Triumphalism

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we are talking about triumphalism, or what is also known as the victorious Christian life. We're always encouraged by modern evangelicalism that there should be an upward trajectory to our Christian life, that we should be overcoming sin and gaining new levels of righteousness as we grow year after year, and yet that is not the experience of many Christians.

They feel defeated, they lack assurance, they do not have joy, and we are here to bring some relief to show you from Scripture what the Christian life should be and how triumphalism and the victorious Christian life is a distraction and actually robs us of the true hope and assurance we should have.

We hope you enjoy.

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To learn more about this and other ways of supporting us, you can go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective.

Our hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina, Jimmy Buehler, pastor of Christ Community Church in Willmar, Minnesota, and I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

Gentlemen, it is truly good to see your faces. It's good to be here recording once again. We have had a fun, lively conversation. I have laughed until tears this morning through our time of pre-shows.

As always.

As always. Justin, you've got a couple of updates for us. What's going on in the Theocast world?

A couple of things that we're excited about here at Theocast, the first being a new podcast offering that is coming out soon or might already be out by the time you're hearing this episode. It's called Ask Theocast, where the three of us will be answering questions that have been submitted by listeners through various mediums, maybe voicemails or emails or various kinds of correspondence.

We'll also be tackling some of the general questions that we get on a regular basis. For example, things like, what is covenant theology? What is the redemptive historical framework of Scripture? What do we mean when we say that we're sinner saints?

All of these kinds of things. What are the uses of the law? We're going to try to answer things like that in a three to five minute format. We hope that those are helpful to people and can shed some light on some of these really big topics that we often discuss on Theocast and don't always have time to unpack during the regular episodes.

The other thing that we're super pumped about is another book, another primer that will be coming out, we hope, even this summer. That's a primer on assurance. The question and the issue of assurance is something that we discuss a lot.

That's appropriate because many people have rightly said that the Reformation was the recovery of the biblical doctrine of assurance. We have been working on and editing a primer for your consumption that we hope will be a great encouragement to you.

Essentially, what it is, is taking a podcast that we did recently on assurance and turning that into a primer. It's going to be a conversation on assurance amongst the three of us. Look for that resource to be coming out over the summer.

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We're hoping the primers are a way for you to introduce people to rest in Christ. We figured this would be helpful. Just to add on to what Justin said, if you want to learn more about Ask Theocast or have a question, just go to AskTheocast .com.

You can get the podcast feed there. You can also send us a voicemail or an email. Jimmy, what are we talking about today? Today's a fun one. I can already feel it's going to be a little lively. You can feel it coming in the air.

I would absolutely love to. Today, gentlemen, we are talking about the idea of triumphalism, or you could also call it the victorious Christian life. In a 10 ,000 or perhaps even 30 ,000 foot view of things, what we mean by that is as we think about the Christian life, the daily grind, the ins and outs, that if we were to take a step back and look at ourselves, we would always see this onward and upward trajectory, that even though we might sin and struggle a little bit, each day we can look to the confidence we have in ourselves that we are struggling less than we did perhaps even a year ago or two years ago or five years ago.

And it's really this idea that there's a heavy emphasis on victory in the Christian life. There's a heavy emphasis on a trajectory of goodness or holiness. And before we kind of even begin to talk about this idea and perhaps rip it apart, we want to be clear from the get-go that we do believe here at Theocast that we are sanctified in this life, that as we continually look to Christ in faith, that we do believe that God uses means to make us more like Jesus.

And so really, this is going to be a nuanced conversation as we look at some of these themes. And so what I want to do is just kind of throw it out to you guys and see if you want to help flesh out this definition of what do we mean by triumphalism or perhaps the victorious Christian life.

The Problem with an Upward Trajectory in the Christian Life

Yeah, this is something that has been a part of Theocast from day one. It's something that I can remember when I became confessional, I started to understand covenant theology, understand saint-sinner realities, that sin is a state versus an action, and all of this began to inform my understanding of communicating the gospel and the Christian life to people.

