There has to be constant and healthy and serious debate about truth in the church. When you decide that a debate is divisive, disagreement is intolerable because everybody's got a right to his own opinion, the church will die. It's essential to be willing to say that's wrong and that's right. Welcome to Grace To You with John MacArthur.
I'm your host, Phil Johnson. What should you do if your pastor says something that isn't biblical? Maybe he's creating confusion about a foundational Christian doctrine. Should you confront him? What if a friend rejects a clear biblical principle?
What should you say to that person? John MacArthur considers those issues today on Grace To You. He's looking at the key role that confrontation has in the Christian life. It's part of his current study titled A Plea for Discernment. This is a study he first preached in chapel services at the Masters University where John serves as chancellor. So now take your Bible and follow along if you're able.
Here's John. We're talking about the issue of discernment, basing it on a text from 1 Thessalonians. If you want to turn back to 1 Thessalonians chapter 5 for a minute, I want to look at just the foundation of our thoughts in verse 20 of 1 Thessalonians 5, do not despise profiteos, do not despise messages really, preaching. Do not look down on it. Do not treat it with triviality. Do not diminish it.
Do not belittle it. Take it seriously. But when you hear preaching, verse 21, examine everything. Put it to the test, obviously the test of Scripture. Hold fast to that which is good, that which is inherently good and true and shun what is evil in every form. That's essentially what discernment is. It is hearing and examining like the noble Bereans who searched the Scriptures to see if these things were so. Absolutely critical that we deal with the Scripture precisely. There's a premium on precision because there's a premium on accuracy. I hate to say it, but in the contemporary evangelical world today there is no premium on precision whatsoever.
Every...everybody is sort of entitled to their own spin on Scripture and on theology and amateurs have sort of commandeered evangelicalism today, people who don't have the training or don't have the diligence that it takes to interpret Scripture precisely. I'm reminded of a book I read a number of years ago. It was a book on mathematics written by a professor named Alexander Calandra who teaches mathematics, advanced mathematics at Washington State University. And in this book, I don't normally read mathematics books, in fact I don't ever read them, but I just happened to stumble across this and found this very interesting story. Anyway, he was given an exam to one of his students in one of his advanced mathematics class and the exam only had one question. The question was to determine the height of a building with the use of a barometer.
How do you do that was the question. And the students had only to answer that one question. One student turned in his answer and it said this, go to the top of the building, tie the barometer to a long rope, lower the barometer to the ground, measure the length of the rope and you have the height of the building with the use of a barometer. Well, the professor agreed that you could get the height of the building with the use of a barometer that way, but that did not demonstrate appropriate knowledge in the subject to commend a good grade. And so he said, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to give you an F. Unless you would like another chance, I'll give you one more opportunity to answer the question. He said, certainly, I'd be glad for another opportunity.
There are many answers to that question. So the professor said, you have ten minutes. Nine minutes went by, he hadn't written anything.
He finally scratched off his answer. Take the barometer out on a sunny day. Measure the length of its shadow. Then measure the length of the shadow of the building and by the use of simple proportion, you can calculate the height of the building because you know the height of the barometer. Wrong again. Then he said, I'm sorry, I can't allow that answer either.
He said, well, here's one you might like. Start at the bottom of the building and go up the stairs. As you go, put the barometer on the wall and mark off a pencil mark as you go. When you get to the top of the building, go back down, count all the pencil marks and you have the height of the building in barometer units. Another thing you might like, he said, just as long as you're asking, is to lean over the edge of the top of the building and dropped the barometer and time its speed with a stopwatch and then using...there's a formula, something s squared, you can determine the height of the building. But he said, here's my final answer, the best way to determine the height of a building by the use of a barometer is to go to the basement and knock on the door of the building superintendent and say to him, sir, if you tell me how tall this building is, I will give you this fine barometer. Well the student had a problem with precision.
The answer, of course, is there's a difference in the air pressure because of the altitude, but that's no fun. As far as the student was concerned, any old answer would do. And I think that's sort of a...sort of what it is in evangelicalism today.
As far as most people are concerned, any old answer about anything will do. But that isn't the way it is in terms of the Scriptures and that isn't what pleases God. I was recently in Italy and it was another wonderful experience for me to be in Italy. We had a pastors' conference for Italian pastors, only the second one that brings everybody together, all the pastors from all the associations, denominations, church groups. And there aren't very many pastors, evangelical pastors in Italy. Italy is profoundly engulfed in the cult of Mary, Roman Catholicism, worshiping Mary, the Queen of Heaven. Basically Catholic power dominates in every aspect of life in Italy. So the churches are small and it's very difficult. It's called a graveyard for missionaries.
