Tonight, I want to go on and give the remaining three basics of the obedience of faith. Because I’m arguing that when Paul talked about the “obedience of faith” in Romans 1:5, he was talking about not just justification and the forgiveness that comes through believing, as Calvin wants us to believe in his commentary on Romans 1:5 because faith for him can’t have any direct effect at all on sanctification. Paul said he was commissioned by God to be an apostle for the obedience of faith under all people groups in the world. So this obedience of faith, there’s something about it that sort of is a package that you can pick up and carry with you. And following the analogy of Lou Holtz, which of course doesn’t mean anything or have any authority, is the idea that football players have four basics that they keep working on, even the best team, to get ready to try to knock over the number one team.

The thought came to me, I wonder if there aren’t four basics that we could break the obedience of faith down into and that we could work on our most promising lay leaders over and over again until we feel that they’re mature enough, responsible enough, faithful enough, and dependable enough to do the work of ministry for the edification of the saints? Because that’s what Ephesians 4:12 tells us that all of the gifts and the church are supposed to converge together to do — to equip the saints for the work of ministry for the edification of the saints.

Against a Sacramental View of Church

Dr. Dallas Willard complains about the evangelical church. That there’s a terrible sacramentalism in it. The ordained minister stands up here in this pulpit and the people come and they feel that by coming and just sitting through the service, somehow, grace mechanically will come out through that pulpit into their lives, whether they listen to the sermon very carefully or not. And if they punch in their time card once a week to hear a sermon, they get enough grace to carry them on.

That isn’t the New Testament picture at all. These people that come and hear our sermons, according to Scripture, we’re to be working to build them up for the work of ministry. They’re to do more than be ushers passing plates and chairmen of committees on various financial and planning committees. They’re to be more than greeters with a nice big red rose in the lapel. They’re to be more than parking lot attendants. I know they can be Sunday school teachers. We allow that. If they’re really good, they can teach adult Sunday school classes. Of course everything depends on how long the adults will bear with them. If they’re really good, they stay on and the class flourishes. If they aren’t so good, another person comes in and so on.

A Story of Church Growth

The idea I’m working on, I have to confess that part of this comes from what my own son, Steve, is doing. And I know this is going to sound self-serving, as though I’m bragging, but I hope I would be as enthusiastic about it if it didn’t happen to be my own son. He’s a pastor in the Vineyard but felt called by God to carry on church growth, not by getting the malcontents from a number of churches gathered into a brand new church and somehow try to keep all these cranky people happy in some new kind of a venue. But God laid on him a burden to do church growth that would be evangelistic.

Of course, that’s what church growth is supposed to be. I am the chairman of the board of the Fuller Evangelistic Association and my chief executive officer is the Reverend Carl F. George. How many have ever heard of Carl George? Okay, some of you know a little bit about what I’m talking about. I’m involved in the whole church growth picture and I sit in board meetings and I see all the charts and the graphs and the things that are happening.

The Vineyard wasn’t going to pay Steve any money to plant a church. I think they gave him a month’s salary that decreased each week until it was zero. So he asked, but God guided him and said, “Become a realtor.” And in the Vineyard tradition, he dreams visions and sees visions. God said, “I’ll prosper you in realty enough to keep your wife and children supported. And in realty you can move your time around. You don’t have to work from nine to five and you’ll have enough spare time to be evangelistic and to gradually build up people that are converted by you and by those whom you convert. And then you can build a church and fulfill your passion to win souls.”

About four and a half years ago, he started to do this. He started to work with a contact of a junior high student, the only contact he had in the Almaden Valley of San Jose. Through the junior high student, he got in contact with his high school brother, and through that brother to a friend. And the first thing you know, he began to be working with four or five young people in high school, early college age. People were won to Christ. He didn’t advertise in the paper, “A new Vineyard is beginning in the Almaden Valley south of San Jose.” He could have gotten quite a number of people to come in. Quite a number of people want to come and join the Vineyard church and see signs and wonders. You bet.

He didn’t make any such advertisement, but he just let this group gradually grow by personal evangelism and by working and by building a church basically in cell groups, not larger than 10 to a group, and working very, very hard to train the person to be the leader of the group. Steve himself led the first group, but while he was doing that, he was training the person he felt most competent to take over the leadership of such a group. And there was also an apprentice under that person being trained.

Disciples Making Disciples

So when more people came in being converted, people from other churches tried to get in and Steve did his best to discourage them. The pastors around there liked that really well. He wasn’t taking any of their sheep. Trying to keep the sheep out. And then the parents of these young people wanted to know what on earth was going on with their young people. And so they began to make inquiries and as things worked out, a second small group started with the parents of these young people. And then there were conversions there of an older age bracket.

Now there are six such small groups, each with a leader that has been trained. It may take about two years to train a leader to take over the responsibility of caring for souls in a cell group. And each leader that is managing a cell group is training an apprentice. Because the cell group is not supposed to become a place where you find mutual emotional support and therefore just couldn’t bear the thought of this group splitting up.

But everybody knows and understands that when this group, through the conversions that are made by the group, great emphasis on everybody being personal workers and doing personal evangelism, when it gets to larger than 10 then it gets split and then the apprentice, who at that time should be trained, takes over the new group. As soon as he takes over, somebody is appointed as an apprentice to start him being trained. And so everything is built up by cell groups.

But every other Sunday evening now for some time they’ve been meeting in a high school cafeteria, all the cell groups together, and Steve seeks to give a word of prophecy, to speak on some timely issue that he feels is particularly needful for the people at that time. They’re meeting every other week. They’re soon to go there every Sunday evening in the high school cafeteria. Now the church is paying half his support and he’s cut back half of his realty time. He’s looking forward to the time when he can give up realty altogether and can give his time entirely to the work of ministry.

