Wheat, Tares, and Waiting for the Harvest

But we don't. We can be fooled. People can make a good outward appearance of godliness. And yes, many of those people attend church and may even be members.

How can that be? Welcome to Renewing Your Mind. On this Thursday, I'm Lee Webb, and this week we have been looking at the meaning and mission of the church, a series by Dr. R.C. Sproul called Communion of Saints.

And today, R.C. is going to explain an important way we describe the church. It was St. Augustine who first gave an in-depth theological exposition and formulation of the distinction that we have between the visible and the invisible church. And as old as that concept may be in church history, it is still subject to much misunderstanding and confusion.

In this session, what I want to do is to take us back to the fourth century and try to gain a deeper understanding of the significance of that distinction. I've already mentioned, at least in passing, about the phenomenon that we experienced in America in the decade of the sixties with the advent of the so-called underground church, which people who were involved in that movement expressed at many times a disdain for the visible organized church. And somehow they saw themselves as being a conscious alternative to the visible church, and by virtue of their loose organization and so on, many considered that they were the invisible church. Well, that reflects, I think, a serious misunderstanding of what St. Augustine had in mind when he made this historic distinction between the visible and the invisible church, because in the view of the sixties, it was as if there is this one circle or sphere that we call the visible church, and then outside of it, external to it, would be another group of people who would make up the invisible church. Now this is not at all what St. Augustine had in mind with the distinction. If we're going to use the image of the circle, the circle would look more like this, that here we have the invisible church, and then this second circle would be the visible church.

Now we would have to make one slight emendation to that, and that is I'm just going to take this little blip out like that, as it were, and see that in addition to this circle, there is this circle out there. Now what this image is trying to show is this, that for Augustine, the invisible church is something that is found basically and substantially within the visible church. There may be this little blip out here that is floating independent, if you will, of the visible church, but this represents an extremely abnormal and unusual phenomenon. What Augustine would include in that little blip outside the visible church would be people, people for example like the thief on the cross who was converted in his hour of death.

He had no opportunity whatsoever to align himself with some visible institution. There was no opportunity for church membership or even for baptism as he hung on the cross in preparation of death. We know certain times in history at points of crisis people are dragged away from society, thrown into prison or in some kind of isolationist position, solitary confinement, alone in a concentration camp where they have no possible opportunity to align themselves with a body or a group of other Christians. And yet those people who are truly members of the body of Christ because of their faith and so on, they remain at least for a season outside the visible church. Now there's one other possibility by which a person could be in the invisible church and not be in the visible church, and that is the person who is truly a child of God, truly regenerate, has authentic salvific faith in his heart, but in his spiritual infancy or spiritual immaturity, he has a seriously defective view of the church. Maybe he has been disappointed in his local congregation, and he has not yet been exposed to the teaching of Scripture. He's a new convert. He said, I don't want to make the mistake of falling into the trap of institutionalism and so on, and so by personal decision and choice he avoids entrance into the visible church. Now notice I said that that would be a temporary short-term problem that would be indicative of an infant Christian.

I'm bending over backwards here. I'm describing a hypothetical possibility of somebody who just simply doesn't know any better. But we would assume that once that person even had a cursory reading of the New Testament, if he were indeed regenerate of the Holy Spirit, he would hear the voice of his Lord commanding him to be a part of his body, and his disobedience at this point would be short-lived. Now this portrait that I've given here then, the basic portrait of the two circles, the visible church and the invisible by which the invisible church is seen as being substantially within the visible church, I have drawn these concentric circles without any particular view to proportion because these people in the outer circle are people who are church members, that is their names are on the rolls of the visible church, but they are not children of God. They are unbelievers.

They remain outside the kingdom of God. They're part of the visible church community, but they are not part of the invisible church, which Augustine said is made up only of the elect, only of those who have been called not merely externally through the preaching of the gospel and so on, but those who have been called eternally and internally by the work of the Holy Spirit and brought to true faith. Now again, the reason for this distinction at this point is that Augustine said that the church is a body, a corpus as we've already seen with the concept of the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, but that it is a corpus per mixedum, that it is a mixed body. Now this was not a judgment that Augustine learned empirically or inductively by canvassing the members in his bishopric and looking at their behavior and saying, well, you're a believer and you're not.

