10 Years of Beholding God: Richard Owen Roberts, pt 1

The Podcast Introduction and Richard Owen Roberts Interview

Welcome to the Whole Council podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and this week we have something special for you. We have an interview with Richard Owen Roberts. If you looked at the first Behold Your God study, Rethinking God Biblically.

Mr. Roberts was one of the contributors to that and Mr. Roberts comments, only a few could be put into the study. And so we have quite a bit of material that we felt would be beneficial if you could hear and that will be our episode for today.

Richard Owen Roberts, I think the first time that I heard him preach was right after my conversion. So I would have been about 20 years old, still in college. And after hearing him preach, I found his book on Revival, which is just a small paperback book, but I found it very helpful.

Unusual in the sense that it was both warm and stirring, like other Revival books that I had read. But also it had a theological core that was much more substantial. Not long after that, a friend and myself, we drove to from South Mississippi to Wheaton, Illinois, outside of Chicago.

It was a 16-hour drive each way and we wanted to meet Mr. Roberts. I wanted to know, was he the real thing? Was he like his book or was he just a clever writer? And we were able to spend the entire day with Mr. Roberts and it really was the beginning of a sweet friendship and we are still friends.

And in fact, I think next week, for me next week, probably when you're receiving this, we will be preaching together in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mr. Roberts, I would say every time I have heard him preach, there is always the same general impact regardless of the passage he's covering.

And that is, I am always made aware again of the reality of God, of the immenseness of God, of the privilege of belonging to one who is and who is as great as he describes himself to be. That also brings us to another thing and that is a new book that we've published and it just arrived a few days ago and it is called The Sermons of Behold Your God Rethinking God Biblically.

Like the title says, this contains the adapted-for-print sermons from the DVD series Behold Your God Rethinking God Biblically and the reason we published this book is that many of us feel that there are friends we have who we wish they would go through this study and consider those biblical themes there and how the self-descriptions of God would alter for us the American way of religion.

But our friends are not willing to do 12 weeks of in-depth study, so we hope that this book would provide you with a tool that you could give to someone who maybe in this form it's a manageable size and it would be a good gift for them, especially around the turn of the new year as they consider, again, spiritual realities.

And that brings me finally to our end-of-the-year book giveaway. Last week, we had a podcast where we mentioned some books that we could recommend. A new edition of Stephen Charnock on the existence and attributes of God.

Quite a heavy read, but really worth the effort. And then a small book on the same topic, on the attributes of God, and Reformation Heritage Books and The Banner of Truth. Both have a paperback edition of that by George Swinnick.

On The Blessed and Boundless God. And The Banner of Truth, Puritan paperback, has the original title, The Incomparableness of God. If you haven't listened to last week's podcast, you can go back and catch that and you can find in the description notes, you can find how you can sign up for the giveaway.

And if you're already on the email list, then you're included. Well, we trust you will benefit from listening to Mr. Roberts, and we're glad to be able to bring him to you again.

The Biggest Problem in the Church: An Erroneous View of God

To begin our interview, we asked Mr. Roberts if there were any introductory words he would like to say. I've come.

Increasingly to the conviction over the years, that the biggest problem in the church today is an erroneous view of God. I've asked in some congregations, be honest now, how many gods do you really believe there are?

Well, obviously in most so-called Christian churches, it's the one God of whom they speak. But in actual truth, it's not one God that they worship. They believe that there are two gods. The God of the Old Testament, who a Methodist bishop described once as a dirty, bloody bully, and the God of the New Testament, who is virtually Santa Claus.

What a grievous thing that people should actually, in some fashion, any fashion whatsoever, suppose that there is a difference between the God of the Old Covenant and the God of the New Covenant. Naturally, if you push someone in a corner, they wouldn't really insist that there were two gods.

They would be very apt to insist that there's only one. So if they really say there's one, then they have to face the question, what's happened to this God? Has he changed? The interpretation that many people really give to it is that the God of the Old Testament has grown up.

He's gotten control of his disposition. He's no longer an angry God, but a God who's full of grace and kindness, who's sweet, who is virtually a Santa Claus. In some estimates, it looks as if they honestly fear that God is too old to defend his own position, to insist that things be done his way, to adamantly require that people submit precisely to everything he says.

So it's either two gods or a changing God. A God who, as I said, has somehow gotten control of his disposition and is now a very open and warm and kindly God, easily approached, not a God by any means to be feared, but a God really to feel buddy-buddy with, to even make statements like the man upstairs and my close friend.