But the important thing about it from my vantage point is that it’s a church that’s being built on the basis of the cell groups being the basic building blocks, and the small groups are not an adjunct as is almost always the case. No, the small groups are the basic building blocks. You’re not really welcome in the Sunday evening meetings unless you come as a member of a cell group.

The cell groups are there and they stand up and make their identity known and they encourage each other to see how many others are in these cell groups altogether at once. And people who want to come in from the outside, I guess he wouldn’t actually try to physically eject them, but they’re not encouraged to come unless they’re willing to become a member of a cell group. Steve tells people now when they come into this small group, “If you come in, you have to be willing to lay down your life, your time, your treasure, and your talents for these other eight or nine people.” Because he doesn’t understand how it’s possible for us to say we will lay down our lives for the brethren, if we just mean all these other church members. The thought is, “I guess they’ll do something for them sometime in some way.” For him, that’s like saying, “I love the human race. But my next door neighbor, I can’t stand him.”

No. If we’re really going to put teeth into laying down our lives for one another, we can’t really do that for more than about 10 people. That’s his argument. So the people that come into these small groups, they have to be there unto philadelphion, brotherly love, a love that will lay down its life for the brotherhood.

So when somebody is sick, others in the group bring food in to feed them. Steve doesn’t have to go running off as a pastor to take care of emergencies. Lots of people are there to do it before him. It takes such a burden off of him as the head pastor to have this hierarchy of cell group leaders and sub leaders. There’s lots I could tell you about it and I don’t want to go on anymore.

Church Planting Among the Nations

But as I think of the 11,000 people groups tonight out in the world, this is Ralph Winter’s estimate, it’s only a guess. Too bad we have to guess about such things so far into church history. How are we going to get churches planted into these 11,000 people groups? We have to bring the gospel to every people group. We all understand that. It isn’t political nations, it’s the people groups inside of each nation. How are we going to do it? Well, I think the only way it can be done is for us to find somebody in one of these unreached people groups, preferably a bilingual person, a bicultural person even, so we can go and train this person in the four basics of the obedience of faith. We can take the one or two years it takes to really work them over on these basics.

I was talking to you last night, what it means to have faith in the son of God who loved you and gave himself up for you. How this means repentance, how this means trusting in Jesus shed blood, how this means making Christ the Lord of your life. And then unpacking this, we continue on to how then we find out the path of life along which Jesus wants to lead us, through the dawning light under the perfect day. How do we find God’s will for our life? And we work this person over on how this is command here now, how is it really carried out by an obedience of faith? Why would this disobedience of this command be unbelief and an insult against God?

This is what I conceive now as the fundamental, the basic. We keep working a person over and over and over again, and I don’t see any end to it. There’s never any end to the need to work people over to see why each command of Scripture and each aphorism of wisdom in the proverbs is something that to disobey is to say to God, “I vote no confidence in you.” Let me just throw this out for you. I’m not going to give you the answer, but you think tonight. How is violating the command “let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying” (Ephesians 4:29) be a vote of no confidence in God? How is that unbelief? I’m not going to tell you. You think it out. You’ll work it out. How about the command in Ephesians 5:4, which says, “Let there be no silliness or jesting”? Why is it a vote of no confidence for us to act in a silly way, to make wise cracks and pick up on people’s language and make a joke out of it, as some people do? Why is that a vote of no confidence?

Working Over the Fundamentals

See, it takes real working over, just like football teams in a way have to keep working at blocking and tackling. You have to keep working at it in order to keep your mind alert and fresh on how every command in the Bible is a command of faith, like a doctor’s prescription, an automobile maintenance book, not like a job description at all. Because God is not therapied (served) by human hands as though he needs anything.

I’d love to have talked to you more about how we need to walk in the light. Remember the person I was able to talk about only very briefly in a small group who needs money to pay the mortgage on his house, who’s a handyman who can fix anything and repair anything, who could earn 15 to 20 dollars an hour and have ample money with his wife’s salary to pay the mortgage on the house. He said, “No, I don’t want to be a blue collar handyman because I have been an engineer who wore a white collar.”

Now, you see the problem with this person in this small group is he is in love with the pride of life. What has to happen? He has to see that this is blinding him. So he’s not able to take a careful look at the panorama around him, or have panorama vision. He has tunnel vision. He can only see himself in terms of going on and being a white collar engineer who’s built radio transmitters in his past life and worked with computers and things. But to become a blue collar handyman? He would say, “No, no, I’m made for better things than that.” That has to stop because he needs the money and if he doesn’t start getting it, they’ll foreclose on his house. How do we get rid of this pride of life? How do we have the love of the Father dwelling in us?

I’m keying off of 1 John 2:15–17, which says:

Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life — is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

I’m so glad for my Navigator training, where Dawson Trotman made me learn my verses and put the reference there. And a part of working with a small group is they’ve got to start memorizing verses, putting them on three-by-five cards. Use three-by-five cards, use rings. But learn the reference along with a verse and review it for seven weeks day by day after you’ve learned it. Because experience shows us that when we review a verse for seven weeks, then we can belt it out without even thinking. As I can say 1 John 2:15–17 without even thinking. This is what the Navigators did for me, and boy what a blessing it was. And we are foolish not to take the wisdom of the Navigators and put it to use in our churches. How can people fight the fight of faith if their guns don’t have ammo?

Caught Unarmed

It’s like in the California riots. Did you read of that fiasco a year ago last April? They had this terrible riot after the Rodney King verdict came down that the police were not guilty. The Black community erupted, and other races erupted in violence and they needed the National Guard. Well, where are the guns? Well my goodness, they’re up in Camp Roberts, 250 miles to the north. And there was such a hassle to get the guns out of Camp Roberts and get them down. By the time they got them down, the fires were out and the riot was mostly over. And the devil just loves to have Christians that don’t have the sword of the Spirit that, on red alert, at the ready, with the push of the button, launches the rocket. Oh, he just loves it when Christians don’t know where their guns are, where their hand grenades are.

