Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible

Announcer: The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals presents the timeless teaching of Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: I always say to young men who speak to me about becoming ministers, don't do it if you can help it. If you can be satisfied as a banker, judge, professor, or in any other calling, God has not called you into the ministry. There must be, as there was for Paul, the cry from the heart, "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel."

There's a good story of a dear old preacher who had the root of the matter within him and who understood spiritual principles. A young minister, rather cocky and sure of himself, came to preach, and after listening to him, the old man said, "Was you sent, or did you just went?"

Announcer: The word is truth for all who came to teach with you, correct and straight. He quickened we can to do the word God has for us to do. The word is all the Christian needs to grow in grace and to produce.

Over a half a century ago, the late Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse, then pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, saw the need to spread God's word beyond the hearing of his local congregation. He started the weekly radio outreach, which has become known as Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. The application of God's word as taught by Dr. Barnhouse is as relevant today as when he first taught over the radio airwaves decades ago.

The message we will be featuring on today's edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible is entitled, Bondslave and Apostle. Do you struggle with the urge to drink warm milk from a bottle, suck your thumb and play with a rattle? Of course not. You no longer have the same desires as you did when you were a baby. Yet many Christians think that biblical separation means avoiding things they did before they became believers. The Christian life is not about exchanging old behaviors for new ones. It is about exchanging your old life for living unto Christ and in His power.

The scripture text for this edition of Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, Romans 1 and verse 1. Here again is Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse with the message entitled Bondslave and Apostle.

Dr. Donald Grey Barnhouse: Through the Lord Jesus Christ, we come unto Thee, our Father and our God, and in the Holy Spirit. We pray Thee that Thou will use Thy word in this hour and that many who know Thee as Savior, may learn that they are to be bondslaves of the Redeemer and apostles for the one Lord who has sent us to witness for Him. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

The late great President of Princeton University, Dr. Francis Lindley Patton, wrote in his godly way, "The only hope of Christianity is in the rehabilitating of the Pauline theology. It is back, back, back to an incarnate Christ and the atoning blood or it is on, on, on to atheism and despair."

There is only one way we can avoid ultimate despair and that is through the Lord Jesus Christ. Now in the opening verse of the Epistle to the Romans, Paul calls himself first a bondslave of Jesus Christ and then an apostle. The word apostle is a Greek word, Apostolos, taken over into English, and its meaning will be better understood if we compare it with the other English word missionary, that has come to us from the Latin.

Both words mean one who is sent. But it is well that we have retained the two words of diverse origins, for we needed a term to set apart Paul and the twelve, whom Jesus Himself sent. The reason that Paul was so great was because of the order of these two words. He was a bondslave, utterly surrendered to the Lord, before he considered himself in his capacity of a sent one.

Any man who is in the army knows the difference between the soldier who kicked against the whole army system, and the soldier who yielded himself fully to his duty. The same difference exists in the midst of Christianity. Paul understood this and surrendered utterly to Christ from the moment in which the Lord revealed Himself to his persecutor on the Damascus Road.

Thus he was willing to follow the word of God and be not only the bondslave of Jesus Christ, but the apostle to the Gentiles. He considered himself to be under orders. But before he could accept the assignment of becoming a Jew ministering to Gentiles, there had to be an amazing work of the grace of God in the heart of this man, who had been so set in his religious ways that he attempted to kill those who disagreed with him.

Instead of having a religion that was narrow and insular, and that saw only one nation, he began to see that the grace of God could come upon all men through Jesus Christ. When he comes to the climax of this revelation in the eleventh chapter of the Epistle, he will cry out, "Oh, the depths of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out."

Let there be that first lesson for all of us. If we would be used of God, we must have a view of the gospel that is as broad as the universe. We must see that God is making the great offer of grace to the entire human race, and that now the door is open, not for men to pick and choose to come to God as they want to, but for all men to come to God in His way if they will.

Our text sets forth that Paul was a called apostle. He did not run by himself. God had chosen him and equipped him for his task. Now in the Old Testament there were prophets who spoke without being sent by God, and they were sternly rebuked. Every minister should consider this most definitely.

Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, "Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you. They make you vain, they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord. I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran. I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied." These were the great and stern words of God through Jeremiah. But Paul was not of such a group. He was called of God.

When a man is truly called, it means that he has been selected by God and set apart for a particular life and ministry. It was because Paul was truly called of God to be an apostle, that he was able to speak with such authority. And let not any man despair. If God could stoop to pick out the man who had been his greatest enemy and call and equip him to be his greatest messenger, then no one need feel that he may not be reached of God.