While there may be some place for a warmth and relationship with God, there's no place for familiarity. So until the church deals with that issue and comes to the deep conviction, as it's recorded in Malachi 3 .6, I change not.

We're adrift as a nation. We're adrift as a church. We're wandering in every conceivable direction and the natural result of confusion and really disbelief concerning the God of the Bible is that we end up with a form of godliness, but we deny its power.

What a tragic thing. I've been thinking a lot in recent days about that amazing passage in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 28, where 14 verses are devoted to the blessings that God brings upon those who love and obey, and then, my word, 54 verses devoted to the curses that come upon those who do not love the Lord and do not explicitly obey him and everything.

Oh, how I long that the church would look carefully at that passage and see that although we once enjoyed the blessing of God, we've lost it, and we've lost it because our view of God is sunk so low that we don't even truly know who he is.

What a Man Thinks About God and the Fear of the Lord

A .W. Tozer claimed that what a man thinks about God is the most important thing about that man. Do you agree or disagree?

I had the incredible experience of being in the city of Wheaton, where a whole lot of former Tozer church members moved. Soon after we moved here, some 35 years ago, I taught a large class that had at least 50 or 60 people in it who had been members of Tozer's church, and I had the privilege of teaching them for several years, but also of observing their lives, and I saw something very distinct and different between those who sat under his wonderful ministry and those who sat under less earnest, less biblical ministries.

I think that what he believed concerning God and people, that indeed if we have a typical American view of God, we don't have a view of the God of the Bible at all, and it shows up in the life and in the way that people think and pray and live.

There's no doubt in my mind that what a man thinks of God clearly indicates everything about his life of any consequence whatsoever, and if we do not get back to true biblical thinking about God, then our situation is utterly without hope.

I know how deeply impressed I was a long time ago by that statement in Isaiah 57, verse 15, Thus saith the high and the lofty one who inhabits eternity whose name is holy.

I.

Dwell in a high and lofty place with him also who is broken and contrite to revive the heart of the broken one, to revive the spirit of the contrite, and I can remember very distinctly how, as I was meditating for the first time really in any depth upon those words, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

God is not open to any and all. He does not draw near to everyone. It could be said with great dogmatism, God has a severely limited habitation. He dwells in two places, the high and the lofty place and the singular exception in the heart of the broken, in the spirit of the contrite.

When that hit me, it was like a fresh beginning as if I had to start all over and had to come to grips with who this God was who so severely limited his habitation and had to think through and pray through what does it really mean to be contrite, to be broken, and I've come to the conclusion through that that indeed the vast majority of people who call themselves Christians have never known anything of brokenness or contrition.

I remember meditating upon each of the parts of that wonderful verse, thus saith the high and the lofty one, and thinking to myself, well, that's not me. I've never in any way been high and lofty. Who inhabits eternity and my word, as long as my life has been, it's been nothing in comparison with eternity.

Who is there who could in any way truly identify with the closeness or oneness as if they were in common? That which inhabits eternity and that which is merely a very small fraction of time. Then the words holy, whose name is holy, gripped me and I became aware.

I've been called a lot of things in my life, even my dear wife who has spoken some very kindly and affectionate things to me never ever called me holy. If she had, she would have been grievously mistaken.

Coming to grips with who God is and realizing that because of his limited habitation, we don't just stumble across him. We don't just become Christians because somehow in the course of our day, we happen to bump into God.

I remember thinking so very, very plainly that Chronicles in particular, but especially the second book of Chronicles, is loaded with detail about seeking God and as I was meditating upon this Isaiah passage, I recalled a situation in which I had spoken upon seeking God and someone said to me afterward, why should we seek him?

I didn't know he was lost. And I was so repulsed by that statement, so grieved that a professing Christian would make such an absurd statement, and then I realized, well, I haven't done my research. I haven't worked through Scripture carefully on the subject of seeking God and therefore setting my heart to do so and going through carefully every passage and coming to the realization, if we don't seek him, we don't find him.

Because he's not here among us. He's not walking our streets. He's not really, truly in our places of worship. He's in the high and lofty place and he's in the heart and the spirit of the broken and contrite and in seeking him, then we learn something of brokenness and contrition and in not seeking him, we miss brokenness and contrition, therefore we miss God himself.

So we end up worshiping and serving a figment of our own imagination rather than the God who reveals himself. And I believe that what I saw in the lives of Tozer's parishioners clearly indicated to me that they had gone to the deeper level having sought God and therefore they had an appetite for the things of God that was not common in this city or in many of the other places where I've been privileged to minister.

