Preservation of the Truth

Well good evening everyone,
thank you for being here.
Would you help me thank the
folks who brought dinner this evening.
It looks like I think pretty good through
next week though the sign-up is there again if you if you’d like to do that
and take advantage of that.
I think I don’t know I’d say good news.
I won’t be good news for you is that Michael gets to teach and that will be well done of
course so we will miss you.
I noticed two of my favorite soups are happening next
week so if you think about it a little to-go cups in the refrigerator would be appreciated.
Tonight we move on to the next great end of the church,
the preservation of the truth which is a mouthful and I think in some ways this
may be the most difficult of the great ends to deal with.
Preservation is maybe not the best word and we’ll discuss that later.
It essentially means keeping or maintaining.
Truth is a fairly straightforward word for something to be
true means it’s credible,
it’s factual, it’s tested.
Biblically the word means uncovered or revealed.
The Greek word for truth is literally the the a or the
a which negates a word and it means hidden so literally it means not hidden or obvious, unconcealed.
Interestingly enough it is the smallest word in the
phrase that causes the most issues,
the truth.
Preservation of truth would be okay.
Preservation of the truth has caused some problems and that’s a fairly recent
development.
We live in an era that some people call postmodernism meaning after modernism.
I struggle with that a little bit because it always seems to me kind
of arrogant to name an era that you’re in.
I think naming probably belongs to
the people who come later but there are lots of opinions about what postmodernism
means and what it doesn’t mean but one of the more agreed upon probably one of
the consensus items of postmodernism is what’s called a denial or the breakdown
of the and I’m sorry to use this language jargon but meta narrative.
In other words the big story.
The idea is that we live in an era where truth is
considered to be personal truth.
So there’s no connecting story that’s true for everyone.
There’s not a meta narrative that overarches everybody.
It’s just my truth.
It’s the micro narrative,
my own story.
So truth is considered personal and not universal.
It’s true for me.
It may not be true for
you and our culture struggles with the idea of something that is universally true.
Read an article recently that said they’re really in our in our day four sources of authority,
science,
cultural norms,
subjective feelings,
and revelation or discovered truth, revealed truth.
This is the main way we talk about Christian
truth as revealed truth but really of those four science, cultural norms,
subjective feelings, and revelation three I would say in postmodernism are in
decline and personal subjective feelings is on the rise.
That is in some ways the
majority of the conversation when we discuss truth.
It reigns supreme.
When I served in Texas had a very memorable conversation.
The young woman had been
visiting our church and this was 20 years ago.
She’d been visiting the congregation.
She came in to talk more.
She was a single mom,
had a son, and wanted to explore getting him baptized.
So we talked for a while about where she
was at and her beliefs and she said well I’m a Christian.
I’m also a Wiccan.
Anybody know about Wiccans?
So Wiccans are kind of Celtic witchcraft not in the
big pointy hat and pointed nose kind of thing riding a broom but like earth
reservation saying both of those things are true for me.
I’m a follower of Jesus
and I’m a witch.
And by the way the third one,
so those two were surprising.
The third one was even more surprising.
She said I’m also a hardcore Republican and
trying to get those three things on the same plate was for me really
difficult and so we talked for a moment.
I said well why you know what are you thinking?
What having your boy baptized I mean are you and she said well I just
think community is important.
I think it’s important that he belongs somewhere.
So for her the idea of baptism wasn’t really an extension of what was true.
It was a thing that would help his story,
help his narrative and as strange as it
sounds we live in this area era where I think people are more and more
comfortable holding truths together for themselves that have typically not gone together.
So people could say I’m a Christian Buddhist.
Well
historically that doesn’t work.
I’m a Presbyterian Baptist.
Historically no you’re not.
But we see this all the time.
My personal truth is the truth and society is
less and less convinced that there’s anything that’s true for everyone.
When I was in seminary I did an internship year I came back and so I sat in with
students who were largely the class behind me some of whom I hadn’t known
because I had been on the the intern year and we were in a preaching class
and and by then I began to get some sense of of the difficulty of preaching.
I’d had an opportunity to preach during the internship.
I worked with a good
preacher who I think helped me a lot
but some of what I did was just experience
the reality of sitting in a congregation.
