You Say You Want A Reformation? With Dr. R. Scott Clark (Session three: The Quest for Illegitimate Religious Experiences )

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the

Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her

King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. What I call the quest for illegitimate religious experience.

So I started off last night trying to give you a picture of why

Reformation Christianity, why the Reformation is such a foreign thing in America in the 21st century.

And why being a Reformation Christian makes you a kind of missionary in a sense to a strange land where people are thinking about other things and seeking other things.

Why are we here? Well, it's October. Why? What's the big deal about October? Well, traditionally, going back quite a long ways, we remember on October 31st, by legend, the nailing of the 95

Theses on the church door of Wittenberg. That may or may not have happened. We actually, truth be told, don't know that he nailed the 95

Theses on the church door. We know for certain that he mailed them to the Archbishop.

But we don't actually know that he nailed them. So when you go to Wittenberg, the tour guide, the docent, will tell you, well, here's where he did it.

And that's just business. It's not history necessarily.

That kind of thing did happen. But these were academic theses, in a sense, more than popular ecclesiastical things.

So anyway, they didn't get published in German until they were stolen and printed.

And then they spread like wildfire because they were translated and printed.

At any rate, so October is Reformation month. At least it is for those of us who identify with the

Reformation and know that it happened. I sketched for you a little bit last night the five steps.

You remember those five steps? The five steps that Luther took towards becoming a Protestant.

So he's a medieval Christian. He's a medieval Christian, and he thinks about the faith in the way that he was taught to think about it in university until he gradually, over time, becomes a

Protestant in the period from 1513 to roughly 1521.

And certainly by 1525, in what he regarded as his greatest work on the bondage of the will, better translated on the bound will, but on the bondage of the will, 1525, you see a mature statement of where Luther is.

And there you see all these great themes, the theology of the cross, the theology of glory, the law gospel distinction, human depravity, unconditional divine grace.

To some degree, imputation. That will come up more clearly in some other places, but he's certainly there by 1521.

Imputation of Christ's righteousness that he accomplished for us, credited to us, and then what he regarded as the sort of turning point of the whole thing, sola fide, which we'll come to later this morning.

By faith alone. Faith as the sole instrument of receiving Christ by resting, leaning, trusting.

These are the participles that we use to qualify faith when we talk about sola fide.

Well, I'm a historian, and so this morning we're going to do some history.

We're going to look a little bit this hour at Galatians 5, but there's going to be some history because it's important for you to understand how we got where we are so that you understand that the way things are now in the midst of third wave

Pentecostalism, for example, that this isn't normal. It seems like the norm now because virtually everybody, it seems, is some kind of Pentecostal or charismatic.

And for the purposes of this talk, I'm just going to give the caveat. I recognize that there are differences between those movements, but from the point of view of traditional

Reformation Christianity, they're essentially the same thing. So I'm going to treat them this morning as essentially, in their essence, the same thing.

Both groups claim to receive continuing revelation from God, direct revelation, actual revelation that's apart from Holy Scripture.

And so at the core, even though they are different phenomena, and some of the differences are sociological.

The charismatic movement is slightly more restrained, a little more polite, maybe a little more private.

There's less, in the charismatic movement, people aren't falling on the floor. In old -fashioned, I say old -fashioned,

Topeka, Azusa Street, or Cain Ridge, if you want to go back to the 19th century Pentecostalism, people are falling on the floor, being slain in the spirit, and so forth.

Charismatics may or may not speak in tongues, but insofar as you have extraordinary experiences of the

Holy Spirit, continuing revelation, prophecies being given by the

Spirit, allegedly, to people that are authoritative words from God, and in some cases, non -canonical, and even according to Wayne Groot, fallible, you can have fallible words from God, the

Holy Spirit. This is an extraordinary thing to say. When God the

Holy Spirit was hovering over the face of the deep in Genesis 1, it's a good thing he wasn't fallible then.

When God the Holy Spirit led the Israelites out of Egypt, through the wilderness, pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night, it's a good thing he wasn't fallible then.

When he inspired the prophets and the apostles to give the inerrant, fallible word of God, and then preserved it through all those centuries, all those extraordinary circumstances, and all those language groups, and all those times and places, so that we'd have the authoritative, final sola scriptura, final word of God, it's a good thing he wasn't fallible then.

But if in a church meeting, the Holy Spirit comes upon somebody, and he stands up, and he says, the

Lord just revealed to me, and you think I'm kidding, but I'm not, this stuff happened, that you have to sell me that classic 57

Chevy you restored. Well, that could be fallible, but it could be the

Holy Spirit. That's the case that's being made. You think I'm kidding. You think I'm making it, boy, that Clark, he's such a mean, critical, negative guy.

No. Well, maybe. Maybe, but that's sort of beside the point, right?

I might be a squeaky door, but I might also be right, right? Read the book.

I read the book, and for a while, I was almost persuaded.

