Many years ago now an older minister came
to me after I had spoken at a church camp and offered me a few kind words of
advice. “Your ministry among us has been a great blessing,” he said. “But there
is one way in which it could have been an even greater blessing; you could have
‘lowered the rope a little bit further.’”
He was referring to my need to make
biblical and spiritual truth more accessible to people by bringing down into
their world a little more – the everyday world of living and working and
playing. What I had done in expounding the truths of the Bible could be likened
to lowering a rope down to people from a great height. But it needed to be
lowered a little further for people to reach it and gain benefit from it. In
other words, it needed to be applied more to life in the real world. Spiritual and theological abstractions belong
to the world of academics; ordinary people need truth presented in a way they
can apply easily to everyday situations.
I wasn’t at all offended by his advice.
On the contrary, I was challenged by it and hope that I have learned from it.
Sometimes I wonder however. Just last week a friend and colleague in the
ministry and I were discussing a paper that I had written. By way of response
he said, “This is all very good, but if I were writing it, I would want to show
how this applies to someone suffering from anorexia, or from some other
pressing ailment. I would want to relate it to the people in the pew.”
Admittedly, the paper was intended to be conceptual rather than practical, and
from that point of view not meant to engage the down-to-earth situations of
people. But it was a sober reminder, however, of how easy it is to teach,
preach and write without connecting with where people are at.
At times that’s because those of us who
do these things – teach, preach and write – are somewhat out of touch with real
life anyway. That shouldn’t be the case, but it can happen. A love of books and
of study and reflection can take people out of the world others face day by
day. When that happens, our teaching almost inevitably becomes other-worldly
and doesn’t quite connect. That’s something that’s been recognized down through
the centuries.
But there’s another reason for sometimes
failing to apply biblical truths as particularly as some might like. That’s the
desire to avoid being legalistic. The moment you begin applying biblical or
spiritual principles to specific cases there is always the danger of creating a
rule, or of giving the impression that this is the only way to do it. And
that’s unhelpful. It almost always leads to people giving more attention to the
new “law” you create than it does to Christ and the gospel principles that
underlie what you are talking about.
One can take, for example, the spiritual
principle that Scripture meditation is essential for spiritual growth and try
to make that practical for people by offering some guidelines on how to do it.
You might relate how others have gone about it in the past – there is a great
literature on devotional meditation available if you know where to find it – or
you may share how you go about doing it yourself. Likely as not, the eager
members of your audience will take detailed notes and try to follow the steps
exactly as you have outlined them.
While that is not necessarily bad in
itself, the danger exists of people slavishly binding themselves to following a
method. Before long they can be either
boasting about its guaranteed usefulness, or lamenting their failure to keep at
it as they should. One way or another, they have become slaves to a particular
way of applying a principle.
Another danger associated with providing
particular applications is that of creating the impression of personal
superiority – particularly when you share how you go about doing something. In detailing how you go about
meditating on Scripture, for example, you can easily seem to be saying, “Look,
I’m good at this. Follow me and learn the secret.” And that won’t do either.
It’s self-inflating rather than Christ-exalting.
There has to be a better way than falling
into legalism on the one hand or boastful self-display on the other. It is true
that people need help to translate broad concepts into practical actions. And
often they need suggested steps to see how to do so. How can we provide these
without losing sight of Christ and his grace? That’s a subject for a separate
Insight. We can take it up next week and explore it further.