As many of you know, I had the great pleasure of visiting the good folks of Faith Presbyterian Church Reformed in Mesquite, Texas the last weekend of October. The church (formerly known as First Presbyterian Church of Rowlett before the purchase of their new facility in Mesquite) was gracious enough to host a number of ministers from various denominations who spoke on the Five Solas of the Reformation. It was a distinct pleasure to meet Rev. John Owen Butler, who had ministered in Tchula, Mississippi years before I was there.

I spoke on the subject of Solus Christus (Christ Alone) from Colossians 1. Now tapes, CDs and MP3s of all sessions of the conference are available over at the FPCR website. Pastor Richard Bacon and my friend Chris Coldwell do an excellent job getting good Reformed gospel material into the hands of people.

I had the opportunity this week to listen to an old podcast of R.C. Sproul’s Renewing Your Mind broadcast from October 5th. The subject was the philosophy of Pragmatism, which is perhaps the only “school” of Philosophy made in America. Pragmatism is built into the fiber of our country. Two of the leading originators of Pragmatism were John Dewey (the architect of the modern American public school system) and Oliver Wendell Holmes (the architect of the modern American legal system). Neither Dewey nor James “invented” education or law, but they shaped how these areas of American life exist today.

It is important for us to remember that Pragmatism is not just “being practical.” I like practicality as much as the next man — I don’t want to buy products that don’t work, or to take hours to do a task that could be done in minutes. But Pragmatism is much more than being practical. It means thinking about problems, solutions and life in general in only the immediate sense. It also means judging whether something is “right” or “wrong” by whether or not a majority in the community thinks so. The obvious problem with that is that majority votes can change radically over time (just ask John Kerry or George Bush, for example). The Pragmatist has no final standard for judging his actions. He only wants to see immediate results. If it works right NOW, then that is what the Pragmatist does. Never mind the fact that a solution to one problem could cause two new problems. The answer to that is just to find two new solutions; and if the result is four new problems down the road (two per “new” solution), well, then, we’ll deal with that later. A good example of this in American history, Sproul explained, was the beginning of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s. More bills were sent to Congress in the first 100 days of his Presidency than at any other time in American history. If a solution “worked” right away, it was funded and continued. If not, it was cast aside. We are still dealing with the consequential problems created by such solutions.
Why would Pragmatists think this way? It doesn’t seem very practical, does it?

The reason is that Pragmatism provides no hope for the long term. There really is nothing beyond the here and now, and certainly no eternity or God. All that matters is what a majority of people believe will be good right now.

This has obvious implications for the Church. It seems that more and more, the Church at large is being pragmatic. Shelves and more shelves in in Christian bookstores are filled with “how to” manuals on everything, from growing your church to having an effective youth ministry to reaching your community. Solutions are touted as being applicable to every church, whether rural, urban, Northern, Southern or Western. Do you have a problem in your church? Things not going as well as desired? Just buy the latest Purpose Driven^TM book and all will be well. But if we stop and think about it for a minute, situations and people in one given place can be very different from another place. Our ministry hear in Katy will not (and should not, I would say) look like ministry in India, or Egypt or even Buffalo. The gospel is the same, but there are all kinds of people and places that need the gospel put into their context.

We need to be careful that as we go forward in our ministry week seek to be first, Biblical in our ministry, and then second, practical in the execution. We should continually ask ourselves at Christ Church how the Bible would inform our ministry. That may mean more work for us. It may also mean some level of “impracticality” (Paul would call that “the foolishness of preaching”). But that is what we are called to. You may find this week that what you believe you are completely wasting your time doing, is actually making a critical impact on others. The prophet Isaiah helps us to keep things in perspective when he wrote: “For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here a little, there a little.”

Moms - you are sowing eternal seeds as you feed children and change diapers
Husbands - you are making a critical impact on your community as you listen to you wife about her day
Children - you are fighting Satan and the demons when you obey your parents, eating your vegetables and cleaning your room

Let us seek to serve God where we are, how we can, with the Bible as our guide. Don’t get frustrated with God or His Church because you don’t see results right away. We wouldn’t think that way if our children did not walk when we first brought them home from the hospital, or if we couldn’t sit in the shade of a newly planted tree! Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Expect accordingly.

This week as we come together to worship, we should seek to be alert to the things of God, shaking off sin and self, as the hymnist writes:

Awake, my soul, and with the sun
Your daily stage of duty run:
Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise
To pay your morning sacrifice.

We will be continuing in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, in chapter 3. This week Paul presses home to the Galatians that salvation comes by grace and not by the law by using an illustration:

¹⁵ To give a human example, brothers: even with a man-made covenant, no one annuls it or adds to it once it has been ratified. ¹⁶ Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, “And to offsprings,” referring to many, but referring to one, “And to your offspring,” who is Christ. ¹⁷ This is what I mean: the law, which came 430 years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. ¹⁸ For if the inheritance comes by the law, it no longer comes by promise; but God gave it to Abraham by a promise. (Galatians 3:15-18)

As always, you can download a copy of the bulletin from the website.

This week we will be singing the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) version of Psalm 146 (”Hallelujah, Praise Jehovah“). You can find a copy of the bulletin insert showing the song, and you can also download the MP3 sample of the song.