God works through grace, not according to men's deserts. Grace is the secret of salvation and grace is the secret of the calling of God. Next we read that Paul was separated unto the gospel of God. There can be no true work of God in any man who is not separated. At times people ask me if a Christian must be separated from the world. I always answer that it is not necessary to look at it from that point of view.

If we are separated unto Christ, we are automatically separated from all that is opposed to Christ. If I'm in New York and want to go to Philadelphia, I cannot be separated unto Philadelphia without being separated from New York. But the man who tries to be separated from the world without being separated unto Christ, is going to find himself in a strange position. There are so many Christians who are narrow and cantankerous, because they have been giving up things instead of getting Christ. They have gone at the thing from the wrong end.

Look out among the people you know as Christians and you will discover two sorts. One rubs you the wrong way, the other fills you with admiration. One of them boasts that he doesn't do this and doesn't do that, until you think that failing to do certain things is the whole of his religion. Those with whom he talks want to go out and do the very things he doesn't do, as a sort of reaction against that in his life which is offensive.

The other Christian strikes you as being a holy person. You don't expect him to do certain things because you rather feel that he's possessed by higher motives. He has been in the presence of the Lord, and is so filled with that presence that he draws you to Christ. If you are not this type of Christian, you are not what God wants. You may bleat from morning to evening that you don't get drunk and don't go in for carnal pleasures, but no one is going to listen to you.

You have pumped a lot of things out of your life, but you've nothing else in their place. And even nature abhors a vacuum under some circumstances. In a Bible class on the University of California campus, a group of students were considering the verse, "Ye are the salt of the earth." They were describing the various functions and qualities of salt, for seasoning, for preserving, and for other uses. And a Chinese girl said, "Salt makes you thirsty."

Now stop and think that over. "Ye are the salt of the earth." Do you make anyone thirsty for Christ? You never will by merely separating from something, but you will by separating unto Christ.

The Greek word that is translated separated is a very interesting one. You practically know it because there is an English word that is so much like it. The word is Aphorisso, and if you look at it closely and listen to it closely, you will see that it contains the word horizon. The prefix is such that the word could be transliterated and would make good sense. It would be off-horizond.

All of us have stood at some time or another on a mountain or high place where we could see across a vast panorama to a far horizon. On one of my earlier crossings of the Atlantic Ocean, I was on the British liner Majestic. I got to know one of the junior officers, and through him was able to visit most of the ship. I asked him if it would be possible for me to go to the very peak of the crow's nest.

It was arranged that I should go up with him one morning, just at dawn. As I climbed the narrow ladder, I never looked down once until I reached the topmost height. Then I gasped for a moment. The ship seemed so small beneath me and the ocean so vast. There was the horizon, a complete circle of the ocean. No land or ship was in sight. Nothing but the wide circle of the earth.

A strange thought came to my mind that made me laugh out loud. You know, it's strange what queer thoughts sometimes come to us totally unbidden. I began to think of a time when I was a small boy and my mother was making cookies. She had the dough spread out on the marble she used and allowed me to take the cookie cutter and cut out all the cookies. The object was, of course, to cut the circles very close together, so that there was very little dough left between the circles.

I remember taking them up from the marble and leaving these white circles beneath the dough, and noting how each cookie left an an entirely different circle. Suddenly on the crow's nest of that ship, seeing the round ocean about me, I began to think of that incident and of those circles. I realized that beyond the blue horizon, there was another circle of ocean with other ships, and that all over the world there were different circles and different horizons.

And thus it was with Paul the Apostle. He had been brought up in one circle, and he had been possessed by one circle of thinking. All of his life had been lived within a horizon that comprehended the total vision, which he was able to have from the point at which he found himself. Now, God had saved him. Now, he had seen the vision of the Savior. He had become the bondslave of Jesus Christ. He had obeyed completely, accepting the apostleship under which God had called him.

Now he had been lifted entirely out of the circle where he had lived and had been put into an entirely different circle. It had a different center, and therefore a different horizon. And the new center was so far removed from that in which he had lived, that there were no segments overlapping. He was off-horizond. He was separated unto the gospel of God. Henceforth, his life revolved on a pattern so different that it was a totally different life.

It must always be thus for those who see the Lord Jesus Christ and know the lesson of the gospel. This is the type of separation that God wants his children to have. There are some people that stay over in the old circle of their former life, and attempt to abandon things that have been their whole life. That is not God's method.

