You can't tell me that in the 20th century all of a sudden God quit giving gifts to His people, and it's just that the secularist has all the talent, and the Christian community is working like mad that they don't have any talent. Well, I think what it is is that the secular man is out motivating the Christian person. The Christian person is not motivated to excellence. What motivates you to use your gifts and talents in service to God? What should be the motivation for the Christian to pursue excellence?
Welcome to the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind, where today we are going back deep into the archives, where you'll hear a message from R.C. Sproul given in the 1970s on excellence. Concern for the good, the true, and the beautiful, pursuing excellence in all things, was a mark of Dr. Sproul's ministry and is in the DNA of Ligonier Ministries. That's one of the reasons that there are thousands of people all around the world who support the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries as ministry partners. They pray for this ministry and financially support the development of new discipleship resources and training events and conferences and fuel the translation of our vast library into the world's top languages. I'll discuss this more after today's message, but if you'd like to join this special group of people and become a theological lifeline to countless Christians around the world, you can sign up and learn more at ligonier.org slash partner. There's also a link in the podcast show notes. Well, here's Dr. Sproul in the 1970s in a classroom setting teaching on excellence. I'm sure that by now everyone in the room knows the primary battle cry or the slogan of the 16th century Reformation, which is the unifying point of classic and historic evangelicalism.
What is it? Justification by faith, sola fide. Justification by faith, is that all?
Alone. Justification by faith alone. Okay, anyone who calls themselves an evangelical historically is saying by that title evangelical, I believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
What does that mean? Justification by faith alone. It has to do with repairing the damage that sin creates in your relationship with God. It is the basis by which we become just in the sight of God because God is a holy God, and He requires righteousness from His people. Since we fail to meet that requirement, then we either stand under judgment or we become justified. We are justified then through the imputation of the merits of Christ so that the basis of our justification is the righteousness of Jesus. Justification by faith alone simply means justification by works alone. All right, where do works come into the Christian life? If they don't apply to your justification, if they have nothing whatsoever to do with getting you into the kingdom of God, are they therefore unimportant? The reason I've introduced a lecture on excellence by calling your attention to justification by faith is that I want to call attention to what I think is the great distortion of justification by faith alone, and incidentally the very thing that the Roman Catholic church feared so desperately in the teaching of Martin in the teaching of Martin Luther, that if this doctrine were disseminated through the Christian community, that people would come to the conclusion that works are utterly unimportant to the Christian life or that works are something done by the Spirit apart from you.
But the New Testament calls you again and again, again and again to do good works. Obviously, good works are not the cause of justification, but they are to be the fruit of justification. And I might even say the indispensable fruit of justification, because if a man says he has faith but has no works, can that faith save him? That's the question the Apostle James asked. If a man says he has faith, he says, I believe, but has no works, will that man be justified? If he doesn't have any fruit, that proves that he doesn't have any faith, and if he doesn't have any faith, he doesn't have any justification. But do the works count for the justification? No. But must the works be present if a person is truly justified?
Yes. The Lutheran church came up with this formula, and I want you to write it down and transfer it from your paper to your head, and then ultimately from your head to your heart, to your head to your heart, and then from your heart to your bloodstream. Justification is by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone. Justification is by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone, not by a lonesome faith, not by a faith that exists in isolation from good works. If it is alone with no works present, then it is not justifying faith. So, good works add nothing to your justification, but they are crucial to your sanctification, which follows and flows out of your justification. You do not trust in your good works in order to reconcile you with God, but you should be constantly examining yourself to make sure that fruit of the gospel is being born in your life. How soon after a person has justifying faith does the fruit of justification begin? Immediately, instantly.
Okay. Now, here is the great problem that I see plaguing the evangelical community. First of all, let me back up and make this statement. That according to church historians that I've spoken with, I keep getting the same message that never in the history of the Christian church has there been so great an evangelical awakening as there is in our day today with at the same time such a little impact on the culture in which it is in which it is manifesting itself. You follow that. I'm making myself clear that we are living in a time of intense interest and hullabaloo over evangelicalism, yet the evangelical community is making almost no impact on the culture in which it is flourishing. Why?
