May 2, 2017 Show with Eric Wallace on “Uniting Church and Home: A Blueprint for Rebuilding Church Community”

The Iron Sharpens Iron Theme and Proverbs 27:17

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet Earth listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you a happy Tuesday on this May 2nd, 2017, and I look forward to interviewing today for the very first time, Eric Wallace, who is president of the Institute for Uniting Church and Home, and today we are going to be discussing his book, Uniting Church and Home, a Blueprint for Rebuilding Church Community, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to Iron Sharpens Iron for the very first time, Eric Wallace.

Thank you, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here and speak with you and to your listeners today. And in studio with me is my co-host, the Reverend Buzz Taylor. And hello once again. And Reverend Buzz Taylor and I met Eric Wallace just about a year ago at the Harvey Cedars Bible Conference Center when we were both attending the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals Faithful Pastors Retreat, and during a dinner or lunch break, or perhaps a breakfast break, we were sitting at the same table providentially with Eric Wallace and got to know him, and not long after that got into discussions about having an interview, and I'm glad that this is finally, all by God's providence, all fallen into place.

Eric Wallace’s Conversion, Marriage, and Sanctification

Tell us something about, before we even get into the Institute for Uniting Church and Home, and before we get into your book, Uniting Church and Home, I would like to know about your own personal background as far as the religion of your youth, if any, and how providentially our Lord in His.

Sovereign grace drew you to Himself and saved you. Then being faithfully married was a huge blessing to me, a huge impact on my life, you know, the covenant, and my two oldest siblings went to Christian school, and so the truth that Jesus Christ in my walk, you know, used that, you know, the course of a few years to, and for what He was going to have me do in this ministry, which we'll get into later, but I, much later, just what it meant that His death was notification.

Notification, that positionally that I need to live a life of obedience to Him, and of course that obedience includes repentance from sin and, you know, the desire to grow Christ in me, and so I will say that might think that because of a perfect person, and we all know the flesh until that day, that glorious day that we actually see Jesus face to face, you know, coming to know what He's done for me has, which came, you know, probably 20 years after I would realize that I was a true believer in Jesus Christ, that came awfully late.

It came, and there were a lot of years in there growing, and a tremendous, just a lot of wasted, just a lot of wasted time, but I am excited of what He's done for me, and just struggling and seeking to live out of that richness every day, and a husband and a father in my home.

And the Rev. Buzz Taylor has something.

To say. You said this struggle went on for like 20-some years, is that correct? Yeah, I would say,.

You know, I'm in the Catholic theology that I'm a Baptist school, and so those years, the emphasis was on walking the honor of the church and my theology. What I was thinking.

Specifically, too, was that in a 20-year struggle, were there some years in there where you just.

Pretty much gave up and didn't struggle with it? No, no, I never gave up with us through, you know, having.

Learned back then. Well, I'm assuming, although you believe in covenant theology and are Presbyterian, you still believe that Presbyterian parents can have children that are lost. I mean, there is a possibility, is there not, that you were lost for a good number of those years?

Well,.

No, I'm a believer, and indeed, you know, they do need to come to that place. There is a piece of the foundation that I've had that we're going to... So tell us what eventually led you to form. What.

Is now known as the Institute for Uniting Church and Home, and obviously give us some background.

Of exactly what that is. Sure, well, we were working with the private school issue, struggling with having a private school of the church, as well as homeschooling back. This was back in the 80s, so there was the homeschooling movement was ramping up, and leading that ministry as a sipping ministry, and the challenge history, and I had to learn what it was that the parents missed with children, you know, what was a relationship, and that it very quickly, the ministry very quickly became much more focused on just helping moms to be moms and dads to be dads.

So that was kind of the focus initially for several years, but then it began to dawn on us that, well, wait a minute, and why is it that the church and the home seem to be, you know, at odds so often?

Why do so many families, so many people that go to church feel like that the church is working against them rather than actually working for them? And then, you know, on the other side of the coin, there's a lot of, you know, are wondering, what's wrong with the home?

Why aren't people at the church supporting the programs and getting the help that we're offering? We began to look at what we were doing in terms of ministry, youth began to see that those affinity programs really began to get in the way of the covenantal-type relationships that God has set forth in His Word as the means through which people's lives are actually transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

So we made some changes in those ministries. For instance, one of my oversights was children's ministry. We had a girl's ministry, a boy's ministry, and so we basically put them together and called it ministry.