I went back to the scriptures, and I tested his claims against the scriptures, and looked at his reading of Ephesians, particularly

Ephesians 4, and then his account of Agabus, and it turns out he completely misunderstands Agabus. But to base a radical revision of the

Protestant doctrine of scripture, and the Protestant doctrine of inspiration, and revelation, and prophecy on what is arguably one of the most difficult passages in the

New Testament, to make that a fulcrum, is a terrible method. We let the clear help us understand the less clear, and when it's patently less clear, you just hold that in abeyance, and you say, you know what?

That's an interesting passage. It's a difficult passage. For example, when Paul talks about baptism for the dead in 1

Corinthians 15, you might have your opinion, I might have mine. You know what I'm not going to do? Base a doctrine on it, because it's a really difficult passage, and frankly, we probably just don't know enough about the original setting to quite sort out what that is, right?

In the Westminster Confession, Chapter 1, we say, all scriptures are not alike, plain in themselves, but what we need to know, we can know.

Scripture is sufficiently clear. It's not entirely clear, but it is sufficiently clear for what we need to know for the

Christian faith, that is, for salvation, and for the Christian life. When I was younger, we used to say, for faith and life.

We didn't add the qualifier Christian, and people started turning the Bible into a manual for car repair. No, that's not what the scriptures were intended to do, right?

You're supposed to learn about car repair from your dad, or your uncle, or your neighbor, right? All right, all right, so that's a whole other conference, but I'm trying to set the stage so you understand we live in this world that is awash in what

I call the quest for illegitimate religious experience. I have these two categories, two groups that I'm criticizing.

One is quirk, and the other is choir. That's the authorized pronunciation of those words, quirk and choir, and that was intentional.

If you're on the quest for illegitimate religious certainty, you're quirky, and if you're on the quest for illegitimate religious experience, you're in the choir, and I'm not a huge fan of choirs, so that was kind of a very inside joke.

It's so inside, almost nobody got it, but it made me laugh. I come from a tradition that favors the singing of psalms, and in the 16th century

Reformation, 17th century Reformation, most of our churches, for example, in Geneva, we sang psalms, and we sang them without instruments, and the choirs that existed prior to the

Reformation were monastic choirs. The people just sat, and they watched the priest conduct a sacrifice at an altar.

Those of you who have Roman backgrounds, you know at least pre -Vatican one, you remember the priest used to turn his back, close the gate to the altar, so you people are on that side of the altar, the priest is in the holy of holies, as it were, closes the gate, turns his back on you people, because you are just observers of the mystery of the

Eucharistic sacrifice. He elevates the host, and he makes a memorial, memorial, bloodless, but watch this, propitiatory.

Who knows what propitiation means? That's a $10 theological word, but it's a really important theological word, propitiatory.

What does that mean? Propitiatory. Hmm? Very good, that's exactly right, he said satisfies the wrath of God.

So the priest, according to Rome, he is turning away the wrath of God.

My preaching professor, homiletics professor, Dr. Bergman, said, he pointed at us one day, and he said, men, don't you ever turn your back on the congregation, you are not a priest.

You're a minister of the word of God, you're a servant of the word of God, you're not a priest, and you don't have magical powers.

Jesus propitiated the wrath of God, and your job is to do nothing but announce that.

Anyway, that's another conference. So I'm not even sure how we get to propitiation and priest,

I don't know. Oh, kirks and choirs. So in our churches, we did away with the monastic choirs, and we made the congregation the choir.

And then we did away with everything else, and we sang the

Psalms acapella, and so that was a very inside joke. It was meant to poke people who knew, because there are people in our world who know that history, and know

I'm right about that, and I was poking them in the chest, right? Few people know what you're doing, and you know it's wrong, stop it.

That didn't win me a lot of friends. All right, so here we are, awash in Pentecostalism, awash in the charismatic movement, awash in continuing prophecy, even non -canonical, allegedly fallible prophecy from the

Holy Spirit, right? Prima facie, highly problematic, highly dubious, but very persuasive.

Why would people, so here's my question, why would people find it remotely plausible that God the

Holy Spirit, who raised Jesus from the dead, who gave you new life sovereignly by his free grace, raised you from the dead, you were dead in sins and trespasses, some mere mortal announced the word of God, announced the gospel, and God the

Holy Spirit used that announcement to awaken you from spiritual death to spiritual life, and he did so infallibly.

How is it possible that we could think that, so how did that become plausible?

That's my question. How did that become plausible? And how did it become plausible even among Reformation Christians?

How did it become such that leading voices who identify strongly with the

Reformation would say, you know, it's great being Reformed, it's great being Reformational, but we need a dose of Pentecostalism to sort of liven things up?

And that's pretty close to what's been argued. That's not a caricature. Well, it's like this.

There's a long history in the church, there's a long history in the church of what I call the quest for illegitimate religious experience.

The one way this has been cast is the quest to know

God as he is in himself, and I'm going to give you a Latin phrase, come away with some

Latin this morning, Deus nudus, right, the naked God.

God always comes to us. The theologian that I did my doctoral research on, Caspar Olivianus, was a big influence on me.

And I'm fortunate because I knew him a little bit before I did my work on him, but I got to know him a lot better, and I'm still reading him, still learning from him.

And the good thing is he's really, really good, he's really, really orthodox. Not that he didn't make any mistakes, but he's very orthodox and edifying.