How could that be? I'm sure there are several factors involved in that, but one of the key factors that I want to focus our attention on today is the myth that is permeated throughout the Christian community that grace means the end of work or labor or effort. Theologically we call this the heresy of quietism. Quietism means that the working out of my salvation is strictly and simply the work of God. I contribute nothing. I do not have to labor.
I do not have to sweat. I do not have to seek to achieve a certain level of working, but I let go and let God. I allow God to work through me while I quietly wait upon the Lord, meaning the whole thing is gracious. And not only does God not have any expectations of me for producing good works other than those which He produces unilaterally in and through me, but I have no right to expect of any other Christian to produce, to be laboring diligently for the sake of Christ. And that other Christian has no right to call me to excellence.
Let me put it in simple language. The underlying motif of this myth is that once a person accepts Christianity and the grace of God, that that interprets to mean a license for sloppiness. Because after all, at the heart of the Christian faith is forgiveness, and forgiveness means never having to make demands on people.
Whatever you do, God accepts you wherever you are, and He never asks you to move from where you are is how the myth runs. You see how easy it is to get into that mentality when we hammer away at the centrality of grace. When I tell people a thousand times, you can never achieve merit that'll get you into the kingdom of God, what's the normal human response?
Oh, well, then I might as well not sweat it. I might as well relax, take it easy, bask in the arms of Jesus, and let it go at that. That's what we call quietism, where I'm totally removed from any serious call to excellence. Add to that the fact that we see in the world around us, particularly in American culture, a ruthless spirit of competition. The competitive mentality of our society is something that we see right off the bat is in conflict with Christian values and Christian virtues.
Our culture has no room for whoever finishes number two. We idolize and exalt those who win the prize, the winner, and we're highly success-oriented in this country. But that has come to mean that success is all that counts. It doesn't matter whether a person is virtuous or not, if they are a good actor or actress, if their lives are scandalous privately, that's okay because their performance excuses their morality.
If Joe Namath can take the Jets to the Super Bowl and win it, it doesn't matter what his lifestyle is off the football field. We honor excellence and winners. Vince Lombardi said, winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. And so we have this super sense of competition that says the only value is success.
The only value is winning. And the Christian looks at that and says, no, that is not true, that's a distortion. And then what happens when we say that? We'll come to the conclusion that therefore it's not important for us to compete. Since the variety of competition that we see in the world is characterized by ungodliness, ruthlessness, and brutality, and pride, and ego trips, and all the rest, we look at the and we say, I don't want any parts of that. Therefore, we should remove ourselves from the arena of competition. Otherwise, we may be guilty of conformity to the spirit of the age. Though it is true that we are not called to participate in the brutal, ruthless, pride, syndrome of success of this country, nevertheless, we are called to work even more diligently than anyone who's motivated from a success ethic could possibly be.
Sure, God accepts you as you are, but He accepts you to change you, and He calls you to excellence, and He calls you to discipleship. And discipleship means discipline. Paul says, for example, I pummel my body to subdue it. Run that you may receive the prize.
Whatever your right hand finds to do, do it with what? All of your might. Seek the higher things, but with diligence. The author of Hebrews, you have not yet resisted unto blood. The Christian is called to herculean efforts of discipline and achievement that would make the labor and the industry of the world pale in comparison. In other words, Christianity is not an exercise in slumber where you take your ease in Zion and spend the rest of your life being ministered unto. I remember when I first became a Christian, and the fellow that led me to Christ said to me one day, he said, R.C., he said, what you have to do as a Christian with respect to the world is that you have to outthink the world, you have to outfight the world, and you have to outlove the world.
That's a tall word, to outthink, to outfight, to outlove the world. Where do you see greatness in Christian art today? Where do you see greatness in Christian music today? Who are the leading great Christian novelists of your age? Who are the great Christian politicians that you know of? Where are the great Christian research scientists? I'm going to put a list of names on the board, and I want you to tell me how significant you think they are.