We had Father and the Word of God, and then that, you know, morphed into, you know, looking at youth ministry and changes with youth ministry. So initially, a lot of the early years was just the rule rather than the...

But then, it began to be apparent to me, as I was getting opportunities to go out and speak, and my book, I don't believe that my book had been published, somewhat ancient, really began to discover was that even with trying to pull the family together in the ministry programs of the church, we still were not able to address the real need.

And brothers, let me say that the real need in the Church is a rediscovery of the gospel of Jesus Christ, not only for the justification of the unbeliever, but also as the means of sanctification in the life of the believer.

Amen. Preach it, preach it! Completely lost. Maybe I'll take that back. I shouldn't say completely, there are churches that I think are working it, but in my experience, my limited experience, when I have calls from people going all the way back to this time, what I discovered was that people just thought, well, you know, we're going to church, our kids are in children's ministry, the kids are in youth ministry, we're in a couple's ministry, you know, then everything's fine.

So we're good Christians, and basically we're going to be able, you know, to overcome the challenges in life. But what we've learned, of course, through various studies that Barna has done, whatnot, you know, over the last probably 20 years, especially, is that there's not been a whole lot of real heart transformation that's taking place.

That what's happened is that people have trusted in what they were doing, you know, going to church almost as if, you know, I'm just going to be at church and growth is going to come by osmosis because I'm listening to the sermon.

I believe that what's happened in the recent history of the church is that we've depended on programs to do what only the Holy Spirit does when we apply the gospel. Relationships are critical. It's been thrown by the waste in a lot of people.

Looking at the issues in their life in a way that they can see how the gospel addresses those. So even back then when I wrote a book, you know, being applied by faith, back then, you know, I was thinking, yes, we need to draw on relationships much more intentionally.

It's in them that God is...we need to...those need to come back to the surface, and we need to emphasize those. So that was good. But I think pretty soon after the book came out, you know, as I saw I'm beginning to reach similar conclusions about, you know, taking a new look at church ministry, what I began to see more and more was that here, even still, in this...even now, you know, there are pastors who in church are certainly being transformed more into the image of Christ.

Covenant Community, Koinonia, and the Gospel for Believers

A southern state, and he had been given my name from the piece, and he had said, you know, I've been struggling with our families. We've really wanted to see our families minister as units, and we've not been able to get them to minister, you know, to minister their neighbors, minister in the programs of the Church.

And I said, well, what have you done, you know, what have you done to try to equip them and to move them in that direction? And he had said, he said, well, we've done this program, we've done that program, great programs that churches offer, many of which you would recognize and your listeners would recognize, but there was no change.

And I had said to him, I said, brother, I said, consider the problem here is not that the people don't know what to do, but the problem is that they don't know how to want to do it. And so I encourage you to step back, you know, giving them the list, just to be short about it, but to step back and actually take a deeper focus on the Gospel, because it's when they see the beauty and full sufficiency of what Christ has done for them that their heart is going to change to want to do ministry.

And I think this is what's missed to help people grow in the home and in the church is we just tell them what to do, and we think, well, we're telling them what to do, they'll do it. So it's not just telling people what they have to do, but more importantly, the bigger picture of helping people's lives change is helping them understand all that Christ has done and being able to live out of that by faith.

But going way, way far, real fast, that is really the heart and soul of this ministry is not so much really talking to churches about how they can change programs. I would say it's much, much more just talking to churches about, let's just rediscover who we are in Christ together and begin to apply that by faith in our relationships.

Let's make a commitment, you know, to elders, you know, being shepherds, and to fathers being shepherds in their homes, in particular. Single mom, helping them to be able to enter into relationships where, you know, they really get to know the people that they're in that relationship with, where they know what they're struggling with, and can apply the gospel to deal with the issues that they're facing so that they're not in cycle of stepping out of that and moving forward in greater obedience to Jesus Christ.

So we have resources and seminars that we do at the Institute for Uniting Church and Home. We will talk to church-wide seminar where we'll just get the whole church together and say, let's just read, look at relationships and get practical equipping for relationships, but also just help you understand what, who we are in Christ.

Well, Reverend Buzz Taylor has a comment.

Well, do you equate this with in Acts 2, for example, where it says they were continually, you know, I mean, chapter 4, 2, I can't remember exactly the reference I don't have in front of me, but when it refers to koinonia, they were constantly giving themselves to the apostles, teaching to prayer and breaking bread and fellowship.

