|
A
Matter of Perspective
As
an eight-year-old boy I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
I remember it well. The week before I accepted Jesus I had resisted
the urge to go forward during the invitation and had raced home
after church (meaning I ran the two blocks) to the house. I remember
my 14 year old sister coming in from church and saying, "I
thought you were going down the aisle today." The
next Sunday morning I responded to the Holy Spirit and accepted
Jesus Christ into my heart. Bob Neal followed me that day and
the following Sunday my cousins, Susan, Bryan and Becky along
with three others accepted Christ. We had a big baptism service
for a small country church in the Concho River on Uncle Bill's
place. I still remember the moment I was immersed by Bro. Golden. Theological Shift This
year I went to the Southern Baptist Convention for the first time
since 1990. I told my fellow messengers at the SBC about when
I accepted Jesus as my savior when I spoke in support of an amendment
to the revised Baptist Faith and Message statement. The amendment
would have reinserted into that statement the phrase from the
1963 statement which said: "The criterion by which the Bible
is to be interpreted is Jesus Christ." I
shared the story of my conversion because from the platform Al
Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Chuck
Kelly, president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary,
and Richard Land, director of the SBC Religious Liberty Commission,
had all at various times emphasized that "there is no knowledge
of Jesus apart from scripture." I
believe their statement is wrong. And I believe their statement
is proven wrong every time a person accepts Jesus Christ into
their heart. I believe God reveals Himself to us through the Scriptures,
BUT I also believe God reveals Himself to us through His Spirit
and I believe that Jesus Christ is alive today. That is why a
person who has never heard of Jesus can attend a revival meeting
in a far away country and hear the "old, old story of Jesus
and His love" preached and repeated through a translator
and accept Jesus Christ as his or her personal Lord and Savior
and be saved right then - saved not because of the Bible but because
they invited Jesus Christ into their hearts. You
cannot limit God The
Bible is God's Holy Word and I believe it. Yes, it tells the story
of Jesus, but God is not limited to the Bible. God is also alive
today and every person reading this article can have a personal
relationship with the living, resurrected Lord. To
limit the knowledge of God to the Bible is to make the Bible a
fixed-in-time book of rules and regulations, and not a living,
vibrant record of God's acts in history culminating in the sending
of his own son, Jesus, who told the disciples before his ascension
into heaven that He "would be with them always, even unto
the end of the earth." It is to limit the Bible from speaking
to us today in new and fresh ways. Jesus
Christ is the "Living Word" who saves us and comes to
dwell in our hearts. Jesus is the "Living Word" that
continues to speak to us through His spirit and guides us when
we read the "Written Word" and makes the Bible come
alive to us anew. That
is why we can read a scripture we have read hundreds of times
before and suddenly it comes alive to us and speaks to us in an
entirely new way and experience a new insight for living our lives.
It is the Living Word guiding us that keeps the Bible alive and
fresh for each generation. I believe a truer statement than that
of the SBC leaders would be "there is no true knowledge of
scripture apart from Jesus!" Jesus is the author and finisher
of our faith. Balance
of the Living and Written Word Baptists
at their best have always had a healthy balance between the Living
Word and the Written Word. We have balanced personal experience
with historical record. Personal experience alone can be dangerous.
It can lead to heresy as people claim to have a direct revelation
from God that is not backed up by the revelation of God we find
in scripture, and they can go off claiming some crazy revelation
of their own like Jim Jones or David Koresh. Richard Land spoke
to this danger and I agree with him on that. But
it is also heresy to claim that we can have no personal revelation
from God as individuals. That very personal revelation is how
we come to know Jesus in our hearts. Healthy
theology understands that we must check our personal experience
with historical record and thus we have a safeguard against either
extreme - the extreme of personal experience alone like the examples
of cult leaders or the extreme of the Catholic church in the Middle
Ages which put all authority in the church and the interpretation
of scripture as taught by the church. The
fact is current SBC leaders are copying the heresy of the Catholic
Church in the Middle Ages with their emphasis on control and their
effort to limit God's revelation to the Bible and their interpretation
of the Bible. Thank
God Martin Luther, prompted by his relationship with the Living
Word, was reading the Written Word and Romans 1:17 came alive
to him: "The just shall live by Faith." There is a difference It
is wrong to say that there is no knowledge of God apart from scripture.
