The Temptations (and Dangers) of the Secret Knowledge Club

Not long after Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension, one of the first "Christian" conspiracy theories began to blossom. You can see the roots of it 1st Corinthians 15, watch it develop in 1st John, and then see how it really blossomed in the early church. It came to be known as Gnosticism, and it was a big problem that hasn't completely gone away even now. 

 

A group of people in the Corinthian church began to say that they had been blessed with "secret knowledge," about "the truth" of Jesus, that no one else could see. That truth was that there really wasn't really going to be a physical resurrection of the dead. They believed the body was evil, so there was no need for a physical resurrection. Paul powerfully refutes these ideas in 1st Corinthians 15:12-19:

 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?  But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead   are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope n this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Paul tells the church at Corinth that their "secret knowledge" is going to send them to Hell. If there is no resurrection, they are without hope, with Christ, without forgiveness, to be most pitied. But this little heresy continues to grow in the church, until a few decades later when it has developed even further - and some are now saying that Jesus never came in the flesh in the first place! See the progression - first, the body is evil. Because the body is evil, there is no physical resurrection. And because the body is evil - then Jesus could have never actually had a physical body! So, the Secret Knowledge Club has now rejected the humanity of Jesus! This is why John wrote in 1 John 4:2-3:

By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already."

Two things are happening here: the "Secret Knowledge Club" was not satisfied to simply deny the resurrection of the dead. The longer they talked, the more secret knowledge they seemed to obtain. Now, they denied the humanity of Jesus. And not only are they hell-bound - John now identifies them with the anti-Christ himself.

 

Now, the Secret Knowledge Club did not end there. They continued to push and grow over the years and decades, and their heretical beliefs continued to grow. What might have been a mistaken understanding of the resurrection turned into a full-blown movement in complete contradiction to Christianity. The Gnostics twisted the sayings and teaching of Jesus in such a way that the apostles wouldn't have recognized them, all the while saying that only they had the secret and special understanding of the way the world worked. The Gnostics are still around today - read a Dan Brown novel to see it. They were convinced that there was a conspiracy to cover up the truth of the world - and only they had the real answers! 

Unfortunately, the "Secret Knowledge Club," is still around, and you don't have to read Dan Brown to find them. There are unfortunately far too many professing believers in Christ who invest far too much of their time into the latest conspiracy theories, all the while believing that they have found the truth! They find some web site in a back alley of the internet that uses a little bit of scripture, a few current events, a heaping dose of suspicion toward "the powers that be," and a sprinkle of out of context facts to create conspiracies that sound like they might just be true. And as outlandish as they are, they seem to make more sense of the world than what you're being told. 

 

It feels good to have that secret knowledge, to understand things when no one else seems to understand them. It is so tempting and alluring, and it especially so right now, when the world just seems to be upside down. If everyone else would just "get it." If they'd just stop being "sheeple." If only they could see what you could see. If only they would do their research the way you have done your research. Here's the problem. It never satisfied. There's always another conspiracy. There is always more secret knowledge to gain. And the longer you invest yourself in gaining it, the further and further you move away from God's truth.

 

Don't join the Secret Knowledge Club. Get into God's Word instead. It will help you navigate every situation in life. It will give you all of the knowledge that you need, and it is not for a special few. It's for everyone. God has not hidden the truth. It is not a riddle that needs deciphering. It's not a code that needs cracking. It's not a secret that needs researching. It's right there, in black and white, just like it has been for 2,000 years. The knowledge you need is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone" (Ephesians 4:20). And it is enough. It will satisfy you. 

On Sunday School - Diversity

This is the latest in a multi-part series on Sunday School. For more, click on Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

There's a little sign as you walk into our classroom, put there by the church, to denote a bit about who we are. It simply says, "Co-Ed 30-40, Wade Phillips, The Loft." The sign is simply there to give us some simple identifying marks of the people who are in the class. We are both men and women, between the ages of 30 and 40, I'm the teacher, and we meet in this room, the loft above the kitchen. There's only one problem with it. It isn't really true.

I mean, most of it is. I'm the teacher. We meet in the loft. Men and women are both welcome. But there's one little problem. I have people who range from their early 20's, all the way up to their 50's in my class. So the 30-40 thing is really not true. They come in all ages. And frankly, despite the misnomer on our sign, I'm pretty pleased with this fact.

