Proclaimer Blog
Delighting in Orthodoxy 101
As Christian ministers, we need to constantly fight the battle to find delight in the most basic truths of Christianity. Without this battle, we become immune to the wonders and awe of the gospel and in all that it means. Take Christmas: every year I preach on the incarnation and its wonder: Jesus as fully God, fully man. There I’ve said it. Pretty basic and fundamental – yet so familiar to us that it loses its shine. How did you feel when you read out that sentence? Did you heart leap as you read once again the mystery of God made man? Did you feel your mind stretch at the concept that is beyond understanding? No? Me neither. And that’s the problem.
It’s not that we don’t believe these foundational truths. It’s that they cease to move us as they should. They cease to prompt a right response in us. And if that is the case, how can we preach them to others?
For evangelicals, this is particularly pressing. Let me suggest three signs that we may be losing this battle, or not even engaging in it. They are three areas that we particular delight in.
- Hunting heresy. It’s good to contend for the faith, necessary. But it’s a serious sign when we start delighting in finding heresy rather than in the truth it is an aberration of. There’s lots of this about. I can’t speak for others, but I always want to ask myself if I’m finding more joy in uncovering such mistaken truth than I am in the truth itself.
- Minutiae pleasure. I love detail. And I love thinking through hard issues and working them out. That’s well and good. I’ve been doing that recently with republication. But there’s a real danger that I find joy in this working out of the detail. Like solving a mathematical problem, there’s a delight in getting to the answer. For myself, that kind of joy is always a danger sign.
- Disputable delight. Some matters are disputable. There’s no doubt about that. Disputable is not just a pragmatic category, it’s a Bible category. That doesn’t mean there’s not a right or wrong answer. Take baptism. Paedo Baptists and credo Baptists cannot both be “right” I don’t think (although that’s perhaps an unhelpful category). But we recognise that there’s a biblical case for the other side, even if we don’t fully agree with it. For myself, I want to be wary of finding too much delight in the disputable matters. I think there’s a danger in that, because the fundamentals of the faith are indisputable.
All of which is to say, we need to constantly fight the battle to find delight in the most basic truths of Christianity. How you do that will depend on you. I take a subject (like the incarnation) and try to write out a prayer in a notebook: not for public consumption, but to train myself to delight in these things. I also pray with a hymnbook. I struggle to choose some old hymns to sing congregationally, but they are great fodder for my prayer time as the poetry is so emotionally engaging.
But however you do it, fight you must.