Contending for the Faith?

We were at our small group gathering last evening at some friends' house, where we've been studying through the book of Acts. We were in chapter 15, just beginning to look at the account of the Jerusalem council. I had just read the first half of the chapter, where we see some Judeans coming to Antioch and teaching that circumcision according to the law of Moses was a necessary condition for salvation in addition to faith in Christ. And Paul and Silas of course "had great dissension and debate with them", and were sent to take the matter up with the other apostles in Jerusalem. And Peter makes that great statement about attempting to be justified by keeping the Law: "Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?" This was a critical point in the life of the early church, one of the first occasions of having to define orthodoxy and defend it publicly.

So right in the midst of reading this passage, the doorbell rings. It's our senior pastor and his adult daughter. As they come in they seem very agitated. The daughter tells us that she and her father have been arguing about a doctrinal issue all afternoon and they needed to bring it to someone's attention in the church. So our pastor proceeds to tell us that he's come to the conclusion that water baptism is a necessary condition for salvation, and presents a couple of Scriptural references for support. The room was dead still, and as I looked around at the people gathered for the small group, there were all kinds of confused and uncomfortable looks on their faces. I could almost read their minds: "Is this really happening?" "What is he thinking?" "Oh, this is gonna split the church to pieces!"

Now, I've ministered with this pastor for over ten years, served as an elder with him, been through some extremely difficult personal and ministry situations with him. He's a friend and a brother who would die for the truth of the Gospel. I knew something wasn't right here. As I sat in the silence I realized that this was an act, planned by the small group leader with our pastor to illustrate the situation we'd just been reading in Acts. He's a great homiletician, but his act in this role wasn't convincing me. So I sat for a few moments and waited to see how the other group members would respond. It was pretty obvious that most of them thought this was real. One man tentatively tried to dissuade the pastor by pointing out the Biblical meaning of the Greek term for baptism. But he wasn't persuaded. I waited a few more moments. Still no response from anyone else.

So I decided to call his bluff. I told him flat out that he was wrong, that he was determining to teach a wrong doctrine that could not be supported by the whole counsel of Scripture. And with that the ruse was over. The small group leader assured everyone that the whole thing was a put on, an attempt to bring the situation in Acts 15 into our own church and time. You could hear the sighs of relief around the room.

We went on to do some further study and discussion based on the passage, but never really came back to the situation we had been faced with. Now obviously the Acts 15 situation is not the same as a pastor who decides to teach heresy today. But I've been thinking about this all day. What if it had been real? What if our senior pastor had truly decided to publicly declare his support for such a teaching? How would we respond? How should we respond? Everyone in the group knew that this was wrong teaching. Everyone knew that if this was real it would destroy our pastor, possibly our church. But what was the response? I mean, after all, this was our senior pastor! We couldn't just tell him he's wrong, could we?

My response is - yes, we can and we must. When the truth of the Gospel is so clearly at stake, when heresy is being proposed to be put forth by anyone in a teaching or leadership role, our response has to be to contend for the faith. To do otherwise is to fail to love our Savior and His truth, to fail to love His Church, to fail to love our brothers and sisters in Christ. My mind goes to Paul's words in Galatians 2:11, where he says that he "opposed him [Peter]to his face" for hypocritically denying the truth of the Gospel by his actions.

But how many real situations like this in many churches are instead dealt with by ignoring the issue, hoping it will go away, not wanting to cause dissension or division, and finally perhaps just quietly leaving the church in question? How committed are we, every one of us that fill the pews each week and call ourselves members of the church, to speaking truth when faced with a situation like this? I pray that most of us never have to. But I further pray that if we do, we do as Jude says and "contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints." As I was reminded more deeply last week at T4G, we have no other hope. As R. C. Sproul said, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only hope we have. But it is enough!