Well, let me ask you this. If I were to ask you who's the greatest composer in the history of the world, let's just take a poll. The greatest composer in the history of the world? Mozart. Any other candidates? Bach. Anybody else? Beethoven. Who else?
You've got to get the other one. Brahms. Handel. Okay, let's take those five.
Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Handel. Now, we're going to choose the best in a straw vote here. You only get to choose one. How many vote for Mozart as number one? I see one. One.
A lover of Don Juan. How many vote for Bach as the all-time greatest? One, two, three, four, five. How many vote for Beethoven as the all-time greatest? One, two, three. They're all romantics. How many vote for Brahms?
How many vote for Handel? One. Okay, who won? Bach. Do you know what I bet?
I bet if we did this same vote with 10,000 people, you'd have the same winner. Of those men, which one most consciously sought to use the medium of music as an instrument to capture men's minds for the glory of God? Bach. Bach was bitterly opposed to the forces of the Enlightenment that were eclipsing the influence of Christianity.
And Bach determined to use his gifts and talents to stem the tide as far as he could against that. Who would you say are the five greatest painters in all time? Rembrandt, Van Gogh, somebody said.
Who else? Michelangelo, da Vinci. You really think da Vinci is one of the greatest?
He has a couple. But Raphael. All right, let's leave those five. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael. Who's the greatest of all time?
Let's take a vote. Rembrandt. One, two, three, four, five. Van Gogh. Van Gogh couldn't carry Rembrandt's palette. Michelangelo.
One, two, three, four, five. Da Vinci. Raphael. I see a hand for Raphael. We've got a tie between Michelangelo and Rembrandt.
Anything peculiar about those two? About 85% of Rembrandt's work was with Christian themes and biblical themes. The same is true of Michelangelo. Who are the greatest authors of all time? Great classical writers.
Milton. Shakespeare. Who else? Dickens. Dostoevsky.
Who else? Tolstoy. All right, let's just take those six. How many think Milton was the greatest? How many think Shakespeare was the greatest? One, two, three, four, five, six. Dickens.
Done. Dostoevsky. One. Tolstoy.
One. Okay, Shakespeare wins, huh? Filled with biblical illusions, although what his commitment was to Christianity's question. Milton, strongly committed Christian.
Dostoevsky, totally committed. And done. Huh?
All right. Do you see the influence in the history here? We could go into the other fields. We could go into the natural sciences. We could look at Galileo. We could look at Kepler. We could look at Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, who, you know, father of modern physics, Newtonian physics. Newton was…his basic rule of thumb was to think God's thoughts after him and on down through the ages. The leaders of the classics in all the fields have been Christians, but today we live in a time of eclipse of Christian influence on culture.
And why? Can we say it's simply because the secular forces are so strong that they have strangled any attempts of Christian infiltration and influence because the Christian is being persecuted? That's true to a degree, but can that satisfactorily explain this failure of the Christian community to dent the culture? I'll tell you what, if somebody paints great art, sooner or later, you know, the level seeks the top.
The cream comes to the top. You know, great novelists have a tendency to get discovered sooner or later. You don't hide the really great people forever is what I'm saying. The great contributors, the great musicians, the great novelists, the great artists, the great thinkers, they will be recognized sooner or later.
Where are they today? Well, you have a whole generation of Christian young people who say, hey, for me, Christianity is a private, personal matter. It's something I enjoy. I get a little trip out of Jesus, but that doesn't mean that I am called to give everything I have back to the glory of God. Now, one thing I know for sure is that every person in this room has at least one gift that they have received from God, at least one gift. I know you do. You may not know what it is, and I may not be able to recognize what it is, but you have one.
And that gift that you've been given by God is supposed to be brought back to God, brought back to God, to be developed to its ultimate potential. I had a professor in seminary, Dr. Gerstner, who was noted for his rigorous demands in the classroom. So terrified were students of Gerstner's classes that I had a seminar course, an upper-level elective in theology of Jonathan Edwards. And there were like 22 people in that seminar. Twenty of them were auditors, 20 out of 22. Two students took that class for credit. The other 20 took it as auditors.