And what I had received my entire life was this onward-upward, that I should be triumphing and I am pressing myself towards this progression. And every sermon and every book, the way in which I approached my Bible reading, the way in which I approached prayer or mortification of sin, it was always making sure that I was almost adding to the spiritual muscle that I had, the spiritual agility that I had to make sure that I could become a better spiritual athlete in some ways, so that I could have victory, victory over sin, victory over bad habits, so everything, sermons were seven ways for this and five ways for this and three ways for that.

And then books that what I would read or nine ways for this or how to overcome this and that, and what ended up happening is you have two options. You can take these small victories that you do find, but you have to neglect the reality of your nature, where you ignore the inward battle and struggle.

And when someone asks you, how are you doing? Because in a triumphalism culture, in a victorious Christian life culture, to admit you're not progressing or to admit that you aren't overcoming is failure.

And so you don't confess sin.

Yeah.

You don't confess sin. You don't confess that you struggle with some kind of an addiction or that you are.

Depressed.

People in, we just did a podcast on depression. People who are depressed are crushed or who suffer from anxiety are crushed underneath the weight of triumphalism.

It's a bitter pill.

Measuring Progress, Discipline, and Affection

There's a number of observations that could be made out of the gate here. To pick up on what you're talking about, John, I think a couple of things that characterize this triumphalistic perspective, this onward and upward clean linear progression stuff, is that it necessarily means that we are always trying to quantify everything that's going on in our spiritual lives.

And so we're always measuring certain things. Generally speaking, we're measuring two or three things. One, we're measuring how well we're doing at overcoming sin. So how are we doing at overcoming vice?

And am I doing better than I was? What's the trajectory there? We think about how we're doing with respect to our disciplines. And am I more disciplined? Am I doing better? Am I more consistent? And the other thing that I might add in there too, is we will often try to quantify our affection.

Our affections in particular toward God and his word and the like. And so we're always measuring ourselves there. And the question that we're asking is, am I better? Are you better than you were a month ago or a year ago or three years ago?

And the implication is, if you're not doing better than you were, then something is terribly wrong and you need to be really concerned about your spiritual state. And I think we're going to go here in a number of different ways, I'm sure.

It's just very unrealistic and it's not the way that the Christian life unfolds for us as we live as fallen people in a fallen world. Take depression or anxiety or addiction or any of these things that we are struggling with on the regular, we'll go through seasons in our lives.

I mean, we might have seasons where the struggle is not as intense and the Lord has given a lot of grace and we aren't even that aware of the temptation or we're not even that aware of the darkness or whatever it may be.

And we're doing pretty well. But then there are going to be other seasons where it absolutely jumps on us like that 400 pound gorilla. And we think, my goodness. And it comes out of nowhere sometimes.

You may be doing well today with respect to the state of your heart and mind. And you're thinking, man, I'm doing pretty well with respect to depression. I haven't been in the throes of it in a while.

And that does not mean, brother or sister, that in five years or 10 years or 30 years, as you continue to trust Christ, that it will not rear its head again and be crippling perhaps. And so there's a lot of damage and harm that comes from this.

It sets unrealistic expectations for the Christian. And obviously it robs us of peace and comfort and assurance because we're always looking to ourselves and assessing our progress. And anybody who's sane and self-aware is going to realize that there is a ton of failure mixed in with the successes.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And even as we think about the everydayness of the Christian life. So to the listener right now, who perhaps feels a little bit rubbed against as we're speaking this way, maybe you are going through a particular time in your life where you feel like your prayer life is rich and your scripture intake is rich and your, quote unquote, your affections for God are rich.

And exactly, Justin, what we want to do is encourage that and say, that is great and praise the Lord that you feel these ways, you're thinking these ways. I mean, certainly as we look at the entire book of Psalms, I saw a meme the other day that it was like sometimes David is like, I am just okay.

And then the next day David is like, no, I'm not. I'm just kidding. You know, and certainly the book of Psalms is encouraging because as we look at the life of David, as it's expressed in the Psalms, there are days where he is asking, how long, oh Lord, will you forget me forever?

Why have you turned your face from me? You know, my tears have been my food and I've soaked my couch in my tears and so on and so forth, but then there are days that he is like, I am ready to go to the nations and declare your glories among them, like let's go.

