Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Basics Instinct
A good friend of ours once told a story about a football camp for quarterbacks that Dan Marino used to hold. As I recall, the camp was for highly-touted college quarterbacks who wanted to hone their skills prior to entering the NFL.
The story went that once at the camp, these young recruits would arrive excited to learn all kinds of cutting edge techniques from the former NFL MVP. They anticipated in-depth talks about how to read coverage, how to run a balanced offense and most-importantly, how to become an MVP quarterback.
Most were disappointed when they learned that all that Marino would focus on for the week were four things: the snap, three step drop, plant the foot and throw. For one-week, that's all these college football players did: snap, drop, plant and throw. Marino convinced them if they mastered the basics, they would succeed.
So fast forward to June 3, 2008....
I just listened to another great podcast on The Whitehorse Inn that talked about this same principle, but instead of talking about football, they talked about the church. They discussed how the 21st century church no longer does the basics, but now chases the "modernist, consumer-driven, self-made man, prosperity-gospel" culture we live in. The title of the podcast was "Selling Jesus" and you can probably find it in the archives of their site by clicking here.
Horton said the role of the church has always been characterized by preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments (baptism and communion), prayer and church discipline. That's it. No business strategies. No culturally-relevant movie clips. No focus groups. Just preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments, prayer and church discipline. The key ingredients to the historical church.
The podcast reminded me of one of the historical creeds, The Belgic Confession. De Bris wrote the confession in the mid 1500's and it was adopted as one of the doctrinal standards to which all officers in the Reformed church had to subscribe. Within the Belgic Confession, there is an article titled: The Marks of the True Church:
We believe that we ought to discern diligently and very carefully, by the Word of God, what is the true church-- for all sects in the world today claim for themselves the name of "the church."We are not speaking here of the company of hypocrites who are mixed among the good in the church and who nonetheless are not part of it, even though they are physically there. But we are speaking of distinguishing the body and fellowship of the true church from all sects that call themselves "the church."The true church can be recognized if it has the following marks: The church engages in the pure preaching of the gospel; it makes use of the pure administration of the sacraments as Christ instituted them; it practices church discipline for correcting faults. In Short, it governs itself according to the pure Word of God, rejecting all things contrary to it and holding Jesus Christ as the only Head. By these marks one can be assured of recognizing the true church-- and no one ought to be separated from it.As for those who can belong to the church, we can recognize them by the distinguishing marks of Christians; namely by faith, and by their fleeing from sin and pursuing righteousness, once they have received the one and only Savior, Jesus Christ. They love the true God and their neighbors, without turning to the right or left, and they crucify the flesh and its works.Though great weakness remains in them, they fight against it by the Spirit all the days of their lives, appealing constantly to the blood, suffering, death, and obedience of the Lord Jesus, in whom they have forgiveness of their sins, through faith in him.As for the false church, it assigns more authority to itself and its ordinances than to the Word of God; it does not want to subject itself to the yoke of Christ; it does not administer the sacraments as Christ commanded in his Word; it rather adds to them or subtracts from them as it pleases; it bases itself on men, more than on Jesus Christ; it persecutes those who live holy lives according to the Word of God and who rebuke it for its faults, greed, and idolatry.These two churches are easy to recognize and thus to distinguish from each other.
Snap, drop, plant, throw. Gospel, sacraments, prayer, discipline.
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