Is this, is this the koinonia that's mentioned in Acts? Is this what you're talking about, that kind of relationship where everybody is involved in one another's lives?

Yeah.

By the way, I want to read, I want to read a couple of commendations for this book that we are addressing, a book of the same title as your ministry, Uniting Church and Home, A Blueprint for Rebuilding Church Community is the subtitle.

And a couple of commendations that this book has received I would like to read are from First George Grant, who has been a guest on Iron Trump's Iron Radio. And this is actually a great reminder for me to invite him back.

It's been quite a while since we've had Dr. George Grant on the program. But he says, this is an important book. It offers a cooperative, integrated and covenantal approach to life and ministry rarely seen in these fragmented individualistic and parochial times.

It's biblical foundations, reformed outlook and practical emphasis make it refreshingly substantive, substantive, sorry, while at the same time, startlingly relevant. The responsibilities of the home ought to be facilitated by the church, not co-opted.

Likewise, the centrality of the church ought to be embraced by the home, not resisted. This remarkable blueprint for symbiosis shows us how to strike that kind of essential balance. And also, someone that I have not yet interviewed, but I would love to have eventually on the program, Susan Hunt, who many of you may recognize from her books that she has written.

And she's also director of Women in the Church, PCA, Christian Education and Publications Committee in Atlanta, Georgia. She says, in a day of raging confusion about ministry models, Eric Wallace speaks with clarity about the necessity of uniting church and home.

This approach expresses the covenant concept of home and church working together to tradition the faith to the next generation. This timely book is indeed a blueprint for covenant community. Some very impressive commendations from some very impressive people.

And rather than interrupt you mid-sentence, I'm going to go to a break right now. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Eric Wallace, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, your country of residence, if you live outside of the USA. And if this is about a personal and private matter, since we are involving family life in our discussion, there may be situations where you prefer remaining anonymous because of the intimate and private and personal nature of the question.

Well, you may feel free to remain anonymous. But if it is not anything like that, we would urge you to please at least give us your first name, city and state and country of residence if you live outside the USA.

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Visit World News Group at wng .org forward slash Iron Sharpens today. Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours with about 90 minutes to go is Eric Wallace, president of the Institute for Uniting Church and Home.

We are discussing his book, Uniting Church and Home, a Blueprint for Building Church Community. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. That's C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. And we do have a listener already all the way in Slovenia who has a comment slash question for you, Eric. Dear Brother Chris, thank you so much for this incredible topic.

Having grown up in and served in churches that were completely programmatic, this topic and title of the book is almost unfathomable for me. I was theologically trained that church is done programmatically.

The assumption is that you need ministry programs that focus on every conceivable demographic in the community. Recently, every conceivable hobby or social pastime has become the basis for some ministry outreach for the church.

How do we rid ourselves of this ministry treadmill and get back to organic relational one-anothering as described in the scriptures? Thanks for helping me develop a new and more scriptural paradigm along these lines.

Wow. Any more minutes? You know, we didn't get into the problem that we're in. There is not a... And I think that that's an important thing for your listeners who would look at their church situation and think, wow, you know, this Wallace guy is kind of pop, but I've never given voice to.

And these are things that, as it were, but I would tell you that the method for reversing that clock is very simply getting back to the rudimentary truths proclaiming those. And, you know, very often when I'm speaking to groups, I'll begin with Romans 1, 15 and 16, and I'll say, you know, I'll read Romans 1.

You know, Paul says, I'm not, you know, I am eager to come and preach the gospel to you who are in Rome. And I'll ask, I'll say, who are the people that Paul is writing to here in Rome and preaching the gospel to Christians?

Isn't the gospel what we put in a little piece of paper that we, you know, leave in seat back pockets on airplanes.

Or in bus terminals? Or on restaurant tables with very bad tips? Right, yes, yes. And so,.

And of course it is. Of course that is. I mean, that's an important part of the gospel, absolutely, that people know that Jesus died, you know, to pay the penalty for their sins. But that's where, and in most people's thinking, Chris and Buzz, this is tragic.

But in most people's thinking, that's where the gospel stops. Oh, the gospel got me in. Now it's a function of simply reading the Bible to find out what I'm supposed to be doing to live my life the way that God expects me to live my life.

And so they overcome, the gospel is just out the window. But then you look at verse 16, and you know, you find out why Paul is so eager to preach the gospel. He says in 16, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation.

And of course, you know, the power there, the word for power in the Greek is dunamis, like dynamite. It's like this enormous power for our salvation. Our salvation is not just our justification, but it is also our sanctification.

