Are Iniquities Different Than Sins?

Mike Leake 1 Comment

These are two phrases which the Bible often uses interchangeably, but they do have a bit of difference in meaning. I’ve written this little piece for Crosswalk to help us understand the difference:

While studying in seminary, in Louisville, I had a job at Chick-fil-A. Taking drink orders was far more complicated than it needed to be because so many people ordered “a Coke.” For me, a native Northeast Missourian, a Coke means a specific dark cola. For those living in more Southern states “a coke” is synonymous with soda. When people ordered a Coke I had to learn to ask “which kind?” In my lingo, all Cokes are sodas but not all sodas are Coke. To many of our customers, all sodas were Cokes. There are many other English words like this which we use interchangeably, but on further inspection, there actually is a bit of difference in meaning.

In the Bible, the terms, sin and iniquity, are often used interchangeably. We know that both of them aren’t good and we know that, in some sense, they are an offense against a holy God. In fact, if you look up the word, iniquity, in most Bible dictionaries, you’ll be redirected to the word “sin,” yet, there is a bit of a difference between these two concepts. At least 70 times, we see these terms used together.

Read the rest…

How to Preach a Text You Don’t Fully Understand

Mike Leake 3 Comments

luke-palmer-305434-unsplashThere are many advantages to preaching through books of the Bible. One “disadvantage” is that you’ll occasionally have to preach through a text that you really do not yet fully understand. But even this, I believe, is healthy for the preacher and the congregation. So what do you do when you spend your week laboring over a difficult text with a couple valid options and you still don’t know where you land?

Let’s say you are preaching through Matthew 11 (or Luke 16) and you come upon this doozy:

From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. Matthew 11:12

This is a very difficult verse to translate (you’ll notice this by the different translations). The word for “suffered violence” only appears here and in Luke 16. And it’s form can be either in the middle voice or the passive voice. This leads to a couple of questions. First, is the kingdom advancing violently or is the kingdom being violently acted upon? Secondly, are the ones “taking it by force” doing a good thing or are they the persecutors?

How you interpret this passage will have a bearing on the way you preach/apply this passage.

If it’s in the middle voice then you’d perhaps share an illustration about standing in line at Wal-Mart on a Black Friday. You don’t just passively sit outside the store and quietly wait your turn in line. If you want that big screen television you push and claw your way to being one of the first ones in line. Likewise, if your heart has truly been changed then you go after Christ with this type of vigor. Are you desperate for Christ? Or can you take him or leave him?

If it’s in the passive voice then you’ll talk about the persecution that Christians face. You would share illustrations about the kingdom of God being attacked and how violent men will always oppose the kingdom of God.

Personally, I take a view that it’s in the middle voice “the kingdom is forcefully advancing” but I don’t see the “forceful men” as positive. Therefore, I’d be a bit uncomfortable making the Wal-Mart illustration. I don’t see this as standing in line on Black Friday but a call to endure in the simple gospel because it will continue to advance in spite of serious opposition. But I’m not absolutely convinced that I’m right.

That makes for a couple different sermons. And you don’t want to preach and apply a text when it very likely could be saying something different. So what do you do? How do you preach a text if you aren’t absolutely certain of it’s meaning?

1. Do either options contradict any other doctrine? If not, then preach both and give a bit of application for both. So what I would do with Matthew 11 is outline the various options, give a few reasons why each are plausible, and then make some application. I would say something similar to what I did above. Perhaps this is calling us to take the kingdom of God as serious—so serious that we’d stand in line over night just to get in. Or maybe this is calling us to endure in the face of persecution. Either way the point is somewhat similar. Jesus is worth every ounce of suffering we might have to endure. And the kingdom will advance.

2. Don’t be dogmatic. There is a Bible commentator who I absolutely loved early on in my Christian walk. I appreciated the certainty with which he’d explain a particular text. And then I got to studying deeper and I realized that what was “obvious” to him wasn’t so clear cut. It caused me to lose respect for him. It’s one thing to be unmoving in clear gospel truth. It’s quite another to not engage and leave open very valid options.

3. Don’t get lost in the weeds. Very seldom do you need to go into incredibly lengthy explanations about the difficulty of the text. The last thing you want to do is have people not having confidence in the text or to feel as if they need advanced theological training in order to read their Bibles. Don’t spend a ton of time laying out the various options. Know them well, explain them quickly, and move on.