Why? They were afraid that they would not do well if they took it for credit and had to take the examinations and be evaluated in terms of their mastery of the material. They all wanted to hear what Gerstner had to say on the subject, but they didn't want to compete. They didn't want to submit themselves to the discipline of his teaching.
I'll tell you why. I remember a student came back one time from picking up his examination or a term paper, and he looked at the grade on the term paper, and it was a C or a C- from Dr. Gerstner. And the student was crestfallen. He said, I can't understand this. He said, I worked so hard on this paper.
I did so much labor, so much research. He says, I'm going to go talk to that professor and see why he gave me such a low grade. And so this fellow goes in to see Dr. Gerstner, and he says, Dr. Gerstner, I don't understand why I got a C- on this paper. He said, I did my best. And Gerstner looked at him and said, you did your what? You did your what? Young man, you've never done your best. How many times have you said that? I did my best. How many times have you done it? How many times have you reached the absolute peak that you could possibly achieve, where you expended the supreme level of effort and energy on any task that you've ever undertaken in your life?
How many times? And this kid came in and said, this is my best. If Gerstner were honest with the guy, he said to him, if this truly represents your best, young man, let me suggest to you that you stop school right now. You just simply don't have the gifts necessary to do the job. If this is your best, but Gerstner knew very well it wasn't that kid's best.
He knew that kid could have done much better than he did. But we live in an attitude of forgiveness, and so if we do fail, it's okay, we're not going to lose our salvation, we're not going to lose the acceptance that we have in the Christian community, then there's no point in trying, is there? There's no point in really developing a gift that God has given you to the fullest measure that you can. None of us have done that.
I know. How many of you have ever taken piano lessons? Now let me see those hands. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight of you have taken piano lessons. Okay, eight piano lesson takers we have here.
It's something almost every kid does at some point in their life to take piano. How many of you feel qualified right now to put on a virtuoso solo concert at Carnegie musical that would rival Van Cleiber? No? None of you? How many of you out of the eight would feel qualified to go and ask for a job playing the piano to entertain people, you know, as a soloist piano, say at the Holiday Inn in Monroeville?
Now that's a long way from Carnegie Music Hall. How many of you feel qualified to do that? None.
We have no Carnegies, no piano bar players. How many of you feel that you could play, credibly, a Rachmaninoff piano concerto? How many of you could play Claire de Lune, credibly? Okay, now two.
We got two, huh? Two out of eight. How many of you can play a hymn on the piano? One, two. How many of you can play chopsticks? Okay. When you first started taking piano lessons, was the first lesson difficult?
Piece of cake, wasn't it? Learn where middle C is, huh? Generally not.
What causes you to lose interest? Work. Here's what happens. You start piano or any other skill, and when you start, it's very, very easy at the beginning. You're playing, you know, little three-fingered melodies, I am playing middle C, I can play it, will you see, that kind of stuff. One finger, anybody can do that.
It requires no great effort. And you cruise along, and all of a sudden the teacher says, okay, now we're going to start playing two hands. Oh, gee, now it starts to get difficult. And we go to a new level, to a new plateau. And at this point, that first plateau of difficulty, a percentage of those children who begin piano lessons eagerly and enthusiastically drop out. They become dropouts. Now maybe 90% continue and make it to the second level where they're playing with two hands. But then they have to begin to learn how to play chords. And in order to do that, they need to learn something about scales, and rhythm, and that sort of thing. And we have to go to another level of difficulty. And now we have about 30% more dropout, and at least 60% maybe make it to that level.
That'd be about the second grade book in John Thompson's course. And then it gets a little bit more complicated in learning five-fingered chords, and difficult tempos, and four sharps, and five flats, and that kind of stuff. And that gets us up to classical compositions, and about 5% of those who start make it there. Then it comes to the question of learning harmonics, fill-ins, and little musical turns, and cadences, and the like. The further becomes difficult, and about 2% then make it up to there. And then you get to people. In order to go from 2% to be in the top 1% of piano players in the world, the level of difficulty to achieve that is almost a sheer vertical wall of difficulty. That's where the boys are separated from the men, the honky-tonk players separated from the musicians.