And what we're trying to say is that there is such a spectrum in the normal everyday Christian life that, you know, Lord willing, by God's grace and his kindness and mercy toward you, the light of his countenance will be toward you and you will perhaps even have some sort of feeling of that.

But there will also be days that you will feel the real struggle of your own frame. And so I think in all of this, what we are seeking to point to is that we as Christians are far more fragile than we think, we are far more fickle than we think, and we are far more weak than we think, and triumphalism or the victorious Christian life often doesn't give room for that.

Looking Outside Ourselves to Christ

Yeah.

I think your illustration with David is a great example that I think towards the end of his life, you wouldn't say he lived a victorious Christian life, he lived in a lot of, he lived, it was horrible just watching his own children and what they did to each other and just even his own heart and his own soul.

One of the things that happens when you live in this triumphalism culture is that your level of joy and your level assurance is going to rise and fall based upon you, it's a highly individualized system, it's focused in on you.

So when you approach God and your relationship to him, you are always introspective. I know it's maybe a drum, if you're new to Theocast, it's going to be new to you. If you've been around Theocast for a while, you're going to, this is a little bit of a repeat and we do this often to remind ourselves that we need to be reminded, don't be so introspective, but we do.

We view the Christian life and now look, I'm going to be totally frank with every single listener and I know both you guys are going to agree. If you were to look at John Moffat 20 years ago, I would be a much different man than I am today.

And there's many reasons why. Not all of it is because I've been in the word. A lot of it's because I've been beat down. I've gone through sorrow. I've gone through loss. I've gone through pain and suffering.

But the thing is, I know I'm a better man. I know that I've made better decisions, but I can't say that my life is one of triumph. I have a lot of failures from back then. I've had a lot of sin struggles from back then until today.

And the thing that has motivated me to continue to find joy and the thing that's motivated me to continue to find assurance is to not be introspective. To not look at myself, but to look outside of myself.

Because what does Paul say in 2 Corinthians 3 .18 and following down to 4 is that when we look at the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, that is when we are transformed into glory from one degree of glory to the next.

Meaning that Paul isn't pointing the believer inward to look at the trajectory of their life. He's pointing them out and up. He does this in Colossians, right? The end of Colossians 2, he says all of these outward ways that you're trying to control your body, he even mentions asceticism, he says there have no value stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

Where does he point you? Up to Christ. Focus your attention on Jesus Christ. Triumphalism is inward. What are you doing and how do you make yourself better? And here are the steps. And we would say the biblical call and even the confessional call is to point yourself out, extranos, away from yourself to something that is greater, that pulls you.

We completely agree here at Theocast. I want to reiterate so that we're not misunderstood that transformation of life is real and that everybody whom the Lord has justified in Christ Jesus, he will sanctify, and at the same time, we want to be crystal clear that sanctification and the transformation of life is a community project.

It is a corporate reality.

Sanctification as a Corporate Reality

That is such a big point, Justin. And it's a huge point that people just, we say that and I don't think people really feel what we're saying there, but it's huge.

No, it's massive. I mean, when we read the New Testament, we have to remember that take the epistles because this is where we often will go. The epistles, all of them basically are written to congregations with the exception of the pastoral epistles that are written essentially to churches through the pastor, right?

So they're all written into a corporate reality. And if we think about the things that are described in the New Testament with respect to the transformation of life, they are all taking place most pointedly within the context of the community called the church.

And so it is not this hyper individualistic journey and process that you're on. It is on, you're on a journey with your brothers and sisters in the church. And so you're, you're looking to Christ. Like you said, John, 2 Corinthians 3 and 4 most pointedly there describe that reality that as we behold Christ, we're changed, but as we live life in the church, we're changed.

And so not only are we looking outside of ourselves to Christ, extra nos for our justification and our standing before the Lord, we live an outwardly oriented life where we are concerned with the good of our brothers and sisters and the good of our neighbor.

And it's in that way that we are transformed and changed most fundamentally and most effectively. When we navel gaze, we use that term a lot when we are hyper introspective and we're always focusing on ourselves and our performance and our progress.