Some people spend their lives studying people who are terrible theologians and bad influences, and it actually can be a spiritual struggle, so I'm blessed in that way.

Caspar Olivianus said in one of his books in the 16th century, God always comes to us clothed in the covenant of grace.

He comes to his people, right, clothed in the covenant of grace. That's a very interesting metaphor, clothed in the covenant of grace.

What that means is God always comes to us and accommodates himself to us.

He stoops, Calvin said it this way, his image to explain accommodation was this,

God uses baby talk. All of scripture is baby talk.

I've had people say to me, I can't wait till I see God, and they mean the Father, face to face, as he really is in himself.

And my response is, when you get to heaven and you see a door, right, were that the case?

And it says, you know, God, as he is in himself, don't open that door, right, because you know what happens when you open that door?

You're gone. No man can see God and live, right?

What does Hebrews say? The pastor's been taking... Are you still on Hebrews? The pastor's taking you through Hebrews. I'm a little behind, right?

What does Hebrews say about God? We worship him with reverence and awe.

This is Hebrews now. This is not Deuteronomy. This is not Leviticus. It's not, right, not one of those scary

Old Testament books with the scary Old Testament God. It's the nice New Testament.

I'm being facetious here. The loving New Testament God, that's how the Marcionites, the

Gnostics, and a lot of evangelicals talk about the Bible. They got their New Testament in their psalms, right?

You ever seen that? New Testament. I understand why they did that, but it always makes me a little nervous, because the

Gnostics and the Marcionites did that kind of thing. For our

God is a consuming fire. So the medievals thought, some of them, particularly mystics, and mystics in the early church thought, we want to know

God as he is in himself. We don't want a mediated God. We want an immediate vision of God.

Not a God who stoops and speaks baby talk to us, right?

We want to get past that. We want to get beyond Scripture, behind Scripture. We want to get to the

God who's behind Scripture. And one of the things we said in the

Reformation is, you can't do that. We relearned the truth of Scripture, that there's no

God to be known behind the God who is revealed in his Word. Much of contemporary evangelical

Christianity is a quest to get behind Scripture. I've had people tell me, I want to know what's behind Scripture.

I've had people use those words. And I'm here to say this morning, there's no such thing.

And were you, you know, hypothetically to do it, as I say. What happens to Annias and Sapphira?

You want to know about the God behind Scripture, if there was such a thing? Well, just lie to the

Holy Spirit, right? In the New Testament, what happens to those two when they lie to the

Holy Spirit, right? Boom, they carried him out, comes in, boom, carried him out.

And what does Luke say? And everybody was afraid.

What does Paul say, 1 Corinthians 14, people come in, we pray and hope and talk to people and we trust that God will bring unbelievers from the community into the church, into what

I would call the visible covenant community. And what does Paul say that he hopes will happen?

That they'll feel comfortable and affirmed and good about themselves and find a positive plan to go forward with their lives to be more successful.

Which version of 1 Corinthians 14 says that? I don't even think that's in the message or the new

English translation or the new, the really new living or whatever. No, Paul says that his prayer is that the unbelievers would come in and see that God was present and that they would fall down on their faces and worship him.

What happens when you steal from God in the Old Testament, right?

Boom. What happens when you don't let the Israelites go?

You go for a swim and you don't get out. What happens when you don't listen to God's prophet who says, there's a judgment coming, but salvation is here, right?

Repent and believe in the promises of God. You go, right?

You learn to tread water until you can't tread water. That's God. And we forgot that.

And for a very long time in the history of the church, we were seeking the vision of God and to know God nakedly.

That was the whole point of being a monastic. People left secular life and they said, you know, secular life is kind of, they came to think of ordinary life, secular life, as secular is a good thing and not a bad thing.

We've come to use that word in a very negative, pejorative way. There's nothing wrong with secular. Secular is just where we live when we're not actively involved in public worship.

It's not a bad thing. It's not a dirty thing. But they came to think in the medieval church of daily secular life as dirty and the people who were involved in that are second class.

They wanted to withdraw from that and to gather in groups. Gather in groups and initially individually.

The earliest monks tried to live individually in the desert and they became holy men. They got reputations as holy men and people started coming out to them saying, we want to be holy too.

And the monks, go away. I left you people. I don't want to be with you filthy people.

I want to be by myself. Be holy. And then the hoi poi came out, we want to be holy.

So they started making communities of monks. And what happens when you make communities of, if you have one monk by himself, you have one center, you have communities of monks, you have communities of sinners.

They had little tiny communities of people seeking to get away from the secular and to get clean, to get holy, and to get right with God by doing things.

And many of the monastic orders were set up so that you could have this vision of God.

That's the quest. So I talked about the runner's high last night. This was their quest for a kind of runner's high, this exquisite experience, immediate experience of God as he is in himself.

Not even Christ, but really of God as he is in his being.

And particularly as it went on, there were some monastics who were thinking about Jesus. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, is one who

I call him a Christo -mystic. He is focused on Jesus. He's thinking about the life of Christ.