So in other words I had kind of learned
that when you step up to the pulpit you know
there’s the couple whose son is sick,
there’s the woman who just found out she had cancer,
there’s the woman whose
family’s home for the weekend and everybody’s happy,
there’s the people who are struggling with their young child,
and the idea that you could
put faces on some of these things that were happening in the congregation and
the struggle to work on a sermon and think what word could I possibly offer
that would be true for them?
That what could you possibly say that would have
something to offer those various people?
I think it was Emily Dickinson one time
who said what can you preach that wouldn’t enrage hearers with its
triviality?
In other words how do you find a word that speaks to these people
in all these various differences,
different situations in life?
And and I was having that conversation with with the graduate assistant who helped with
the preaching class and she said well what if you don’t accept anything as
universally true?
What if I think there’s nothing that’s universally true?
And and
the question the thing I remember thinking is
well then what do you preach?
Because if all I have to preach is my my micro story, my personal truth,
I don’t have much to offer you.
That’s pretty thin.
So the bold claim of the church is
that anything is really true for everyone.
That there is something that is universally true.
This thing that we are preserving is true for everyone.
It is a challenging time to preserve the truth.
Lots of conversation about truth not a
lot of acceptance of the truth,
the idea of truth.
So first of all we have to
consider what is it that we’re preserving?
When we say the truth what do we mean?
And when Christians use the word truth we often get this confused
because we ultimately are not talking about a proposition,
a doctrine,
or an idea.
We mean Jesus.
When we say we are seeking to preserve the truth we mean
exclusively the person of Jesus.
Not things about Jesus but Jesus Himself.
For Christians the truth is a person.
Jesus Christ is the truth,
the fulfillment and embodiment of what is true not just because we say so but because He is.
In other words not just for me.
Jesus isn’t just true for Clint the Presbyterian in Iowa.
Jesus is true and our job is to try and uncover the ways in which Jesus is true.
And this matters because so often when Christians argue with people
we argue over propositions and we think of keeping truth as fighting about
doctrines and convincing people of ideas and proving that our way of thinking is
the right way of thinking but reality the task of the church is only the
extension of keeping the truth of Christ.
It is a person that we present
to the world.
It is not an idea.
It is not a doctrine that we have to offer.
The gospel is not about a doctrine but about the person of Jesus Christ.
When we talk truth in church we have to mean Jesus first.
So when we argue about things like
is the Bible true?
Is it factual?
Is there science in it?
That’s not unimportant but it’s secondary and I would say vastly secondary and so often
we let those kind of arguments become primary.
When somebody wants to argue
with us about whether the Bible is true Christians don’t need to be…
our task is not to prove to anyone the Bible is true.
Our task is to present the one who
is true Jesus Christ and let the Bible point to that truth.
The Bible is just a
sign just an arrow that points us toward real truth.
So when we say true we
shouldn’t mean true for me but we also shouldn’t mean doctrine.
Though we all should know Jesus personally and doctrine is good that’s not what we mean.
If you know and Michael will like this there’s this wonderful scene.
We argue about the gospel sometimes.
Michael is a big gospel of John fan and I have to admit
John has his moments and one of them one of them is Jesus is standing before
Pilate.
This is a crucifixion narrative and Pilate asks you know are you a king?
And Jesus says I came to testify to the truth and there’s this wonderful beautiful response.
Pilate says truth what is truth?
Question mark.
And then he tries to get
Jesus off the hook with the crowd but he can’t.
And what’s beautiful about that
scene is that Pilate knows political truth and Pilate knows the truth of
power but the great irony of that scene is the truth is literally standing
before him and he doesn’t know it.
He doesn’t get what is truth is really who
is truth and it’s one of John’s masterpieces.
He has a couple and I
say that’s one of them.
And that’s the truth that the church proclaims.
That’s the truth that we live under.
That’s the truth that we offer the world the one
who is the truth.
The one who is the way in the life.
Again doctrine matters but
doctrine is an extension of what is true about Jesus who is himself the truth and
ultimately that’s when we talk about preserving the truth which we will in a
minute that’s what we mean.
So let me stop there.
Comments, questions, observations.
No I don’t we didn’t.
As we talked she was going to find it
difficult to affirm the things that you need to affirm when you stand up and
present your child to be baptized.
Yeah no she didn’t.
So in the Reformed tradition one of the ways we’ve referred to scripture is the unique and
authoritative witness to Jesus Christ.
So we have proclaimed historically that
the most credible source we have to discover the truth of Christ is the scripture.
