Good news, not good advice.
Robert Capon on recovering the astonishing tidings of God’s Word.
A few weeks ago, I preached a sermon from the prophetic book of Amos, where he lays on the oracle of Jehovah’s judgment of Israel with all the heavy-handedness you might expect from a Old Testament prophet of Yahweh. Amid all the talk about disaster, devastation, and exile, the most damning message, in my mind, comes in verses 11 and 12, where Amos relays God’s nail-in-the-coffin verdict:
“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God,
“when I will send a famine on the land—
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord.
They shall wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord,
but they shall not find it.”
(Amos 8:11–12)
The grueling fallout of Israel’s prolonged rebellion was a kingdom of parched souls. To be sure, this doesn’t mean that the Lord’s Word would somehow lose its effectiveness. God’s truth never atrophies. His decrees are “firmly fixed in the heavens” (Ps. 119:89). Amos’s prophesied famine doesn’t have to do with the Word but with the hearing of it. The failure, then, had nothing to do with what the Lord had promised or revealed about himself in his holy Word. The fault lied squarely with God’s people, who had set their hearts and minds on something else. Yahweh’s covenantors had long since pledged fealty to the bulls of Bethel and Dan, perpetuating the “Guilt of Samaria” for generations on end (Amos 8:13–14; cf. 1 Kings 12:25–28).
The looming famine, then, was little more than God giving his heedless, listless people what they’d already chosen. It wasn’t God and his Word that had gone silent, it was they who’d become deaf and disaffected. The fallout of decades heaped upon decades of resistance and defiance was a veritable famine of the soul, such that the piercing words of their Deliverer did little to move them towards repentance. Instead, Israel’s focus remained entrenched in their own self-interests (Amos 8:4–6). The people of God had become bored with the Word of God, so much so that the worship of Yahweh had become an inconvenience.
Needless to say, this attitude is rampant within too many sanctuaries today as well. Folks can hardly be bothered to sit in church more than once a week — and when they do show up, they come with a fistful of priorities that will ensure the whole thing is catered to their liking. The service can’t be boring, it’s has to be filled with excitement and accompanied by music that fits everyone’s tastes and preaching that isn’t drawn out. When such considerations drive how we worship, you can be sure that flippant attitude towards the things of God is being fostered. And flippancy plus boredom equals famine.
There’s an Orthrus that’s wreaking havoc on the Body of Christ, and its heads are the “itching ears” and the “famine of hearing the Word” that plague would-be disciples, leaving them displaced and disgruntled (Amos 8:12). And where did this Orthrus come from? How did all this start? It comes about when the focus of our worship is turned inward, on ourselves. This is all reminiscent of Paul’s warning to Timothy regarding a time when folks would no longer have the patience nor the interest to relish in “sound teaching” and, instead, would crave to have their fancies tickled by an endless parade of speakers who’d “suit their own passions,” turning them “away from listening to the truth” and guiding them “into myths” (2 Tim. 4:3–4).
I make no apologies for harping on this topic of late. I am burdened for the state of the church and, especially, for what’s being propagated and proclaimed within its halls. Even though I know I shouldn’t, I see the stories and read the reports that come out from the smarmy ecclesiastical watch-bloggers. Though they traffic in the tittle-tattle that’s plaguing the Body of Christ, their peddling reveals that the famine has arrived. Our churches are filled with starving, famished, distracted people not only because we have ignored what God’s Word says, but also because we’ve lost sight of Who it reveals. We’ve catered to the burgeoning boredom by offering a smorgasbord of spiritual advice. The result? We’ve lost our astonishment.
It’s in that way, then, that I read the following excerpt from Robert Capon’s The Astonished Heart as a modern addendum to Amos’s pronouncement of a “famine of hearing the words of the Lord,” in which Capon lays the hammer down on the so-called wisdom of the “Great White Queen of Advice.” He writes:
Preaching among us has far too often turned into the mere dispensing of advice. Even worse, the advice we hand out consists of little more than exhortations about a host of supposedly achievable life-enhancements, without even once getting our hearers within shouting distance of the astounding gift that’s been handed us in Jesus at the price of no human accomplishment whatsoever. Our pulpits are fountains of irrelevancy when they are not puddles of dullness. They soak us with helpful hints about self-improvement in everything from morality, to spirituality, to health, to family life, to peace of mind — all the way down the ladder of the unaccomplishable to the ultimate banality: the advice that if we are loving, we will find the key to earthly happiness.
And all the while, every last item in that farrago of free advice is a hundred-eighty degrees off the Gospel mark. Jesus proclaims unlimited forgiveness, not the excoriation of sinners. He hands out the resurrection of the body, not spiritual perfection in some aliens heaven. He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery; he meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing. And as for the Great White Queen of Advice — the suggestion that love will make life come up roses here and now — well, according to the Gospel, love is just a recipe for getting yourself crucified. But not only is all such advice demonstrable malarkey; it’s mere pandering to a market that the Gospel has no interest in pleasing. It’s what the world thinks it wants to hear, not what God in Christ has to tell it. But most of all, it is to yawn. It is to lull the world to sleep and invite it to dream of a world that advice can never in a million years create. (14–15)
The advice which scratches the itch and titillates the attention of the modern congregant is nothing but a heaping pile of “demonstrable malarkey,” the likes of which leaves souls just as famished as they were before such advice was given. This catastrophe can, again, be traced back to the self-focused, self-absorbed liturgy that fills far too many sanctuaries on any given Sunday. To be clear, going to church is not about you. The assembly of sinners-made-saints is not about how you can be made to feel better. The gathering of the church is first and foremost a space where God is glorified and exalted as the One True Creator, Governor, and Redeemer — as the One who draws all people to himself (John 12:32).
Worship on Sundays is less about what it does for us and more about what it says about him. Ours is a God who has sovereignly determined to glorify his holiness by pardoning unholy sinners in the blood of absolution which pours from his own veins. Such is what God’s Word is all about. The Word is God’s gift to you and me, through which it is revealed that God’s ultimate gift to us is himself. It’s a book that shows us that God’s posture towards us is one of open arms, as the Word incarnate welcomes every sorry, stinking sinner to have a share in his triumph over sin and death. That’s what the Word is: it’s a living and active Word that imparts life to dead things and raises them back to life. Who can be bored with that?
Grace and peace to you, my friends.
Works cited:
Robert Capon, The Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the Lost-and-Found of Church History (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996).