So he's grounded in the history of salvation. So there's that. But he comes to talk about Jesus in ways that, if you were, for example, to read his commentary on the

Song of Songs, it would make you blush. It would make you blush. It's a little shocking.

You know, as I'm reading, I'm thinking, really, Bernard? Really? Did you really just say that? That's a little creepy.

It's quasi -romantic language. More than quasi. It's not quasi. It's romantic language about Jesus.

I guess I could say it's quasi -erotic. But at least he's thinking about God the

Son, the Word of God incarnate. So he's got that going for him. But there were before him, and particularly after him, mystics

I call onto -mystics, being mystics, mystics interested in transcending their finitude, their humanity, and being absorbed into the deity.

And those are the most famous mystics. Julian of Norwich, who's the guy who divided history into three sections?

It'll come back to me. Maybe it's in my notes. I can't think of his name just now. Oh, there he is.

Joachim of Fiore. He's a famous one. In fact, he's one of the, he's kind of, we can think of him as an early

Pentecostal Joachim of Fiore. And there were, the traditional story about the

Montanists in the second or in the third century is that they were early Pentecostals. There's some doubt about whether that's really true.

But if it's true, you've got a kind of Pentecostalism already in the third century.

So all through the history of the church, leading up to the Reformation, and particularly just before the

Reformation, there's a lot of this onto -mysticism, resigning ourselves to God and questing for an immediate experience of God.

And we're not even thinking now about Jesus as the mediator of God, but getting behind Jesus.

That's the quest. Right? And I call this the quest for illegitimate religious experience or the choir.

And at the Reformation, Martin Luther put a stake in that quest, in the heart of that quest.

Or you remember the vampire story of Dracula, right? Dr. Van Helsing has to, and I never thought about the fact that he's

Dutch. I wonder if he was reformed. Maybe that's why he wanted to kill

Dracula, because he was a good Dutchman. You can't have vampires running around. Got to drive a stake in his heart.

Probably crafted that stake in his, they do a lot of woodworking. Really nice stake.

Got a handmade hammer here, going to pound it in his heart when he's sleeping, get rid of him. So you got to pound the stake in Dracula's heart.

When we were kids in Omaha, there was a television show called Creature Feature, and there was a guy who worked for the local

TV station, it was a Channel 3. And I don't remember what his real name was, but he put every, he just was a technician.

But on Friday nights, he put tons of airplane glue and all kinds of stuff on his face and painted himself up, and he became

Dr. Sanguinari, sanguine, it's blood. And he would show old horror films, and we would stay up late on Friday nights to watch

Dr. Sanguinari. That's where I saw Dracula. So Luther drives a stake into the heart of that mysticism.

But just as soon as he did, out squeezes, sort of like a

Ghostbusters, and here comes another one of those slimy things. The radical mysticism reappears in the

Anabaptist movement. Now, I don't know what you know about the Anabaptists, but whatever you think you know is probably wrong.

They were not just Protestants that were just like the Protestants, just a little more radical.

They're sometimes called the Radical Reformation. They were not Protestants. The Anabaptists in the 1520s, now when it gets to Menno Simmons, it gets a little more complicated, but so the second generation

Anabaptists are a little different, and the succeeding generations are a little different. But the early generations, all of them, all the major Anabaptist leaders, they all looked at the

Reformation and they said, ah, we don't want that. And the things that, here's what they didn't like, they didn't like the

Orthodox Christology, that Jesus is true God and true man, because they said, well, his humanity is celestial.

And the best way I can explain their view of Jesus' humanity is to talk about Star Trek.

I call it the Star Trek Christology. You know how people would dematerialize and then go to the planet, you know, whatever it was, and rematerialize?

That was their view of Jesus' Christology, Jesus' humanity. He had a magical, dematerialized humanity, celestial flesh.

He was in the Virgin, but not of the Virgin. He passed through her,

Dr. Horton says, like a train through a train station. That's not the biblical doctrine of Jesus' humanity.

It's not the ecumenical Christian, certainly not the Protestant doctrine of Jesus. So they were heretical on Christology, and every single one of them,

I know this might be a shock, but every single one of them in the first generation denied the Protestant doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone, for the very same reason that the

Roman Church denied it, because they said it's going to lead to people misbehaving. You can't tell people that they're saved by grace alone through faith alone, because you tell them that, they're going to go out and do whatever they want, and then expect to go to heaven.

And we can't have that. And they said that pretty much that way. And the other thing that you might not know, that most people didn't know,

I didn't know, is that they were among the original modern Pentecostals.

And I say modern advisedly, because I use that word very carefully in this context, because Luther's not a modern guy,

Calvin's not a modern guy, Booth's not a modern guy, Zwingli's not a modern guy, these are medieval people. But the Anabaptists were modern because they asserted the autonomy of self.

The essential religion of the Anabaptist is private, personal, independent, and autonomous.

I am the measure. You want to know where people got this idea that I can read the

Bible by myself in my closet and I get to say what it means, and I don't care what anybody else says,

I don't care what anybody else has ever said about it, I'm going to read the Bible as if nobody else has ever read it before.

You ever heard anybody say, I'm going to preach this passage as if nobody's ever preached it before? The Anabaptists taught us that.

