to be very careful not to alter the content of truth, because truth never changes.

But all of this requires a willingness to forsake the cultural baggage that we consider to be “comfortable” or is deemed “popular” or “important” in our community, the church.

The “Nice” People and the “Rubbish” People

Many church members seem to think that everything is fixed once they are baptized. God will bless us—in fact He owes us big-time because we are the nice people and we put money in the offering plate and we don’t get drunk anymore.

There is a smaller group who can identify with Paul in 2 Corinthians and see themselves as chief sinners, and part of “the off-scouring of the world” (literally, “the rubbish” or the sewage scraped off the roads).

With my scientific background³ I had plenty of intellectual pride influencing everything I said and did as a new Christian. It was liberating to see the Lord’s sense of humor in saying that he chooses “the foolish things of the world to confound the wise—and the base, and the weak, and…even things that do not exist, to shame the things that are, so that no flesh should glory in his presence.”

I have come to believe the really important work God does in a generation is probably very low-profile. Visible leaders or popular teachers may or may not be called from the “bleachers” to sit at a place of honor at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.⁴ When Jesus returns, nothing will be hidden. We will see things then as they really are!

Solomon has a wonderful story of a “nobody” who is actually the channel God really uses behind the scenes of history:

There was a small town with only a few people, and a great king came with his army and besieged it.  A poor, wise man knew how to save the town, and so it was rescued. But afterward no one thought to thank him. (Ecclesiastes 9:13-15)

But all that praise and recognition which means everything in the World System really doesn’t matter at all, as Solomon concludes:

So even though wisdom is better than strength, those who are wise will be despised if they are poor. What they say will not be appreciated for long. [But it is] better to hear the quiet words of a wise person than the shouts of a foolish king.  [It is] better to have wisdom than weapons of war… Eccles. 9:16-18

I remember well Ray speaking in Southern California on one of those trips he dragged me along on. 1 Samuel 15 was the text:

But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.’” (1 Sam. 6:5-7)

Ray used this to teach about the “good side” and the “bad side” of the flesh and how the good side of the flesh generally was praised in the church.  The flesh loves to sing in the choir and preach lofty, eloquent sermons. (Ray himself felt so vulnerable, he never greeted people at the back door after church. He was always “Ray” never Dr. Stedman or even “Mr. Stedman.”)

Making a Difference

This past year I have been pondering the ministry the Father gave His obedient Son, Jesus, to carry out while waiting for the exact timing for His crucifixion. There are wonderful hints in Isaiah’s prophesies that our Lord in His humanity must have felt He was a miserable failure at the end of his life, yet he trusted God:

“Listen to me, all you in distant lands! Pay attention, you who are far away! The Lord called me before my birth; from within the womb he called me by name. He made my words of judgment as sharp as a sword…”
I replied, “But my work seems so useless! I have spent my strength for nothing and to no purpose. Yet I leave it all in the Lord’s hand; I will trust God for my reward.”
The Lord, the Redeemer and Holy One of Israel, says to the one who is despised and rejected by the nations, to the one who is the servant of rulers: “Kings will stand at attention when you pass by. Princes will also bow low because of the Lord, the faithful one, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.” Isaiah 49:1-7

From these illustrations I think that we need to get off the bandwagon, and rather than taking our identity from counting converts or numbers, we must be sure we are paying attention to the individuals God puts in our path.

There may be effective evangelistic outreaches out West, but it’s rare that truth gets through to “modern man” around here these days—or so I think. But I don’t know anything, really. I do find that loving one’s neighbor in the same way Jesus loves us is a very safe bet. I really love a low-profile life style

This is how ministry under the New Covenant is: “Nothing coming from us, everything coming from Him.”

It works! It works better in our lives as Jesus increases and we decrease.

Footnotes:

1. From Labert’s Web: “Think-and-Pray, or Core Groups, are vehicles for the rediscovery of the Church as the Body of Christ in the world. Such small groups also constitute ministering teams of Christians, who meet and pray together in order to be available together for the purposes and work of God in contemporary society. Think-and-Pray groups become expedient and revitalizing to the Church as a whole during periods of history when the Church becomes encumbered with traditions, ritual, organizational structure, or philosophies and methods derived from the past or from the world-system (cosmos).” [↩]
2. Terms like “modern-modern man” and “true-truth” were coined by Schaeffer long before “Postmodern” was coined–Schaeffer saw the rise of Postmodernism. [↩]
3. Dr. Dolphin is a Physicist. [↩]
4. See Luke 14:7-14, the “Parable of the Wedding Feast” in which we are told not to seek the place of honor at the table. [↩]

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