If there’s one thing I have a strong opinion about, it is that I do not like people with strong opinions! I have a hard time with the person who declares what he thinks with absolute hard-core certainty, riding roughshod over any contrary thoughts I might have. I struggle with that. I have difficulty with straight-out, fully-declared, unequivocal judgments. If there’s one thing I have a strong opinion about, it is that I do not like people with strong opinions!
Like the blogger I was reading this week, who rendered sentence on the Al and Tipper Gore marital separation by declaring, "Al Gore is a liar about climate change. These people are not Christians. Christians don’t divorce." What a misrepresentation, what a distortion! I cannot accept that kind of full-throated opinion. If there’s one thing I have a strong opinion about, it is that I do not like people with strong opinions!
Or there’s the person who called the Convention office from California this week, at least six times, to speak with me and other staff members and to insist that we lead a crusade to impeach Barack Obama. The president must be impeached, he said, in order for this land to be restored to what God intends. The caller was quite clear that D. C. Baptists must lead that effort. My answer? Not in my pay grade. For if there’s one thing I have a strong opinion about, it is that I do not like people with strong opinions!
The problem is, of course, that the usual alternative to strong opinions is to be namby-pamby, unclear, uncertain, and unfocused. The common alternative to being a person with definite things to say is to be one who just smiles sweetly and goes through life with no clear convictions. I remember attending a funeral at a church of a denomination whose theology is notoriously fuzzy, and, having identified myself to the pastor after the service, I was greeted with, "Oh, you should have come up to say something. We let anybody speak here." Which I took to mean, we can tolerate even you evangelical Baptists, because we are not going to render judgment on anyone or have a strong stance on anything at all, other than that we strongly believe we should not strongly believe. Hmm; not the best alternative to strong opinions, is it?
So what do we do if we want to pursue the truth? What approach do we take if we want to be clear about what matters to us? Go ahead and blurt out all our opinions, prejudices, half-baked theories, and notions? Or retreat into mumbling sweet nothings, offering no judgments, and correcting no wrongs? Is there a way for us to deal with truth other than either to blurt it out aggressively or to hide it under the proverbial bushel?
There is. There is indeed. The apostle Paul began his great summary of the Christian faith where any philosopher would begin – with the question of knowledge. Paul asked his readers to begin understanding the Christian faith by musing about the nature of truth, how you handle knowledge. And in so doing, Paul made sure that his readers understood that their stance was to be different from what they had long heard. Paul wanted his audience to see that there was something better than what their culture had given them, something better either than vociferous opinion or wishy-washy waffling. Paul wanted his audience to know about revelation. Revelation. God’s self-disclosure. God’s opening Himself up.
Now let me pause to think with you about what your pastor is calling a contrarian style, a contrarian stance. Pastor Long told me that he would be doing a series in the Galatian letter, designed to point out that many of the things we do today are directly contradicted by the Bible. He gently suggested that I might want to begin that series, and once I saw what he was going to do, I quickly agreed. I liked the series of juxtapositions that he had planned … Faith (Not Works), Equality (Not Isolation), Freedom (Not Coercion). Purpose (Not Random Bliss). That all attracted me, and so I chimed in with my assessment of the reading that was given me: Knowledge (Not Opinion). I thought I was on my way, happy, fat, and sassy. But then I read your website and saw the overall label your pastor has assigned to this series: Contrarian! Contrarian, moi?! I am not a fighter. I am not argumentative, at least outside the walls of my home. I am one of those who just wonder why we can’t all get along. Contrarian? Taking a stand against? Do I want to get into that?
But then I began to take stock of the things I’ve had to do as the Interim Executive of your D. C. Baptist Convention. I began to count up the number of times I have had to be contrarian. I have had to say “No” to more people in more ways than I ever experienced as a pastor! I had to decline participation in an event calculated to honor churches that have gone out of their way to affirm a behavior that I consider immoral. I said I would not attend; that’s contrarian. I refused to participate in another event that was not wrong, in and of itself, but which was done in a way that threatened to cheapen the ties among our churches. I had to say no to a friend, on principle; that’s contrarian. I spoke up at a meeting about church planting, sponsored by one of our national denominations, and told those assembled that D. C. Baptists could not cooperate if that group would not affirm women as pastors. Very contrarian.
