A Cocktail of Blessing and Judgment Part 1: When Christ Disciplines His Church:

“You can tell what God thinks of money by the kind of people He gives it to!”

This is typical wit from the 19th Century Baptist preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. We could probably say the same thing about fame, power, and many talents and abilities which enable people to get on in the world. The things by which we measure success frequently come at a great cost to character. As the old adage puts it “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The pursuit of worldly riches often advances at a great expense to the soul.

But not always. There are examples of people who have used their wealth and power sacrificially and with tremendous generosity for the benefit of others. There are also poor people who are bitter and selfish.

So are wealth, power, and gifting a blessing or a curse?

The truth of the matter is that there are no absolute blessings or absolute judgments in this world. Absolute blessing and absolute curse are reserved for eternity, for heaven and for hell. In the meantime, our experience is always mixed.

In the life of a Christian this means that there is a delicate balance of grief and joy. In Romans 8 we “groan inwardly” because perfect blessing has not yet arrived.  But we also “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4) because we know that this consummate blessing will come and is, in a real but limited sense, already breaking in. So as Christians and churches we live in a tension where conflict and failure, warnings, discipline, and ‘judgements’ are real but so are peace and love and joy.

In recent weeks, Christian churches have been feeling this acutely. In the wake of the coronavirus crisis some people with little religious interest have been asking whether the Bible has anything to say about this situation. At the same time, because church doors are physically locked, Christian ministers have been broadcasting their sermons online. Some have commented that they have reached more people with the Christian message in a few months than in their entire ministry. It is reminiscent of Paul’s words in Philippians 1:12-16:

“I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ. And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear.”

This is good news. How can anyone suggest that the church is not experiencing a time of blessing?

The answer is that God always mixes ‘blessings’ and ‘judgments’ in proportions that He deems best. In the next few verses,

“Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defence of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. To Live Is Christ Yes, and I will rejoice...”.

Was it a ‘blessing’ that Christ was being preached? Yes. Was it a ‘blessing’ for those who were doing it insincerely, and for wrong reasons? No. Paul could rejoice in it because of his love for Jesus. But the troublemakers had no cause for rejoicing because the exercise of spiritual gifts - even preaching - without a living, loving, devotion to Jesus is of no value whatsoever:

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3).

The visible church in Philippi was a mixed body. This is true of the church in all times and places. As well as true believers walking with the Lord, there are unbelievers with only a superficial appearance of Christianity. There are also real Christians whose lives are, for all kinds of reasons, not what they should be. The Lord has to deal with them, in His way and His time, in a disciplinary manner, in order to bring them back in line with His purposes.

In short, because it is a mixed body in the midst of a spiritual conflict, we often find the church to be the sphere of God’s blessings and God’s judgments simultaneously. After all, “judgment begins at the House of God”.

For example, under the blessing of preaching one person receives the message of God’s grace by faith in Jesus Christ and is 

“Blessed in Christ Jesus with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places...” (Ephesians 1:3).

receiving the Holy Spirit as an initial down-payment: 

“...the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:14).

Another person hears the same message preached but rejects it, and moves one step closer to the final, absolute judgment.

“For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things?” (2 Corinthians 2:15-16).

Likewise, acts of God - such as natural disasters, famines, wars, restriction of liberty, and so on - fall on believers and non-believers alike. Christians are not spared from the Lord’s Providential ‘judgments’. And who can say that we do not deserve them? We are not yet free from sin in the absolute sense and 

“If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10).

The difference is that, whilst these temporal  judgements fall on religious scoffers with condemning power,

“there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

In the lives of New Testament Christians, as with the Old Testament people of God, God’s judgments serve a disciplinary function. They teach us about the holiness of God, the brevity of life, the reality of eternity, and the deceitfulness of this world’s riches. Whilst “we are what we are by the grace of God”, they show us that we are still a long way from perfection. Hence the Bible draws lessons for us from the experience of God’s ancient people:

“As it is said, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion." For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief. Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it” (Hebrews 3:15—4:1).

This is why we need to humble ourselves in recognising the Lord’s righteous judgments on the world and the church as well as rejoicing that the gospel is being proclaimed in the face of those judgments. God is angry with the sins of the world and the sins of the church. The fact that the gospel is still being preached is a sign that “in His wrath He remembers mercy”. When God disciplines the church it often involves a curious mix in which painful, temporal judgments are over-ruled by God for the ultimate spiritual blessing of His people. We do not benefit from this by focusing on the ‘blessing’ and denying the element of ‘judgment’. Rather it does us good as we receive it by faith for what it is: the necessary correction of our heavenly Father’s loving hands.

“And have you forgotten the exhortation that addresses you as sons? "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by him. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives." It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons” (Hebrews 12:5-7).

“The same sun which bakes the clay, melts the ice”.

Read Part 2 here.