The Base of Operations

You’ve heard me refer to the church as ‘the covenant community’ if you’ve come to church more than a few times. What does this mean? Understanding this sort of community is crucial to us winning the war for our marriages.

There are different sorts of community. And when we hear that oh so common call for ‘authentic community’ from our postmodern and emerging neighbors we really need to ask, “What exactly do you mean?” Now, this sort of analytical question tends to stir up deconstructionist ire, but that’s the fun part. If by ‘authentic community’ we mean, ‘hanging out at Starbucks with a WOW worship playlist on your iPod and a George Barna book study with a couple of your friends and a token pagan’, then this is not biblical ‘covenant community’. If by ‘authentic community’ we mean, ‘doing life together and experiencing a common journey by sharing our hurts and longings in a safe place of acceptance and non-judgmentalism’, then this is not biblical ‘covenant community’.

Huh?! So, can we not meet at Starbucks? What’s wrong with iPod worship? Surely you’re not against sharing hurts and ‘doing’ life together? Are we not on a journey? Are we supposed to be judgmental? What are you saying?

These things are all various components of community that are important in a given context, and have some biblical validity in their place. It is what is missing in these paradigms of community that make them biblically inauthentic, however culturally relevant and ‘authentic’ they may be on the surface. Until we place ourselves within a ‘covenant community’ context, our fight for the survival of our marriages and families is so much spittin’ in the wind.

A ‘covenant community’ is a community that is gathered under the covenant love of God, sealed by the blood of His Son, and ordered and surrendered under the Word of God. In their children’s catechism our kids are taught that a covenant is ‘a relationship that God sets up with us and guarantees by His Word’. O. Palmer Robertson calls a covenant: a bond in blood sovereignly administered. In his instructions to his disciples at the last supper, Jesus called us together into a ‘new covenant’ relationship through his own blood. Our bond together is through the blood of Jesus, and it is a bond that is initiated, ordered, and governed by God in His Word. We are a community on the basis of the work of Christ, appropriated by faith. So, we say with the Reformers that there are two basic marks of the covenant community:

1) the preaching of the Word and fundamental submission to its authority [established by God through his sovereign will and under His Word]; and

2) the right administration and observance of the sacraments or ordinances of the Lord’s Supper [a relationship with vows and obligations, commitments and duties- always initiated, sustained, and even superintended by God’s grace in Christ]. In this second mark there is a third dynamic that must be present in biblically authentic communities - the practice of church discipline (which is bound up in the admission of members to the Lord’s Table through repentance and faith).

For us to relate properly to one another in the bond of unity and faith, we must do so in the context of a healthy covenant community. If we are to champion each other’s marriages, w must do so in the biblical framework God has supplied. Sadly, many believers have abandoned such communities outright, or they essentially abandon the church by their lack of commitment and involvement. Adding to the problem, many churches have abandoned their calling to preach the Word faithfully and call their people to submission to God. Many pastors and elders/leaders have given themselves over to worldly paradigms for community and fail to meet the basic qualifications and duties laid out for them in the Scriptures. The church is to establish and pursue a repentant and believing community by calling people to examination of their hearts as they come to the table, and a profession of faith and the bearing of fruit in keeping with repentance as people come to the waters of baptism. There must be a bold and unwavering resolve on the part of God’s people and godly leadership to confront sin and call for holiness, and deal with hard hearts in keeping with Jesus’ process for reconciliation and discipline.
Building a healthy program for ‘church life’ is a commitment to at least four things in my understanding:

1. An ongoing celebration of the blessings and faithfulness of God to us in the covenant (ongoing celebration of the gospel)- through worship, fellowship, evangelism, and enjoying the blessings of life with God’s people.

2. Living in the God-ordained contexts for growth, relationships, and accountability (in our church this means engaging one another in our fellowship group model that is under the pastoral leadership of the elders).

3. Embracing the authority, judgments, and counsel of God-ordained leadership (alongside a commitment of godly leadership to exercise biblical authority, judgment, and wise counsel).

4. An ongoing, grace-saturated pursuit of repentance and reconciliation according to Matthew 18:15-18.

The covenant community and these four dimensions of commitment and involvement become the ‘base of operations’ for believers as we wage war against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Are you availing yourself of this covenant ammunition as you fight for your brothers and sisters, your wife and kids, and for the hope of the gospel?