So they were radical individuals, they made a radical assertion of autonomy of a kind that doesn't really take hold until much later.

They anticipated modernity. They are the fathers, if you will, the progenitors of what we know as modernity.

So here's my, are you tracking with me? You want to know one of the reasons why things are the way they are?

It wasn't Martin Luther who unleashed the autonomous man. It was the

Anabaptists, the first generation Anabaptists, who unleashed autonomous man. Because some of them were spiritualists and some of them were rationalists.

They said what my mind can't understand isn't true. What my net can't catch isn't a butterfly.

What my hook can't catch isn't a fish. And Voltaire would come to say man is the measure of, it's not

Voltaire, he's repeating an earlier, much earlier Greek philosopher, but man is the measure of all things becomes one of the slogans of the

Enlightenment movements and of modernity, modern autonomy. I'm the boss.

What my senses don't experience can't be true. What my mind can't comprehend absolutely can't be true.

That begins, that kind of rationalism is in the early Anabaptist movement. And, and the other side of it is this desire to receive direct revelation.

So one of the leading Anabaptists was Thomas Münzer, M -U with an umlaut,

E, Münzer. Not Münster, the town, right, which actually in some ways is symbolic of the excesses of the

Anabaptist movement, 1535, where they had a guy receiving direct revelation, right, from the

Lord, and he set up, he tried to set up a theocracy, killed people who disagreed with him, right, and he was an, these were

Anabaptists who did this, the peaceful Anabaptists who never hurt anybody, except if you disagree with them in Münster, then they put you to death.

That's another story. Thomas, Thomas Münzer said to the Protestants, you guys are ministers of the dead letter.

You are trapped, you are locked into scripture. I don't need scripture.

I get direct revelation, shundalala, shundalala, shundalala. I get direct revelation from the

Lord, right? All this stuff that we're seeing, that we've been seeing since Topeka and Azusa Street, 1906, 1907, it starts with Thomas Münzer in 1520, 21.

And you know where he ended up, 1524? He's at the head of a giant army going to war against the empire, taking up arms against the empire, and they're going to bring in the kingdom of God, and people came, some people came to regard him and the other spiritualist

Anabaptist leader at the head of that as the two prophets of the revelation, and people thought, this is it, the thousand years are coming, and these two guys, do you get a feel for what's going on in the early 1520s?

In the early 19th century, we redid that in America, is my argument.

Now there's a bridge in between, right? So the quest for illegitimate religious experience, we've always had it in the monks, we've always had it in the mystics, and then we had it at least in a substantial portion of the first generation

Anabaptists, and it continued in a more moderate way, but it continued still in the second generation Anabaptists.

At the same time, there developed movements that were more polite, more restrained versions, and the second big phase in the bridge movement to get between us, that bridges them to us, our time, is a movement called

Pietism. This is the bridge, if you will, between the Reformation and the

Revival movements. And the Pietists, in the 17th century, were in state churches, and they were, so Pietist describes a movement of people who were in state churches, and that's really important that you understand and remember that.

These are state -sponsored, state -controlled, state -ordained churches, and everybody in a state church is a member of the church, whether you want to be or not, you're a member.

And everybody's baptized, and everybody has a right to come to the table, everybody has a right to get married, and so there was a problem of nominalism, people saying the words but not believing the truth that they signified.

And the Pietists said, this is intolerable, and so they did two things. They said, we need to form small groups.

The small group movement was invented by the Pietists. They called them conventicles, and they met in small groups, and in the 18th century, they came to be called holy clubs.

That's where Wesley came from. That's where Whitfield came from, from the holy clubs in Oxford. And there were conventicles all throughout

Europe in the state churches, particularly in the Lutheran churches, and to some degree in the

Reformed churches, particularly in the Netherlands. And it was a reaction to state churches, and it was a movement that said, orthodoxy, what we confess in our confessions is fine, but it's not enough, and ultimately, if I have to choose between orthodoxy and a certain kind of religious experience,

I'm going to prioritize a certain quality of religious experience. So whatever you confess with your mouth, well, that's all well and good.

What I want to know is, what is the quality of your heart religion? How many times,

I don't know if you've had this experience, I don't know how many times people have come up to me after I've done a conference or preached a sermon or something or taught a class and said, well, that's all very interesting, but tell me about your heart religion, your personal relationship with Jesus.

And I want to say to them, you're, I want to be a little careful how I put this, you might as well ask me about my intimate relationship with my wife.

I'm not going to detail that for you. That's none of your business. But that's pietism.

I didn't say piety. We're all in favor of piety. Attending to the due use of ordinary means as public worship, the preaching of the gospel, the administration of the holy sacraments, absolutely.

Private prayer, yes. Private Bible reading, yes. But when I was a young Christian, the first thing

I learned and the first sacrament I was taught as a young evangelical was not baptism and not the

Lord's Supper and not public worship. It was the sacrament of the quiet time. And the way we measured piety when

I was a young Christian in 1976, spring of 76, right, through those early years, was how is your quiet time?

I was given a pack of verses from the Navigators, and I was memorizing these random verses out of context.