That's just to divide the top 2% from the top 1%. I'll give you an illustration on this. I play golf, and I take golf seriously. And I have had probably 200 lessons in my life of golf. And I've been playing golf for almost 20 years now, okay? And I have read every serious book of instruction there is, and I work hard at my golf game. I have a four handicap. That puts me in the top 1% of golfers in America. Now, do you realize what the difference is from a four handicap golfer and a zero handicap golfer? All the difference in the world. A guy who has a four handicap has a serious problem with his game, okay?
And then you get to be a zero handicapper where you shoot and par regularly, okay? More often than not. How many of those are there in this country? 100,000 maybe? I don't know.
I don't know. There are a ton of them. A ton of them. How many of those can win the state championship in America?
50, okay? Or those guys start separating the men from the boys. How many of those can make it on the professional golf tour?
Lucky if 10% of those down to five. How many of those can make it big on the golf tour? Do you know what the difference is between a four handicap golfer and Jack Nicklaus? It's the difference between you and Van Cliburn on the piano, all right? And not too many people coming to pay money to hear you play the piano.
Nobody pays money to watch me hit a golf ball either. Do you realize that what it takes to achieve excellence more than anything else is not talent but perseverance? Because the amazing thing is, here's the kicker. Once a person reaches a certain plateau of mastery and proficiency in a skill or knowledge or the like, it becomes simple to get even better, but below the cost of reaching a certain level of achievement. Now, very few people in their life ever develop any skill or gift to even this plateau, whether they're in the top 5% of proficiency or the top, say, 15%, very few in anything. That means that what happens is what starts easy, as soon as we run into obstacles or difficulties, we quit. No perseverance, no commitment, but it takes work.
It takes monotonous, oh, monotonous routine, running your fingers up and down the scales. I remember when I went back for music lessons when I was in the seminary, and I went to my teacher and I said, I want to learn how to play Chopin. And she says, you're not ready to play Chopin? I said, I don't care.
I want to play Chopin. She said, okay. So she gave me some pieces that had all these runs up and down the scale, you know.
And I said, I can't do that. She says, here's what you do. You take and you figure out how that goes, and you start with your left hand and you go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, real slow. And then we add the right hand, boom, boom, and do that 10 times until you can go very slowly without making a mistake. And then it said, now we turn the metronome up a little bit, and you go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Notice I didn't take voice lift. And you just do it real slow over and over and over again and gradually increase the speed. And after a couple of weeks of that, a person can sit down the piano and go up and down the scale without ever missing. But the discipline it takes to train your fingers to do that is just simply tedious. It's laborious.
And we hear a man like Van Cleven, very expressive, mastery over their instrument. We see men who do that, and you understand that not until you master those discipline areas do you have the freedom to do anything you want with the piano. But the more you master the details, the more freedom you have to be creative. You want to be a creative painter? You better learn the basics first.
You better learn all that laborious business in order to do it. Most of us don't want to pay the price. And what happens is that we have people in our secular culture who are more highly motivated than we are. I mean, you can't tell me that in the 20th century all of a sudden God quit giving gifts to His people, and it's just that the secularist has all the talent. And the Christian community is working like mad, but they don't have any talent. And I think what it is is that the secular man is out-motivating the Christian person. The Christian person is not motivated to excellence. Well, you've got to help me with that, because I don't understand that.
How can that be? How can you have any understanding of what God has done for you and have no motivation to return your gifts, the gifts that He gives you to Him? Do you love Christ? Is love a strong motivation? It's the strong—one of the strongest motivation forces in the world. If you love Christ, then you are called to give yourself as a living sacrifice to Christ.
It's your reasonable service. It means you are called to work, to labor diligently. I defy you to go through the New Testament and count how many times the word diligence and count how many times the word diligence appears over and over and over and over and over again. But the Christian community is slothful. It's lazy. It's sloppy. It doesn't want to be challenged.