He walks about looking and seeking whom he may devour and when he sees Christians that don’t have any sort of the spirit to fight back against the lies of the devil, Satan just moves in and destroys that person’s faith. Because that’s what he’s after. That’s what he wants to do.

So I envision as part of the workout in this small group to see if we can get a leader trained, and then send him back into an unreached people group. We should aim for a bicultural bilingual person. We could say, “All right, now we’ve put you through these four fundamentals. We’ve taught you how to see every command as an obedience of faith. We’ve taught you how to understand the hundreds of thousands of commands that derive from walking in the light.” It’s like Dr. Ray Ortland’s advice, “Always aim to be 10 minutes ahead of an appointment.” That’s smart, and there are thousands of other things that need to be said.

Cell Groups and Spreading Leaders

The text behind my message is all printed up here in the book. I want to go on now and write a short book, something about back to the basics, but I need a fleshy title. And God gave one of my students a help on the gospel and law book. He said, “Call it Contrast or Continuum.” Ah, that was just the subtitle that was needed. Good old Ron Ganza up in Tacoma. He gave me that subtitle.

We’re thinking about Lou Holtz, back to the basics now. I want to figure out a way that we can break down this obedience of faith for all nations, all people groups. We want to break it down to four fundamentals so we can work over this bicultural, bilingual person enough so that we can say, “Okay, now can you go back now and you start one-by-one to build up a small group that you meet with regularly and that you spend a lot of time one-on-one with each person, mentoring them.”

Steve just hates to get up and teach Bible classes. The kind of teaching that really works is two hours in the Denny’s restaurant with one or two people taking them through a study plan. Make sure they read something first. This is Adler, you see. Learning comes by reading, not by hearing. Have them read a certain part of the material they are to know. And then you come to the Denny’s restaurant and you talk to them. You say, “Do you have any problems with this?” When you’re mentoring people, if they’re hung up upon something, you can spend 20 weeks until they turn the corner. You don’t have to keep following the schedule as you do in a Bible class.

This is what we have to do if we’re going to start training the leadership that we need in order to reach the 11,000 people groups, and I don’t see any other way to do it. Because when you plant such a person like this in an unreached people group, you know what you’ve got? You’ve got a pastor in there who in the small group he’s forming is forming a church. Steve regards each of his cell groups as a church. Each cell group leader is ordained and there’s an ordination service. Now, this is terribly unorthodox ecclesiology. But they lay hands on a cell group leader and they ordain him. Now, I don’t think he gives out certificates or if they ever get paid sometime. I don’t know what the IRS is going to do about it, but Steve’s not worrying about that yet.

So we get a pastor now in this people group and because this person now has been worked over on these four fundamentals, you know what else we have? We have a theological seminary there. That is the big bottleneck, the big problem that you read over and over again in Operation World. The gospel has entered this land, but what a need there is for Christian workers, for leadership. Where are the leaders going to come? Well, the last thing you should do is go over there and build a Fuller Theological Seminary, three stories of brick and concrete, and then you bring in people with PhDs and ThDs and lectures and registrars. That’s not the way the job is. If you’re going to do that, the jig is up. We’ve got to find some vastly more efficient way of doing it. When we train people in these four fundamentals, then we’ve got a theological seminary inside and unreached, and this leader now we can constantly be feeding books to that person so he can read more about church history.

Use It or Lose It

Wesley, when he sent out his lay ministers, he would fill their saddlebags with three or four very good books for them to read. Soon it was common knowledge that Wesley’s unordained lay preachers were more learned than the Oxford graduate priests of the Church of England. We do it by theological education by extension (by TEE), that my close friend and buddy Dr. Ralph Winter invented about 25 years ago. That’s the key I think. At least I’m trying to think of a way for it to be done. We have to sit down and think about how it can be done.

So as this person keeps reading about church history and reading John Owen and reading the life of Hudson Taylor and all kinds of good things to increase his education, he becomes a more and more learned pastor. And as he trains his apprentice, then that person becomes trained in theology, you see? Then that person turns around as a new cell group is formed and appoints an apprentice, and that person starts to get trained. And so you see, you have a theological seminary that is working as a church. Teaching and learning have to go hand in hand. There’s no good at all in teaching people and then saying, “Well, we hope that somehow someday you’ll be able to use this.” Dawson Trotman used to say, “Use it or lose it.” When we’re working like this, you see, a person learns something immediately and turns around and uses it and therefore doesn’t lose it.

Now I’m not a missionary, and I’ve talked to Dr. Ralph Winter about this and I can’t get him excited at all, but I think this might be the way to go. Maybe when I get my book published, maybe that will help. Well, we just have to keep whacking away at this thing. I’m 68 and a half years old and I want to use what time I’ve got left to do the very best I possibly can. So I’m thinking of these four basics, and then we talked about the leading of the Holy Spirit as the third way to know the way Jesus wants us to go. And tonight I want to quickly go over the three remaining basics, and I’m going to get through them. I’m going to give just about eight or 10 minutes to each one of them.

Learning to Suffer with Jesus

Obviously much more could be said about each of these basics, and it will be in the manuscript that you can get if you sign up with Shelly tonight. I don’t want to just write academic books. John was talking about that today. I’m sick and tired of the academic rat race. My heart is in the foreign mission field, although I’ve never been to Asia. I’m a homebound provincial, but my heart’s still there. So I look forward to Dr. Fong speaking tomorrow and being on the panel with him.

