Is there reality in our worship?

Is there reality in our worship?

Is there reality in our worship

By John R. W. Stott

November/December 1979

The Christian Church is fundamentally a worshiping community. According to I Peter 2:5,9 it is a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood whose function is to offer to God the spiritual sacrifices of our worship.

Now I venture to go even further than that. I believe that worship is the church’s priority task. Of course, it is popular to say that the church’s priority task is evangelism. I venture to disagree. I believe that the church’s priority task is worship.

Of course, this is an unnecessary dichotomy anyway, because we don’t have to choose between worship and witness. Each, properly understood, involves the other. It is impossible to worship and love God without loving my neighbor. And, it is impossible to love my neighbor without loving God. Therefore, worship and evangelism inevitably involve one another.

Worship is derived from “worth ship.” So true worship is an acknowledgment of the supreme, absolute worth of God. How can I acknowledge the unique and absolute worth of God and not be concerned that the rest of the world will recognize his worth equally? Therefore, true worship is bound to drive me and the Church out to witness. There is something essentially hypocritical about worship if it does not lead to witness.

Why do we want to evangelize? Do we want simply to win people, get them to profess faith, and be baptized – period? Why do we want them to come to Christ? Surely in order that people, having come to him themselves, will bow the knee to Jesus, give to him the glory that is due his Name, and acknowledge him as Lord – in other words, worship. Therefore, the ultimate objective of evangelism is worship.

Having worshiped, we’re driven out to evangelism in order again that there may be more worship. So, there is a continuous circle of worship leading to witness, witness leading to worship, and so on.

It is an unnecessary dichotomy – worship and witness, worship and evangelism. Each, properly understood, inevitably invokes the other.

Nevertheless, I think we must put worship first. Partly because our duty to God precedes and takes precedence over our duty to our neighbor, and partly because evangelism is only a temporary task. It will end when Christ comes again in glory and power, but we shall be worshiping God forever and ever and ever. It is the eternal function of the Church to be preoccupied with the worship of our Creator and Redeemer. That task will never come to an end.

As evangelicals we should not be ashamed to assert this. I say this because evangelicals are supposed to be interested only in evangelism, and I think it would be greatly for the health of the Church, as well as for the glory of God, if we said that we are equally or even more interested in worship.

The subject of worship has acquired a new importance in our day because of the contemporary quest – particularly in the Western World – for transcendence [something greater or higher than human wisdom and achievements]. What a remarkable thing this is! Young people, disillusioned increasingly (thank God) with the technocracy, are everywhere seeking something Beyond. They believe there is another dimension – a higher dimension – to life than scientists or technologists have ever dreamed or conceived. And today these young people are seeking this higher dimension.

Unfortunately, many seek it in mind-expanding drugs, in yoga, in the higher consciousness, in the flight to the East, in Transcendental Meditation, and in sexual adventures. Although they’re seeking in the wrong places, they are seeking transcendence. This is what they should discover in worship within the Church.

We need to remember that our Christian worship must be more than a social habit, more than a cultural convention. It must be real. It must be authentic. This means, I think, that there are three indispensable characteristics of a local church’s worship-characteristics which make worship both acceptable to God and satisfying to the worshipers.

  1. Worship must be informed and inspired by Scripture, the Word of God. Human beings never initiate the worship of God. For all human worship is a response to the divine initiative. Jesus says in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, “such the Father seeks to worship him” (John 4:23). He takes the initiative. He reveals himself in order to evoke our worship.

It is impossible for us to copy the Athenians, who had that foolish altar to an unknown god (Acts 17:23). You cannot worship a god you do not know! For if you do not know him, then you cannot know what kind of worship might be pleasing to him, acceptable and appropriate.

Jesus also teaches this clearly in the Sermon on the Mount. He dismisses heathen or pagan worship (Matthew 6:1-18). He says that the heathen have these repetitions.

That is pathalogia in Greek, meaning any kind of prayer whether spontaneous or liturgical, in which the mind is not fully engaged.

Jesus wants us not to worship like this.

Why not? Because the God we believe in, the living God who is revealed in Jesus Christ, is not interested in that kind of worship.

Instead, he wants us to come to him and say, “Our Father in Heaven, may your name be honored and your Kingdom come and your will be done.” In this spirit we come to him like little children, thoughtfully, intelligently, confidingly, trustingly. We know the kind of God we come to, that he’s our Father and that he desires us to bring him our worship. And so, the kind of God we believe in determines the kind of worship we will offer him. That is why the Psalms are full of references to his works of creation and redemption.