As long as we have been a class, we have really made strong efforts to have diversity in our class. Now, I know this is a word that brings up some strong connotations, some positive and some negative. But we have felt from the very beginning that the more different kinds of people we have in our class, the better. To that end, we have people, both black and white, married and single, single again and married with husbands who don't come to church, couples with "full quivers" of kids, and couples with no kids at all, people who have lived in our area all their lives, and others who just moved here. We have people who are well-off financially, and people who are struggling, and people in between. And all different kinds of ages. It's something that we feel very strongly about.

Now, if you are familiar with church growth strategies at all, you may look at this with some amount of concern; maybe even a bit of horror. For many years, a strategy called the "homogeneous unit principal," has held sway in many church circles. There are a lot of different ways to define that very large term, but the basic idea of it, I think, is that people like to be around people who are like them. People will naturally gather with other people who are like them, so we should just use that fact, and grow with it. Now, there are obviously some ways in which this almost has to be true; it's hard for people who speak different languages to worship and study together regularly. I can even see a need for some age segregation in a Sunday School class; it would be difficult for an 8-year old to get the things we are talking about (though we've seen a few of those in class over the years, too.) But the bottom line is this: I believe diversity is not only acceptable, but that it is good and should be encouraged.

Here's what I mean. The Bible has a lot to say about the right kind of diversity. Revelation 5 talks about how God "ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation . . ." God made a point, not just to save as many people as possible, but to make sure they represented all of these different kinds of people. God made the diversity, he likes it, and he wants to redeem all of it. We should embrace it too.

Maybe the most important verse when we talk about the subject of diversity is this one: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28) What's the point here? It's simply that the differences that we see on the outside, those differences in race and gender, social and economic status, marital status, and age, among others, aren't really that important as compared to the similarities we have as people ransomed by Jesus. We all unite under the Cross. We all possess the same Spirit. And those similarities are infinitely more important than any differences we might have.

Now, I don't think it's enough just to say this: we must believe it in a way that it actually makes a difference. We must welcome people who don't look like us or act like us, or think like us. We must make sure the people in our class know that this is not a class for one particular "people group." We must teach on the importance of this kind of diversity, when it comes up in the texts we are studying together.

And here is what might be the most important thing: when we study the Word, those barriers come down. God's people unite around God's Word. This is why our studies are centered on the Word. It applies to everyone. It pierces hearts and minds, and cuts through joints and marrow, and gets deep inside people. And it shows us our similarities, while helping us appreciate our differences.We are not perfect at this. We're still working on it. But it's important to us.

Let me end by making something clear: the sign on the wall doesn't bother me. I'm fine with it as a guide. I just hope it never becomes a fence. I hope the common theme of the Gospel continues to help unite all kinds of people in our classroom, and for that matter, in Sunday School classrooms everywhere.

On Sunday School - Bible Study

This is the second of a multi-part series. For previous post, see On Sunday School.

It was November 2005, a Sunday. It was a Sunday I had been looking forward to for several weeks. It was the Sunday we began our new Sunday School class. We had been birthed from what was, at the time, one of the largest classes in the church, and I was excited about the prospect of several of the couples in that class joining me for a new adventure. I'd already confirmed that two couples and another woman would be joining us. I was excited to see who else would do so.

My excitement was tempered by reality that morning. No one else decided to join us, and one of the couples who would be a part of us, could not be there that Sunday. So including Crystal and I, there were five of us. It let the air out of my balloon just a little bit, to be honest. But looking back on it, I believe it was exactly what should have happened. More on that later.

I tell this story to tell you what I told those four who joined me that Sunday.  We were few in number, and our church had been in a state of plateau/decline for several years, so there was no real guarantee that we would ever grow. For all I knew, it would be us seven and no more until they finally shut us down. But I had made a commitment then, and I told it to them on this day.

Here's what I said, (paraphrased): "We're going to be committed to studying the Bible. I believe it is our only hope and our only chance. The things we read here are the most important things in the world, and we will study them. If we never grow larger than we are right now, that's fine. We are going to grow spiritually, if not numerically, because studying the Word will do that."

