The following post was written by Archbishop Steve Wood for The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) and can be found here.
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
1 Timothy 1:15
It is so very easy for the church to lose sight of the main thing.
Today, churches are all too often riven by arguments over politics, socio-economic issues, and what it means to be human. All of those are important questions and we are to be wise in how we address the questions that our society and culture ask of us. But we also need to be aware that those things are secondary. They are not the principal work of the Church. And we must be focused on the main thing.
What is the main thing? Jesus is the main thing. But what about Jesus? Well, we do not have to guess. Paul tells us quite plainly what the main thing is in our text today, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” (1 Timothy 1.15)
Those words may sound familiar to you. They should. They are the third of Thomas Cranmer’s four Comfortable Words that follow our Confession and Absolution. Cranmer had an amazing ability to focus our minds and our hearts on the gospel message.
This is the proclamation of the church, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” That is the main thing. That is the message to which I have given myself. That is the message I have sought to keep central in the parishes I have served. This message is central in our diocese and in our province
That message – that doctrinal assertion – was at risk in Timothy’s church in Ephesus, and Paul was concerned.
Paul will return to the matter of sound doctrine for the second time in as many chapters: 1 Timothy 2.5, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.”
Why? Why the concern? Why the insistence on sound doctrine? Because Paul understood that sound doctrine produces a sound church. Right living follows right thinking.
One American Christian theologian, writing of the radical transformation of Christian theology and Christian belief taking place in the Western church, penned these words, “the sovereignty of God [is being replaced] with the sovereignty of the self. In this therapeutic age, human problems are reduced to pathologies in need of a treatment plan. Sin is simply excluded from the picture, and doctrines as central as the wrath and justice of God are discarded as out of step with the times and unhelpful to the project of self-actualization.”
Friends, the world in which we live is a murky world of madness, a world that, at best, is confused about what is true and what is false. This confusion can work its way into our churches. And so, for every doctrine we profess to be true, there seem to be a hundred false contenders.
It has always been so.
But we are not left to ourselves. Our gracious God has given us His Word, His Spirit, and the examples of our forebears. In our text, Paul sets for us a model. He begins with doctrine. He begins with the transformation of the mind. But this was not just his message to a young Timothy. It was his counsel to the church at large.
But it’s not just the head that is the problem. It is the heart as well.
To the church in Ephesus, Timothy’s church, Paul wrote: “You must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart.” (Ephesians 4.17-18)
The human problem – our problem – my problem – is with both our heads and our hearts. As a young clergyman, Bishop FitzSimons Allison, echoing St. Paul’s description of the interplay of heart and mind, said to me, “What the heart desires, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”
Yes, Paul tells us that we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. But he goes deeper. One commentator said, “[God] penetrates beneath the futile mind and the darkened understanding and the willful ignorance,” and says that it is all rooted in, “the hardness of their heart. And here is the deepest disease, infecting everything else: Our mental suppression of God’s truth is rooted in the hardness of our heart. Our hard hearts will simply not submit to the supremacy of Christ, and so our blind minds cannot see the supremacy of Christ.”
Paul begins by stating and restating the necessity of the church to embrace sound doctrine. Paul knew that sound doctrine reveals truth about God to both our minds and our hearts, leading us to love God more than we love our sin.
A fundamental premise behind Paul’s writing is this: the Christian faith has substance. The Christian faith is a crunchy faith. It has content. It matters what you believe.
It has always mattered what Christians believe.
Classically, those things that we believe about God – about Jesus, about the Father and the Spirit, those things we believe about the Christian faith are called “doctrines.” But like the word “sin,” the word doctrine is not often used in our culture, even our Christian culture. When it is used, it is rarely used positively.
But, like it or not, what we believe and the faith we profess will both determine our eternal destiny as well as the manner in which we live in this world.
So, what do you believe? What do you think about Jesus?
There are those – even within the church – who have no use for doctrine. They view doctrinal statements as being divisive. They claim that they create a hostile and intolerant religious environment.
But I’d argue the opposite. A doctrineless faith is a rootless faith. A lowest common denominator, contentless faith, is an anemic faith. And it is precisely this “believe anything you want kind of faith” that is rightly rejected by many outside the Christian faith as trivial and inadequate to make sense of the experiences and complexities of their life.
Hold fast to and proclaim sound doctrine.
Yours in Christ,
+Steve
The Most Revd Stephen D. Wood
Archbishop, The Anglican Church in North America