There is one variety of oak tree that is known as the pin oak. One of its chief characteristics is that it keeps its dead leaves all through the winter. But some spring day when the sap flows, the leaves will drop off because of the pulsing new life within. All believers have a lot of dead leaves clinging to them, and some people start picking them off, one by one. All they do is reveal the dead skeletons of their former life. And it is denuded and uninviting.

But there are some Christians who understand that God's method is to let the sap flow from the vine into the branches. Then the old leaves will fall off and the new life will come all by itself from the vine. It is one of the most important lessons to be learned in the Christian life. The true Christian never has to give up anything. Of course, I'm not speaking of sin.

But there are a lot of things that will give him up. They will go one by one. There will be no grief. It will be the way that childish occupations are abandoned. I never had to give up playing tops and marbles. I never had to come to the place where I said, "Oh, I'm a big boy now, and big boys shouldn't play marbles. So I'll make a great effort to give up playing marbles." It did not happen that way.

So it is for all of life. It is what a great Scotch preacher called "the expulsive power of a new affection." The new love comes in and pushes off the old. The new life comes in and pushes off the old dead leaves. As long as you are hankering after the things of the world, you can never grow up in the knowledge and life of Christ.

But if you will turn to Christ and contemplate all that He has done for you, you will find yourself on a new horizon, with a different center and therefore a different outlook. The great men of the Bible and the great men of God throughout the ages, were all transferred from their old horizons unto the center of Christ and his vastly greater horizon. Paul wrote to the Galatians, "God separated me from my mother's womb and called me by His grace to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen."

Throughout the Bible, we find that men were separated unto God even from their birth. Moses was chosen by God before his birth, and Stephen the martyr recounted that when Moses was born, he was fair unto God. As we read in Acts 7:20 in the revised version. Of Jeremiah, it was written that God said, "Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee. And before thou camest forth out of the womb, I sanctified thee. And I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations."

The same was true of Jacob, Samson, Samuel, John the Baptist. Amos was taken when he was following his flocks and transferred to the new circle of the life of God. You must not think that this calling is only for the Pauls and the Jeremiahs of this world. God wants you to live for Him in the exact circle where He has placed you. It does not mean that He's going to pick you out of your place and mode of living and take you to a far place and a new mode of living.

But where you are, tied down as you are by the law of gravity to the few square yards you can dominate at any one time, and bound to your body and your personality, whatever it happens to be, He can give you a vision of the new life that is available in Christ, and all things will become new. You may still lean over the same old sink, or the same desk. You may still lie as an invalid in the same bed, or walk in vigor in the same round of tasks, but you will be a new creation and have a new horizon.

That is what is meant by the great verse, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things are passed away, behold, all things are become new." And this work of separation will continue throughout all of life for the Christian. We have seen that Paul was separated unto God even from his mother's womb. Later, at the time of his conversion, when Ananias was afraid of him because of his reputation, God said, "Go thy way, for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel."

Still later in the midst of his ministry at Antioch, the Lord came upon the church leaders and announced that Paul was to be further separated for the task he had prepared for him. It is a wonderful thing in life to know that we are in the center of the Lord's will. And that can be true for every child of God. God has separated some men unto Himself to be good carpenters, and good plasterers, and good bankers, and good merchants, and good men of any other honorable work or profession.

And God has separated some women unto Himself to be good nurses, and good teachers, and good mothers in homes. And God has separated unto Himself some men and women to be good and patient sufferers. Good invalids lying in beds of pain and smiling through their tears, praising Him without question as to why He made them thus.

Now next we note that Paul was separated unto the gospel of God. The word gospel is an old Anglo-Saxon word, good spell or discourse, or as we would say in simple meaning today, good news. It is a translation of the New Testament word that has given us evangel, evangelistic, and evangelism. The meaning is the same: good news.

There are several things said in this chapter concerning the good news or gospel. First, it is called the good news of God. Stop and think. It is God who was our creator and against whom we have sinned. Yet He brings us good news. It is God whose holiness we have violated. Yet He brings us good news. It is God whose love we have trampled. Yet He brings us good news.

The news is that He loves us. He loves us in spite of what we are. He loves you in spite of anything that may have happened to you. You cannot have gotten beyond His reach as long as you are yet alive. In the world today it is rare to find men who love to the end. There are some women who love in spite of anything. All of us know of some case where it seems that love cannot be killed by any affront.

Every minister has seen some woman heartbroken for some drunken sot or wayward man, loving him, loving him, loving him. I heard a group of young people describing the attitude of a certain girl who was afflicted or blessed with this type of unchanging, unvarying love. They said, "Oh, she's carrying a torch for him." Now we can use that language about God. The Bible everywhere presents us the picture that God is carrying a torch for us.