The American Church, the Fear of God, and Shallow Christianity

Without denying the reality of healthy growth and healthy churches, can you respond to Tozer's claim that the American church is 2 ,000 miles wide, but only a half inch deep?

Yes, and it may be that he would have been better to said 4 ,000 miles wide and a quarter inch deep. He certainly hasn't overstated the matter. My impression is that things are a whole lot worse now than they were when Tozer spoke those words.

I'm deeply convinced that the vast majority who call themselves Christians are not because they have never truly exposed themselves to the God of the Bible. I remember giving a series of sermons on the fear of God and they were three in number and a very simple approach really.

Number one, the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Number two, the fear of God is the only true preservative against personal evil. And number three, the fear of God is the only guarantee of social justice.

The response to those sermons absolutely astonished me. People very adamantly said, we can't believe in a God. You have to fear.

And.

We've got a lot of evidence around us right now that for multitudes in the church, there's never been a beginning of wisdom. They don't seem to have any true wisdom from God at all. Certainly the fact that the morality rate in the church is essentially no better than it is in the world is another clear indication.

There can't be a fear of God else people could not possibly be living the way they're living. And certainly no one in their right mind would suppose that our country has become famous for social justice.

We're so far removed from that that it's hard to imagine that we ever were even a caring society, let alone a Christian society. And when you think about that whole matter, a man can be witnessed committing a murder, maybe eleven eyewitnesses who saw him actually put somebody to death and 14 years later, they're still toying around in the courts pretending to administer justice.

So the absence of the fear of God has resulted in the degradation of the nation in every conceivable realm. Now what I see happening in these churches that are flourishing, that are drawing great crowds, that are adding rapidly to their membership,.

Every.

New false convert that is added to the Church of Christ cheapens the message of the gospel and brings a nation down another rung in true godliness and holiness. There was a time I believe I could have honestly said that the positive witness of those who called themselves Christians and really were was remarkable in its impact upon the nation, but we can't speak words like that today.

What we have to say today is that the negative influence of those who call themselves Christians and are not is vastly greater than the positive impact of those who truly are. So as we go on adding more and more and more of these shallow make-believe Christians, we are bringing the nation down deeper and deeper into the depth of immorality and ungodliness.

So I believe Tozer was 100 right and that there are multitudes of churches and pastors that have no hope whatsoever till they get on their faces before God and repent of the sham Christianity that they are presenting.

The Root Problem in the Church and a Personal Revival Through Suffering

Many people see problems in the American church, but what do you diagnose to be the true root issue that must be dealt with?

There isn't any question in my mind that the most urgent task before every professed Christian is to get truly aware of the God of the Bible. In its providence, God leads each of us differently and this circumstance will affect that person and another circumstance another.

But after moving here to Wheaton, I had a very difficult experience where some so-called Christian brothers defrauded me in a very major way and I thought that my life and usefulness had come to an end as a result of that.

I won't go into any detail, but having been grievously defrauded, the first thing that happened was I got angry at the people who defrauded me, professed Christians. That didn't linger very long. When my anger toward them actually turned toward God, I thought, well, God is responsible.

He knew what I was getting into. I think he led me into this situation where some fraud has occurred and so there I am, burning angry against God. And then almost immediately that anger turned inward and I was angry at myself for being angry at them and at God.

What I was saying all these years, you've been walking with Christ. You've been studying the Bible. You've been preaching and counseling, helping people. You don't seem to have made any progress at all in having so grievously lost your temper.

No, not that I did anything outward. I mean this was within. This was pretty well confined, but nonetheless it was happening. The result of that was a sense of desperation and that led to an incredible personal experience of revival, but almost immediately I began to realize I don't really adequately know the God of the Bible.

So I was clearly impressed on the urgent necessity of making as thorough a study of the subject as I possibly could. I got the new Bible because I tend to mark my Bible and sometimes when you mark it up, things seem familiar and you pass over certain passages that you've been working on before.

So I thought a new Bible, a different translation, and this is what I'm going to do. I am going to discover everything the Bible says about God and at that time I happened to have an opportunity to give a series of 12 messages.

And so I entitled those messages, The God of the Bible, a self-portrait. And what I did was urgently to work through scripture and mark every passage where the word I appeared, God himself speaking, just put a circle around that occurrence of the word I and then made notes to distinguish those passages where God was revealing something about what he did and those passages that were revealing his heart, how he felt, what his thoughts were, what his reactions were.

I worked on this for a very long time. I believe without any question that the series of sermons I mentioned, The God of the Bible, a self-portrait, was the most significant series of sermons I ever gave.