4. Unite it all under the banner of Christ. If you aren’t able to see how both options relate to Christ then you either aren’t fully understanding the passage or one of them can’t be true. You should be able to preach Christ in both options. Consider Matthew 11. No matter how it’s translated the point is actually somewhat similar—it’s about the sufficiency and worthiness of Christ. Either he is worthy of standing in line on Black Friday and clawing your way in or he is worthy of our suffering.

5. There is much to be gained by honest wrestling. If the preacher stands in the pulpit and says, “I don’t know” every week, then perhaps he needs to look at a new career. But if we occasionally come to a text and say that we aren’t quite sure what it means this actually adds to the confidence folks will have in not only their own ability to exposit but also in our ministries. This will add weight to the times when we do speak with absolute confidence.

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Read This! 08.23.18

Mike Leake

Are We Training Our Children to Gain the World But Lose Their Souls?

An important question to consider.

A Word to the One Depressed Over Sin

This was really refreshing.

Let Your Internet Yes Be Your Real-Life Yes

Good stuff.

How Your Church Can Respond to the Loneliness Epidemic

We are super-connected AND super-lonely.

Deep Work for Pastors: 6 Keys for Better Sermon Preparation

Helpful.

Can You Imagine Jesus Delivering a TED Talk?

That should be informative, shouldn’t it?

How Antebellum Christians Justified Slavery

This is an area that I’m hoping to give a bit of study towards.

An Interview About Keswick Theology

I really appreciate Andy Naselli’s work on this topic.

This is absolutely 100% fake, which is why it’s kind of okay for me to laugh at:

What Our Longing For Heaven Says About Our Engagement in Warfare

Mike Leake 1 Comment

Normally the lad whines about bed time. He still has energy left in the tank and wants to fight for every moment of wakened life that he can. But on this particular day he happily collapses into his bed at 7:30pm. Why? Because he has spent the entire day doing manual labor which has left him exhausted.

Do you long for heaven?

I know that we know we are supposed to say we are longing for heaven, but do you really? My longing for heaven is a bit like a little boy who cannot wait for a trip to the ballpark to see his favorite baseball team. I’m excited about meeting Jesus. I’m thrilled to see what heaven is like and to experience the mind-blowing joy that God has for me. And I suppose all of that is a very good longing. But I think it’s a bit different than the longing which the apostles felt.

The longing of the early disciples seems to be not only a longing to meet Jesus but also like the deep longing of a tired man for his bed at night. They were as Keith Green described them, “Holy tireless men. Who spilled their blood for Thee”. They were spent. They fought the good fight.

And I’m really not talking about ministry here. Part of the reason I think we aren’t longing for heaven as much (or in the way) which we ought is because we aren’t laboring against sin as we should be.

I’ve been going through John Owen’s Mortification of Sin with a friend. We were discussing how absolutely tiring much of this sounds. Consider this quote:

When sin lets us alone we may let sin alone; but as sin is never less quiet than when it seems to be most quiet, and its waters are for the most part deep when they are still, so ought our contrivances against it to be vigorous at all times and in all conditions, even where there is least suspicion.

In other words, you and I do not get a day of rest in our battle against sin. Yes, Christ has conquered sin. Yes, we are battling a defeated enemy. But it is also true that if we do not continuously fight sin it will kill. “Kill sin or it will kill you”. That’s exhausting. That’s not getting a moment of rest. That is a life filled with struggle and labor and fighting and warring and vigorous activity.

But that’s part of the point. That’s part of what creates in us a deep desire for heaven…for rest. Rest doesn’t sound as amazing if your day is filled with eating bonbons and playing Super Mario Brothers. If our time on this world is spent with half-way dedication to the Lord and half dedication to fulfilling (instead of fighting) the lust of the flesh, we aren’t going to see rest as all that attractive. We’ve settled for a cheap rest in our worldly trifles. And so we don’t rightly long for that eternal rest. We aren’t actually spent so we fight against bed time.

I remember a former coach yelling at a group of us players messing around after practice. We were engaged in some stupid and jovial teenage activity. He concluded that he wasn’t running us hard enough. If we still had energy to screw around after practice then we must not have left everything on the field.

How much different would our longings be if we were actively engaged in this war? What does our longing for heaven (or perhaps lack thereof) tells us about whether or not we are actually engaged in spiritual warfare? Maybe we’re just passive spectators.

I’ve always been inspired by this:

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