So for years and years, I would come across verses I had memorized as a 16 -year -old and think, oh, that's where that is.

That's what that means. I had no idea. I memorized it, no idea what it meant, because I was memorizing it out of context.

The context was a verse pack. It was supposed to be thematic or something. And we kept a manual.

When I was a young Christian, we had a little book that we carried, and it was called nine, it was digital clocks were brand new. And it was 9 colon 59 minutes with God, your 9 .59

book. That was for young Christians. And when you matured, and when your discipler decided that you were mature enough, you got the 29 .59,

the half -hour book with God. And I was filling out these Navigators workbooks with Leroy Iams and doing my 9 .59,

right? And the only test that was ever asked was, how's your quiet time? And I remember when the guy who led me to Christ, he confessed to me, he said,

Scott, I haven't had a quiet time in two weeks. And I thought, uh -oh, Bob's not saved. That was the measure of spirituality, not attending to public worship and loving your neighbor, loving

God. It was the quiet time. And I was given a book by Rosalind Rinker, Conversations with God, I think it was.

And it was all about how I could get beyond behind the Bible, climb up into heaven, and have a conversation with God directly.

I could ask him questions. And he talks to me. I talk to him. That was real prayer.

And the other thing I learned as a very young Christian was, we all get still, small voices from God.

If Christian, then still, small voice. And you know what?

I never got the still, small voice. I couldn't figure out what it was. Everybody else was getting it.

But I wasn't getting it. And the syllogism wasn't hard to do. Christians get still, small voice.

Scott does not get still, small voice. Ergo, dun, dun, dun.

I better go forward again. Better get baptized, right? Some need to get filled with the

Holy Spirit. Somebody got to lay hands on me, right? I'm missing. What if 1

Kings isn't actually saying anything about you and your quiet time and getting direct revelation from the Lord?

What if that passage has absolutely nothing to do with that? What if that was never intended to teach you how to pray or how to receive a direct revelation from the

Lord? Which, of course, if you go and look at the passage in context, has nothing to do with you. You're not in that passage.

But our reigning assumption was, the Bible is all about me and all about how to facilitate a particular quality of religious experience.

And that's what the pietists were ultimately selling. There's an interior turn and a quest for a direct encounter apart from the means of grace.

So the pietist movement was led by mystics questing for this immediate encounter with God, going even behind Christ, behind the scriptures.

And so that some of them even wanted, by the early 1620s, were seeking, just like the old

Onto mystics at the end of the medieval period, seeking to be absorbed by God.

That's how. Go to Barnes and Noble. Look at the religion section, right? And you go partway down and there'll be a whole section of mystical books,

Christian mysticism. Thomas Merton, seven -story, whatever, seven -story house or whatever it is.

Hm? Seven -story mountain. Thank you. There'll be four, five, or six, or ten books on Christian mysticism.

Go into any, if you can still find one. We were in one yesterday, a used bookstore. You'll find books on Christian mysticism.

Nothing on the Incarnation, nothing on the Trinity, nothing on any of the objective truths of the

Christian faith, but all on how you can transcend your humanity and escape and be absorbed into God.

That's what some of the more radical pietists were selling. So one scholar of pietism lists five qualities of pietism.

The first is a turn to the practical. What does it mean for me? It's all about me.

What does it mean for me? Second, we're going to get back, we're going to read scripture as if no one's ever read it before, and we're going to talk about this in another talk.

We call this, this is called biblicism. I and my Bible in the closet reading it as if no one's ever read it before.

They were, they were biblicists. Third, we want to be holy, we want to be good, and we want to change society.

We want to be holy, we want to be good, and we want to change society. This was a pietist. This is not, am

I not describing the, any issue of Christianity today, so far?

Fourth, a priority on religious experience, more important than anything else.

This, so this, this is not in any particular order. An emphasis on religious experience. Fifth, emphasis on acts of mercy.

Now, I want you to hear me. I'm not opposed to religious experience. I'm opposed to looking for it.

I'm not opposed to religious experience. If God wants to give you a religious experience, fine. Personally, keep it to yourself, right?

It's fine, but I don't want to hear about it, and I don't want you looking for it. I don't want you trying to teach other people how to get it, right?

For $29 .95, send before midnight. Click on this link. If you see me on late night

TV, right, selling direct revelation, wealth, power, and spiritual experience, you know

I sold out, and I really need the money, and you know what? I could do it, and I could,

I could be rich as stink, because people will send me money if I tell them those three things, and it's easy peasy.

Jesus, give me a message right now. He wants to heal you, and I will send you the keys, the three keys to spiritual power and healing and wealth for $29 .95.

There's a link at the bottom of your screen. Click on that link now. It's on your screen, and power will come to you right through your phone, and people will, money would pour in, or you could see

God as he is in himself, right? Where's all that come from?

Comes from the pietists, comes from the mystics, comes from the early Anabaptists. Does that not sound like American evangelicalism?

If it doesn't, you don't ever look, and you probably shouldn't, look at the Christian TV stations, right?

There's some channels you should block on direct TV, the Christian, right, the religious TV networks and the porn, block, all of that ought to be blocked because it's all damaging and dangerous for your soul.