That it points us to truth.
It reveals truth to us in a way that nothing else does.
In a way that other books do.
I have a friend who
served as an associate pastor in a church where the pastor used for the
morning reading for their sermon Dr.
Seuss.
Can’t do it.
You cannot do it.
It’s stupid.
I mean you want to quote Dr.
Seuss in your sermon?
Great.
You cannot stand there and read from the pulpit Dr.
Seuss as if that’s God’s living word to you today.
Cannot do it.
Yeah you can’t.
You just can’t.
Sorry I have a little opinionated about that.
Yeah mind-boggling.
So we do say about the
scriptures Mike that that they are true in a way that we don’t talk about other
written materials but again it is not because it is not because they by
themselves stand alone but because they are the best witness to we have to what
God has done and to the the truth that is Christ.
Does that make sense?
No.
Okay you’re emphatic about saying well the scriptures are way secondary to the truth.
I don’t doubt that.
I mean I think you’re absolutely right on.
But how in absence of that?
I mean it has to testify to him.
Well and we don’t and I would say we don’t function in absence of the
scripture in no way shape or form are we in absence but.
That’s why the emphatic.
Yeah.
The scripture is so secondary.
I’m sorry if I if I gave that
impression then I was that’s that’s wrong.
That’s not that’s not at all.
I would say that the scripture is the best source of revelation that we have about Jesus who is the truth of all the ways we can uncover the truth of Christ.
Scripture is the best.
It’s the most reliable.
It is the most trusted.
It is revelation.
But what that means is and this is I think quite frankly where it gets difficult.
That.
Scripture is not the highest revelation we’ve been given by God Christ is.
And so when we use scripture when you hear someone use scripture to teach something that’s not in keeping with Christ.
Then it’s not that then it that’s a it’s a disservice.
It’s not it’s a so when when someone uses the scripture to teach hate and separation and judgment and whatever it is we have to be very cautious because.
Ultimately we say that that does not reflect the truth of the person of Christ who’s revealed in scripture.
Does that help.
So what’s Paul saying to us when he says no one no one has an excuse but a lot of folks didn’t have scripture and they didn’t know him and they didn’t know.
So what’s Paul saying to us when he says you therefore have no excuse because you judge others and you’re guilty of the sin.
Yeah. So I would argue that that comes to the point where Paul is trying to teach us our need for grace and particularly to a culture that trusted works righteousness if we could use that label broadly.
And the following of the law Paul is saying no you are just as guilty and he does it masterfully he says you know look at them they’re sinners they’re sinners and then he says now look at you you’re one too.
And you go oh thank God.
And and once he’s got us once he’s got us then he’s ready to say now let me tell you what it means that you’re all sinners all of you not just them but us.
Here’s why we need Christ.
So I yes and one of the one of the primary things I think that scripture does is its role is is it convicts us when we look at the scripture and we see Christ reflected in it.
We see how far we fall from that and it helps turn us back to our need.
To be filled yeah Jan.
Is the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the arbitrator of truth the advocate that the Holy Spirit I think is the mechanism I check me here Michael I would I think I could say the Holy Spirit is the mechanism by which the revelation happens.
In other words when truth is revealed to us that is the work of God’s spirit it’s not it’s not our ability to decode it it’s not it it is God at work through the spirit to uncover to to reveal.
Truth.
Because I think scripturally the highest truth is is not something we attain but something we discover something that is shown to us.
Is that fair.
Reverend Gwecky.
He thinks that has to be true because the Trinity is at one time three and one but also one.
Yeah Jesus is true.
Yeah and and what we said is there’s a congruence there’s an agreement that the spirit won’t tell us something that is not in keeping with Christ and and God won’t do something that is contrary to his nature yes absolutely there that there is unity in the three.
I always I went to the University of Texas for a couple of years and they always found it interesting that card you know foot highlighters and granite across the base of 1314 story graduate school library are these words you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.
So again I guess I mean it was a Christian part of the country so you know I guess he’s saying or I guess they’re saying that true knowledge true education is not going to fly in the face of God’s revelation either I’m not sure I go round and round on that one but I think it’s an interesting thing.
So I think Presbyterians have been strong in in that Phyllis my pastor in a very much simpler way used to say that Christians never need to be afraid of truth all truth is God’s truth so Christians need not fear discoveries about the world because those are simultaneously discoveries.