I'm actually certain I wasn't nearly so eloquent at the time. But that was what I believed then, and it's what I believe, even more so now, because I've really seen it in action over the last five years. I have seen people grow spiritually, and God has also grown our class numerically, exponentially even. Let me be clear; I take no credit for that (well, in my lesser moments I might). But I believe the commitment to study the Bible, deeply and systematically and in an expository way, has been blessed by God.

Looking back five years, I see now how ignorant of what I was saying that I actually was. I had spent a fair amount of time in Bible study classes that were that in name only. In other words, though they (usually) opened their Bibles, the lesson and the conversation often veered off into personal feelings and opinions, and psychology instead of theology. I had been in one class that I thought had really been serious about studying the Word, and I had watched that class shrink, rather than grow, because people thought it was "too hard." So my experience had been that classes that grew were classes that were light on the Bible. I was convinced that it could be otherwise, and even if it wasn't, that I must try anyway.

So that was my commitment. I was very fortunate to have fellow members who were in agreement with me, and who wanted to study the Bible with real depth, and ask real questions about meaning and theology and how that applied to their lives. We didn't know what would happen, but we all wanted to find out.

So our first commitment was to study the Bible, every Sunday. We weren't going to take weeks off to do testimony time, or read books on marriage, or do Bible trivia games. (Let me be clear; I'd not only done these in classes before, but recommended and supporting doing them. But not this time.) The Bible was going to be our guide.

Here's what I've learned though, since that time. It's not enough to say you're going to study the Bible. There are right ways and wrong ways to do it. Over the last 5 years, I've learned a lot. Here are some of the things that we have tried to do as we study, every single week. Admittedly, I do better some weeks than others, and many of these things, I have learned over the years.

1 - We study the Bible systematically. I'm not one to skip around the Bible a lot from week to week. My preference is to go through the Word, book by book, one at a time. But I've actually found in recent years that using the Lifeway literature (as a loose guide) has helped a lot. Whether we are studying a particular book, or a particular topic, I'm able to help people keep common themes and thoughts in the minds of my class over a several week period.

2 - We study expositionally. I'm no Biblical scholar, and I have no degrees in theology. But I do believe the best way to study scripture is to study it verse-by-verse, with the goal of trying to figure out what the passages mean. All too often, we decide on a topic we want to teach on, and then try to throw all the verses together that support what we already think. There is no growth in this. There is growth in looking at themes, and interconnections between verse and passages. In short, when you study expositionally, you study in context, with the goal of finding what God is saying.

3 - We explore the tensions. In every passage you can study, there are going to be phrases and words and sentences that, at least on their face, don't seem to make sense. Maybe they don't seem to fit with the rest of the passage. Maybe they seem to contradict something else that we know, or think we know, about God and about the Word. Whatever they are, we don't ignore them. We embrace and we explore. And in doing that, we grow, because we find more meaning and deeper nuances and connections that we didn't previously realize existed.

4 - We look for Jesus. I have come to realize over the years, that Jesus is the main character in every story and every passage that we study. He's not always standing center stage, but he can always be found, if you search hard enough. And this searching is always fruitful. The finding is even better. I try to make Jesus appear in every single lesson, sometimes from the beginning, sometimes riding in on his white horse to save the day, sometimes bubbling up from the surface over the course of the class. But he is always there, and he is always the main character.

5 - We center on the Gospel - I wish I'd realized this sooner than I did. I guess I always knew it, but I'm not sure I always really "got it." If we don't look at every part of the Bible through the lens of God's redemptive plan to save his people through Jesus' death on the Cross, then we will fall into empty moralism and legalism. We will tell people what they must do, without helping them understand where they find the strength and ability to do it. This is what too much of our Bible study and preaching has become. And it does no good. Even if it does manage to change some actions, it never changes hearts. Only the Gospel of Jesus, which rips out hearts of stone, and replaces them with new hearts that love God, can cause us to be the kinds of people we must be.

So these are my goals, every Sunday. To reach them, I spend hours in Bible study every week. It's a long, difficult, but incredibly rewarding process. I'm certainly imperfect, and have to admit my imperfections, and confess my lack of knowledge often. But we ask the questions together, and grow through the process.