It actually is a great hindrance to our sanctification. We, we don't grow as we should, and we often are just blind to many of the realities that exist. Were we to take our gaze off of ourselves and fix it on Christ and our brothers and sisters and our neighbor, as God has intended, it would be much better for us.

And as John, you've pointed out already, brother, in that approach, there is peace and rest and assurance because we're looking outside of ourselves and the Lord does his sanctifying work in us as we look to Christ and as we live in the church.

So like we can't beat that drum hard enough that we're all for the transformation of life, but it is a corporate reality. It is not an individual pursuit.

Victory Is in Christ, Not in Our Progress

And, and even let's just be clear about something. We do believe that victory exists in the Christian life. And what we believe about that is that victory exists in the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, that ultimately Christ is victorious.

And so that is what we are arguing to look toward is the victory is not so much found in the increased goodness and sanctification of yourself, but the victory is found in your status that you are a forgiven, sin-sick wretch sitting under the banner of the victory of Christ.

The other thing that is helpful to remember is what we call, or what has not necessarily we call, but what has been known as simul justus et peccator, that we are both simultaneously saint and sinner, that as we think about the Christian life, we live in a constant tension of Romans chapter seven and Romans chapter eight, that we naturally wake up in a Roman seven world, that we struggle with our flesh, we struggle with sin, we struggle with things that we never thought we'd struggle with, but we are constantly looking to the Romans eight realities that there is no condemnation for us in Christ Jesus.

And so I think you guys might speak to this a little bit more later, but the simul life, you know, simultaneously saint and sinner, that has been a very helpful category for myself, even as I think about the everyday Christian life.

No, just to add to that, Jimmy, I would say, you know, I'm going to throw, this is my role at Theocast, is to keep you guys on your toes.

Short hops. Here we go.

Oh yeah, here we go.

Here we go.

So we have in scripture, I know if there's someone new to Theocast and they're from a conservative, Reformed, or even Calvinistic background, they're yelling at their phone or their car speaker right now, but guys, guys, guys, guys, the Bible clearly says in 2 Corinthians 5, 17, that for those who are in Christ, they're a new creature.

Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new, right? The whole put off, put on, put off the old man, put on the new man. Well, there seems to be Paul saying that there is a trajectory where we are focusing on putting off the old man and that we are living in this new nature that we have, and the new nature provides us the ability to be progressing in our sanctification.

So it sounds like you guys are ignoring these verses, that the reality you're describing is not the reality that I'm reading in the New Testament, and how would you reply to such accusations? That was a real question.

I mean, go ahead. I mean, go ahead, J.

I think Jimmy and I are being deferential to each other. So obviously, sure. So the same apostle who wrote 2 Corinthians 5, 17, wrote Romans 7, right? So what we're trying to do is hold these things in appropriate tension and have a theology that incorporates all of the Bible, but even all of the apostle Paul's theology, and it is entirely right and true that in Christ Jesus, we are a new creation.

We have been regenerated by the Spirit of God. We have been circumcised, not by circumcision that is made with hands or done in the flesh, but we have been circumcised of heart with the circumcision of Christ, and so we have been raised to walk in newness of life and to walk in the good works that have been prepared beforehand for us to do.

All of those things are entirely true, and there will be this transformation of life that we've already alluded to multiple times. There will be change. We will look at ourselves. John, you described your own life.

I'm different than I was 20 years ago. I mean, brother, so am I. My goodness. Myself, in my 17, 18-year-old me versus me now in my later 30s, there is a world of difference. There's a world of difference from 10 years ago.

So I am in no way saying don't pan back and look at your life and praise God for what he's done. Of course we do, and at the same time, we acknowledge that we are not yet fully sanctified. We are not yet glorified.

We will know complete victory over sin, and we will know only righteousness in our experience at the resurrection, but not until then. Paul is crystal clear. Jimmy, you mentioned Romans 7 and Romans 8.

I mean, even if we think Romans 6, we think about our new identity in Romans 6, our new war in Romans 7, our new hope in Romans 8. So that's the world that we live in. That's all we're trying to point out here is that so often the focus, we're just trying to press back biblically with a more, we think, balanced, dare I use that word, balanced approach to say, look, we can't just talk about transformation.