It's so hard to serve there. But anyway, we had a pastors' conference and it was different because through the years the evangelical unity in Italy is important because there's so few of them, the churches are so small, there's such a fragile Christian testimony there that everybody wanted to make sure they circled the wagons and let's all get along. So let's never make doctrine an issue because doctrine might divide us and we're already so weak if our testimony gets divided any further, we're going to be just utterly disappearing from the radar.
So the idea was let's not ever bring anything up that's going to divide us, you know, this little group has their little view on this and this on that and so forth, so let's never deal with those issues. So as a result of that, the church in Italy tends to be very, very weak. It doesn't have strong doctrinal foundation. There was a foundation there, a financial foundation that had some vision and said, let's see if we can't strengthen the Italian church by making doctrine an issue.
Many of the people thought it wouldn't work. We had about 350 pastors and missionaries come and I just unloaded on them the foundations of Reformed doctrine. And it was pretty shocking for the first couple of days and then they began to see the power of the Word of God because we were taken out of the text of Scripture. As a result of that conference, they said we want more, we want more.
We were just there for two weeks, we went back. This time there were 500 pastors and missionaries there and they were just sucking it up like sponges and in the intervening time and now even in the time looking ahead, they want more and more and more training in the knowledge of what the Word of God has to say. They've gotten a taste of what it is to be precise, a taste of what it is to know sound doctrine.
They find that it's much better than the fragile unity that exists when everything is maintained on a shallow level. Discernment is critical in the life of the church. Knowing sound doctrine is essential in the life of the church. Sound doctrine, Paul said to Timothy, is to be preached, it is to be guarded, it is to be kept as a treasure and passed on to the next generation. Now we said last time that there is a lack of discernment in the evangelical world. And I gave you the first reason, you remember what it was? Lack of doctrinal clarity and conviction...lack of doctrinal clarity and conviction.
That's pretty obvious, we just don't have that. I remember being on a talk show with a woman, it was a Christian talk show in a major city, a big, big station. And we were talking and it was obvious that she was a host of this Christian talk show. People called up with their questions about their spiritual life and it was more like Christian counseling than Bible questions.
But anyway, she was the answer lady. And she said to me in the middle of this discussion off the air, she said, you know, there's a word that a lot of people use, it's the word sanctification. What does that mean?
What does that mean? And so I explained to her a little bit about that and after another half an hour or so, we went off the air for a commercial and I said to her, I said, how did you become a Christian? Trying to figure out if she was, but I said, how did you become a Christian? She said, oh, it was really cool.
One day I got Jesus' phone number and we've been connected ever since. That's what she said. And I guess I had a startled look on my face. I was so stunned by that and she looked a little surprised and I said, what does that mean?
What do you mean you got Jesus' phone number and you've been connected ever since? She said, well, what do you mean, what do I mean? That's about as far as she could go. She said, if somebody asked you why you were a Christian, what would you say? And I said, I'm glad you asked. So I explained to her the gospel and at the end of that she said to me, oh, come on, you don't have to go through all of that, do you, to become a Christian. This is the Christian answer lady on the radio. We have a serious problem when we don't know sound doctrine, and sound doctrine is offensive. Let me give you a second reason. This is just kind of an assessment of why we have the problem we have. The lack of doctrinal clarity and conviction is followed by a failure to be antithetical.
Get a little bit philosophical there for a minute. A failure to be antithetical. To put it another way, an unwillingness to disagree...to disagree. Martin Lloyd-Jones says, when you remove polemics from the church, the church dies. There has to be constant and healthy and serious debate about truth in the church. When you decide that debate is divisive, disagreement is intolerable because everybody's got a right to his own opinion, the church will die.
It's true. It's essential to be antithetical. It's essential to be willing to say that's wrong and that's right.
This is antithesis. We have now this sort of politically correct, kind of a smarmy sentimental relativism that prevails in the church that doesn't want to disagree. Nobody's really right and nobody's really wrong.
Nothing is really true and nothing is really false. Whatever you feel is to be accepted because you by your own intuition have a right to come to whatever spiritual conclusions you want to come to, that's just deadly to the life of the church. Everything is subjective, biblical preaching is not relevant today because it's too definitive, it's too offensive, it's too sharp, it's too black and white, it's too absolute. But if you look at Scripture, and just to give you kind of a sweep over Scripture, you would be amazed if you sort of rehearsed this a little bit, and I'll help you do that, how black and white and absolute the Scripture is.
J. Adams wrote a paragraph that I think puts it in perspective. From the Garden of Eden with its two trees, one allowed, one forbidden, to the eternal destiny of the human being in heaven or in hell, the Bible sets forth two and only two ways, God's way and all others. Accordingly, people are either saved or lost. They belong to God's people or the world.