Okay, let’s talk now about the second fundamental. The second fundamental is learning to suffer with Jesus. The first one was learning to find out the path of life along which he wants to lead you through the dawning light of the perfect day. It’s along that path in which you will fit, you with your particular personality will fit your strange profile. You’ll fit right in, as a jigsaw off piece fits in perfectly with the next jigsaw piece. That’s what Jesus will do for us if we turn the future of our lives over to him.

Now, the second thing is to learn to suffer with Jesus. And part of Gethsemane love is, strange as it seems, Jesus chastening me. He said in Revelation 3:16, “As many as I love, I reprove and I chasten.” It’s a very loving thing for Jesus to do because each of us has come into this world as sons and daughters of hell (Matthew 23:15). We come in with a demonic disposition, an ego that wants to exalt itself. We want to be important and that as sons and daughters of hell, everything we do we do in order to promote our importance before other people and to try to get ahead of the other person. And all of our sins go back to this. In order for this hellishness in each of us to be eradicated, Jesus has to take us and he has to want us. He has to punish us. And no chastening for the person is joyous but greenness (Hebrews 12:11). Chastening hurts.

But how else are we going to learn not to trust in ourselves? How else can we learn not to try to get ego fulfillment but to find fulfillment by being in that place where Jesus who occupies that high and holy place fellowships with him that is of a humble and contrary spirit (Isaiah 57:15). How are we going to get humble enough so we can have fellowship with Jesus? We have to have the hellishness knocked out of us by chastening him after chastening after chastening. And it goes on not just for a few years like it does with our children. After a certain time you can’t punish your children anymore, it won’t work. But God has our whole lifetime to do it, and he needs it because he’s got a whale of a child-rearing problem on his hands. Oh boy, talk about people that are not suited for this household. No adoption agency would ever take us to put us in God’s household. We just don’t fit.

No foster home would take these renegades, but God takes us into his household. But in order to shape this up so that we become the sort of people who are the kind that should have the demeanor that befits God’s household, God has to chasten us. When you read Pilgrim’s Progress, all the way along to the celestial city, he’s being going through one chastening after the other. As I recall, he came to a plain, that is a meadow which was level and it was easy to walk over, but it didn’t last long and another terrible chastening befell Pilgrim on the way to the celestial city.

Par for the Course

So being chastened is par for the course. This is part of Jesus’s Gethsemane love and we have to learn to suffer with Christ and not a rebellion against him. And that “if” clause in Romans 8:17 says, “If we suffer with him, then we’ll reign with him.” If we suffer with him not against him, then we’ll reign with him. And in exegesis and hermeneutics, we learn that often the “if” clause is an implied imperative. So it really means suffer with Jesus. Why? Because if you suffer with him and learn to profit from chastening and exercise yourself in chastening, then you get the peaceable fruits of righteousness and then you’ll reign with him. And we mustn’t think that suffering with Jesus comes only when we’re persecuted. Not at all. Because the next, Romans 8:18, begins with “for,” which means reason follows, or proposition that precedes, and the commentators go crazy. What on earth does Romans 8:18 mean? It says:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us (Romans 8:18).

What on earth is that “for” about? It’s prefaced with a for, what’s it arguing for? It’s the second argument of why I should suffer with Jesus. Because the sufferings of this present time, which God uses as the means for chastening you and me, as as bad as they can be, as hurtful as they can be — financial loss, bereavement, loss of health, betrayal of people that we trusted — the yardstick that measures their awfulness has to be thrown away when it comes to measuring the glories that shall be revealed in us because there is no comparison with it. And that should encourage us, that if we endure this light affliction, which is but for a moment, we shall have a far greater weight of glory.

Faith Sorely Tried

Now it’s in the times of chastening that our faith becomes sorely tried. Dr. Piper was preaching last Sunday morning and I was reviewing a sermon that he preached earlier on 1 Peter 1:6–7, which says:

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

The trial of our faith is what happens in suffering, and that’s when you need to start to fight the fight of faith. When Paul heard in Athens that the church in Thessalonica was undergoing great sufferings — this church just recently converted people back up the sea coast from Athens — he sent Timothy right back up there because he feared lest by any means the tempter should have tempted them and their labor should have been in vain. He had to send Timothy back up there to strengthen these peoples’ hands in God, to teach them to fight the fight of faith, to claim the promises so that they don’t become discouraged by these sufferings and decide to give up the Christian life.

So I would urge you that part of what we’re talking about is set forth on pages 279 to 299 of The Unity of the Bible, where I’ve tried to break down and isolate the various states of mind which constitute an evil heart of unbelief. We have to beware lest there be in any of those around us an evil heart of unbelief and exhort that person to quickly get out of it and come back to the place where they’re trusting in God and enjoying peace. How can we do that except for in a small group, in a cell group?

We can’t do it in a church like this. It has to be done in a group of people not more than 10 in number because the social psychologists tell us that more than that number are too many people to pay attention to. Eight to 10 is the optimal number to have in a small group. When it gets larger than that, split it. Because everybody should know that in coming into one of these, you’re not coming in now just to have a nice place where you get affirmed by each other. I don’t need anybody to affirm me. I need the almighty God’s promises to keep me from toppling over.

All Joy and Peace in Believing

So when you’re meeting with me in a small group and you see me with a long face, you’ll say, “What’s wrong Dan Fuller?” And you keep homing in on me till I tell you and then you urge me not to let myself feel that way and you work me out of my evil heart of unbelief and you bring me back to the place of enjoying all peace and joy by believing in the God of hope (Romans 15:13).

