We Are the Body of Christ, Part III

We Are Evangelical. A sermon preached May 11, 2003.

by The Rev. David R. Harper

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We Are Evangelical

I want to move on today to tell you another story. Last week you heard about my visit to St. Paul’s, Symonds Street, when I was in seminary. But before that I was at Christchurch College, and some of my friends there were students in the engineering school. What attracted me to them was that they had a different vocabulary from mine for talking about their faith. I am sure they wondered whether I was a true believer! These friends of mine were absolutely insistent that you need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and that you need to be born again by receiving him as Lord and Savior of your life. When I heard this strong articulation, I began to wonder whether I’d really taken those steps.

These were men absolutely passionate about the word of God. If they didn’t know Paul’s epistles by heart, they had certainly memorized large portions of them. They were totally steeped in the tradition of scripture. I was attracted by their fervor and zeal. Many of them had aspirations toward missionary service. Some of them went on to seminary and became clergy, as I was to do myself.

But what I’m describing to you are certain aspects of a second part of our family identity, the evangelical stream. We are not just catholic, in the way that I articulated that last Sunday: we are also evangelical. Today I want to explore what that means.

Last week I quoted I John, chapter 5:7-8, where John speaks about these three streams that I’m expounding in these sermons. He writes: “There are three that testify, the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, and the three are in agreement.”

The metaphor for the evangelical stream is water, since Jesus spoke about water as being the word which makes us clean. The evangelical stream is steeped in the whole notion of the importance of the word of God.

There are four unique dimensions to our faith to which the evangelical stream testifies. They are critical to our understanding of what it means to be one family in Christ.

The first testimony of the evangelical stream is the primacy of the word. The word is the absolute and ultimate authority. There is absolutely nothing that stands above it. In the thirty-nine articles of faith, which were developed by Thomas Cranmer in the sixteenth century, Article 6 addresses the primacy of scripture: “Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation. So that whatever is not read in it, nor may be proved by it, is not to be required of anyone that it should be believed as an article of the faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” That is our Anglican stand.

The Bible contains everything that we need to know in order to be saved; anything that can’t be proved from scripture is unnecessary for us. It’s that clear within the tradition of this Anglican Church of which we are a part. As a matter of fact, our evangelical tradition is so clear on this point that it says that the word of God eclipses even counsels of the church. Since even leaders can be wrong, the word must hold them accountable. Article 21 of our 39 articles says: “And when general counsels be gathered together, for as much as they be an assembly of men, whereof not all be governed with the spirit and word of God, they may err and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God, wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy scripture.”

In the Roman Catholic tradition, by contrast, they have what is called the Solemn Magisterium. It is headed by an infallible Pope, and by gatherings of cardinals and theologians. These leaders articulate what the church believes, and have the final word. Not so in the evangelical tradition.

Our Anglican tradition is rooted deeply in evangelicalism. The word is primary, and nothing eclipses it. Because of that, the word of God is central to everything: our understanding of renewal, and all that we seek to do together as the body of Christ.

Dr. Visser ’t Hooft says: “There have been many who have sought the renewal of the church by breaking away from the Bible or by adding to and improving upon the Bible, but we must maintain this simple truth that outside the word of God there is in this world no true source of renewal. Why is this so? Because the Bible is the authentic record of the only new event that has ever taken place in the world, which is the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The Word stands above the gifts of the Spirit, such as prophecy. In the book of Revelation, chapter two, verse 20, Jesus says to the church, “You tolerate Jezebel who calls herself a prophetess.” Jezebel was uttering words she said were from God, but they were not rooted in the Bible; in fact Jesus says they were in conflict with the clear teaching of scripture: “By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of foods sacrificed to idols.” Here was a church elevating prophecy, but not rooting it in the word of God. What Jesus is saying is that prophecy is dangerous unless it is absolutely rooted in the clear revelation of scripture.

The word of God stands over and judges moves of God. Think of the story in Acts 11 where the apostle Peter has gone up to Caesarea to the house of Cornelius. As he is preaching in this gentile home, which as a Jewish person he shouldn’t even have entered, the Spirit of God falls on those people, and Peter baptizes them.

He’s way out of line with what the other believers thought was appropriate. He goes back to Jerusalem, and he’s really in trouble with the leadership establishment there. They give him a real dressing down over it. In response, Peter gives a very rational explanation of what happened. He doesn’t just appeal to the fact that this was of God, and so there was no need to search scripture to justify and help understand it. He gives a rational explanation of what happened. When we say the word is primary, we are lifting up our ability to reason. We don’t just need to appeal to inspiration—things which may not be able to be understood cognitively nor rationally. The appeal to scripture is an appeal to reason.