It is right to say that God will not reveal Himself to us in a
manner inconsistent with the teachings of scripture as interpreted
properly. Do you see the difference? During
my speech at the SBC meeting in Orlando I read Galatians 1:11-12,
where Paul said: "I want you to know, brothers, that the
gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not
receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received
it by revelation from Jesus Christ." (NIV) I
stated that I was glad the current SBC leaders were not around
when Paul was or they would have condemned him for his personal
revelation. The
fact is the same spirit and attitude displayed by current SBC
leaders was alive and well during the time of Jesus and Paul.
The religious leaders when Jesus was on earth knew the law and
were limiting God to their interpretation of the law. Thus
when God revealed Himself in Jesus, they would not accept it.
They had a closed, static system, in which they thought they controlled
God and tried to control what people could believe about God.
When
Jesus broke the law to heal someone on the Sabbath, they could
not handle it. They could not see the good for their love of what
was right. Current
SBC leaders are likewise consumed with being right. That is scary.
I left the meeting thinking of words of Dr. Nat Tracy, my Bible
professor at Howard Payne University, who said: "the biggest
danger for a Christian is to become a good, moral person who doesn't
know how to love." The
Judiazers Paul wrote about in Galatians, were "false prophets
who had infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in
Christ Jesus and to make us slaves." That is the same spirit
of the current SBC leadership. They do not want us to have freedom;
they want us to be slaves. They do not want Jesus to be the criterion
by which the Bible is interpreted because that gives to much freedom.
That is why the revision committee took out the statement in the
1963 BF&M preamble which said, "A living faith must experience
a growing understanding of truth and must be continually interpreted
and related to the needs of each new generation." They
are scared that if we are free to relate to Jesus personally and
"continually interpret the Bible to the needs of each new
generation," we might have a thought or opinion different
than theirs. Women might think they are called to preach. Some
Baptist might oppose capital punishment. Someone might not vote
like Jerry Falwell tells them too. GOD FORBID! Interpretation
is not inerrant The
SBC leadership is attempting to force everyone to accept their
interpretation of the Bible which they do not even consider to
be "their interpretation" as they equate their viewpoint
with the Bible. They
cannot even entertain the thought that they might be wrong. Their
mind and God's mind are one and the same. They think that freedom,
even freedom in Christ, just can't be trusted. They believe we
must live by the law; everything must be black and white; settled
once and for all time. Everyone must be of one mind as long as
they can say what that one mind is. I
will not be a part of it. I will stand with Paul and praise God
because of my personal experience with Jesus Christ who continues
to live in my heart and reveal His will for me through His spirit.
I will continue to read the Scriptures as totally true and trustworthy
and ask the Living Word to help me interpret them for myself. I
will continue to believe that being gracious is more important
than judging; that loving others as a fellow sinner is more Christ-like
than claiming moral superiority. And
I will praise God every time someone responds to Jesus' personal
revelation of Himself through His Spirit and accepts Jesus Christ
as his or her personal Lord and Savior. And THEN I hope they will
read the Bible as the Living Lord, Jesus Christ, guides them in
interpreting it. When
someone asked a question from the floor about the Bible, Al Mohler
replied, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is what it all comes
down to," and then he made a speech about the Bible and how
we can have no knowledge of Jesus apart from the Bible, and nearly
everyone cheered. But
I did not cheer. I felt sad. We had come to "what it all
comes down to," to the heart of it and Mohler and most of
those messengers had missed it. The
heart of the matter is Jesus -Jesus - Jesus, who continues to
try to reveal Himself personally to every person on this earth
and He does so with every new generation and will continue to
do so until He comes again at the end of the age. Jesus loves
every single person on earth - homosexuals, liberals, adulterers,
racist, atheists - and even arrogant, holier than thou, modern
day legalists. Paul
wrote in Romans 1:16, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, because
it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes."
Paul was not talking about everyone who believes in the inerrant,
infallible Word of God. Paul
was talking about everyone who believes in Jesus, as he wrote
in Galatians 2:16: "So we, too, have put our faith in Christ
Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing
the law, because be observing the law no one will be justified." I
will be gentle here, and I am not an Apostle (as was made clear
to me on the convention floor), but I believe that when you elevate
faith in the Bible and the law above faith in Jesus, my dear brothers
and sisters, you have lost your way. Jesus is the answer for the
world today and everyday. As Texas Baptists, we must keep our
eyes upon Jesus! July 2000 |