There is Gerizim, the mount of blessing, and Ebal, the mount of cursing. There is the narrow way and the wide way. One leads to eternal life, the other to eternal destruction.
There are those who are against and those who are with us. There are those within the Kingdom and those outside the Kingdom. There is life and death, truth and falsehood, good and bad, light and darkness, the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan, love and hatred, spiritual wisdom and the wisdom of the world. And Christ is said to be the way, the truth and the life, and no one may come to the Father but by Him.
He is the only name under the sky by which one may be saved, end of paragraph. And that is exactly the way the Bible presents itself. It presents truth and error, God's way and everybody else's way.
There's a right way, there's a wrong way. There's a right interpretation of a passage and every other interpretation is the wrong one. There's a right theology and anything that disagrees with it is a wrong theology. There is a right way to understand God, Christ, the Holy Spirit and salvation and a wrong way. This is on every page of the Bible, from the beginning to the end of Scripture.
This antithetical kind of thinking is everywhere...everywhere. In the Old Testament, give me an illustration. In the Old Testament you look at how God's put the ceremonial law in place and within the ceremonial law there were distinctions being made that weren't moral. For example, there were clean animals and unclean animals.
Remember that? There were certain kind of animals that you could eat and certain kind that you couldn't eat. There were certain kind of birds that fit into the clean and certain kind that fit into the unclean. And there was this whole structure about clean and unclean. There were certain ways to prepare food, certain ways to treat utensils. You couldn't steal eggs out of a bird's nest. And there were all these sort of little rules that didn't have any real moral or spiritual implications to them.
And if you ask the question, why? Why did God put all of this stuff into Judaism? Why all of this distinction in the Old Testament? I would like to suggest to you that that wasn't arbitrary at all. It was a means of teaching the Jews down to the smallest little detail of the day how you ate, how you cooked, how you farmed, what kind of clothes you wore.
You couldn't even mix two kinds of fabrics. You had to think about every single thing you did and know there was God's way and there was the other way. And you had to think about that at every single point. You woke up in the morning and you were aware when you put your clothes on that God had prescribed a certain kind of clothes and forbidden a certain kind. And then you went to your meal and there was a certain way to eat and that was the way God had ordained to eat and then there was every other way, the way the Gentiles ate, farming techniques, justice, health care, holidays, all these things that don't have particularly moral or spiritual components were nonetheless used as what the Bible calls the ABCs, the primer teaching so that you would learn that there is God's way and there is every other way, teaching people to go through life with an understanding of thesis and antithesis.
Today all of a sudden this is just gone. Anybody's sort of able to do whatever they want. No longer are we trying to distinguish God's way from every other way. I remember one time when I was asked if I would become the head of a Christian school and of another Christian college or university. And the people who were talking to me said, you know, here's our objective. We want to integrate the Scripture with the wisdom of the world. We're committed to syncretism and integration. I say, well I think we have a profound difference then. What I want to do is distinguish the truth of God from the wisdom of the world. I'm into separation.
You're into integration. That is a profound and substantial philosophical difference. I want to make sure in whatever education I'm involved in that people understand God's truth separate from any pollution by the thinking of man. And then that truth of God sits in judgment on all human wisdom.
Great difference in those two mentalities. If, as James 1.27 says, you're going to keep yourself unspotted from the world, if you're going to distinguish the wisdom that is from above from the wisdom that is from beneath, you have to maintain clear understanding of biblical truth. In Psalm 1, another very distinct separation is made. How blessed is the man who doesn't walk in the counsel of the wicked.
That's the first thing that I think of when I think about integration. Don't walk in the counsel of the wicked. Don't stand in the path of sinners and don't for goodness sake sit down in the seat of scoffers. Don't go to some school and sit down in a seat where the Bible is going to be mocked. Don't do that.
That's pretty straightforward. Don't set your course under the counsel of the wicked. Don't stand, that is to say, take your position in a pathway designed by sinners and don't sit down in the seat of a scoffer in a classroom. On the other hand, His delight, the one who is blessed, is in the Law of the Lord and in His Law He meditates day and night and He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, yields its fruit in its season, its leaf doesn't wither whatsoever He does prospers. The wicked, on the other hand, are not so.
They're like the chaff which the wind drives away and so forth. Again, it's about discernment. I remember when I was...I had the idea that I wanted to pursue a degree at Claremont Graduate School, a degree in theology at one point in my life, and a doctoral degree. And I went out there and they said, well, what you have to do is you have to read 200 books, 200...I think 220 books that are in French and German. So very dutifully I marched off to the local junior college over in Glendale and I took German, figuring once I got German down I'd take French and then I'd go over and read all these 200 books. Well I just got enough German under my belt to get into one of those books and I decided that all it did was mock the Word of God. All the German hierarchical theory stuff just mocked and dishonored and blasphemed the Word of God and God Himself.