We run from Him, and He knows shortcuts to the point where He can wait for us in our running. And when we come, there He is, waiting. "God commendeth His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Now that is the way that God loves you. Charles Wesley has sung it in one of his grandest hymns, "Depth of Mercy, can there be mercy still reserved for me? Can my God His wrath forbear? Me, the chief of sinners, spare?

I have long withstood His grace, long provoked Him to His face, would not hearken to His calls, grieved Him by a thousand falls." And yet that God still loves us. "Cries, 'How shall I lift thee up?' lets the lifted thunder drop." Oh, how true then it is that the gospel is the gospel of God.

There are several things said about the gospel in this chapter and we shall hope to study all of them in more detail as we go on. If you read carefully, you will find seven things said about the gospel here in this chapter. One, it is the gospel of God. Two, it was promised in the Old Testament. Three, it concerns the Lord Jesus Christ, being indeed the gospel of God's Son. Four, it must be preached. Five, it's the power of God unto salvation. Six, it was to the Jew first and then to the Gentile. And seven, it is the revelation of the righteousness of God.

The central fact is, of course, that it is the gospel concerning God's Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. There have been those that have wished to tell us that we should adopt the religion of Jesus and not accept a religion about Jesus. When you read the Bible, it's, of course, the exact opposite. Jesus Christ, strictly speaking, had no religion because He was God. He cannot worship, for there could be no one to worship but Himself.

He prayed, but only in an accommodated sense, since He was talking to the Father as an equal. He even went so far as to say that these prayers, dialogues within the Godhead, were spoken aloud only in order that the disciples might learn something about the relationship of the eternal Son and the eternal Father. At the graveside of Lazarus, we read in John 11:41, "Jesus lifted up His eyes and said, 'Father, I thank Thee that Thou hast heard me. And I know that Thou hearest me always. But because of the people which stand by, I said it, that they may believe that Thou hast sent me.'"

But the Lord Jesus taught us the true worship was to come unto the Father by Himself. No man can approach God in any other way than through the spiritual principles which are connected with four historical facts. This was the gospel that Paul preached. We read it in the 15th of 1st Corinthians, where the four historical facts are set forth. One, Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. Two, Christ was buried.

Three, Christ rose again from the dead. Four, Christ was seen of many witnesses. These historical facts are the Gibraltar of the Christian faith and the Waterloo of infidelity. When people come to us asking how we know the Bible is true, we can point to these four historical facts. Christ died, Christ was buried, Christ arose, Christ was seen.

There is, of course, more evidence, real historical evidence, to prove these facts than there is to attest the writings of Julius Caesar. The documents in the case are older, the research on their problems has been much vaster, the attacks against them have been more successfully refuted, and the results that flow from them have been shared by an infinitely greater number of persons. There can be no gospel, not even a gospel of God, apart from that which concerns His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In his commentary on our text, Calvin says, "Here is a beautiful passage, which teaches that the gospel is contained in Christ, so that he who withdraws one step from Christ, withdraws from the gospel." Calvin then quotes Hebrews 1:3 and comments on it. "Christ, being the brightness of God's glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power."

We should not be astonished that God should call us to center our faith in Him. And there we do center our faith. And there today, we worship the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ.

And we thank Thee, our God and Father, for the great privilege of exalting Jesus Christ. We pray Thee to take the word to each heart. If there be those that listen who have not been born again, accompany them with restlessness, that they may know no peace until they rest in Christ. But upon all those who are truly Thine own, may Thy grace, mercy and peace abide, and a new sense of the rock of the gospel, and our apostleship therefore, and therefrom.

And unto Thee we give Thee all the glory and the majesty, the dominion and the power, now until Jesus come again and forever. Amen.

Announcer: Salt makes people thirsty, and the Lord said that His followers are the salt of the earth. Are you living the kind of life that makes others thirsty for a relationship with Jesus Christ? We hope you have benefited from today's message entitled, Bondslave and Apostle. Listen to additional Bible teaching by Dr. Barnhouse via the internet. Visit us at Alliancenet.org.

An audio copy of today's teaching is also available by calling us toll-free. 1-800-488-1888. Today's message again is entitled, Bondslave and Apostle, or simply request message number R1-2. We would also like to make available to you a free copy of our booklet entitled, Why and How to Study the Bible. Christians have many excuses for why their Bibles never find their way off the bookshelf. "I don't have enough time." "Scripture is too hard to understand." "I just don't know where to begin."

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