It doesn't want to have to work hard for things. And this is a golden opportunity because we're turning out a whole culture now of unmotivated people, people who want to drop out, people who just want to take it easy. I talked to a Christian student not too long ago that was graduating from college, and I said, Well, what are you going to do with your life?
And they said, Well, I don't know yet. I think what I'm going to do this next year is I'm going to take the year off and just go trucking through Europe and have the experience of having some fun. He said, I've been working in college for four years. I'm tired of going to school.
I don't want to go to work. I'm just going to spend a year trucking through Europe. I wanted to say, Hey, there's a war on. People are dying all over the world, and you haven't even started into the ministry.
You haven't even begun to pay your dues and you want a year's vacation right now. Where is that sense of the Christian community that they're willing to give their best to the Master, like the old song says? We mentioned the Old Testament principle of the firstfruits, the firstfruits. What were the firstfruits? A man goes out and he plants his field, and he comes in and he sees that part of his crop is just perfectly cultivated, and the fruit is lush and firm and beautiful. He goes through that crop and he picks that.
In those days, the Jewish man would go through there and he would make a selection process, and he would say, I want the finest 10 percent of that fruit, and we're not going to put that in the market. We're giving that to God. Today, what we do is we take the finest we have, which isn't very fine, sell it for as much as we can get, and then we come down to the stuff that's withering and dying on the vine, and we take that and throw it to God, like slop to hogs.
Listen to part of the Sermon on the Mount. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but you put it on a candlestick. That's simple enough.
Son of God, I mean, He's not all that brilliant. If you take a candle, what do you do with it? Put it on a candlestick and put it under a bushel. And Christ calls you to be the light of the world. Now, is He going to put you under a bushel?
That's not His way of doing things. He wants to put you on a lampstand. The only people that will put a bushel over your light is you. And the light that's on the candlestick gives light unto everyone that is in the house. If you give a gift that God has given you back to Him, not only does it honor God, but it enriches God's people.
It becomes a blessing to everyone around you and an inspiration. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father, which is in heaven. There's the Christian impetus for excellence, the mandate of Jesus, let your light so shine before men that they may see what? Your good works. Your good works are supposed to be visible. You are supposed to be a light that can be seen, not a closet Christian, a Clairol Christian, where only your hairdresser knows for sure, a Secret Service Christian, but a visible Christian whose gifts bring illumination and light to this world. Let it shine so that, Jesus says, men can see it, see good works.
To what end? To the glory of God the Father. Let me finish this by saying, one theologian made this observation that the essence of theology is grace. If you don't understand grace, you can't understand theology. The essence of ethics, he said, is gratitude. The essence of ethics, he said, is gratitude. That's the motivation for excellence.
You're listening to a special edition of Renewing Your Mind as we went back into the archives to feature a very early recording of R.C. Sproul on the Christian motivation for excellence. This area was so important for Dr. Sproul that we actually turned this message into a short booklet that is given to each new staff member at Ligonier to help ensure that Dr. Sproul's vision and desire for Ligonier Ministries continues.
Speaking of Ligonier, Dr. Sproul often referred to Ligonier's ministry partners as the backbone of Ligonier as their prayers and monthly financial support keep Renewing Your Mind free to a global audience. They underwrite our conferences and fuel the development, translation and spread of trusted Bible teaching around the world. To help further equip them, every month they receive discipleship resources from us like the message you heard today and Table Talk magazine. They receive discounts on events and free resources and when they set up their recurring gift they receive a reformation study Bible and most recently we unlocked our complete teaching series library so they can stream, learn and be helped to grow anywhere and anytime. Today I invite you to become a ministry partner to help those who otherwise wouldn't have access to trusted and deep Bible teaching and to be better equipped yourself as we send you discipleship resources and give you access to even more teaching. Sign up today at ligonier.org slash partner. Use the link in the podcast show notes or sign up at Renewing Your Mind.org. Thank you so much for your generosity. Without our ministry partners Renewing Your Mind wouldn't have the reach that it has today. Do you ever struggle with assurance knowing that you are saved? For the next three days Joel Beakey will join us to teach on the assurance of faith to join us tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. you