I mean, I see it on my, and I don't see the, it's all blocked, but I didn't block it. I have some professional obligation to know what's going on on the religious, and so I see it.

I see what they're talking about, and every time I see it, I die just a little bit inside. What happens coming out of pietism into the 18th century?

We have the first great awakening. Pietism gives us the first great awakening, and we have a beginning of a series of revivals in the 18th and 19th centuries.

First great awakening, and so what do I mean by revival? Well, J .I.

Packer and Martin Lloyd -Jones define revival in three points.

It's more than evangelism. It's more than cheerfulness and enthusiasm, he says, with respect to the local church.

What is it? What's the essence of revival? This is a direct quotation. It is a new quality of spiritual life, a new quality of spiritual life.

It didn't say, it doesn't say new life granted by the Holy Spirit. It's a new quality of spiritual life embedded in the very definition of revival from the and from Jim Packer is a kind of second blessing higher life view of Christians and Christianity, which goes all the way back to the

Gnostics in some ways, goes back to the Marcionites. I'm not saying they're Gnostics or Marcionites, but that way of thinking goes back to the

Montanists, if the traditional story is true. That goes back to the Montanists, goes back to the monks.

We're going to leave the ordinary Christians. We're going to become extraordinary Christians in the monastery by withdrawing from the world.

And so the First Great Awakening is this outbreak of enthusiasm that is objectively defined.

If I didn't tell you, you're right. If I read to you the descriptions of what happened in Northampton under President Edwards' ministry, and I didn't tell you it was under Edwards, and I didn't tell you it was

Northampton, you'd say, well, that sounds like the Toronto blessing, some of that stuff.

And I was in the UK when the Toronto blessing reached the UK, and the church one street over from us had the barking revival.

They had people sitting in pews and barking. I kid you not. And the revival spread, right?

The First Great Awakening in the 1720s, 30s, 40s. By the early 19th century, the first quarter of the 19th century in Europe, there's a revival in Geneva and in France.

And then the Second Great Awakening breaks out in the New World, depending on whom you ask, maybe as early as 1790, certainly by 1800 at Cain Ridge, lasting all the way to the 1860s.

So the two -thirds of the 19th century, religious life in America was dominated principally by the

Second Great Awakening, which was nothing more than a heightened quest for an immediate experience of God or for a particular kind of religious experience.

And for the advocates of revival, even as distinct from revivalism, going all the way back to Edwards, Whitefield, and Tennant, Gilbert Tennant, anybody who criticizes these revivals or criticized those revivals is denounced as unregenerate.

When I first started thinking through these issues and raising questions about the legitimacy of even revival as a thing,

I was personally denounced as unregenerate. The harshest critic of Recovering the

Reformed Confession, on sale at your local bookstore, the harshest review of Recovering the

Reformed Confession effectively accused me in the review of being unregenerate for criticizing particularly the

First Great Awakening. He was a fan of the First Great Awakening. Listen to the doctor. Now, I love Martin Lloyd -Jones, and one of the things

I love about him is that he doesn't pull any punches. He tells you exactly what he thinks. I've learned so much from the doctor, so I don't want you to think that I'm unappreciative of the doctor.

I really am deeply appreciative. But listen to what he says. They say of me, he's talking about not me personally, but people like me, people who hold the view that I hold.

They say that the Spirit works only through the Word, and that we must not expect anything from the

Spirit apart from that which comes, he uses the word immediately, I wouldn't, but comes immediately through the

Word. And so it seems to me, now listen to this. This is the doctor. They are quenching the

Spirit. So this is the juxtaposition

I'm setting before you. Reformation spirituality is a word and spirit, word and sacrament, piety.

Revival or choir spirituality is an attempt to go around the means that God has ordained.

What does Acts 242 say? What does Acts 242 say?

Look that up and read that for me. Speak up.

They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to breaking of bread, which some people take as the holy communion,

Lord's Supper, which I take as, and to prayer. All I'm arguing for is for Acts 242.

I'm arguing for an act, I should start an organization, Acts 242. I'll be setting up a 501,

John, I'll be setting up a 501c3, and I'll be sending you requests for donations.

I'm kidding. So the doctor said the

Reformation needs a dose of revivalism. He said Calvinism without Methodism tends to intellectualism and scholasticism.

How's your heart religion? Not enough heart religion, not enough experience.

It tends, he says, to elevate the confessions over scripture, which is code for, you know what, I disagree with chapter one of the

Westminster Confession, therefore I'm going to accuse you of elevating the confession over scripture. That's what that means.

And my response is, is this revival or is it enthusiasm? And what

I see as I look at the 19th century from a Reformation point of view is I see an outbreak of the 1520s all over again.

You take all the craziness of the 19th century, the Millerites sitting on the roofs waiting for the return of Jesus, setting dates.

The early Anabaptists set dates all the time, regularly. Some con man in upstate

New York who was a water diviner, whose shtick was, he didn't have a stick, he had a hat, and as a water diviner, his shtick was he's going to put his head in his hat and just figure out where the water is so you knew where to dig your well.

You know what that guy's name is? Yeah, and he got a revelation from an angel named Moron.

