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The 20th Anniversary of Liberty Bay Presbyterian Church A word first about the text. I have discovered over the years that Christian folk are comfortable with this statement -- a statement that on its face sounds too self-confident to evangelical ears -- for one of two reasons. Either they assume that this is the sort of statement that a believer in the Old Testament might have made, but we now, in the age of the gospel, know better than to make it ourselves; or they take it as a confession of imputed or imparted righteousness. David is thought to mean that he is blameless because he is forgiven and made righteous by the justification of God. Even Augustine's comment on the text is: "not my merits, but your mercy is before my eyes." But neither of those interpretations of v. 1 is really possible. As the second half of verse one and the rest of the psalm indicate -- along with a great many like statements in the Old Testament -- David is not talking about imputed righteousness, he is talking about the righteousness of his own behavior. He is describing his faithfulness to God. But, there is nothing in such a statement that is peculiar to the Old Testament or to the Mosaic epoch. Paul's "I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith," is only a different way of saying the same thing. The NT lays a similar stress on the necessity of a righteous life and of the Lord's reward of it both in this world and at the judgment day. I suspect it would distress the typical evangelical no end to discover how often the NT writers say something like what Jesus said in John 5:28-29.
A statement made much worse by the fact that the Lord does not hurry on to qualify his statement and to assure us that he does not, of course, mean in any way to diminish our conviction that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone. What is this statement in John 5 but the objective side of that same truth David describes subjectively in Psalm 26:1. But, of course, David is not claiming to be sinless. As he says in v. 11, he knows that he needs God's mercy and redemption. Indeed, at whatever time of David's life he may have written Psalm 26, near the end of his life he makes a similar claim, even the more staggering for coming after his sin with Bathsheba and against Uriah.
If that sounds impossibly brash and self-possessed and arrogant for a murderer, adulterer, and derelict of a father, remember, the Lord says the very same thing about David himself, after David's death. Remember what he said to Solomon in 1 Kings 9:4:
If I were, without this introduction, to ask you to say the same thing about yourself, to raise your hand to indicate that what David said about himself you can say about yourself, I'm sure most all of you would refuse. You would think it proud and, still more, you would think it wrong, untrue, an out and out lie. So well have you been taught sola gratia and sola fide. But, in that, you would be wrong and you would be unbiblical. It was Jesus, the same Jesus who taught the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-collector, who told us that the sheep would be separated from the goats on the Great Day according to the behavior of each. It was Paul, the same Paul who mourned his still so-bitter bondage to sin, who confessed to his daily failure to do what he wanted to do and ought to do as a Christian, who then spoke, on a number of occasions, of his own righteousness and blamelessness. Our one-sided reading of the Bible has diminished our capacity to appreciate such statements and the implications of them. In a lovely passage in one of his letters, John Newton points out that the obedience of Christians in this world, however weak and imperfect, is greater than that of the angels. Your holiness exceeds Gabriel's who has no law of sin warring within him, no inner conflict. To do a godly thing, to think a godly thought he does not have to defy his own evil nature, the world, and the Devil himself. The work of grace is to be estimated not from its imperfect appearance, but from the difficulties it has to overcome. [Cited from BOT 275-276 (Aug/Sept 1986) 6] In the same vein, I like this very much from Christopher Love.
Now, what does all of this have to do with Liberty Bay Presbyterian Church, and, still more, what does it have to do with "the faithfulness of God" which was the suggested topic for this sermon marking the 20th anniversary of the church? Well, it has everything to do with it. But, I hesitated for some time before deciding to preach this sermon and not another. For, you see, I have some hard things to say. Not about anyone here. Had that been the case, I would not have said what I am about to say. Indeed, I do not believe that there is anyone present in the room who had anything to do with the decisions that brought Liberty Bay Presbyterian Church into being more than twenty years ago. I have some hard things to say, but then, if we never say the hard things, we will never really face the facts as we ought, and so, we will never really appreciate what God's faithfulness has meant to us and how much of it we have consumed. I fear that if we don't consider together what was done, the lesson will be left unlearned and God's goodness will not really be appreciated, because we will think of it only sentimentally and as a generality, not realistically in regard to specific and particular facts. The Bible is a book full of hard facts that it requires us to face and out of that honesty comes a love, a faith, a gratitude, an understanding of God and ourselves that the world knows nothing of, and, sometimes, even Christians know little of. The fact is, the decisions that were made by which LBPC was brought into being were ill-made. They were bad decisions and there was presumption more than faith in them. I don't say, of course, that anyone involved intended such a thing. Quite the contrary. I'm confident that no one wanted anything but the extension of Christ's kingdom and the blessing of this part of the Peninsula with a strong, vital Reformed church. But we often see things more clearly from a distance and are only able to assess decisions when the consequences can be measured. Let me offer some of my own recollections. When I came into the Presbytery in May of 1978, -- it was not PCA then, it was the Northwest Presbytery of the old Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod -- the decision to borrow money to buy this church property had already been made some months before. As some of you, perhaps many of you in the Presbytery will not know, we had no congregation at that time, no organizing pastor selected. There was no core group already meeting in a Bible study and clamoring for us to provide them with a church. But there was an available building in what we had been told would be one of the fastest growing areas of the Puget Sound region. And so our little Presbytery, composed of small churches with small benevolence budgets, borrowed some $300,000 dollars, a much larger sum then than today, but large enough even by current standards. And, to be sure, the bonds that were offered for sale, were sold, locally and throughout the RPCES, quite quickly. The money was raised and the building was purchased from its former owners. There were some presbyters who voted 'No' when the plan to borrow was approved. To my shame I remember that we thought them men of little faith. The plan was that almost