And I said, I don't really see any benefit in wading through another 200 of these. And I at the time really found that Psalm 1 was what forced me completely out of that program. I decided I'm not going to benefit by going in the path of sinners and standing there and sitting in the seat of a scoffer in a classroom and exposing my mind to assaults on the truth of God, not if I'm going to keep my mind pure and unspotted from the world. In Titus chapter 1 verse 9, Paul talks about holding fast the faithful Word which is in accordance with the doctrine. Holding fast, having a strong grip on the faithful Word, that's the Word of God, understanding what it teaches so that you may be able...and here's a very important idea, that you may be able to exhort in sound doctrine, listen to this, and refute those who contradict. It is essential to ministry that you exhort, that's the positive side, you exhort people in sound doctrine. It is also critical that you refute those who contradict sound doctrine. Now by the way, that's a portion of Scripture that describes the responsibilities of elders and pastors, as a pastor of a two-fold responsibility to teach and to rebuke, to help teach those who receive the truth and rebuke those who are in error. We have this new evangelical climate that's been contrived where discernment is unacceptable and unwelcome and calling someone out as being in error is absolutely intolerable and therefore error wins the day.
Error wins the day. Discernment will only thrive in an environment of confrontation. Discernment will only thrive when you understand that there is antithesis and thesis, there is black and white, there is true and false, there is right and wrong, and you not only have a responsibility to proclaim the right, but to expose the wrong. That's part of our responsibility as guardians of the truth. We thank you, Lord, for the call to discernment and we thank you that you have raised us up in a sense sort of counterculture in the evangelical world as well as the world outside and we pray, O God, that we would be faithful to the truth, to live it and proclaim it and apply it in our own lives and in the lives of those around us as we serve you in Christ's name.
Amen. That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, showing you that a discerning church must proclaim what is right and expose false teaching. John's current series here on Grace to You is called A Plea for Discernment. John, with what you said today about interpreting scripture with spiritual eyes, that kind of insight is available to any believer regardless of age, gender, poverty, privilege. It's one of the most remarkable aspects of scripture that it's simple enough for a child to understand yet so profound no one could ever plummet to death. I think at the outset when you approach the Bible, even as a Christian, you can be a little overwhelmed with all the material that's there and as you read it, you might come across passages that you don't understand and just wonder, how can I have the discernment to get this, to understand this, to be able to explain it to someone else, let alone a child? So the good news is this, look, through the centuries, God's people led by God's Holy Spirit have written so much helpful material that aids us in understanding scripture.
I get it. It's an old book. It's an ancient document. We need help with geography and cultural history and history in itself. We need some help with the context of the Bible. What about the location? What about the people?
What about the circumstances? And through the years, we've had wonderful resources that have been written to help us get the context around the texts of scripture so that we can have a better and truer understanding of the scripture itself. Also, through the years of my life, I have been collecting all these contextual helps and put them all in the MacArthur Study Bible, or a lot of them, that will explain to you the meaning of scripture. They're intended to help you understand what's going on around that passage to make the passage clear.
Notes on background, culture, geography, language, those kinds of things, history. This brings your Bible reading to life. So many people read the Bible and don't know what it says.
There's no value in that. The message of the Bible is the interpretation. If you don't have the interpretation right, you don't have the message. Make your Bible reading live. We have the MacArthur Study Bible in a number of different English translations and even in other languages.
Hardbound, leather editions, large print. We can fill any need and any budget. Contact us today and the cost is always reasonable. Get a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible. Thanks, John. And friend, the MacArthur Study Bible is the ideal gift for any student of scripture. To pick up the MacArthur Study Bible for yourself or to get a few copies to give to your loved ones, get in touch with us today. You can call us at 855-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org. The MacArthur Study Bible is available in several English and non-English translations. You can get it in hardcover, leather, premium goatskin.
Shipping is free on all of those options. Again, to order, call 855-GRACE or you can shop online at gty.org. And if you visit gty.org, make sure you take advantage of the thousands of free resources that we offer. That includes our blog series titled Faith and Discernment. It's an ideal complement to John's current radio series. You can also read daily devotionals. Keep up with the reading plan from the MacArthur Daily Bible. That'll take you through the entire Bible in a year. You can download any of John's sermons. That's more than 3,600 hours of verse-by-verse teaching.
And all of it is free to download in MP3 and transcript format. Our web address again, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Watch Grace to You television this Sunday on DirecTV Channel 378, that's NRB-TV. Or you can check your local listings for broadcast times in your area. And then be back here tomorrow for another look at how you can develop biblical discernment when John MacArthur continues unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