On Sunday School

I have had the great honor, for the last five or so years, to be able to teach a Sunday School class of young adults at my church, Northcrest Baptist, in Meridian. Yes, we still call it Sunday School here in Mississippi. I guess it really doesn't matter what it's called. It's what you're doing there that counts. Over these five years, it has been, for the most part, one of my greatest joys. I believe I am called and gifted to be a teacher, and I have taken the job as seriously as I know how. It's my hope and prayer that I get to continue leading this class for many years to come.

But things inevitably change; we're probably going to see some changes in our class soon. Frankly, we have gotten very large. We started the class five years ago, birthed from another class, with a mere 5 people there on our first Sunday. We now have almost 80 on the roll, and have lately been running close to 40 in class. It really has been remarkable to watch the class grow and change over the years. We began meeting in the smallest classroom at our church; a couple of years ago, we moved to the largest one, and we are growing ever-close to outgrowing it.

It looks like we're about to start another class out of our class; we've gotten so large, and I have some people who are really qualified to teach in my class. I'm certain one of them is going to step up and take on a leadership role in the new class. Most Sunday School/Small Group experts would tell you we should have already started another class, but we've just been having so much fun, and we've just been growing so fast. It's been a wild ride, to say the very least. We have visitors and new members almost every single Sunday. It's really a lot to keep up with. So I think a new class is probably best, though I do not look forward to losing some of my most faithful members.

A lot has happened over 5+ years. We've studied thousands of verses of scripture, gathered at dozens of homes, held numerous baby and wedding showers, fed multitudes of sick people and new parents, done multiple mission projects, and even started a brand new downtown Bible Study for young people, called City Gate. I've been in a lot of Sunday School and small group classes, and this has been by far the most active and most mission-oriented. We've also formed bonds that I believe will last a lifetime, bonds that are stronger than just friendship; they are bonds forged by fire, strengthened by service, and bonded by the Gospel of Jesus. We are truly brothers and sisters, in a way I've not always been able to say about fellow church or Sunday School members.

The fact that I'm probably about to send some of my friends off into a new adventure of their own has gotten me thinking a lot about our class lately. I think I'm going to spend the next few days blogging about what it's been like, specifically what I think we've done well, and what I think we could have done better. Stay tuned.

Complementarianism or Chauvinism?

I've been thinking a lot over the last few days about the complementarianism; for those of you who don't know, it's basically the idea that men and women have specific, God-designed, complementary, gender roles in their marriages and in the church. Some will even take it as far as to say those roles should carry over into every other aspect of life: work and politics being two specific examples. The two most obvious ways this plays itself out in Christian life is that only men are allowed to be pastors, and the man is considered the head of the household. Those are two controversial topics in and of themselves, to say the very least.

But I am a complementarian. I'm a converted one, but I am a complementarian. I grew up in denomination that ordained women, and didn't see a problem with it, and I never really thought much about gender roles in marriage growing up. I've become convinced, that in those two particular situations, the Bible does prescribe different gender roles. The most all-time most popular posts on my blog are about just these subjects.

Nevertheless, I'm very nervous about much of what I see in in the complementarian community. I think it's led to excesses that subjugate women in ways the Bible never said. The Internet Monk has recently spoke about this topic a bit; I've also been thinking about it for my own personal reasons, in my marriage, and with the pending birth of my first daughter.

Let me give you an example from my own life: A couple of years ago, our church did the "Every Man's Battle" study, a look at how to best avoid the temptation of lust. Though I didn't like everything about the study, I found it generally pretty helpful, and still use some of the techniques I learned from it in my daily life.

My problem came, not as a part of the study, but at the end of it, when we had a guest speaker come in to talk to us about lust. He's a guy that I won't name, because I know him, and respect him and his thoughts in some areas. But the theme of his talk, basically, seemed to be that we shouldn't lust after women because we were sinning against their fathers or their husbands.

Here was the argument: When you lust after a woman, because they are under that authority of a man, then you primarily sin against that man. If that woman is married, you've sinned against her husband. If she is not married, you've sinned against her father. If she has neither father nor husband, then you've sinned against the church, who is the primary authority over her in the absence of the other two, according to this line of thinking.