These provide God’s people with tangible ground for their praise. I was upset a bit at the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne when we kept crooning “alleluia, alleluia.” A sort of mindless trance. I wanted to say stop! stop! stop! What are you saying “alleluia” about? It’s no good just saying, “We praise you,” “we praise You,” “we praise You.” That’s never so in the Bible.

Many psalms begin with the word “alleluia” and end with the word “alleluia.” But in between this “alleluia” sandwich there is tremendous theological content. We are told what we are alleluiaing about. We are told to praise the name of the Lord because of his mighty works, for his creation, and right on through to his redemption.

As a result, our minds are filled with an awareness of the greatness of the Lord. That is the reason for saying “alleluia.” We need to recover some content-full theological hymns and songs so that we can know what we are singing our praises about.

I long for more evangelical reverence. Why not teach our people to come to church early, not to hurry in during the first hymn or after it, but to come in time to be quiet as a prelude to worship? I wish we could teach people that instead of the bout of conversation, to be quiet at least a minute or two before the worship service begins. It’s quite a good idea for the clergy to come in and sit down and be quiet a minute or two before 11 a.m. Also, it’s a good thing to have periods of silence during public worship.

Our worship, if it’s inspired by God’s Word, will not only be reverent but warm. Worship is cold only when the preaching is cold. There is no need to stir a congregation’s emotions artificially when Christ opens the Scripture through the reading and preaching of the Word. That is what makes worship warm, joyful.

  1. Worship must be offered by the whole congregation. The second mark of true worship is that it is congregational.

During the Middle Ages, worship was a theatrical performance. The stage, especially the eucharistic stage [having to do with Eucharist or the sacrament of Communion], was the church chancel. The actors in the drama were the priests and the language of the play was Latin. Congregations were mere spectators in the audience, watching the drama performed by priests around what they called the altar.

One great insight that God gave to the Protestant reformers was a determination to replace this theatrical performance by congregational worship. This reform brought the action down from the chancel to the naves (people). The Protestant reformers insisted on the use of a language understood by the people.

The Church of England produced a book of common prayers, or, in the Church of Scotland, the common order. They did this because they were determined to involve and engage the people in congregational worship.

Some churches today have gone back to the Middle Ages. The pastor does everything while the people sit and doze and listen, interspersing their dreams with hymns.

The highest some churches reach in so-called congregational worship is that during the prayers a hundred, two hundred, three hundred people engage in their own individual prayers. Really, this is not much different than the medieval mass in which the congregation was just encouraged to go on with their private devotions while the priests performed up in the sanctuary.

Do we come to church in order just to enjoy our private devotions, although standing or sitting next to somebody else who is doing the same thing? Surely we should come together for public worship!

Therefore, anything that will better involve the congregation in common worship seems to me highly desirable. Take the seating of the church, which symbolizes our understanding of worship. The Roman Catholic custom was to erect a screen to segregate the chancel from the naves and the clergy from the people. Protestants have opposed this. Yet we tolerated a kind of confrontation between the clergy and the people which the traditional arrangement of pews creates. Over here you have all the people … and over there the clergy. This separation establishes a confrontation between the clergy and the people. It perpetuates and encourages that clerical domination of the laity which has been one of the most disastrous things in the history of the Church.

When Christians meet in houses we gather around in a circle. Somehow we need to secure this intimacy again in our public worship. We need a sense of the congregation being gathered around the action.

In our own church in London we have recently made all the furniture movable. The chancel furniture is movable, the pulpit is movable, the Communion table is movable, the baptismal font is movable. For a Communion service, the table is brought right forward and the people feel they are gathered around the table for the Lord’s Supper. If it’s a baptism, we bring the font forward, closer to the people. If it’s a preaching, we put the pulpit in the center and the people are gathered round. We want to overcome this appalling feeling of confrontation, of separation, between laypeople and clergy.

Related to seating is the question of lay participation; it’s good to involve laypeople also in the reading of the Scripture lessons.

God has gifted many Christians with good voices or an understanding of Scripture so that they can read well. We can also involve laypeople in giving testimonies from time to time or being interviewed about some significant aspect of their lives as Christians. These can greatly enrich our worship.

Why should the pastor always lead in prayer? It’s a very good thing for the laypeople to lead the prayers individually or as a group.

Bach once composed a fresh cantata for every Sunday. And at a Roman Catholic cathedral in Holland there is a group of young people who produce and compose a fresh folk mass every Sunday. Do you have a little worship group in the congregation to help the pastor with the composition of the worship?