Winning the War

I think the most important key to understanding and applying what Paul says about marriage, divorce, and remarriage is recognizing that we are at war. By the way most believers live there does not seem to be any sense of urgency in the face of the bombs falling all around us. The Apostle Peter says that the devil is most assuredly on the attack, and being the lion that he is, he likes to ‘prowl’ before he ‘howls’. This means that once the roar is heard, it might be too late. He masquerades as a ‘minister of light’ but is no doubt a master of war. He has a way of wheedling his way behind the lines and getting the knife in before the benign smile fades from our countenance. Satan seems to be zeroing in upon three fronts of battle, and we would do well to take a look at them in more detail.

Fighting Worldliness and Moral Chaos

Our enemy is the ‘prince of the power of the air, the spirit who is now at work in the sons of disobedience’. He is able to incite chaos, moral disarray, perversion, and outright anarchy in the world and in the hearts of men. And this is most assuredly the case in our culture. We live in a nation that debates the virtue of sodomy and the validity of homosexual relationships (even in our ‘evangelical’ subculture). We live in a culture that debates the legality of the dismemberment of newborn children. We live in a culture that blithely accepts the of naïve demands of egalitarian feminism in almost every quarter. We have a 50% divorce rate, an absolute crisis of marriage and parenting within certain minority communities, a plague of sexually transmitted diseases, an army of disaffected and morally indifferent males who are the product of thirty years of a failed gender feminist experiment, and a pathetically neutered church that that seems only able to stare blankly into the abyss. Am I painting too bleak a picture? I didn’t even mention David Hasselhof and America’s Got Talent, which bears all the marks of a Satanic attack upon good taste, and is, no doubt, a sign of the apocalypse.

Fighting a Narrow and Graceless Legalism

As we fight the war, we must pour resources into the attack on sound judgment, wise application, and discernment. The twin enemies of the gospel are crass libertinism and narrow legalism. In each ditch there is a profound inability to exercise ‘spiritual insight’ and instead opt for either a kneejerk dismissal of truth, or a quick tempered judgment that is founded more in a reaction to sin than in a spirit filled response towards godliness. Legalism circumvents discernment, fences Torah, goes God one better, and makes it easier for the lemmings to limp along toward the edge without having to think all that much. Biblical discernment and leadership is hard work. It’s hard work because it takes energy not only of the will but also of the mind and heart. It will not do to quote Malachi 2:16 in the face of a culture of divorce with a sense of righteous indignation and be done with the matter. If we are going to win the war on marriage, we must ready ourselves to dig into the whole counsel of God’s Word and apply it with wisdom in a variety of contexts and crises. This must be done with great discernment, hearts filled with grace, and a steely resolve. We need to fight the battle with the artillery of God’s Word and not with the pea shooters of our narrow legalistic judgments or the suicide bombs of libertinism hung about our necks.

Fighting a Passive and Professional Framework for Community

Let’s face it, when it comes to facing the fiery tribulations of life, do any of us want that guy from 7th Heaven giving us counsel? Pastors have become, for the most part, a merry band of invertebrates who have succumbed to the demands of the board, the latest poll in the pew, or the oh so eager desire for next month’s paycheck. As an old seminary prof of mine liked to say, “make your living from your faith and you’re going to lose one or the other”. Yes, there are godly and faithful pastors who are committed to shepherding the flock come hell or high water. But in my limited evaluation of the landscape of the American church that these men are relatively few and far between. If you have ever been on a pulpit search committee, I’m fairly certain that you’d agree with me. There are hundreds of churches, hundreds, here in Tallahassee. That means there are hundreds of pastors. And I know for a fact that many of them are fundamentally passive when it comes to preaching the hard passages (or in preaching any passages), confronting sin, standing for truth, and involving themselves in the crises and struggles that plague our people. Most of them, more than you want to know, just got finished surfing the net looking for the latest downloadable sermon series fashioned after some inane TV show. ( I would like to see a sermon series drawn from the Sopranos, though I’m fairly certain that our benign evangelical sensitivities couldn’t bear it.)