Now, I just don't see the Biblical warrant for that. I think it's stretching the text, at best. And it does the very thing that critics of complementarianism say they do; subjugate women to a role of lesser person. Is a sin against a man greater than that against a woman? I think I can answer that with an unreserved no. The whole idea strikes of chauvinism disguised as complementarianism. I don't want to judge any one's heart, but that's the way this kind of think will certainly be perceived.

The complementarian position is supposed to be one that says men and women are equal but different. Any complementarian position that does not completely affirm the equality of women in the eyes of God is just plain wrong. Those who advocated complementarianism are going to get lots of slings and arrows anyway. We need to be more careful.

Letter to the Rural Church

I grew up in a small, rural church, in tiny Sebastopol, Mississippi. Sebastopol is tiny town, and Steam Mill Cumberland Presbyterian Church was small even for Sebastopol standards. We ran 50 on a good Sunday when I was growing up. But I cut my teeth on the Word there, heard the gospel preached faithfully there, and gave my life to Christ there. My grandfather ministered there in good times and bad, persevering to the end, for almost 40 years, and I believe his will be among the largest crowns given out in Heaven. There is much to love about small rural churches like that, and I do love them.

But there is also much that needs to change. The church I grew up in does church almost exactly the same as it's done it since I was a kid. I went there one Sunday, realized they'd added a fourth song to the musical worship, and almost had a heart attack. That's how married to their traditions they are.

Nevertheless, I love the small church, even though I no longer attend one. That's why this letter I just read really jumped out at me. It's called Letter to the Rural Church, and it's patterned by Jesus' letters to the seven churches in Revelation. It's from the web site Building Church Leaders. I found the text of the letter at Les Puryear's blog, Joining God in His Work. Here it is:

TO THE RURAL CHURCH

I know where you live: in a nation ruled by the god of Business, where those who do not have the power to buy are shunted aside. The old and the very young are ignored. The few (who do not make up a critical mass, a niche market, a group worthy of attention) are dismissed.

Instead of a business, you rural churches have been a faithful family. You have refused to be professionalized; you have rejected the model of corporate effectiveness. Like me, you have chosen to be inefficient. You have lavished love and energy on the old and sick, on the isolated, on the very young. You have patiently waited decades for fruit. You ministers who spend your lives in the service of a congregation of 30, you teachers who pour out your souls for a Bible class of 5: you have understood what it means to be children of the Father and brothers and sisters of the Son.

You have also rejected those who claim to act in my name: those church-planting experts who advise that my people "target" only densely populated areas so that the largest number of people can be efficiently herded into the kingdom; the denominational leaders who have seen you as a useful training ground for inexperienced pastors who will soon move on to "better pulpits" in more worthy (and populated) places. You have endured this, and remained strong, and understood the truth: that size and efficiency are important only in the economy of hell.

Remember that 20 years spent in the service of a handful of faithful believers are as priceless to me as 20 years spent calling crowds to repentance. I will be with you in your long, quiet march toward the coming of the kingdom.

But I also have something against you. Like a family, you make judgments that stand forever. Just as the child who once stole is forever branded a thief by his family, so the poor and sick and despairing have been judged shiftless, no-account, congenitally drunk. You have been unwilling to admit that my light brings change. You give food to the food pantry, but in your hearts you believe that hunger and poverty happen only to the unworthy. In my eyes, you too were naked and hungry and filthy. But you have forgotten the grace you have received, and you have chalked up your relative comfort to hard work and sterling moral character.

And you have built again the walls that I once tore down. White and black and Native American, you have settled into your different rooms, content that you all live within my house. Rarely are the doors between those rooms opened; never have you mingled freely in my name. You white churches would not drive away a black worshiper from your doors, but you keep yourselves separate nonetheless; you make no effort to eat with and play with and babysit for and enjoy the fellowship of your black siblings. And you churches of color, who call my white children colorless, passionless, oppressive, cold: I call you also to repent, to put aside your resentments, both past and present. Remember that I also was beaten. And yet I forgave and gave life to those who did evil. I brought together the Jews and Greeks in uncomfortable union: they fought, and shed tears and blood, but when I looked at them I saw only my followers. I wish that the same were true of you.