Maybe not for anybody else, but for me. They profoundly impacted me and they're still impacting me because I have learned through that that everything is either a fruit or a root. And I believe that much of my early ministry, as earnest as it was, was directed more toward fruits than roots.

And that beginning study of The God of the Bible enabled me to go beneath the surface of every issue and to discern what the roots were. I had to analyze my own passionate anger because of that fraud and realized it was because I did not really have a truly biblical view of God.

I hadn't come to grips at that time with persecution, with suffering. I rather thought that when persecution and suffering came, somehow God had almost forgotten us and let that happen. And if he'd been paying attention, it wouldn't have happened.

But I began to realize that everything that occurs and especially those things that are devastating, those things that really bring us low, are not accidents, but God at work providentially and graciously in our lives.

So personally, going back to the heart of Scripture, finding The God of the Bible, the most important thing I ever did in my life. And I have to say that since then, that has been a major portion of everything I teach and preach.

And I've come to realize that the great evil in the church is that we're truly misrepresenting God and we're not speaking his heart. And I don't know how anybody could possibly do anything more fruitful in their own life than to make some kind of a careful study.

I mentioned putting a circle around I. Now, that's a almost childish approach to it, but my word, better to start like a child than not to start at all. And what an incredibly fruitful thing it is when we begin to think like God.

This is what I discovered about myself. I was looking at human problems and analyzing them as a sincere and an earnest Christian. But as I began to be affected more and more by the heart of God, I wasn't looking at issues so much through my eyes as I was through his eyes.

That was my goal. I'm not pretending that I was 100 successful in that, but just absolutely convinced that that was the desperate need that we do everything in us and around us through God's perspective and that our own dispositions and our outward ministries be regulated not by our thoughts, but those thoughts that God himself presses upon us as we are sensing his heart in all of these various things.

Seeing the Offended King and the Broken and Contrite Heart

In learning more about God, our sympathies begin to be centered on the offended king rather than the offended pauper. Can you speak to that idea?

That's an incredibly important statement, and I believe it with all my heart. We tend to be merciful toward those we like and those that in some sense we're close to, and we're much more forgiving of somebody who we have an attachment to than we are to somebody whose appearance doesn't impress us, whose conversation, whose language even is not to our liking.

And.

So there really is no mercy on a broad scale extended by us to others, but when we begin to see things through God's eyes and feel things through his heart, then the course of mercy takes a very different direction, and we're able to be merciful and gracious to those who we find hugely offensive.

At the time I was going through this process of really trying to get acquainted with the God of the Bible, I became very aware of the passage in Exodus 32 and 33, and I was deeply meditating upon Moses being on the mountain with God.

You remember the circumstance, Moses had been summoned upward by God, the people were down below, Aaron was on the plain with Moses, and the people were saying, well, I'll ask for this Moses. We don't know what has become of him, which wasn't even true, but.

God and.

Moses were on the mountain, and what dawned on me was.

When.

God was on the mountain, God was on the mountain, but he was also on the plain. When Moses was on the mountain, he was on the mountain, and it really began to grip me. God was seeing things Moses didn't see, and feeling things Moses didn't feel.

When God said, get out of the way Moses, I'm gonna go down there and utterly destroy those people, Moses didn't step out of the way. It's like he got right in God's face, and he argued with God in a very acceptable manner.

He laid out two basic arguments. What will the Egyptians say if you destroy these people now, and what about the promises that have not yet been fulfilled? If you destroy them, how will you fulfill them?

And God was pleased with the argument that Moses raised, and God wavered what he had intended, but what really gripped me was when Moses came down from the mountain, he heard the noise of the shouting, the carousing in the camp, and immediately then he felt what God felt, and it gripped me powerfully.

If I don't see what God sees, I won't feel what God feels, and therefore, I will not be able to respond to things as God would have me to respond to them. So it is my duty to see everything that it is possible to see through God's eyes, so that I will then feel as God feels about every instance, and I believe that ministry changes dramatically when it is a result of feeling what God feels, because you have seen what God sees, and I have made that an earnest desire that in every situation I might see it all through God's eyes, and therefore feel what God feels, and in consequence do what God would have me to do.

Christ Above All Human Affirmation

St. Ignatius said, apart from Christ, let nothing dazzle you. How have you personally pursued an ever-clearer sight of Christ's love and loveliness in the middle of life's daily tasks, and can you tell us the means you have found most helpful in that pursuit?

Well, I wouldn't want for a moment to pretend that I've done real well at that, only that I'm very much affected by that truth and keenly aware of the urgency of it. Something happened by way of a personal experience that was of immense help.