So so Presbyterians and science have not we generally been okay with now we may come from a different place but but a Presbyterian Christian is able to say I’m not afraid of scientific discovery because it teaches me something about the world God made and how and and how it works and so that there’s no and at our best I think we’ve not been to a fair
but I’m not afraid of of education yeah Michael maybe I think it’s congruent with what you’re saying but I think one way to conceive of the Holy Spirit in that relationship is instead of thinking of it as as the channel you think of it as as the presence so so Christian doctrine is that God lives in you so so the idea of revelation isn’t just revelation
outside of us it’s actually revelation also within us right that God exists and so therefore the point I’m trying to make is I think to assign any member of the Trinity that is to take away from the fact that God is active in different ways so so so Jesus is the representation of God and and and Jesus says if I’m the way the truth and the life right but but realistically
we believe that Christ lives in us by the power of the Spirit so therefore God’s revelatory work is not just outside of us it’s actually also within us yeah so so it’s to say that what Christ presents in us by the work of the Spirit is also revelatory which is another way of saying that this the Spirit is revelatory but I don’t you get the point attract instead of thinking of it mechanically which which gives the idea of like a like a connector
it’s it’s it’s more it’s more atmospheric that’s not helpful well I think I mean I’m tell me if I’m off track here but I I think the idea is whatever whatever if we could talk about the Trinity as individuals whatever one does all do and so if I understand you correctly I I think I would agree a hundred percent that
what the Spirit does in us is the work of Christ in us and vice versa and so when we for instance when we read scripture
or when we hear sermon or when we worship and something happens in us that that is simultaneously a discovery of Christ and an uncovering by the work of the Spirit.
To help us point to Christ is that fair yeah I think maybe more so six hundred instead of thinking of revelation is something that happens between you and God you think of revelation as something that happens in all contexts by God and the Spirit does that right.
Yeah we follow up on that one later.
I mean I think that’s how you would reach out when talking about knowledge of self and knowledge of God and how it’s going to say spirit lives in the middle of that.
Yeah yeah I think I mean obviously we want to be careful as talking about spirit as a bridge and yet when we discover it when truth is uncovered.
It is it is the action of God it is the power of spirit it is the presence of Christ it is all of those things I think simultaneously.
So yeah and that was a little detour.
Yeah I think Trinity takes us very quickly to the outer edges of our comprehension.
Though I don’t want to say it’s a metaphor or an analogy I mean we it’s it’s not an example there is it is a real doctrine it is a real belief of how God is and who God is.
But quickly it’s beyond our ability I think to process.
Okay then the last thing I’m going to pick at the great end of the church a little bit.
I think I take some issues with the word preservation so when I was a kid my aunt had a storm seller that was also the fruit seller and once I get to help and so if you’ve done that business you know.
By the way everybody done that like eating fruit out of the canning jar and how awesome it is we know why it’s awesome it’s like 22 pounds of sugar goes in it when you’re doing the fruit so then it would go in these jars and the jars would just sit down in the seller and then whenever you wanted you’d open and you’d have peaches or you’d have what you know whatever and it was outstanding but.
Preserve I would almost argue the word preserve is difficult because it it implies that you’re keeping something old.
That you’re.
You’re you’re preserving
something you’re not adding to it you’re keeping it.
Keeping it fresh is is that’s not bad but that idea implies that truth is sort of static and passed down from generation to generation.
Which is half of the story.
But we have to add to that this idea that the truth of Jesus is is revealed truth it is uncovered discovery.
You know Jesus tells Peter after he tells he says who do the people say I am Peter says they’re this this and he says who do you think he says you’re the Messiah and and Jesus says flesh and blood has not revealed this to you.
But my father in heaven in other words you didn’t figure this out on your own.
God has uncovered a truth for you the truth of who I am.
And because revelation is a divine gift there is a sense in which we can talk about truth as always new now that doesn’t mean Christ changes.
The truth is the truth and always has been it is true yesterday as today is tomorrow.
But each generation discovers new things about what it means that Jesus is true about what it means to call Jesus Lord so it’s not only preservation I think I would argue that there’s also some progression that the church is never done uncovering the truth or what the truth means.
Because we never get to the end of it.
And we don’t just keep it we expand it or at least it expands as we encounter it God reveals new things to us in some cases things that previous generations missed.
And it’s less that there’s new truth or that truth changes and more that we never have all the truth of who Jesus is.