There are people in your congregation with creative and innovative artistic and liturgical understandings, laypeople who need to be involved with us clergy in preparing worship that is acceptable to God.

  1. Worship must be related to the contemporary world. Public worship can have a very damaging effect on our Christian lives if worship is regarded as an escape from the real world. A minister in the United Church of Canada, writing about the Jesus People, has said that like the early Christians they live simply, they read Scripture, they break bread together. But he goes on, “Like drugs, a Jesus religion can be an escape from the world in which He is incarnate.”

We gather together as the Lord’s people on the Lord’s Day for worship; then we scatter into the world for our witness. This is another rhythm of the Christian life – gathering and scattering, gathering in church in order to scatter as Christians out into the world. It is vital that we keep the gathering and scattering together in our minds; that we don’t divorce them from one another. In church on the one hand, and at home and at work on the other, we are in the same world.

God’s world. We mustn’t live a double life, oscillating between two worlds, secular and religious. Instead, we must carry our business into our worship and our worship into our business.

Many worshipers, when they come to church, deliberately and consciously step out of the real world into a religious world which has nothing to do with ordinary life. They even step back three or four centuries into an Elizabethan world which no longer exists. And when they look around at the ecclesiastical architecture or the clerical dress or the liturgical language, they must sometimes wonder if they’re dreaming. Is this the real world?

I want to urge that we must worship in modern English! I believe honestly it is inappropriate to worship the living God in a dead language. Oh, we’re so used to “thee’s” and “thou’s” and other archaic words and phrases. But using such archaic words tends to separate our worship from reality.

That is why using today’s language is indispensable, if our worship is to have about it the quality of reality.

It’s very important, as we worship, to keep in our minds the modern work-a-day world to which we belong. Do our worship services encourage the congregation to shut out of their minds the world of their home and of their job and of their community life? If so, then we are promoting by our public worship an unBiblical, spiritual schizophrenia. And we are contributing to that divorce of the sacred from the secular – possibly the most disastrous thing in the whole history of the Christian Church. We need to teach our people that the God whom we worship is the living God who created the world of work and marriage and homes and leisure and community.

His Son, after all, was incarnate and lived and died in the world. So we must not shut out the world in order to retreat into God. Instead, we must worship the God who made and rules the world. We must submit to his sovereignty that bit of the world in which we are involved day by day.

In its widest sense worship is living for God. It is honoring God in the totality of our lives. The hour or an hour and a half in which we mouth our hymns, songs, prayers, and praises simply focuses and verbalizes what is (or ought to be) the direction of our whole life. The sacrifice pleasing to God, according to the Scripture, is not just the praise of our lips, but the offering of our bodies and our money and our service in the world of everyday affairs (Romans 12:1,2). That is true worship! And Scripture states with great plainness that mere words, when divorced from social righteousness, are nauseating to God, disgusting to Him (Amos 5:21-24).

So we need to help people, in public worship, not to forget the world, but to remember it. Not to escape from life into God, but to bring all our life, as it were, with us and subject it to God as an act of worship. At least some of our prayers in church should be really concrete and topical, relating directly to the contemporary concerns of the people. Not just mentioning the sick and the bereaved by name and the missionaries {although that is very good), but also to take up newspaper concerns that are local, national, and international: racial conflict in the community, war, tragedy, disaster, high-jacking.

Public worship is God’s people responding to God’s Word in God’s world. And so my final exhortation is: do let’s toke trouble over the worship. A lot of preachers, I’m afraid, come to church with a prepared sermon and an unprepared service. It seems to me we ought to take equal trouble with the worship as we do the preaching.

John R. W. Stott (1921-2011) was Rector Emeritus, All Souls Church in London.  This article is appeared in the November/December 1979 issue of Good News and is condensed from an address Stott delivered to a combined meeting of leaders of Good News and the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians.

 

 

Is there reality in our worship?

Archive: An Outstanding Overview of the Bible

Archive: An Outstanding Overview of the Bible

a review by Diane Knippers, Assistant Editor of Good News

UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE by John R. W. Stott. Regal Books (Gospel Light), Glendale,CA, 1972. 154 pp., $2.25, paperback.

Studying the Bible can be rewarding! But it can also be frustrating and discouraging. It’s easy to get lost in all the details and miss the more central points. Passages sometimes seem to contradict one another. Sometimes the Biblical messages seem shrouded in ancient customs and thought-patterns. What does THAT mean? the Bible reader puzzles. What in the world does it have to do with ME?