And people, I'm telling you, their eyes open and their mouths drop. And so because they are not hearing that, you know, what they're hearing in the church, you know, is the gospel of justification, which is, you know, part of the gospel.

But there's also the gospel, that same gospel helps us in our sanctification. It proclaims that not just by faith do we become a believer, but by faith we grow as a believer. Not just by faith in Christ's work, in his life, death, and resurrection, you know, that not just that that saves us from the penalty of our sin and justifies us, but that also is the means by which we are sanctified.

Faith in all that he's accomplished fully and sufficiently for us and gives us as a part of our sanctification. And there's a doctrine that is very seldom taught, and it is the doctrine of definitive sanctification.

There's the doctrine of justification, and you know, normally we have that, and we draw this big heavy line that separates the doctrine of justification from the doctrine of progressive sanctification.

And we forget that there is a connection between justification and sanctification, and that is, you know, definitive sanctification. And this is where the real freedom and joy that we should have in our Christian life is located.

It's here. It's in what we have already been fully and sufficiently given in Christ.

Now, when you say definitive sanctification, are you saying that this is in opposition to cheap grace and easy believism, the repentant-less idea of salvation that is very popular and has.

Been for a number of decades, tragically? Well, I think of what Christ has fully and sufficiently done for us, you know, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5 .14 that he's compelled by the love of Christ. For him, in his ministry as a reconciler, as an ambassador for Christ, you know, his motivation is the love of Christ for him.

And so I think a proper understanding of all that Jesus has done for us, truly, when we understand that, motivates us, it pushes us, it compels us to want to obey what God says that we are to do, and of course a huge part of that is, you know, confession and repentance.

I mean, we are to live lives, you know, each day, Lord willing, we're seeing sin, and we're confessing that to God, and we're, you know, repenting of it. But we're doing that out of a heart of joy, because we see, you know, all that cry of fear, because, oh no, you know, I've sinned again, and God's not going to be happy with me, God's not going to bless me today.

And this is the way, you know, many Christians live. They live in that performance orientation because they don't proclaim. Yes, and that's why if you believe in.

The doctrines of grace, I know that the doctrines of grace, the doctrines of sovereign grace, the doctrines of Reformed theology, Calvinism, however you want to label them, I know that the Reformed faith and biblical Christianity reaches out much farther than just the acronym TULIP.

I understand that. But I think it's very important that when you hold to the doctrines of grace that you hold to all of those five points, because of the fact that if you leave, for instance, the perseverance and preservation of the saints out of that, you can have disastrous results.

I was just at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed theology and heard a powerful message by Dr. Rick Phillips over at Second Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina, and he was telling a, or briefly just mentioning an account, a very tragic account of a professedly Reformed pastor, quite well-known pastor who had fallen into adulterous sin and was forced to leave the church.

And he had a warped, distorted understanding of Reformed theology that was in fact heretical. It was part of the hyper-grace movement in which he was basically attempting to seduce a woman in the church with the promise that, hey, Jesus Christ's sacrifice on Calvary paid for all sin.

We are to live free in our grace that we have been given. That kind of nonsense, that kind of wickedness, where he was taking the truth of God out of context and turning it into.

Licentiousness. Right. More for how to design ministry, the more we've drifted from a proclamation of the truth. And, you know, people fall into these traps where they do believe, you know, that, you know, in a sense, you know, it's all about me, it's not about God's glory, it's not about, you know, Jesus Christ being seen more clearly in and through me, it's about me getting what I want.

So, you know, to come back, circle back to the question, you know, from our brother or sister in Slovenia, you know, the key is to get back to preaching the gospel for the Christian. And this is what, this is, when you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and chapter 2, you know, Paul, he's going to address a lot of sin in the Corinthian church, but where does he begin?

He doesn't begin with saying, thou shalt not, and, you know, do's and don'ts. He begins, you know, with the gospel. And in chapter 2, verses 1 to 5, he talks about how that he comes to them, you know, not with all the rhetorical zeal or the...he doesn't come to them like the people that would be teaching false teaching.

He comes to them plainly with this gospel, so that their faith, the faith of the people, will rest in Christ rather than him. And so I think that that's an aspect of what we have to try to get back to in terms of this proclamation, that this gospel message really is, it's simple.

It's simple to understand. Granted, it's hard to apply at times, because of our hearts, but the gospel is sufficient. That the gospel is fully sufficient, that we are, you know, a priesthood of believers, that we can sufficiently apply the gospel in our homes and in our churches, and we need to teach.