Contrarian, moi?! But of course. It has to be. It must be. Christians must know what they think. Christians must know what is right and what is wrong, by God’s standards, and must live out of that knowledge, not just out of uninformed opinion. What we do is to be informed by the word of God, by God’s self-revelation, and not just by what seems popular at the moment. So says Paul, "… I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel … is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." Not of human origin, but received through a revelation. Knowledge, not opinion.
I
Paul’s starting point is that the Christian Gospel is not an exercise in human logic; it is a gift from God. The Gospel is not a philosophy that we have put together, not a system of thought that we have devised. The Christian Gospel is knowledge, not opinion, knowledge that is founded on what God has done in Christ. Given as a revelation, a self-disclosure. Knowledge, not opinion.
Take a flight of fancy with me for a moment. Imagine what you would do if you were given the assignment of founding a new religion. Think a moment about how you might design it if somehow you were to create a whole new faith. What would it look like?
You say, "Wait a minute. That’s a far-fetched idea. People don’t just go out and start religions." Oh, really? When your name is Joseph Smith you sort of think you really might be able to do that!
Now if indeed I were to start my own religion, what would I want it to have in it? Well, I would want to set up a bunch of rules and tell people to live by those rules, no questions asked, in order to earn the prize of salvation. Isn’t that just the logical thing to do? Make it so that the better you keep the rules, and the more faithful you are to the precepts, the better your ultimate reward? That’s the way of the world. Merchants have rewards cards, airlines have loyalty programs, the world thinks you get what you pay for. So that’s the way I would structure my religion. Logical, clear, settled.
But that’s not the Gospel! That’s not God’s way. God is a contrarian. God in Jesus Christ reveals an utterly different way to salvation – salvation by grace through faith. That is not what most people expect, but it is the truth given by God through revelation. Paul is teaching over against the backdrop of Judaism and its focus on the Law. Keep the Law and God will reward you. Get it right, make it firm and rigid, and you get what’s coming to you. But no, Paul says there is another way, the way of freedom and grace. Not an opinion, not a tradition, but knowledge revealed in Christ.
One church group in recent years has used the slogan, "God is still speaking." I cannot affirm everything that they imply in that, but this much I know: God is still speaking through the power of His Word. God is still speaking through the life of Jesus Christ. God is still speaking through what He does in His church. And God is still speaking to those who listen for His voice and shut out the confusion and clutter of an opinionated, prejudiced, closed-minded, cold-spirited world.
Knowledge, not opinion; "For I want you to know that the gospel is not of human origin … but [was] received … through a revelation of Jesus Christ."
II
Now of course one of the issues in all of this is the issue of personality. When I said, at the beginning, that I have strong opinions about people who have strong opinions, I suspect that certain personality traits jumped into your minds. You likely began to think of people who are so forceful and so hostile in the way they express themselves that pretty soon the issue is not what they say but how they say it.
Members of a certain pseudo-church in Omaha who travel around the nation picketing funerals and carrying hate signs: quite apart from what they say, the spirit in which they say it is offensive. The personality behind their doctrines is hostile.
Years ago, on the George Washington University campus, I watched in horror as an itinerant preacher climbed on a stump, opened his Bible, and began to harangue the students about a certain very warm destination to which he was certain they were headed. Some of the students took him up and began to heckle. The more they heckled, the more angry and negative and condemning he became. It was now not so much what he said as how he said it. I wished I had had some way to stop him, because I am sure he did some damage to the Kingdom that day.
But now here is what I want you to see in all this: that those who know things, or think they know things … those with vigorous opinions, loudly trumpeted in hostile ways … they are not nearly as confident as they look. People who try to bully others into agreeing with them may look confident, but they are not. They are uncomfortable with dialogue, and so they just push, push, push, and wear down the opposition. They are not comfortable with the give-and-take of genuine discourse, so they get louder, more offensive, more bullying. If you do not really know, but don’t want to admit that you don’t know, you try to wear others out, so that it feels as though you have won the argument. But you have not won anything. You have only exposed your weakness. You have revealed your insecurity. Uninformed opinion gives us insecurity, not confidence.
