Jane the Free Thinker - Christians Who Sell Jesus

Selling Jesus

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Allow me to introduce you to Jane. Jane believes that there are no guiding principles in scripture regarding money and ministry because, she says, everything is ministry if it's done as unto the

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Lord, right? As long as we're loving God and our neighbor and seeking to make disciples, all of life is ministry.

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A janitor can work for the glory of God and when he does, that's a ministry just as important as preaching.

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A Christian flipping burgers can be a ministry just as much as praying for someone's healing.

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So, Jane has concluded that just as a janitor can demand payment for the work he is doing, a preacher can demand payment for each sermon he preaches.

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It's true that all of life should be lived to the glory of God and that all believers are priests and should actively participate in building up the body of Christ, but Jane has believed the lie that scripture does not distinguish spiritual things from earthly things.

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Although she is well -meaning and wants to glorify God, she has mistakenly oversimplified what it means to do

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Christian ministry. She also has wrongly conflated the truth that we should do everything as unto the

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Lord with the truth that some things are uniquely suited for the edification of the church.

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The sincerity of encouragement and love are utterly compromised when done in exchange for money.

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Even unbelievers understand that some things like friendship and marriage should not be sold, and if they are sold, they are no longer real.

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Jane means well, but has been led astray by her culture's obsession with money and materialism, along with the desire to force scripture to support the status quo.

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I'll just jump in here and I'll say, first of all, this touches on the issue of definitions, definitions of ministry, which we have not talked about at length and I think would be helpful if we got some clarifications going on some of the ambiguities that are involved in defining ministry, defining spiritual things.

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And we just want to acknowledge up front that we don't have some kind of like super, how should

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I put it, super articulate definition with super refined boundaries to delineate what is ministry and what is not ministry.

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So, first of all, we just want to acknowledge that and that's okay. It's really surprising in the research that we've done how this question has been avoided by everyone in the

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Christian world. Nobody's interested in defining ministry. Nobody wants to write a book that really clearly delineates the boundaries of what is and what is not ministry.

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It seems to be that it's one of those things everyone is avoiding or just ignoring.

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And so, if you try to look for resources out there, you're just really not going to find any.

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And even if you find a couple here and there, they're not going to be really robust biblical theology developing these definitions from the whole of scripture and from a rigorous study of scripture.

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Maybe you guys could jump in here and talk about, you know, why is it okay to have ambiguity here and why is it, what are some of the factors that create the ambiguity?

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Part of this has, I think, received a lot of pushback in terms of what is evangelism.

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So, the idea that you can just be a nice person and be kind to everyone and that's evangelism.

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I think a lot of pastors would already be on board with the idea that no, you actually have to preach the gospel.

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You have to share the gospel. You can't just be a nice person and love them and think they're going to be saved. You have to, as Paul says, you know, how can they believe if they haven't heard?

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But again, on another side, I think Christians already live with a lot of ambiguity with other topics and we're totally fine with that.

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I mean, for example, how do we define what generosity is? How do you decide when someone's being generous or they're just being,

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I don't know, average? Or how do you define when someone's being greedy or if they're not being greedy?

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I mean, there's not always a clear line there, but we know those principles are really important. And so, just because we can't clearly define, all right, you're now officially a greedy person.

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You're officially a generous person. It doesn't mean we throw out those concepts and say, oh, well, I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

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No, there is a line between what's ministry and what's not ministry and what's spiritual and what's not spiritual.

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And we might have slightly different opinions on this, but for me personally, I don't think it's a big issue because I think 90 or 99, 95 % of cases are clear cut.

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And so, you know, most things, prayer, preaching, evangelism, clearly ministry, clearly spiritual and other things like, yeah, just being a nice person or just being friends with someone, you know, everyone does that.

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So obviously you're trying to live out the gospel in your whole life, but those aren't clear cut spiritual things.

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But again, even in that you can see the slight ambiguity where, you know, the gospel, you're called to love people.

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And so, every time you love someone, is that the gospel? So, I think it's really useful here to draw an analogy to worship because a lot of people have had a chance to think about this one.

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So, we're talking about ministry, which a lot of people don't spend a lot of time thinking about what counts as ministry, what doesn't.

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But maybe, you know, to listeners on the podcast, you have thought about what the difference between worship and not worship is.

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So, some people say that everything is worship, right? They read Romans 12, 1, it says,

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I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.

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And so, well, if I'm a living sacrifice, then all of my life is worship, right?

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But what happens at that point is that if you really go down that road where everything is holy, then nothing is holy.

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You know, if everything is set apart for the Lord, then really nothing is distinguished at all.

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And it is important to recognize that there are some things that are distinctly worship and some things that are distinctly not worship.

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For example, we are permitted to be creative, God created us to be creative. You know, this is the nature of work in the

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Garden of Eden. But when people decided that they would make images of God, call them

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Yahweh, bow down to them, that kind of creativity was not accepted because they were introducing some new way of worshiping

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God that was not accepted. So, this is often called the regulative principle of worship, that God regulates how he is to be worshiped.