As we read further in chapter 11, Peter takes the Jerusalem leadership to scripture. “This happened at Caesarea,” he implied, “because I see the antecedents of it in the word of God.” He took them to the words of John the Baptist: “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized the Holy Spirit.” It was at that point that they began to embrace what he was saying: “[They] praised God, saying, ‘So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.” But there needed to be an appeal to scripture before they were convinced.

The word of God stands above moves of God, but also above manifestations of the Spirit. The Toronto Airport Vineyard church was eventually disassociated from the Association of Vineyard Churches because they regarded manifestations as being above the word of God. They felt no need to appeal to scripture to understand what was happening. They were just enjoying the phenomena. John Wimber and the Association of Vineyard churches told them: that is not good enough. You have departed from scripture, even if you teach it. It is no longer in the place of primacy in which the evangelical stream insists that it remain.

The second witness of the evangelical stream is personal commitment to Christ. Those friends of mine in college were insistent: “David, you need a personal relationship with Jesus.” It irritated me at times! Yet the spark that lit the Reformation, the spark that ignited this explosion in Europe, was Luther’s discovery that he was justified by grace through faith; that God’s righteousness and God’s justice were satisfied through the sacrifice of his Son. He realized that everything that needed to be done for him to be in the right relationship with God had been accomplished through the cross.

He discovered that it wasn’t his self-effort, not trying to be a faithful priest, not trying to live a good life, that would do it. He had been tormented by that until he discovered in Galatians what Christ had done for him.

The evangelical stream begins with the cross. It sees the cross as the dividing line of history. That is where we need to come to be born again, to have our sins forgiven, to be made new, to be born into a new and living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Until we do that, we cannot be right with God. We must appropriate what Jesus has done, not just appreciate it. We appropriate it by repenting of our sins, by acknowledging that what Jesus has done for us is something that we desperately need. And we receive his gift of forgiveness and life.

The evangelical stream insists that there be a decisive moment of turning, a decision that we need to make. We don’t initiate the decision; God initiates that work of grace—but he leaves it to us to make the decision to receive it so that we can be reconciled with God. Nothing less than, and nothing apart from that, will do.

Believing in God, having some notion that there is a being above what we can see and understand in this world, isn’t good enough either. The word became flesh, his name is Jesus, and we need to do business with him. We need to be born again into that new and living hope that I mentioned a moment ago. We cannot substitute works. We cannot substitute a life that we think is probably acceptable to him. The cross means realizing that everything in our life is foolish and futile, broken and empty, and that only Jesus can heal and restore.

The evangelical stream is very individually focused in that sense, because it begins with that decisive intensely personal moment of turning. And consequently it’s not very high on hierarchy. The word is the hierarchical appeal of this tradition. The evangelical stream prefers the priesthood of all believers to those who are in places of hierarchical authority. The priesthood of all believers is where the evangelical stream calls us, because when we’re born again we are empowered by Christ to serve as his faithful people.

The third unique testimony of the evangelical stream is the emphasis on teaching the gospel. Evangelical comes the Greek word “euangelion,” which means gospel, or good news. Born-again evangelicals know more than anyone else the good news, because they know where they were before they met the Lord Jesus.

The good news of being born again is so extraordinarily powerful, that in this tradition believers say, I have no choice but to share the love of God that’s been made known to me through Jesus Christ. Let me join together two verses of Paul, one from Romans 1, and the other from I Corinthians 9: “I’m not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes... yet when I preach the gospel I cannot boast, for I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.”

In the evangelical stream, preaching the gospel is not an option! Since we are members of the priesthood of all believers, all of us are preachers. All of us are those who have been called to witness to the good news and to share that with others around us. “Woe to me if I don’t preach the gospel.”

Preaching is not an optional extra! In other words, normal Christianity is not defined by living a private life with Jesus as my Lord and Savior. It is a public life, because it takes me out to share that good news with other people. Woe to me if I don’t do that. Woe to me if I’m disobedient and simply hoard for myself the riches that Christ has put into my life.

Think of the great Wesleyan revival, called The Great Awakening, which was going on in England, and also here, in the 18th century. At the end of that century, in 1799, the Church Missionary Society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel were formed. They flung the gospel into the darkest corners of the earth, in those days called heathen countries, to bring the light of Christ. Men and women went out on one-way trips to Africa, taking a coffin in their baggage because they realized they probably would never return because of disease and sickness.

People from privileged backgrounds understood that proclaiming the gospel is such an awesome privilege, as well as a responsibility, that it was worth laying down their lives to share Jesus. There’s no cost too great, because he paid the ultimate price for me by his death on the cross.