We can't just talk about victory. We can't just talk about overcoming. We can't just talk about the new nature. We've got to acknowledge that, like you said, Jimmy, the simultaneous reality of new nature, saint, old man, we are not resurrected and fully sanctified yet.

Those are both characteristic of our reality.

We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called Faith versus Faithfulness, a Primer on Rust, and we, the hosts, put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

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That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry. You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

The Gospel as the Ground of Sanctification

Yeah, as we look at sanctification, we do recognize that there is a progressive nature to it, but something I think we also need to remember is that there is a definite nature of sanctification, that we are set apart by God in Christ.

And so one of the things we wrote about this in our Primer on Rust is that when we think about the corporate realities of church life, or even the individual realities of church life, is often when the emphasis is the victorious Christian life or triumphalism, the gospel all of a sudden shifts to the background.

The good news of what Christ has accomplished on our behalf moves to the background, and then what moves to the foreground is life transformation. And I'm going to kind of poke at something, and I'm sure people are going to get really upset.

But I mean, think about the modern evangelical way of sharing testimonies. What is the focus? Jesus changed my life, or Jesus transformed my life. And I'm not against that, but you better not regress where you are right now.

Otherwise, Jesus didn't change your life. And I'm also going to say something that's probably going to blow people's minds, and we'll get another email about antinomianism. My worst and most heinous sins, guys, have been committed after I became a Christian.

Think about that. So I have sinned against my wife and others in ways that when I was a teenager, when I first became a believer, I have sinned against my wife and others in ways that if you would have told me when I was a teenager, I would have ran from you in fear and said, there's no way I'd ever do that.

There's absolutely no way I'd ever do that. But here I stand, and I can say no other, that my nature to sin, my propensity to sin is great. It is unbelievable. Something I like to say to our church all the time is we are experts in sin.

We are so good at it. We are just naturally good at it. And so what we're trying to say is when the progress of the Christian life moves to the foreground, it is going to wreck you when you struggle. It is going to wreck you when you sin because you have it in your brain that, well, my testimony is that Jesus changed my life.

And if I regress anything lower than that standard of that day when I gave my testimony, you're going to find yourself in a heap of trouble because you're going to begin to question everything. And I know, John, you wanted to jump in here, so I'll defer to you.

Jimmy, that is super insightful and very helpful because it's true. If you were saved as a young child, as I was, then your worst struggles are ahead of you. I was saved before I really hit into—I was 12, so my greatest, deepest struggles hadn't even happened yet, even just from a natural standpoint.

And then if you come from a drug background and you are a partier and all of a sudden you're not there, you can have a false sense of assurance and you can even have a false sense of, I'm good with God because at least I'm not sleeping around doing drugs anymore.

And you always look to what you're not doing to find your assurance when that's just very dangerous. It's very obvious that Christians are going to struggle because how many times in Scripture—we have just as many as when it says you're a new creation, which I want to reference that real quick—to Paul's warnings about Galatians 6 .1, those who are trapped in sin, all the warnings in Ephesians 4 and following about the battle and struggle against sin that you're going to have within the internal battle that you're going to have.

And church discipline exists for a reason too.

Yeah, it has to exist. So this is all true. But even going back to 2 Corinthians where it says you're a new creation, what Paul is saying there is that you are a new type of person that has never existed within the humanity.

Before now, we had people who are depraved, fallen under the curse of Adam. And now there's a whole new type of person, and this type of person is still living within a body that is depraved, that's fallen and sinful, but has the spirit to give it power to have a belief and not be trapped to sin.

He is not saying your new creation means you shouldn't struggle with sin anymore. This is what triumphalism's biggest lie is that over time, the battle against sin goes away, and I cannot tell you how many times I've had to sit down with individuals and say, you are going to fight sin for the rest of your life.

You'll never get to a moment where sin will no longer be tempting to you. That is just not a reality, even for the New Testament doesn't give us that a reality, that is the lie of triumphalism.