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And he has determined that holy worship, this thing that is different from our other activities, is regulated and he declares how we are to worship him.

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And Christians have agreed on this principle and yet disagreed on what exactly those ways are, what are the elements that must be included, what are things that are just forms, and so don't actually change those elements.

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You know, for example, things like whether or not you're standing or you're sitting while you're singing. And I think that that analogy works well here because so many people have agreed on the principle and yet the little gray areas, you know, there's some disagreements.

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And so, why would we throw out a whole principle just because we can't agree on some of the gray areas?

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Like John said, 95 % of this is crystal clear and that's what we're really trying to get people to see.

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And then, yeah, let's have discussions about that 5 % that's not clear. But yeah, that's no reason to discard the principle.

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Pete Yeah. And like we said in the last podcast discussion, there's the issue of the heart.

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You know, a lot of people, their heart in saying things like this, trying to just find a loophole by redefining things or whatever, or saying, well, you don't have a clear enough definition so I can sell

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Jesus, their heart just isn't pursuing the Spirit of Christ and trying to find, you know, how can

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I be truly biblical in this? It's more, how can I justify myself? I think those two things have to go together.

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You know, where is your heart at in why you're asking the question, what is ministry or what is spiritual?

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Or am I trying to define this just to serve my ends? Or am I trying to define this to serve

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God? John If there is some ambiguity, then what I would counsel people as a pastor is to err on the side of caution and be above reproach.

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And so, you know, if you feel there is ambiguity in what you're creating then and you feel like there might be conscience issue, then just don't sell it and, you know, find some other way to earn your income.

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So, yeah, I think that would be the usual wise approach in these matters. So, even if there is some ambiguity, just err on the side of caution.

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Darrell Bock Yeah. So, I think just stepping back a little and considering, you know, the opening of this description of Jane.

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Jane believes that there are no guiding principles in Scripture regarding money and ministry. I'd like to say something about that naivety, and I say that in a spirit of love because I was there too at one point and didn't know whether or not

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Scripture said anything on this topic. But Scripture covers so much ground.

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As it says in Psalm 119, your commandments are exceedingly broad. You know, a lot of these commandments, we think of them as being very narrow things that regulate one specific kind of sin.

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But when you think about how broad that application goes, it really goes far. And what we see with money and ministry is that Paul addresses this just so constantly throughout his letters when other things he only addresses a little bit.

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The Bible says a lot about money and ministry, and this is actually very heavily regulated by Scripture.

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But you see this in a lot of areas where people haven't heard others talk about it, they haven't seen their pastors preach on it.

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Just things like ecclesiology, I think the Bible is very clear about how the church should be structured, but a lot of people think it's just kind of up to us to decide based on what works best.

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You know, should churches be part of connectional denominations, or should they be loose associations, or should there be pastors or elders, or should the deacons be a board that run the church?

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You know, Scripture actually answers these questions, and it's not just up to pragmatism.

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But a lot of people, if they haven't heard anyone talk about it, they assume it is just up to them to figure out what works best.

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Pete Yeah. And if you think about Jesus cleansing the temple, there's a reason he cleansed the temple, it was the temple.

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And that's, I think, the key issue here is Jesus would not frown upon these kind of secular vocations that were being done inside the temple.

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It wasn't the vocations or the type of work itself that was the problem.

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If somebody had been flipping burgers in the temple to the glory of God, he still would have overturned the table because that's, you know, it's not just because they're flipping burgers, it's because what he said himself, right?

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Explicitly that they've made the house of God into a marketplace. So, it's that mixing of the two that Jesus doesn't want, just as I already mentioned in the description, but just as when you mix money and marriage, paying for intimacy with somebody, as soon as you mix those two, you have a big problem.

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It's not that money is bad, it's not that marriage is bad, it's just the mixing of the two that's bad.

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Jared Some things are truly holy. There are such things as holy things. They are dedicated, they are distinct, and they need to be treated with special care.

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And if we treat everything like it's equally holy and subject to the same set of regulation or non -regulation, it's really like the stereotype of the kindergarten teacher that tells each child, you're special just like everyone else.

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You know, it's just kind of nonsense. Pete Everybody's a winner, yeah.

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Yeah. And we want to reiterate, of course, that everything can be done to the glory of God.

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You can eat, drink, everything you do to the glory of God, as Paul says, but that is different from dealing with spiritual things and doing ministry, especially when we have clear examples in scripture that delineate boundaries on those things.

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Jared And this is something that we've already, I guess, mentioned implicitly, but really, scripture has so much to say and we shouldn't just assume that we're in the clear if we haven't considered the matter before.

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Yeah, we just really need to abandon the attitude of, I'm in the clear if I feel like I'm in the clear.

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So really, really go to God's Word and bring all these questions to Him.