So in our day we’re asking questions about what does it mean that Jesus is true in this day and age and in some senses those questions weren’t asked in the past.
We now look at something like racial equality with a new truth that some of our ancestors missed they were blinded to it it was true then they didn’t know it.
We know a little more about the truth of it because we’ve come we’ve made some progress we’ve taken we’ve added to the conversation and.
I think the power in that is never can the church say we got it figured out now all we got to do is put it in a jar lock it in the cellar get it out and throw it at people when we need it.
We’re never done uncovering truth God has never done revealing truth to us and that truth may change
circumstantially doesn’t change in its essence.
But it makes our understanding of it changes the nuance changes
we grow and I think that’s the beauty of it on my computer I keep a few random pieces of paper.
One of them I keep is very short prayer that comes from the church of Kenya and it says this from cowardice that dares not face the truth from laziness contented with half the truth and from arrogance that thinks it knows all the truth Oh God deliver us.
So what are the mistakes we make ignoring the truth.
Being settling for partially true or thinking we have all the truth I think I’m indebted to the church of Kenya because that I see in that so much wisdom.
From a cowardice that won’t follow Christ from a laziness that wants to follow Christ as I frame him and from an arrogance that thinks I know all of Christ Oh God deliver me Oh God deliver us as we seek to live out this mission of preserving the truth we do not lock the church down to its past but we link the church in separately in separately to Jesus Christ.
Who is the truth that sets us free shows us the way and gives us life and we preserve the truth by following him.
More so than by our doctrine and our ideas and even our teachings we preserve truth by following Jesus and as we do we are in turn preserved by the truth we are kept by the truth the truth protects.
Guides shepherds and leads the church as we follow Christ because he is the truth and so.
I think if I had you know the magic pen I might fiddle with the word preserve a little bit it’s.
It’s too easy to get it I think it’s too easy to be misguided by the word preserve.
Seeking truth sharing truth I don’t know what else I’d say I shouldn’t criticize it’s good language but it’s a little dated in my ears and.
I’d argue I think I’d argue that preserve comes from a time in which the church was more confident about the truth that it thought it had than we are right now.
So preservation of the saints is the idea that that God protects that God keeps and by the way when it says saints it means you.
We that’s
what we mean by it Presbyterians so when we say preservation of the saints that’s really the idea of something that God does and maybe the primary difference would be that in the great ends we’re talking about something that church tries to do.
And preserve is not a bad word I mean we do things like pass down the Apostles Creed the Lord’s prayer we we do preserve but
we have to acknowledge that in that we’re always trying to make room for what God might uncover that is new to us not new truth but new to us
contextual in the sense that we hear it in a new way.
Let me stop their comments questions.
Yeah.
Right by the expansion of the definition of truth and we get away from being instead fast and we listen to whoever is expounding on their take or their opinion of what truth is sure that’s why we’ve left and we’ve been right that only appears
in our churches
I think it all also appears in our country.
In the world is this lack of step to the truth.
I think I think the other
personal truth to me are really truly you think the veil away our opinions a personal truth to me is probably.
Yeah mixed in that could be the truth but part of it is not the truth or could be not.
Well and yeah
absolutely well said and we I do think we live in an era that that easily substitutes my truth for for truth the truth.
So if it’s true for me it is true and at my worst I might even argue then it’s probably true for you too because it’s true for me and it’s the wrong place to start.
Christians have to remember that when we tell the world we know the truth we’re talking about a person not an idea when
when we say we have truth to offer we’re not saying we’re not talking about what we know we’re talking about who we know.
And I think that is a vital distinction when we have conversations about what is true with the world that we’re not arguing opinions we’re trying to introduce Christ.
Like an illustration of your point I think is in the ancient world there were lots of movements like stoicism
right and there were different spokes people for the movement.
It’s striking that the early Christians were it was a slanderous term it was intended to be an insult they were called Christian little Christ there
was no there was no confusing that they were trying to be like Jesus.
So just to separate between the idea of a movement and people who were defined by the person early
Christians even their opponents understood them to be about Jesus about that but that’s what they were about.
Yeah, they’re good.
Yeah, they weren’t Epicureans they weren’t stoics that they were Jesus people.
That’s that’s helpful.
It’s good.
Anything else.
All right well thank you all for your time again thanks to those who fed us this evening we appreciate it have a good evening and a good week.