And we’re not to neglect the assembling of ourselves together (Hebrews 10:24–25), but we’re to meet in small enough groups so we really can goad one another to love the good works. So that verse can never be used to tell people they ought to attend public worship. It’s only meant for the kind of meetings where we can goad another to love the good works and encourage one another, and we ought to be doing this all the more as we see the Day approaching. America is going downhill awfully fast. I’m amazed at how much crime there is here in Minneapolis. I thought this place was relatively unscathed, but it’s getting pretty close to Los Angeles from the little television that I’ve watched. Yes, I did watch it a little bit, but not much, John.

So in training this person who is to lead a small group in a church or in an unreached people group, we want to teach them to fight the fight of faith. Teach them to claim the promise that God works everything together for good to them that love him, to those who are called according to his purpose. The early Luther regarded this verse as the most important of all God’s promises. In his Freedom of the Christian, he said, reciting this verse:

Consequently the cross and death are compelled to serve me since God works all things together for good. This is a splendid privilege, a spiritual dominion in which there is nothing so good and nothing so evil.

That’s the way the early Luther taught and he was saying, “You have to believe. Grace is conditional but not merited.” He also went on to say that if I did not believe, God will work everything, even the best that happens to me together, for my evil. So the early Luther, the 1520, the 1519 Luther, he understood the obedience of faith and fighting the fight of faith. He understood faith as basically Galatians 2:20 faith. The Luther of 1526 wrote a treatise about reforming German public worship away from the way done under Roman Catholicism. In this treatise he says, “The Reformation is never going to be complete until we have lay leaders holding small groups accountable in homes.” And in Emil Brunner’s The Misunderstanding of the Church, he remarks that this treatise of Luther is the one that the Luther scholars like to gloss over and not talk about.

Luther didn’t see his way clear to do anything about this with all the tumult of the reformation that he had to contend with. But he said, “I got so sick and tired of preaching in my pulpit at Wittenberg. People come and gape at me for four years and hear me preach my heart out. But after four years they don’t know anything more about the Apostles’ Creed than they knew when at the beginning of the four years.” So Luther didn’t leave all that much in preaching. He said, “It’s only going to get done when we get the lay people organized into the house churches as they were in the early church.” The Luther of 1526 said this had to happen.

To Destroy Our Confidence

Now Satan and his minions know the name of the game. It is to destroy the Christian’s confidence, future confidence in Jesus Gethsemane love and just say, “Oh well, you made that mistake. You did that dumb thing, you lost that money. If you had zagged instead of zigged, everything would be fine now. But you made that mistake, it’s all over.” You come right back with Jeremiah 38:20, where a wicked Zedekiah was told by Jeremiah, “Obey, I beseech you right now, the voice of Jehovah in what I commend you.” The Babylonians were knocking down the walls and just about to take Zedekiah captive. Jeremiah said, “If you obey now after all your sin and mistakes, everything will be fine for you.”

That’s the way to fight back against the devil when the regret unbelief problem grabs hold. He knows the name of the game. Do the preachers know that the name of the game is to strengthen people’s faith? Paul knew it. He said, “When I come to Philippi, my one and only goal will be to increase your faith and your joy” (Philippians 1:25), and joy is the barometer of faith. God fills us with all joy and peace in believing and we’re miserable and unhappy when we’re not believing. Paul knew the name of the game, and Satan just loves it when ministers have all kinds of other objectives that they’re trying to accomplish. But he sure gets nervous when a minister realizes that the only thing that really matters is to uphold people’s faith and to strengthen their hand in God, to keep walking with God.

It’s so wonderful that you don’t have to worry anymore when you preach whether the people in front of you are converted or not. I remember my evangelist father. I would chauffeur him to Long Beach, the 30-mile drive down Atlantic Boulevard, no freeways. And my father would sit over in the passenger seat and I remember him agonizing. He would say, “I’ve got 22 minutes to preach to several million people. How many of those minutes should I give to urging people to get forgiveness from God by faith in the atonement? But then there’s so many people that are already converted and they need edification. So how many minutes should I give to urging sanctification?”

I remember the agony and the body language of the anguish. He would say, “How will I divide at the time between justification and sanctification?” And he never read a word of Calvin, but Calvin has cast a long shadow and somehow through the dispensationalism of our age, which is just a subset of covenant theology, you preach one thing to the unconverted and another thing to the converted. Well now, all we have to do when we get up in preaching is to urge people to have confidence in Jesus’s Gethsemane love. That will convert the unconverted and that will strengthen the hand of the converted, and we don’t have to worry or give us thought about whether the people we’re talking to are converted or not. I wish I could tell that to my father now. I didn’t know what to do. But it struck me as remarkable that he was feeling like that.

Despairing of Life for the Sake of Love

We have to go through these chastenings. In 2 Corinthians 1:8–10, Paul tells of the terrible chastening he went through in Asia:

For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself . . . But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.

God was trying to get Paul rid of his habit of trusting in himself because that was a part of his hellish nature, still very active and operative 12 years into his apostolic ministry. Paul still had to be whomped so hard that he despaired of life. And so don’t think it’s strange if you have to undergo and I have to undergo fiery trials because God has got to do so much child training on me in order to shape me up to become the kind of person that should be seen in the Father’s house.

Learning to Profit

There’s an awful lot that could work if you set about chastening and fighting the fight of faith. There’s no end to what can be said there. You never run out of things to say about that. It’s just like practicing tackling and practicing blocking. It’s just like physical conditioning, dieting. There’s no end to it. It’s just like reviewing your play assignments. We need to be reminded of this over and over again. And so it’s a basic that is something that will never run, never cease needing to be taught. But now we need to teach people to learn to profit. In 1 Corinthians 6:12, Paul said:

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.

People in their swashbuckling self-confidence treat themselves so shabbily that they become their worst enemies. They don’t need enemies. They’re doing such a good job of destroying themselves by their non-Methodistic behavior that they don’t need any enemies to finish them off real quick. This is the way people are and we’ve got to work with people and teach them how to do the things that will profit them in life. And here I admit, I’m drawing heavily on John Wesley and what his agenda for the class meetings was.