Some of those friends of mine at Christchurch College, are now serving as missionaries, one of them Henry Paltridge, who was a graduate student in engineering back in those days, is now a bishop in Uganda. He could have been a successful engineer back in New Zealand, but he preferred to be a successful bishop in Uganda.

My evangelical friends would invite me to what were called “House Parties,” which were run by the Church Missionary Society. In those House Parties, which took place over an entire weekend, there was relationship building, there was worship where we sang the great evangelical hymns, there was Bible teaching—and there was prayer for missionaries, and testimony from those who had come back. Those were exhilarating times.

The great danger in the evangelical stream is that we become complacent, something that actually happened after the Reformation. People became proud of their repentance, proud of their relationship with Jesus, and they lost their passion for the lost and their zeal for the gospel.

I was stunned a few years ago, when I was in parish ministry in New Zealand, with something that happened when I was teaching our home group pastors how to do Bible study. I was showing them how to dramatize scripture within a small group, and the passage that I chose was Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats.

We had about thirty people in this training session. I divided them into different groups, each representing one of the three characters of the story. One group were to be the sheep, another the goats, and the third Jesus, the Son of Man. Each group went off to study the passage, and figure out how they wanted to act out their assigned role.

They came back together after about twenty minutes, and began to act the story. The group representing Jesus stood up and said, “I want the sheep over here on my right, and the goats on my left.” Then they dramatized the rest of the story.

When they got towards the end, they had become totally immersed in the drama. To my utter astonishment, when the sheep saw that the goats were being condemned to hell, they began crying. One after the other, they walked over to the goats and asked, “Can we take your place? We can’t bear that you should be lost.”

God brought that group into a profound understanding of what it feels like to be lost—but also what it feels like for those who are not lost to reach out to them.

Here’s the final testimony of the evangelical tradition: Practical Action. This is something that the catholic stream does quite well too—but the emphasis is different. Let me simply say that for evangelicals, practical action is not any more optional than preaching the gospel. It’s integral with the gospel. The gospel must be dramatized and not just verbally preached.

In those evangelical circles, I would often hear them quote: “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven.”

I look back at the history of the evangelical tradition in the church. Neal preached recently about William Wilberforce, a member of the Clapham Sect. It was a group of evangelical men in England who were steeped in the understanding of the great awakening, and fired by the idea that this gospel has got to bring justice and peace to this earth through practical action.

Men like William Wilberforce came from the very privileged classes of English society. They risked their reputations and put their lives on the line because they understood that this evangelical gospel demanded that they serve the Lord in practical ways. The history of the missionary movement of the church reveals that where missionaries haven’t gone out only as pastors and evangelists, or even church planters. They have also gone out as missionary doctors and nurses, and educators. They have gone out to help the development of developing countries as agriculturalists, and social workers, and economists. They go out to preach the gospel by serving.

There’s a wonderful hospital in Peshawar, in Pakistan, right on the border with Afghanistan and in the heart of the Muslim world. They don’t often preach to the Muslims specifically about Jesus, because that will turn those people off. They preach by practical love, by showing a deep respect for the people that come in that they haven’t experienced before. Many patients at that hospital have found the Lord Jesus Christ.

Evangelicals realize that the preaching of the gospel is often best proclaimed by the practical ways in which we let our light shine before men, so that they may see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven. Their works are not self-consciously pointing to their own goodness, but to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who loved the world so much that he sent Him. And through those good works we bring people to the cross, which is the evangelical’s starting point, so that they can come into a saving knowledge of Jesus.

This evangelical tradition is so immensely powerful for us. We dare not lose these precious truths, these unique testimonies to the gospel. Let me end by quoting one of the greatest evangelicals, Martin Luther. He is speaking here about practical works, practical action. I’ve modernized the language a little bit: “Oh this faith is a living, busy, active powerful thing. It is impossible that it should not be ceaselessly doing that which is good. It doesn’t even ask whether good works should be done, but before the question can be asked, it has done them, and is constantly engaged in doing them. But he who does not do such works, is a man without faith. He gropes and casts about him to find faith and good works, not knowing what either of them is, and yet prattles and oddly multiplies words about faith and good works.”

My friends, the Word has primacy at Church of the Apostles. Because we are a three-streams church, we are catholic, we are evangelical, and we are Pentecostal. (We have that to come.)

We call all of our people, and hold ourselves as clergy and leadership, to a personal relationship with Jesus that comes out of a personal commitment to him. We are committed, not just to enjoying the preaching of the message in this building, but as the priesthood of all believers to fling it out, and to live it out, through the words that we speak and through the practical actions that he inspires us to do.