The Holy Spirit is, of course, the chief illuminator of Scripture. But I’d nominate John Stott’s book for second place as a guide into the Bible’s wonderful message. Stott, an Anglican, is Rector Emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England. A noted evangelical thinker, his books include Basic Christianity and Christ the Controversialist.

Understanding the Bible begins with a concise statement of the purpose of the Bible. The purpose is not scientific, nor is it literary-the Bible is a book of salvation. But Stott cautions:

Salvation is far more than the forgiveness of sins. It includes the whole sweep of God’s purpose to redeem and restore mankind, and indeed all creation. (p.15)

The Bible is, therefore, Christocentric. This centrality of Jesus Christ is evident throughout Understanding the Bible.

Having set the stage concerning God’s intention for Scripture, Stott goes on to set the stage geographically. His second chapter, “The Land of the Bible,” is not simply a dull catalog listing average annual rainfall or noted mountain peaks (although it does include such information). Using several helpful maps, Stott shows in an interesting way the importance of basic geographic and historic information. His explanation of various Biblical phrases, such as “from Dan to Beersheba” and “rose of Sharon,” help one appreciate Scripture more fully.

The following two chapters provide an excellent overview of the Old and New Testaments. Such a broad perspective is invaluable in comprehending the relationship between Biblical events and characters, and in understanding main Bible themes such as salvation.

In chapter five, Stott affirms, “The Bible is essentially a revelation of God. It is, in fact, a divine self-disclosure.” (p.161) The story of the Bible is the story of God’s covenant relationship with His people.

The most crucial element in understanding the nature of Scripture is in understanding its authority. Can we trust the Bible fully? Stott answers with a confident yes! He discusses the uniqueness of Scripture by defining three words: revelation, God has taken the initiative in making Himself known to us; inspiration, the mode by which He reveals Himself; and authority, God’s words carry God’s authority.

While there is no question about John Stott’s high view of Scripture, some conservatives have questioned his suggestion that the Genesis flood was a “comparatively local disaster.” He also leaves the authorship of Isaiah 40-55 open to question. This important passage prophecies the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem under Cyrus. Isaiah’s authorship of this section means that he foretold this return perhaps 200 years in advance. If someone other than Isaiah wrote Isaiah 40-55, this would negate Scripture’s prophetic dimension-as liberals claim. The classic view of the church has been prophetic authorship of Isaiah (see “Our Master’s Mind” by John Oswalt, Good News, Mar/Apr 1977, pp. 21-28).

Stott does not push this question—he simply indicates that a different view exists. He personally is thoroughly sound concerning the prophetic notion of Scripture in its relationship to Jesus Christ.

On the whole, Stott’s balanced view of inspiration is refreshing. He is not threatened by critical theories, nor is he doggedly defensive of conservative theory for its own sake. His attitude in accepting the Bible as the Word of God is thoughtful, humble, and reverent.

The cornerstone of the authority of Scripture, according to Stott, is its endorsement by Jesus Himself. Christ affirmed the authority of the Old Testament by His submission to its teachings and prophecies. He endorsed the New Testament by providing for its apostolic authorship.

The Bible is the Christian’s primary avenue for discerning the will of God. So it is essential that we interpret Scripture carefully and accurately. How? Stott urges a combination of enlightenment by the Holy Spirit, disciplined study, and the teachings of the Church. He also offers several very practical principles for interpreting Scripture. For example, every passage should be considered in its setting, from surrounding verses and total Biblical revelation.

To wrench a text from its context is an inexcusable blunder …I was myself greatly disturbed that the World Council of Churches (which ought to have known better) should take as the text for their Fourth Assembly at Uppsala in 1967 God’s great words in Revelation 21:5, “Behold, I make all things new,” where the sentence applies to what He is going to do in the end when He makes a new heaven and a new earth, and should then proceed without any conceivable justification to apply it to the political, revolutionary movements of today. (p. 232)

Understanding the Bible does not conclude with a plea for Biblical understanding. Instead, it ends with challenge to apply Scripture. The Bible is to be used in our everyday living: ” … be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” (James 1:22)

A final word of caution—do not read this book if you want to remain comfortable with careless habits in Bible study:

Sometimes our growth in understanding is inhibited by a proud and prayerless self-confidence, but at other times by sheer laziness and indiscipline. He who would increase in the knowledge of God must both abase himself before the Spirit of truth and commit himself to a lifetime of study. (p. 213)

Archive: Jesus, Teacher and Lord

Archive: Jesus, Teacher and Lord

Archive: Jesus, Teacher and Lord

By John R. Stott

July/September 1971

I have been helped by some words Jesus spoke in the upper room just after He had washed the apostles’ feet. When he had resumed his place, he said to them: “You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord’ were polite  forms of address used in conversation with rabbis. And the apostles used them in addressing Jesus. What he was now saying is that in his case they were more than courtesy titles; they expressed a fundamental reality. As the New English Bible renders it: ‘You call me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what I am.’ I am in fact, he declared, what you call me in title.