Rather like the story they tell about the preacher who left his sermon notes on the pulpit; someone found them the next day. Halfway down the page there was a hand-written self-instruction, "Weak point; pound the pulpit and yell like crazy." When you do not know, when you lack confidence, then you get aggressive.
But listen to Paul’s account of his experience! Listen to the apostle describing his story: "You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many … far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors." Can’t you just see Saul of Tarsus cheering them on as they stoned Stephen? Can’t you just imagine this brittle young Pharisee sneering at the followers of Christ? But then, what does he tell us? What happened? You know the story of the Damascus Road. Paul summarizes it like this: "God … was pleased to reveal His Son to me … [but] I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem … I went away at once." There is more to the story, but here is the point: when Paul was touched by Christ, he recognized that all his zealotry, his hostility, his cocksureness was a sham. And he had to get away from everybody for a while to find himself, to locate himself in Christ.
And after three years of that, the Paul that emerged was truly confident. No longer the false confidence that comes from mindlessly repeating slogans, but the true confidence that comes from thinking things through. No longer the hostility that comes out of defending sterile ideas, but the warm and compassionate confidence that can speak of love as conquering all things. Paul got his groove on. He thought through what God had done in him and gained his confidence.
So many people have said to me over the years, "I would like to witness for my faith, but I just don’t know enough. I don’t know enough about the Bible to answer the arguments. I don’t know enough about theology to counter the complaints." No, and you never will. You never will accumulate enough arguments to be fully secure. But if you are willing to rest on the grace of Christ and allow His spirit to work in you and guide you, you will know enough. You will be confident; not shrill, but lovingly confident. Knowledge, not opinion.
III
For, you see, the reason why neither you nor I care very much for people whose opinions are too strong is not only that they are so aggressive. It is also that such folks have not submitted themselves to the possibility of transformation. Someone who just knows what he knows and, by george, you are going to be made to agree, like it or not … someone like that has never acknowledged that the fundamental need of the human heart is for transformation.
Brothers and sisters, the essential need of our souls is to be thoroughly and seriously worked over by the spirit of Christ. Until you and I have come through the vortex of that experience, everything we think we know is just opinion, even if it is Biblically correct and theologically proper. Until we have discovered, in a deeply life-changing way, that what Christ will do in us is to remake us, remold us, and reshape us, then we may spout nostrums and spew ideas galore. But what is really real, what is authentic knowledge, is what we know after Christ has gone to work in us. Transformation.
And so the apostle, describing himself to the Galatian church, not only presents his Gospel message as revelation, coming from God and not from human opinion; and not only authenticates what he knows by the new confidence he has; most of all he simply tells us what they said about him in the churches of Judaea, "The one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy." That’s transformation!
Good friends, the one thing no one can argue with is a transformed life. There is no textbook more clearly written than the history of a reshaped life. There is no documentary more potent than a heart radically empowered by Christ. There is no witness like the testimony that once I was this hostile, misshapen, ugly enemy, but now, I proclaim the very thing I used to hate. Transformation!
Nor is there is knowledge like the deep personal knowledge of one who knows what he used to be, sees what he once was all about, but now knows – not opines, but knows, because his mind and his heart have experienced it – a whole new way of life. That’s knowledge, not opinion. That’s truth, not speculation. That’s incontrovertible evidence, not fluff and flannel. Transformation; knowledge, not opinion.
What do you know today? Really, deep-down, know? Bible verses? Fine. Theological propositions? Well and good. Baptistic trivia? Nothing wrong with that. But I ask you, has the Spirit of the Living God been at work in you? Has the Christ who confronted Paul and confounded his old ideas come to you to do the same thing? Do you know not only facts and figures, but do you also know who you are? Do you have the confidence born out of the work of grace within you? Have you turned yourself over to the one of whom it was said, "I know … I know … I know the one in whom I have put my trust, and I am sure … I am persuaded, I know … that He is able to guard … what I have entrusted to Him."?
"I want you to know …" "I want you to know …". Knowledge, not opinion.