Time Management

You need to teach people seven-day a week time management, not how to operate according to time management rules during the 40 hours of the business week and then we can go home and goof off and don’t have to redeem the time anymore, as if they can watch television, be a couch potato all weekend. But then Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. they pull Ted Angstrom’s book off the shelf, review the time management principles, and off they go for the next five days. No, no, no. We have to redeem the time all the time. We always have to be waiting on Jesus to find out the next step to take as he with his Gethsemane love leads us along the way.

In the revival among the missionaries in Korea in 1939, Aleta Jacobs, a single lady from South Africa, came to be the speaker. She had such manifest power that was in such contrast to the other people that were invited to speak to these Presbyterian missionaries that they asked her to give them some special meetings and they asked her for the secret of her power. The first question she asked them was this, “Do you always seek first the kingdom of God?” She said, “Now write down on a piece of paper yes or no. If it’s no, write that down and then say, ‘I’m a hypocrite.’” What I would say why you’d be a hypocrite if you wrote no was, “I don’t really believe that Jesus always has the very best thing for me to do by waiting upon his leading. I’ll do some things for him part of the time and then I’ll do some things I want to do. I don’t have to work all the time for God, do I?”

Notice the sarcasm, “working for God,” even though I don’t believe in that at all. God is working for us and he wants to work for us and pursue after us to do as good all the time and we should always be seeking for that next wave, that Jesus in Gethsemane love wants to bless us so mightily. And a revival broke out. I have a whole file full of the things that she did. So teach people time management, to prioritize the things they need to do, to delegate some tasks to others. To learn to say no, that Dr. Ted Angstrom says is the most important word in the English language. Don’t get hauled in on every trip people want you to take. Know your priorities and when people ask you to do something and it’s not what you want to do, just say, “No, I can’t do it.” That’s so essential.

Thrift, Diligence, and the Principles of Health

We need to teach people to profit themselves by learning the elemental rules of thrift and diligence and business. So much can be said about that. People need to learn Dale Carnegie’s principles for not offending people. Dr. Charles Koller, president of Northern Baptist Seminary where I attended in 1954, held up How to Win Friends and Influence People. He said, “Most of the young pastors who have to leave the ministry leave because they don’t obey the rules of this book. It isn’t because they get mixed up with the Bible.” Well, I think there’s problems with obeying the Bible too. But Dale Carnegie has a lot of wisdom. A lot of the commands for walking in the light are to be found in Dale Carnegie. If they’re part of walking in the light, then they become God’s commands.

We want our people to be able to win friends and influence people, to be able to insinuate themselves into the lives of their non-Christian friends so they can win them for Christ, and incidentally then they won’t make trouble in our church. And we ought to teach people the principles of health.

I talked this morning about how 85 percent of what is behind bodily aches and pains physicians say is due to anger and bitterness against people that have wronged them. That’s what Dr. Brand says in his book, Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants. Oh, there’s so much more I could say here on this.

Learning to Edify Others

Now to go to the fourth basic, is to learn to be edifying. In 1 Corinthians 10:23, Paul says:

“All things are lawful,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful,” but not all things build up.

That’s the fourth basic. The third is to learn to profit yourself, and there’s no end of things that we can say to people about profiting yourself. And we can’t profit others if we’re not profiting ourselves because Dr. Piper in his first book says, we’re to love others as we love ourselves. And if we’re loving ourselves by being our own worst enemy, I think other people would be very pleased if we did not try to bestow our love upon them. But when you learn to be your own best friend, then you can turn around and be the friend of other people.

Now, I said I was going to define my terms. I talked about holiness. Holiness means a person who is valuable and a person who wants and seeks the greatest good for the greatest number of people for the greatest duration. That’s Jonathan Edwards’s definition of virtue in his essay on the nature of true virtue. When you find a person who is dedicated to doing the greatest good for the greatest number for the greatest duration, then you have a holy person because such a person then becomes so valuable to the rest of the world. Paul regarded himself as a debtor to all the world as though he had a great immense debt of value to give to people. That’s holiness. When something is so valuable, then it has to be set aside because they don’t want the value to be injured or polluted in any way.

So that’s the best I can do in trying to understand the difference between holiness and righteousness. Romans 5:7 says:

One will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die . . .

The Ministry of Sending

But I want to close with what Reverend Thomas Steller said in the afterward to Dr. John Piper’s latest book, Let the Nations Be Glad:

It is not of secondary importance to be engaged in the ministry of sending.

Now most of our people in our churches will be senders and not goers, and this church I understand at least partially supports 100 missionaries. So it’s one of the major missionary churches of the world. Steller goes on to focus on the exegesis of 3 John, meditating on the Greek:

It is walking in the truth, reacting properly to the way the world really is and not in contempt of it. It is a manifestation of a healthy and prospering soul to be a sender. To send in the manner worthy of (3 John 6) is a call to excellence in the support of missionaries. When we send in a manner worthy of God with our prayers, our money, our time, and a myriad of other practical ways, then God is glorified. Then people’s souls prosper (people can’t be healthy unless they’re committed to being world Christians). Then we’re in sync with God’s heartbeat and His purpose to be glorified among all peoples.

I’ll just close with this. People that don’t want to get interested in world missions. We ought to tell them, “You’re going to find heaven a rather uncomfortable place when you go there because the God of heaven is the God who so loved the world in all of its various people groups that he sent his only begotten Son to call out his elect from each and one of them. And if you aren’t in sync with such a God, heaven is going to be as uncomfortable for you as being at a party where you find you were never invited.”