This verse tells us something of great importance both about Christ and about Christians.

What it tells us about Christ concerns his divine self-consciousness. Though but a peasant from Galilee, carpenter by trade and preacher by vocation, he claimed to be the Teacher and the Lord of men. He said he had authority over them to tell them what to believe and to do. It is evident (if indirect) claim to deity, for no mere man can ever exercise lordship over other men’s minds and wills. Moreover, in advancing his claim he showed no sign of mental unbalance. On the contrary, he had just risen from supper, girded himself with a towel, poured water into a basin, got on his hands and knees, and washed their feet. He who said he was their Teacher and Lord humbled himself to be their Servant. It is this paradoxical combination of lordship and service, authority and humility, lofty claims and lowly conduct, which constitutes the strongest evidence that (in John’s words in this passage) ‘he had come from God and was going to God’ (John 13:3).

Secondly, the same verse reveals the proper relationship of Christians to Christ. This is not only that of a sinner to his Savior, but also of a pupil to his Teacher and of a servant to his Lord. Indeed, these things belong indissolubly together. He is ‘our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.’ What, then, are the implications of acknowledging Jesus as Teacher and Lord?

Of course everybody agrees that Jesus of Nazareth was a great teacher, and many are prepared to go at least as far as Nicodemus and call Him ‘a Teacher come from God.’ Further, it is clear that one of the most striking characteristics of his teaching was the authority with which he gave it. He did not hem and haw and hesitate. Nor did he ever speak tentatively, diffidently, apologetically. No. He knew what he wanted to say, and he said it with quiet, simple dogmatism. It is this that impressed people so much. As they listened to him, we read, “they were astonished at his teaching, for his word was with authority.’’

There is only one logical deduction from these things. If the Jesus who thus taught with authority was the Son of God made flesh, we must bow to his authority and accept his teaching. We must allow our opinions to be moulded by his opinions, our views to be conditioned by his views. And this includes His uncomfortable and unfashionable teaching … like his view of God as a supreme, spiritual, personal, powerful Being, the Creator, Controller, Father and King, and of man as a created being, made in the image of God but now fallen, with a heart so corrupt as to be the source of all the evil things he thinks, says and does …. He taught the divine origin, supreme authority and complete sufficiency of Scripture as God’s Word written, whose primary purpose is to direct the sinner to his Savior in order to find life. He also taught the fact of divine judgment as a process of sifting which begins in this life and is settled at death. He confirmed that the final destinies of men are the awful alternatives of Heaven and Hell, adding that these destinies are irrevocable, with a great gulf fixed between them.

These traditional Christian truths are being called in question today. The independent, personal, transcendent being of God, the radical sinfulness of man, the inspiration and authority of Scripture, the solemn, eternal realities of Heaven and Hell – all this (and more) is being not only questioned, but in many places actually abandoned. Our simple contention is that no man can jettison such plain Gospel truths as these and still call Jesus “Teacher.”

There have been other religious teachers, even if less authoritative than Jesus. But Jesus went further, claiming also to be Lord. A teacher will instruct his pupils. He may even plead with them to follow his teaching. He cannot command assent, however, still less obedience. Yet this prerogative was exercised by Jesus as Lord. “If you love me,” He said, “you will keep my commandments.’’ “He who loves father or mother … son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’’ He asked from his disciples nothing less than their supreme love and loyalty.

So Christians look to Jesus Christ as both their Teacher and their Lord – their Teacher to instruct them and their Lord to command them. We are proud to be more than his pupils; we are his servants as well. We recognize his right to lay upon us duties and obligations: “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.’’ This ‘ought’ we accept from the authority of Jesus. We desire not only to submit our minds to his teaching but our wills to his obedience. And this is what he expected: “Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant [literally ‘slave’] is not greater than his master.’’ He therefore calls us to adopt his standards, which are totally at variance with the world’s, and to measure greatness in terms, not of success but of service; not of self-aggrandizement, but of self-sacrifice.