Adding to this quiet passivity, there is the devastating professionalizing of the pulpit. Mounting pressure to build bigger churches, perfect a public persona, and maintain peace in the pew at all costs squeezes the life out of the pastorate. In the face of such pressure, along with the natural, fleshly desires for reputation and power, many pastors simply do not have the time, energy, or conviction to involve themselves in people’s lives or engage them with the word each week. And the fault here lies as much with us as people as it does with our priests. We get the leaders we deserve, folks (don’t roll your eyes at me, Oakster, you got just what you deserve!). When churches become the halls of pristine, and world-savvy professionalism there is little room for the messy work of confrontation, confession, repentance, and redemption. There is room for slick, well-marketed divorce recovery workshops hitting a distinct ‘felt need’ in our culture, but not much room for painstaking formative and punitive discipline which deals with the fundamental ‘sin-need’ in our hearts and lives.

Are you aware of the war being waged on your marriage and family? Are you armed with every piece of armor available to do battle? Are you shoring up your defenses on the three fronts of attack? Let’s fight the worldly assault holiness, godliness, and gracious gift of the Spirit’s power. Let’s arm ourselves with life giving truth and not narrow legalism. Let’s refuse passive professionalism in our church families and engage one another with God’s Word, and call our leadership to a higher, biblical standard of living, loving, and shepherding. Let’s commit our fight to the sovereign Lord, who has already won the battle and has known and designed the end from the beginning for His own glory and our good.

Another Reason NOT to Get Divorced

There is a great word that is scattered throughout the New Testament: hupomone.

It means 'patient endurance'. Plato asked, "In what does courage consist? It is a certain endurance of the soul." For the Greek this was a sort of stoic virtue, a manly bearing up of one's resolve to face trials and struggle for the sake of some greater, more noble ideal. Aristotle said, "one endures despite the fear that one feels...for the beauty of the deed" [from Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, pp. 414-415].

The New Testament writers use this word to describe the fortitude of a soul firmly grounded in the life of Christ and the power of God. We 'endure patiently' becuase of our great hope in Christ, because of the surity of his promises, and his faithful Word. Consider the Apostle Paul's wonderful exposition of the effects of justification by faith alone in the life of the believer:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. - Romans 5:1-4

We have been made righteous through faith- we have peace with God through Christ- we stand in grace. These realities give us more than just some stoic resolve when things aren't as we would have them. The Word says they give us joy in hope. These realities give us joy even, especially in, sufferings. The cross of Christ brought us the joy of our salvation. The crosses we face daily are part of a great work of God through us. Our struggles provide for us an opportunity to hold forth the deep truths of our faith to a lost and unbelieving world. And, we believe that these struggles produce wonderful fruit by the Spirit of God in our lives.

So, patient endurance is generally seen and understood as good and right in a secular context.
And for those of us who have put our trust in God and have been transformed by the work of Christ, we know that patient endurance is part of a wonderful providence of our Father to mold and shape us into the image of His Son, who endured the cross for the joy set before him.

Consider this quote from a great site -- www.divorcereform.org

Cited in a posting from Smart Marriages Listserv Feb 28, 2005."For most people, marital unhappiness [in marriage] was not permanent," says University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, Ph.D.Recent findings indicate that two-thirds of all unhappy marriages are repaired within five years. Dr. Waite's study also showed that only 19 percent of all divorced subjects were happily remarried.

"When researchers examined data from the late 1980s on 5,232 married adults, they found that 645 subjects reported marital dissatisfaction. When the unhappy spouses were surveyed five years later, those who had remained married were more likely than divorced subjects to state that they were happy. In fact, the most miserable marriages had the most dramatic turnarounds: 78 percent of people who stayed in "very unhappy" marriages said that the marriages were currently happy. " [Kary, T. (2002) Don't Divorce, Be Happy. Psychology Today, v35 i6 p26(1). Retrieved June 9, 2004 from Expanded Academic ASAP.]

For so many, the great area of conflict and pain in their lives is in their marriage. They are dissolusioned, hurt, angry, or just plain bored. The deception of the world, the flesh, and the devil is that there is greener grass over there somewhere. Another relationship, another person, a new start, a different locale would make you happy. But these things will not change the sin of your own heart that is the root of your unhappiness and discontent. Patience in marriage pays off no matter who you are because it is an institution made by God for our good and it reveals his Trinitarian glory. But, for believers, it is a wonderful arena to display God's grace, his redeeming love, and find his promises true. The grace, love, and faithfulness of God is found and held forth as we patiently endure.

Are you unhappy in your marriage? Trust God and patiently endure. This is not some human centered stoicism. It is a trust in a sovereign grace working good in all things to the glory of God.