Have you ever had that experience? That’s terrible. You find an excuse to leave. You say, “I’m sick, I have to go.” Out you go. The person who refuses to make this kind of a commitment to be profitable to others is not virtuous — doesn’t meet with Edward’s definition of virtue — but is vicious and their address should be the local state penitentiary because that’s where we put people who are enemies of society, enemies of the people. And people who do not want to discharge their debt of telling about the good news of Gethsemane love are vicious people and they’re going to find heaven a very, very unwelcoming place when my time is up.

Question and Answer

We’re going to take maybe 20 minutes and questions will flow mainly from tonight. I think what I want to do is give Dr. Fuller another chance to clarify something for me. Let me interpret what I was hearing because I think I was hearing two things happening and I think it would be helpful to get a clarity on those two things. So you come rove around up here where you do so well.

The two things I heard interweaving tonight, and it didn’t come clear to me how they were all fitting together, were the four basics. Those basics are learning to find the path of life in Jesus, learning to suffer, learning to profit, and learning to profit others. That was mingled and interwoven with this whole issue of the hidden peoples and the issue of small groups. Knowing you, I’ve got lots of ideas of how that was all going in and out of each other. My guess is a lot of these people out there don’t know why that’s all in the same lecture. So it would help to hear you just think out loud for a minute why in this lecture on the four basics of learning to live by faith in Jesus are you talking about the hidden peoples and small groups.

What’s going on inside of you that makes that happen? I just think that’s really significant. Why in this lecture were those things twisting in and out of each other there? And then when he’s done thinking out loud about that, you jump in with wherever you want to.

The unreached people groups are absolutely essential to Galatians 2:20 faith that I’ve been trying to unpack last night, this morning, and tonight. Because if we have such a treasure as Jesus’s Gethsemane love, in which the one who sweat drops the blood to make possible our forgiveness, having offended a just and holy God so terribly by our unbelief — if he shed his blood that we might be forgiven and thus able to put our confidence in his promises to us, we have something that is so valuable that to hold it back from other people’s on the face of this planet would be farm far worse than Jonas Salk having discovered the polio vaccine just to use it for his own children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews and cousins.

If people in La Jolla where he lived heard that Salk had a vaccine for polio and was using it only for his family, I wonder what they would’ve done to him? They would’ve become outraged. I’m sure that Dan Rather would’ve had a piece about this. If we have something as valuable as Galatians 2:20 faith in Jesus, who loved us and gave himself up for us, the viciousness of not trying to get this message out to these 11,000 people groups that don’t have a church in them is just something that cannot be tolerated if you claim to have a Gethsemane love bringing you great blessings with goodness and mercy pursuing after you all the days of your life. Does that make sense? Does anybody want to ask anymore about it?

I don’t see how it’s possible for people to have it as an option to be a world Christian. It’s not optional. It’s mandatory. If you don’t love the world as God did, serious things are wrong with your faith, very serious things. People should not be allowed to think that well, “If I don’t want to be a world Christian, I don’t have to be. I don’t have to read Operation World if I don’t want to and don’t have to pray about the needy peoples of the world.” We ought to make it very clear that it’s a violation of faith in Jesus who loved us and gave himself up for us.

Why would you say small groups are so important for people becoming mature Christians?

I believe in small groups because of Hebrews 3:12–13, which says:

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.

I just don’t see how we carry this on unless we do what Luther told us to do back in the early years of the Reformation and start somehow to get the layperson trained as ministers and holding forth in small groups in homes. Luther saw it, but the church has conveniently overlooked Luther all this time. So if I’m going to be in sync with Hebrews 3:12–13 and Hebrews 10:24–25, I have no choice but to be an advocate of cell groups. I don’t know how to bring them to pass in the organized church. Luther found the task too daunting to try. I don’t know how it’s going to happen. But somehow we have to get back to the place where we can obey Hebrews 3:12–13 and Hebrews 10:24–25. We’re not obeying it now very well. We can obey it much, much better than we’re doing. We also have to have some real meaningful way of being willing to lay down our lives for eight or nine other Christians. We can’t do it for more than that. We have to really go out of our way.

This president of a computer company in Silicon Valley spent a whole Saturday helping a minority person learn mathematics so that person could get a higher paying job. That was in a small group. That’s the kind of thing we have to be willing to do, take our time to mentor somebody in algebra, trigonometry, analytical geometry, calculus, and so on. We should take food to people when they’re sick and babysit their children in an emergency and so on. If you go to visit there you’ll see this happening, and it seems to me he’s onto something. I do believe that they are more effective. Even Luther believed it. I don’t want to feel like he did preaching in the Wittenberg pulpit for four years.

Why don’t we have more in the New Testament about the ministry that goes on in small groups?

I think the answer is that up until the time of Constantine and the edict of Constantine, when Christianity became the state church and then they began building cathedrals and all that, the church didn’t meet anywhere else hardly except in people’s homes. So there wasn’t any need to make any big deal about it. There are just references made to the church in your house here and there in the Epistles, and Hebrews talks about exhorting one another and encouraging one another. Ministry is carried on a very small scale in the New Testament. They don’t envision big churches like this at all in the New Testament. And Luther saw this, but he was conveniently ignored, as Brunner complained. Brunner got fed up with the whole way the Swiss state Church ran and wanted to get back to something that was more apostolic.

I believe that I love God but there are some things about how you view service to him that I disagree with. Why can’t I serve God out of my love for him?