Because we are fallen and proud human beings, we find this part of Christian discipleship very difficult. We like to have our own opinions (especially if they are different from everybody else’s) and to air them rather pompously in conversation. We also like to live our own lives, set our own standards and go our own way. In brief, we like to be our own master, our own teacher and word.

People sometimes defend this position by saying that it would be impossible – and if it were possible it would be wrong – to surrender our independence of thought. Drummer Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones expressed this view when he said: “I’m against any form of organized thought. I’m against … organized religion like the Church. I don’t see how you can organize 10,000,000 minds to believe one thing.” This is the mood of the day, both in the world and in the Church. It is a self-assertive and anti-authoritarian mood. It is not prepared either to believe or do anything simply because some “authority” requires it. But what if that authority is Christ’s? What if Christ’s authority is God’s? What then? The only Christian answer is that we submit, humbly, gladly, and with the full consent of our mind and will.

But do we? Is this, in fact, our regular practice?

It is quite easy to put ourselves to the test. What is our authority for believing what we believe and doing what we do? Is it, in reality, what we think and what we want? Or is it what Professor So-and-so has written, what Bishop Such-and-such has said? Or is it what Jesus Christ has made known, either himself directly or through his apostles?

We may not particularly like what he taught about God and man, Scripture and salvation, worship and morality, duty and destiny, Heaven and Hell. But are we daring to prefer our own opinions and standards to his, and still call ourselves Christian? Or are we presuming to say that he did not know what he was talking about; that he was a weak and fallible Teacher, or even accommodated himself to the views of his contemporaries although he knew them to be mistaken? Such suggestions are dreadfully derogatory to the honor of the Son of God.

Of course we have a responsibility to grapple with Christ’s teaching, its perplexities and problems, endeavoring to understand it and to relate it to our own situation. But ultimately the question before the Church can be simply stated: is Jesus Christ Lord, or not? And if he is Lord, is he Lord of all? The Lordship of Jesus must be allowed to extend over every part of those who have confessed that “Jesus is Lord,” including their minds and their wills. Why should these be exempt from his otherwise universal dominion? No one is truly converted who is not intellectually and morally converted. No one is intellectually converted if he has not submitted his mind to the mind of the Lord Christ, nor morally converted if he has not submitted his will to the will of the Lord Christ.

Further, such submission is not bondage but freedom. Or rather, it is that kind of willing Christian bondage which is perfect Christian freedom – freedom from the vagaries of self and from the fashions of the world (and of the Church), freedom from the shifting sands of subjectivity, freedom to exercise our minds and our wills as God intended them to be exercised, not in rebellion against him, but in submission to him.

I do not hesitate to say that Jesus Christ is looking for men and women in the Church of this kind and caliber today, who will take him seriously as their Teacher and Lord – not just paying lipservice to these titles (“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?”), but actually taking his yoke upon them, in order to learn from him and to “take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

This will involve for us, first, a greater diligence in study. We can neither believe nor obey Jesus Christ if we do not know what he taught. One of the most urgent needs of the contemporary Church is a far closer acquaintance with Scripture among ordinary members. How lovingly the pupil should cherish the teaching of such a Master!

It will also involve a greater humility in subordination. By nature we hate authority and we love independence. We think it a great thing to have an independent judgment and manifest an independent spirit. And so it is, if by this we mean that we do not wish to be sheep who follow the crowd, or reeds shaken by the winds of public opinion. But independence from Jesus Christ is not a virtue; it is a sin, and indeed a grievous sin in one who professes to be a Christian. The Christian is not at liberty to disagree with Christ or to disobey Christ. On the contrary, his great concern is to conform both his mind and his life to Christ’s teaching.

And the reasonableness of this Christian subordination lies in the identity of the Teacher. If Jesus of Nazareth were a mere man, it would be ludicrous thus to submit our minds and our wills to him. But because He is the Son of God, it is ludicrous not to do so. Rather, submission to him is just Christian common sense and duty.

I believe that Jesus Christ is addressing the Church of our day with the same words: “You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am.” My prayer is that, having listened to his words, we shall not be content with the use of these courtesy titles, but give him due honor by our humble belief and wholehearted obedience.

By John R. Stott (1921-2011). In addition to being Rector of All Souls Church in London, Dr. Stott was considered one of the foremost evangelical thinkers and theologians in modern time. Condensed by permission of InterVarsity Press, from his book, “Christ, The Controversialist.” This article was republished by permission in the July/September 1971 issue of Good News.