Many, many years ago, a man whom I was close to, who I really thought respected and loved me, came to me one day and made a statement that I found almost impossible to believe, that he would make such a crack.

He came and he said to me, you're two different people. What do you mean? No, he said, no, I want you to listen. You're two different people. I've heard you preach in a huge auditorium to thousands. I've heard you preach in a tiny little church with a handful.

You're two different people. I said, that's sheer nonsense. He said to me, if you had any idea how difficult it was for me to come and speak to you like this, you would pay closer attention to what I'm saying.

He said, this was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, to say this to you. I said, I would pay attention if there was any truth to it, but sheer nonsense. And he left in disappointment. But fortunately, the Holy Spirit did not.

I began to weigh that. That is absurd, isn't it, Lord? But then I began to realize, no, it was not absurd. If I was preaching in a series of meetings and the crowd was growing night after night, I was in some fashion thinking to myself, man, you must have been good last night.

Look at the additional crowd that's come. If, on the other hand, the crowd was dwindling, I might think to myself, I wonder what dumb thing I said last night that caused so many people to stay away. Now, that was a revelation just that much.

I mean, it was a shocker to realize that that was really taking place. But as I began to weigh that before the Lord and to ask, well, what does it mean? What can be done? Well, it became so clear to me.

I was at the center of my ministry. Not wittingly, didn't for a moment want to be. Thought Christ truly was. But no, that's where I was. And then God, in his wonderful providence, directed my thinking toward the Gospel of John.

And what gripped me initially was, I don't know how familiar people are with these words, but in chapter 2, there are three verses that just sort of dangle in space. They don't fit what precede at all.

And the essence of the verses are, a group of people come to Christ and say, we believe because of the miracles that we see you performing. And then it says, Christ on his part did not commit himself to them because he knew what was in their hearts and because he didn't need anybody to testify concerning him.

Well, one direction that my thoughts took was, well, obviously these three verses belong to chapter 3, not to chapter 2, because chapter 2 deals with the first miracle, the wedding at Cain of Galilee, and the first cleansing of the temple.

And it dawned on me, well, if Christ rejected the claim to faith of the crowd, when they said, we believe as a result of what we see, he would not turn right around and accept the same claim from an individual because he was prominent.

And that's what we've got in chapter 3, a prominent individual, Nicodemus, the teacher of Israel, making the same statement. So my perspective on John 3 was radically altered when I realized there had to be consistency between the two.

But now that's an aside, the essential thing of which I'm speaking is, I began to reflect soberly on he did not need any man to testify of him. And it gradually dawned on me that those elevated and sinking moods that I was experiencing, preaching, that self-centeredness and wondering, was I good last night?

Was I bad last night in terms of the sermon? Totally inappropriate I began to realize that no man is safe in the ministry of God's Word who is relying on human affirmation. That the only way I could truly serve Christ well would be if I were totally liberated from all human affirmation.

And God in his great kindness sometimes visits us with a series of things along the same line to help us to get the message. I was preaching in a church in a desperate need and I had been there three or four times and I was clearly led to preach on John 17, and I think I'd spoken with great care.

And after the service a family walked by me in a breezy manner at the door and they said to me, we can't imagine where you get the gall to think God called you to preach. If you had any grace at all, you would never afflict another congregation.

And they breezed out. Maybe five, six minutes later another couple came by, tears coursing down their cheeks. They said, we came this morning in desperate need of a word from God. God met us in a powerful way through your message today.

The Spirit of God is all over you. You must go on doing that. And I thought later, now which of those two should I have believed? Which of the two should have affected me? And the answer was so clear,.

Neither.

I don't need man's affirmation. Indeed man's affirmation is dangerous. It may turn my head. It may set my course in an altogether wrong manner. So I determined solely to focus on Christ. What does it matter whether somebody likes me or dislikes me?

Whether they claim to have gotten a benefit from my preaching or they said it was worthless. What does it matter if the crowd is growing or if the crowd is shrinking? The only thing that matters is Christ.

And keeping my eyes on Christ, living the whole of my life so that I'm not set to please anybody but Him. And I'm really truly indifferent to criticism and praise. Now, I don't mean by that that if somebody gives us a constructive criticism, we don't pay attention to it.

I merely mean we're not swayed, we're not affected. We don't really care at all as to our popularity and what people think about us. We have our eyes set on pleasing Christ. And as I said, I wouldn't claim to have made huge progress at that but I dare to say that is my perpetual goal.

And that has been a huge incentive to me to walk as closely to Christ as I possibly can so that indeed I might at least on occasion bring Him glory.