That's so damaging. And I think to your point, I've said this so many times in the context of our church, the impression that people are given, John, the battle with sin will go away, or I would maybe even nuance that a little bit and say, sometimes the presentation is, well, the battle with sin will always be there, but it will get a lot easier, like you will be victorious over it, and that won't be as hard to do as you mature in the faith versus where you are now in your more infantile state.

And that's just flat out untrue. It's patently false on the face of it, because there are going to be times in our lives where the battle gets, if anything, more intense as we grow. And that ebbs and flows season by season.

I want to pick up on something else that you said, though, too, John, where we're putting our confidence, oftentimes in a triumphalistic framework, we're putting our confidence most fundamentally in our own transformation of life, rather than placing our confidence in the finished work of Christ in our place.

We constantly are looking to how we've changed as the ground of our confidence. And like, how do I really, it's like, yeah, okay, you're safe in Christ, but how do you really know that you're going to be in heaven?

How do you really know that you're legit? Well, it's because you have adequate and sufficient transformation of life to look to and to fall back on, and I think this is just a public service announcement for everybody.

I try to do this about once a month in our own church, lest we think that we're crushing it in the Christian life, and lest we think that we really are on this just super soaring upward trajectory and we're just doing great.

Let's just consider the great commandment from the words of our Lord, that we're to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Assess that honestly, in light of your life, the last 10 minutes, let alone the last week, and give it 30 seconds of thought.

I think we all, if we rightly understand our minds and hearts, we would be like prostrate on the floor before the Lord, like, Father, forgive me, because I have not loved you with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength for one second of my sin-sick life, and so we are always, even in our quote-unquote best moments as we perceive them, we're naive and deluded when we think we're doing that great.

In our best moments, we are always debtors to grace, and we are always looking to Christ, because we have nowhere to stand. Even in our transformed lives, there is no ground to stand on to say that is legit.

Only Jesus is legit, and there will be real transformation that we can look to and have our assurance bolstered as we see the work of His Spirit in our lives. My goodness, man, we just need to be more realistic in our assessment of ourselves in light of what God requires, and nobody meets the standard.

The Bible’s Redemptive Narrative and the Order of Command

That's right. In Scripture, we do have promises of how the body or how we are to be transformed. Paul very pointedly says in Ephesians 4 that when the body functions properly, it builds itself up in love, and you will see that the believer within the New Testament is pushed into a corporate reality, a body of believers, where you have people who are teachers, you have people that are gifted with giving and love, there's so many gifts.

And when we approach the Christian life this way, what we're doing is we're reaching out and grasping onto something that is pulling us towards Christ. We are not pushing ourselves to Christ. Here's a great example of this.

So in the triumphalist system, the focus is always you getting better. It's just like anybody who's working out. They adjust their entire life. Someone who's trying to become fit, the way they eat, the way they sleep, how they work out, when they work out, their entire life is focused in on that so they can accomplish that goal.

And then we think this is how it works in the Christian life. The way in which you do everything spiritually, you're going to build yourself up, but it just doesn't work like that. Growth within the Christianity is a community event.

It's always been that way. And that's how the New Testament pushes us. Let me give an illustration here that I used for my church this last Sunday. I preached a sermon called, what is, well, it's not really a preacher sermon.

I shared some truths. How do you preach a sermon to a camera? You know, that's just my opinion.

You don't.

So I share some truths.

You don't. Preaching is a corporate reality.

I shared some truths to my DSL friend, and what I told him was, if you were going to say, all right, I want to consume God's word, or we're as a church are going to consume God's word, and you start from the beginning to the end and just let God's word be read over you.

I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but 95 of God's word is narrative and descriptive. Describing how God accomplished redemption through all kinds of crazy stories of death, magic, people coming back to life.

It's just the most incredible gnarly ride from the beginning to the end. Then you get to the New Testament, and in the epistles, there are some very important instructions. You have some instructions.

You have the Old Testament law that's still applicable to us, but if you've ever read those commands, you can read them in very, like just word count. They're really small. The law doesn't take up a lot of word counts, and some of the law applies to us, lying, stealing, cheating, all that kind of stuff.