No, no, no. He drew this conclusion of course from the teaching of Jesus that is found so clearly in the New Testament. Jesus speaks of the condition of the church as including a mixture of tares or weeds, if you will, that live and grow along with the wheat. In fact, though Christ institutes a process of church discipline that involves the expulsion from the membership of the visible church, those who are engaged in gross and heinous sin, nevertheless Jesus puts certain constraints upon how church discipline is exercised and the process is a kind of process by which the church virtually bends over backwards in its care not to hastily excommunicate someone out of fear that the weeding process is done indiscriminately and brutally to the end that someone who is truly a child of God is wrongfully cast out of the body of Christ.

And so Jesus, though He does institute excommunication, fences that process with great care and great caution, basically saying this, it is better that the church continue living in the presence of weeds growing among it than that in our zeal to purify the church we ruthlessly rip up the wheat whom God has planted and destroy them along with the tares. The other image of course that Jesus uses is the image of the sheep and the goats, the sheep referring of course to those who truly belong to Christ, who truly love Him and embrace Him. The goats are those who are spurious in their confession of faith. Their profession is false. It is not genuine.

It is not authentic. Now Jesus again indicated that it was clearly possible for people to make a profession of faith and do all the things that are required by the visible church to enter into her membership. As Jesus indicated, this people honors Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me. Now again, the lips and the speech of the lips, the claims of the mouth are things that we can perceive outwardly.

They belong to the visible or to the audible realm. But the reason why Augustine calls this inner core of true believers the invisible church is because the thing that is invisible about them is their hearts. Again the Bible says man looks on the outward appearances, but God looks on the heart. The invisible church therefore is invisible to us.

It's not invisible to God. Christ knows His sheep. He knows who our authentically is. He can read their hearts just as He read the thoughts of the woman of Samaria and of Nathanael and all of that. God can read the state of your soul without seeing any external visible evidence of your faith. He knows who is truly redeemed and who isn't.

But we don't. We can be fooled. People can make a good outward appearance of godliness. In fact, we call that the problem of hypocrisy. I'm astonished when lay people come to me and they're upset because of some gross act of misconduct that they observed in their pastor or an attitude of unbelief that they heard expressed by their pastor, and they say, he's an ordained minister. How can he do that?

Or how can he say that? The tacit assumption of the lay person is, well, if he's a minister, he must be a Christian, and not just a run-of-the-mill Christian, but a profoundly committed Christian. And I say to these people, who was it who screamed for the blood of Jesus? Who were those who were most hostile to the historical Christ? It wasn't the sinner. It wasn't the publican.

It wasn't the layperson in the community. It was the clergy who were most vicious in their hostility toward Jesus and toward the apostles. What I'm saying simply is from the first century to the 20th century, there's always been the clear and present danger of unbelievers present mixed together with the real believers in the body of Christ. And those unbelievers may in fact be heads of the church. Be heads of the church, the clergy of the church, the bishops of the church, or whatever.

That's always a serious possibility. Now, as I said, the proportion of these two circles is arbitrary, as I put it up here on the blackboard. There are obviously times in church history where God so renews His church and where the church experiences awakening to spiritual things that the visible church is comprised almost completely of those who are truly in the faith. But there are dark moments in church history, dark ages where the church falls into deep, deep corruption and disobedience so that churches become, as the Scripture suggests, synagogues of Satan where we are fortunate to find the remotest spec or presence of the invisible church within the visible church. Remember what happened in the Old Testament. The whole nation of Israel was called into fellowship with God. The whole nation participated externally in the visible church of Israel, in the covenant community. But by the time the Old Testament draws to a close, the hope for the future was for a tenth, for a tiny remnant that would still be faithful.