It was a gag from the very beginning. He got golden plates with gibberish, it'll only be interpreted, it's not a real ancient language, and only to be interpreted with magic glasses given to him by an angel.

It's like L. Ron Hubbard stuff. Nobody's going to write some grade B fiction and then turn it into a religion attended by major Hollywood stars, that could never happen.

Don't go east, don't go in the east county, east of San Diego, they have an armed camp out there.

I've got to be a little careful because they'll come and they'll kill me in my sleep. Well, we're running out of time.

And so here's my question. Is the Reformation really deficient? And I want to answer that question with this question.

Have we actually ever tried Reformation Christianity? And particularly in the new world where we have free churches, that is, that are not state churches.

It's one thing to do Reformation in a state church, it's another thing to do Reformation in a free church.

We haven't, in this country, ever actually tried Reformation. We don't know that it doesn't work because we never tried it.

In the 18th century we had a revival, 19th century we had 60 years of revival, 20th century we're busy fighting the liberals and attempting to rekindle the

Second Great Awakening. I think we've finally run out of really big, famous evangelists holding giant rallies.

I don't know if there's anybody, there's no successor that I know of to Billy Graham. Is there anybody that really,

I don't think there's anybody that really succeeds him exactly. So maybe we're on the other end of that whole phenomenon.

So what I'm pitching is, let's try Reformation Christianity, see how it goes. Because in this country it's never actually been tried, not really, not in a serious way.

There's a lot more that I can say, but let me close with this.

Just like I said last night, the power of sanctification is not the law, it's the gospel.

The parallel, the correlate to that, the analogy to that is that true spirituality doesn't come when you're seeking exquisite, extraordinary, special, extra -biblical religious experiences or revelations or encounters with God.

It comes when you give yourself over in faith to the Christ, who is

God the Son incarnate, who is the Logos, in the beginning was the Word. What does that mean?

In the beginning was God's self -disclosure, and the self -disclosure became flesh and dwelt among us.

And if you, show us the Father, the disciples said, and what did Jesus say? You've been with me so long and you don't realize that if you've seen me, you've seen the

Father. And how does Jesus come to you? Not in some ecstatic experience in your closet where you get slain in the

Holy Spirit, you roll on the floor. It's when, right, you're hearing the

Word of God read and preached by a minister sent to you from God, when you receive the gospel made visible in holy communion, when you're initiated into the visible covenant community in holy baptism, and then flowing out, and you're gathered with God's people to hear

His Word, to sing His praises, right? He speaks to you in His Word, you respond to Him, ideally with His Word in praise, and then flowing out of that is your ordinary

Christian life of prayer, reading scripture, praying, right, with other believers.

And you know what? The ordinary Christian life is a beautiful thing. Read Dr.

Horton's book, Ordinary, because ordinary has a twofold sense, and I know I got to stop. Ordinary has a twofold sense.

In the first sense, it means it's what God has ordained. God hasn't ordained for me to have direct revelation.

You're not getting direct revelation. This is what I tell my...I used to pray with Pentecostals until I figured out they didn't have any more power than I did.

They were just making stuff up. If they had an upset stomach, they had a demon. If I had an upset stomach, it's because my stomach was upset.

I needed to take a Roland's. And it's not healing...we

laid hands on a guy because he had a bad knee. And then afterwards, these are really spiritual, powerful men.

And we laid hands on a guy, and we asked him, well, how does it feel? He said, I think I still need surgery. And I thought, well, maybe

I ruined it because I was this doubting Presbyterian. And then I read, what happened to the Apostle Paul when he was on Malta and he got bit by a viper?

The guy next to him, what did he say, huh? And what else did...he's

going to die, right? You get bit by a viper, ordinarily you're going to die. What did Paul do? He shook him off and he kept going.

Why? Because he's an apostle. They stoned him, they tried to kill him. He was taken up to the third heaven.

You weren't going to kill him until it was time for him to die. He's an apostle. These guys got picked up by the Holy Spirit and transported.

The guys I was praying with, they weren't apostles. They're just schmucks like me. Those people didn't know any more about the secret will of God than I did.

They weren't getting direct revelations. They didn't have any power. They weren't raising people from the dead. You want to see apostolic power?

Raise people from the dead. That's what I tell them. I'll believe you have apostolic power when you shut down the hospital and start raising people from the dead.

Let's get serious. Quit messing around. You're just making stuff up.

And you're putting people under this law of extraordinary experiences. You're just making up. Stop it, to quote

Bob Newhart. If you don't know that, go look that up on YouTube. The word is enough.

The gospel is enough. The law is enough. The scriptures are sufficient. It's the word of God.

I know I got to stop. But it's the word of God. What else do you want? You went to great trouble to give you the word.

Three languages, 1 ,600 years, lots of martyrdoms.

Prophets died so that you'd have the word. And you want to go around that word and get a direct revelation? I don't know if I should take this job.

Oh, shundalala. No. Pray. Seek wisdom. Talk to people.

Make the best decision you can. That's ordinary. So ordained and ordinary, regular.

That's just regular Christian. It's OK to be a regular Christian. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.