This. Now our listener in Slovenia says something in his comment slash question that I don't want to be taken out of context. I'm not sure whether he would agree with what I'm about to say or not. I'm not sure if you would.

But although I believe it is very tragic and disturbing when churches who are buying into the seeker-sensitive movement, when they adopt all these kinds of ministries related to, as our listener says, every conceivable hobby or social pastime that replace in their life, their church life, the worship and teaching, the worship of God in an honorable, God-centered, Christ-glorifying way, and the teaching of the whole counsel of God, when those things replace those very vital elements of worship, that is disturbing.

But on the other hand, I don't find anything wrong with members of the body of Christ using the gifts that God has given them to create some kind of a ministry outreach. Like, for instance, if a man is a carpenter and he wants to teach carpentry lessons and the lost come to his classes and then they'll hear the gospel as well, I think that's great.

I agree. Things like even the performing arts, where I disdain things that are being added into the worship of God that are not commanded in scripture, things like dancing and all kinds of things that people want to incorporate into the worship service to make them more entertaining.

On the other hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with a church who has gifted people teaching all kinds of musical and dramatic arts and things like that, or having some kind of a ministry outreach connected to the church that involves those things, as long as they're not replacing the preaching and teaching and appropriate worship,.

The biblical worship of God. Right. What we're doing is we're leaving a vacuum for people to try to find, even in their service, even in their well-intentioned service, trying to find in that service something that they have already received through Christ.

For instance, someone that thinks that, you know, well, you know, I'm kind of, I'm not very active, and they begin to feel down on them, and they begin to think, you know, well, you know, God's just not happy with me because I'm not, you know, doing things that other people are doing.

But, you know, to remember to come back and think, you know, if you're in Christ, if you're united in Christ, which if you're a true believer, you are united in Him, Colossians says you are hidden in Christ, then, you know, what part of what you've received from Him is His righteousness.

That, you know, 2 Corinthians 5 says, you know, that He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God. So looking at the righteousness as what they already have, it's fully and sufficiently in Christ.

So they don't do the service out of a guilt that, oh, I better do it because, you know, people are going to look at me and they're going to think that, you know, there's something...or doing it as a way of trying to gain something from God, you know, to gain effectively righteousness, to merit His approval in their life.

And so that's, I think, the problem, you know, with the Church today is that there are a lot of people that are thinking that their position in Christ is not already settled, but that their position is something that they're, you know, seeking to improve, you know, through their performance, which normally happens in.

Their own strength, which is impossible. By the way, Joe in Slovenia, thank you for giving us an American address where your daughter lives because we are going to be mailing to you and her address, at her address, a free copy of Uniting Church in a Home, a Blueprint for Rebuilding Church Community, compliments of our guest, Eric Wallace, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, who are actually going to be shipping that out to you at no charge to you or to Iron Sherpins Iron Radio.

So we want to thank Eric Wallace and cvbbs .com, that's C-V for Cumberland Valley, B-B-S for BibleBookService .com, and look for a package in the mail with an envelope or a label, I should say, that says cvbbs .com, C-V for Cumberland Valley, B-B-S for BibleBookService .com.

We want to thank Todd and Patty Jennings of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service for their loyal support of Iron Sherpins Iron Radio and for shipping out our listeners all the Bibles and books and DVDs and CDs and other things that they win by submitting questions to our guests.

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who asks, I know that the host of this program, Chris Arnzen, is a Reformed Baptist. I was wondering if this book is equally applicable to Reformed Baptists or Baptists in general, since you were emphasizing covenant theology earlier.

And obviously Reformed Baptists, many Reformed Baptists claim, adhere to covenant theology and obviously have somewhat of a different interpretation of it than a Presbyterian would, but if you could reply to our listeners'.

Question. To you and your situation, and in fact, when I, 20 years ago, Susan Hunt endorsed my book, had said, you know, the language and the term, it's plain language. And so I think that there will be an easy, it'll be easy for you all to dive into that and to get some.

Yeah, I believe Susan.

Hunt is a Reformed Baptist, isn't she? Well, actually I'm thinking of Martha Peace, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Okay, and we are going to a break right now. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com, chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name and city and state and country of residence if you live outside of the USA. And please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter. Oh, and by the way, RJ in White Plains, New York, you've also won a copy, a free copy of Uniting Church and Home by Eric Wallace.