And then of course there's the danger on the other side. Sometimes we're so acutely conscious of this problem of the visible and the invisible that we even further reduce the possible number of those in the invisible church down to a dot that we require the lamp of Diogenes to discern, and we suffer from what I like to call the Elijah syndrome. Do you remember when Elijah complained to God that he was trying to be faithful in the midst of a people that were collectively unfaithful, priests and prophets together were going in a completely different path from the prophet Elijah until finally he laments before God, Oh God, I and I alone am left. That's the Elijah syndrome, and God had to rebuke him and say to him, be careful Elijah, I have preserved for myself, you know, seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal. From the vantage point of Elijah, everywhere he looked he saw people on their knees before Baal. He couldn't find seven, not to mention seven thousand, but God knew who His people were.

And so again, the point of the distinction between the visible and the invisible has to do with the state of the soul. Just this morning I was writing the final chapter of a book that I hope will be titled when it comes out, The Soul's Quest for God. And I was dealing with one of the most terrifying warnings that Jesus ever gives, and that's His conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount when He says, He says, Many will come to Me saying, Lord, Lord. And He says, It's not everyone who says, Lord, Lord, who will enter the kingdom, but those who do the will of His Father. And again He says, They will come saying, Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy in Your name? Didn't we cast out devils in Your name? Didn't we do many wonderful things in Your name? And Jesus said, on that day He will look at them and say, Depart from Me.

I never knew you. I'll tell you what scares me about that. Not only that there will be some people on the final day who will come saying, not only, Lord, but Lord, Lord, the repetition of the form of address indicates an assumption of a close, personal, intimate relationship. These aren't your Easter and Sunday visitors to the church that He's anticipating are going to come and say, Lord, Lord, but people who suppose that they have a deep personal relationship with Him. But what scares me is not that to some will, but He says, Many.

There is a multitude, a great multitude of people who actually believe that they have a personal relationship with Christ to whom Jesus will say on the last day, Please leave me. I don't know Your name. And they're going to protest, but Lord, I was a preacher. I prophesied. I did miracles. I cast demons out of people. Look at my track record of the wonderful works that I've performed in the name of the church.

Please leave, He says, because they are defined as those who are workers of lawlessness. Again, they are people who say they love Christ but refuse to keep His commandments. Now, John Calvin struggled with this distinction between the visible and the invisible, and he said, Yes, the hearts of the faithful are known only to God, but it is not as if the church is to be a corporation of H.G.

Wells's invisible men. Calvin said that the task, the principal task of the invisible church is to make the invisible church visible, that those who have true faith are to be a light to the world, to make their faith manifest, that we may bear witness to the Lord whose church we are. And that reminds us of Paul's directive to examine ourselves to see if we're genuinely in the faith. Then, as Calvin said, we must be a light for Christ in the world. We've heard another message from Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Communion of Saints, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind.

Thank you for being with us today. This week we're taking a look at the church through the lens of the Nicene Creed, learning why the church is one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic. The Church of Jesus Christ is made up of sinners saved by grace, so by its very nature it's in constant need of reform. That's why I hope you'll request our resource offer today. It's Dr. W. Robert Godfrey's series, which looks at the history and insights of John Calvin's treatise, The Necessity of Reforming the Church. But this is not just a history lesson.

Reform was needed then, and it's needed in the church today. When you give a donation of any amount, you can request this series. We'll send you all six messages on a single DVD. You can give your gift when you go to renewingyourmind.org or when you call us.

Our number is 800-435-4343. Renewing Your Mind is the listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries, and since 1971, our goal has been to proclaim, teach, and defend the holiness of God in all its fullness to as many people as possible. Many of our online resources are free, including articles and devotionals, along with Dr. Sproul's entire Crucial Questions booklet series. Well, tomorrow Dr. Sproul will look at another way we describe the church, and on the surface, a way that may seem harsh. Beloved, for the church to be the church, the church must in this world be the church militant, and I don't believe the church can ever be the church triumphant unless it is first the church militant. What does it mean when we describe the church as militant? Dr. Sproul will answer that question tomorrow, and we hope you'll join us for Renewing Your Mind.