immediately the new congregation that would be formed -- the Presbytery was confident that it would grow rapidly, faster than any other of our mission churches had ever grown, because of the attraction of the fine building -- would undertake to repay the interest on the bonds that had been sold. An organizing pastor was soon called -- he arrived shortly before I did. And, to be sure, the mission began to grow at a very encouraging rate. Nothing like the new church that Chuck Swindoll now pastors in suburban Dallas, that started with a Bible Study at which two hundred came the first night, four hundred the next week, and a thousand a few weeks later, but there were some sixty or so folk after the first year, which was better than we had ever done before. But, from day one, we never came close to having adequate revenue to repay our obligations for those bonds. Imagine yourself an organizing pastor who was trying to attract new folk to your church but having to tell them at the same time how much they needed to give if the church was to repay its immense debt! Because I was a rookie in the Presbytery and couldn't say "No," I was assigned to what was then called "The Church Extension Committee." We met every month and each month we faced the same two questions: could we keep the new mission work in Lake Stevens open another month? and, was Liberty Bay going to take the entire Presbytery down with it when it went? Well the church never did collapse. Presbytery took upon itself the obligation to repay the "B" series of bonds -- some $60-70,000 worth as I recall, a formidable sum for us in those days; many bond-holders graciously consented to exchange interest due them for a promissory note that would pay them later; and an individual presbyter came to our rescue with a large loan. But that does not by any means tell the whole story. The personal cost of all of this was terrific. I know it was for the organizing pastor. But by no means for him alone. First Bob Harrah and then Mel Harless found themselves responsible to communicate bad and embarrassing news to people all over the country; to go cap-in-hand for help to repay debts that they personally had had nothing to do with assuming in the first place. It was the Presbytery that had made these decisions, but it was the church and its officers who had to deal with the consequences of them. I remember my acute embarrassment over this fact at meetings. Time and time again I wondered if these men did not hate us in their hearts for having made their lives so difficult while refusing publicly, openly to acknowledge the fact or to do anything practical to help. I'm not sure there is anyone in this room besides myself who knows how much Liberty Bay Presbyterian Church and this Presbytery owe to this faithful elder, Mel Harless, who undertook a horrifically thankless task and performed it faithfully through long and difficult and, at the time, seemingly unending years. How would you like to call bondholders to tell them that there was no money to pay the interest that was due and to ask them if they would be willing to take, instead, a promise of payment much later? And then there was one thing more, perhaps the worst thing, the thing I remember with the most acute sense of guilt. In the face of our financial crisis, there were some bondholders who simply gave their bonds back to the church, made a gift of them. In other words, they effectively gave us their money instead of loaning it to us. Now, that was wonderful and generous of them to do that, and I hope the Lord has or will reward them generously for what they did. It is the great advantage of financial dealings with real Christians. We could have been sued for non-payment and instead brethren here and everywhere went out of the way to make it easier for us to deal with the mess we had created by borrowing money without a reasonable confidence that we would be able to repay it in a timely way. And, as I say, in some cases, they just gave us the bonds they had bought. But, you see, they hadn't planned to contribute a large gift to buy the Liberty Bay building. They had thought to help us by loaning us some of their money. If we had asked them originally for a gift, they wouldn't have given it. They had their own churches and their own ministries to support with their gifts. They made the gift, at least in certain cases, because they didn't feel that they really had any choice. We were in a bind, we couldn't repay, and here they were Christians who didn't feel that they could insist on making money from a church in financial trouble. That speaks very well of them, but it is galling from our viewpoint. Without intending it at all, of course, -- please hear me, everyone was acting with the best of intentions, I'm sure -- in this way, we extorted money from the saints. We gave them too many reasons, after the fact, to turn their loan into a gift they had never intended to make. [As an aside, I'm glad for the opportunity to tell this story to the Presbytery because with turnover what it is in the American church today, I fear that we might make the same mistake again because there is no one to remember the sorrow, the shame, the fear, and the painful choices that were required the last time we borrowed money without demanding of ourselves reasonable assurances that we would be able to repay our debt in a timely way. Mr. Codling and I are the only ministers now active in the Presbytery who were here at the beginning or almost the beginning of the Liberty Bay mission (though Mr. Walker must have come relatively soon thereafter) and there is perhaps not more than one or two active elders in our churches who were serving on sessions then.] But, that is not my reason for recollecting this history. No, what I want to say is simply this: here we are, brothers and sisters, some twenty years later. The building is paid for. The church is healthy and stable, and folk have received much blessing from the Lord through its ministry over these years. Its second pastor has served now for some thirteen years. The gospel and the whole counsel of God are preached, the saints built up, ministry to the community continues. The church can say, as even the Presbytery can say, "Vindicate us, O Lord, for we have lived a blameless life." We really can say that, even as we look back with grief on things that were done, things that we did in this Presbytery, things our fathers did -- which Daniel confesses as his own sins. "Vindicate us, O Lord, for we have lived a blameless life." It may be that the Lord has taken a very little for a lot. It may be that our obedience and our service are measured primarily by the obstacles that must be overcome in our hearts and in the world if there is to be any obedience whatsoever. It may be that it occurs to us first to say, "that which we would have done, we did not do, and that which we should not have done, we did"; but it remains just as much true that "We have fought the good fight and kept the faith." And, frankly, to be able to say that seems to me as grand a demonstration of the faithfulness of God and his mercy and love, as can be found. Who is a God like our God who will teach us to say "Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have lived a blameless life," and really to mean it, when we have lived as we have lived and done what we have done? He is a God who delights to show mercy! Soli Deo Gloria! |
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