Well I would ask you to define your terms. This is what Adler would ask you to do. You say you love God. What do you mean by that? Do you mean you find great delight in God, like the deer panting after the water brooks for God to slake your thirst? That God would meet your need-love? Or do you mean you want to do benevolent things for God? It sounds like you mean the latter. And if you mean the latter, then your understanding of what it means to love God is wrong. Because loving God with all the heart, soul, and mind means nothing more than satisfying my cavernous, cosmic, God-shaped vacuum needs. All my energy goes towards letting God service me. When I believe in Jesus that way, the promise is that rivers of living water will flow from me and I don’t have to worry about loving other people. And the last thing God ever wants anybody to do is to think that he needs to be therapied (served) by human hands as though he was a needy client needing our services.

The church has to be disabused of this idea that we work for God. Hudson Taylor said, “I never made any sacrifice for God throughout all my years as a pioneer missionary in China. Jesus was so good to me and buoyed me up so often under such terrible circumstances, I never made any sacrifice for God. No, it was Jesus servicing me.” That’s an important point that was raised here. That’s terribly important. I spent a lot of time in seminary getting people to understand that it’s different. Because the churches seem to be telling everybody to work harder for God, and that’s contrary to Acts 17:25.

Can you define then what it means for us to be servants of God?

An ordinary servant was surely providing all kinds of service for his needy slave master. So if you’re going to say, “Well, as slaves serve their masters, so I must be a slave of Christ.” There’s one problem, Matthew 6:24 says, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” And a cranky, Berean student tripped me up on this one day in class. He said, “How do people serve money? Do they work to be benevolent towards money to meet money’s needs? Are we supposed to serve God the same way people serve money?” Now all the financial companies say, “Let us take your money and we will put it to work for you and make it work better for you than this other financial company will.” You see, money is always the work, is always the patron provider and we’re always the needy client. And so what do people do to serve money? They constantly try to position themselves as to be in the place where when the market turns, they will have made the investments that pay off. And they watch that ticker tape on television. Los Angeles has two television stations running the ticker tape from NYSE all day long.

They’re worrying, they’re calling up their broker, worrying about this investment and that investment. They’re reading “Smart Money,” “Wall Street Journal,” and all the money magazines on the magazine rack. What are they doing? They’re trying to position themselves to get the full benefit from their money, and that’s the way we’re supposed to serve God. We position ourselves so that we’ll get the full benefit from Gethsemane love, and I prove it from Matthew 6:24.

So when Paul talks about himself being a servant of Jesus Christ, yes, he is. Surely has to say very close to Jesus Christ because to leave him means his need-love is no longer satisfied and met. So we all want to stay very close to Christ because only there will the cavernous, cosmic hole in our hearts be filled. And apart from Jesus, there’ll be a terrible aching emptiness. So I’m going to serve Jesus Christ, not to do anything for him, but to keep myself in a place where he can fully benefit me. That’s why the obedience of faith, as I’ve tried to unpack it in this very tentative way, is so important in training people to go into the unreached peoples of the earth and start small groups.

You said this morning that hermeneutics needs to be presuppositionless. How is it possible for us to be presuppositionless?

It’s probably not, but I’m sure going to fight my best not to be. This is what Dr. Oster Cuermon said in answer to that question, under whom I studied in Basel: “It’s probably not really possible to do, but we have to fight to the death to be presupposition-less, to try to find out what the New Testament was trying to say.” In his office one time he said, “Early in my theological career I was a devotee of Albert Schweitzer and liberalism, and then I became a devotee of Søren Kierkegaard and of Neo-Orthodox.” And then one day he said, “I decided to read the New Testament and try to figure out what the writers in the New Testament were trying to say.” And I didn’t expect this from a state church Lutheran from Strasbourg. He put his hand on me and he said, “And then I became born again.”

It’s probably impossible, but we fight to the death. And we read a passage though we’d never heard a sermon or a lesson on it. On plane fights we meditate on Greek all the way from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, trying to figure out what this means. Let the Arminian read Dr. Piper’s Justification of God, regarding the exegesis of Romans 9:1– 23. I’d just like to see an Arminian show why that’s wrong. It can’t be done. I mean, he has absolutely iced the cakes.

What do you think should be done about the problem of big churches where we aren’t learning to profit each other?

Well, something has to be done. I don’t say we don’t abolish meetings like this. My son wants to have great big, massive meetings with hundreds and hundreds of small groups in attendance. But the church is still built basically with the building blocks of the cell groups and their leaders. And you can’t come into the church unless you’re willing to come into a cell group and lay down your life for brotherly love. It is very difficult. Since Constantine, things have really gotten messed up and we’ve never got back. And Luther saw that, but didn’t know what to do about it. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t have any quick panacea for this church or Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena where I attend, where Dr. Ortlund used to be a pastor.

What about our relationship to God as a Father? When my son brings a card to me and does a good job on it I am pleased with him. Is that wrong for him to be motivated to want to please me? Is it wrong for us to be motivated to please God?

Well, I think he wanted to show his daddy how creative he could be in making this card up for you, and the more pleased you were with it, the happier he would be. I just don’t think, though, that I should carry that analogy over to the way I serve God: “Look at the great things, Lord, I can create and do for you. Isn’t this nifty what I’ve dreamed up?” I get scared of carrying on that analogy of what your son did for you and what I should do for God. I get nervous about it.

So what do you think about all the passages that tell us to please God?

Apart from faith, it is impossible to please God. The only thing I can ever do to please God and to worship him is to believe him. I could read that long quote from Luther who has such an insight into that. The very highest worship of God is telling him that we trust him to meet our needs. And there isn’t anything else I can do that is pleasing to God. He says, “I get sick and tired of your offerings, Israel. What I want you to do is to call upon me when you get in trouble so I can deliver you and work for you and then you’ll glorify me. That’s what I want. I’m sick and tired of all your offerings.” He says, “The cattle on a thousand hills are mine. If I were hungry, I sure wouldn’t tell you about it.” So there’s only one thing I can do to please God and that’s to trust him, nothing else. It’s sanctification by faith alone.