What Are You Guarding and Defending? (Part 1)
What Are You Guarding and Defending? (Part 1)
By Pastor Joseph Dunkin
I have often referred to my time at Westminster Seminary as four years of extreme academic duress. If you ask a friend to lightly press his finger into the flesh of your arm so that it makes a slight dimple, you will find that this does not hurt very much at all. But if you steadily hold it there for twelve weeks, you will be in ever-increasing and alarming discomfort. That’s what a semester of seminary feels like. It starts with light pressure and ends in agony.
Part of this is due to the challenge of keeping up with biblical languages. Because there is so much memorization involved, you often have to let other classes go in order to focus on Greek and Hebrew. That study involves hours of oral recitation with flash cards. One of my professors made audio tapes we could listen to while driving around or working in the house. I still remember her voice for the Hebrew word “shamar”. “Shamar…he guarded, he kept…shamar…”.
When memorizing a particular vocabulary word, it is important that you learn as many translations as you can, so that you can better understand the concept behind the word. “Shamar” means not only…to guard and keep, but also…to preserve, protect, and even…to defend. It isn’t necessarily a violent concept, as though you are taking up weapons, though you certainly could. Rather, it describes your attitude toward the thing that is most valuable to you. What are you watching over? What matters? What do you need to keep your eye on?
Having to recite this word over and over again got me to thinking. “What does God want us to guard and defend for the church?” And, “What are we actually guarding and defending?” Pondering this over the years, I have come to two useful and different conclusions which I will share in two parts. Part 1 is a look at what God clearly commands us to guard and defend for the church. Part 2 will look at the concept of guarding and defending across relationships and human endeavors. Asking the question, “what are you guarding and defending?” is a way to get behind why we behave the way we do – and more: what we need to change if our thoughts and actions actually endanger the thing we want to guard and defend.
Part 1. What does God want us to guard and defend for the church? I believe the answer to this comes down to three things: 1) peaceable unity, 2) apostolic doctrine and practice, and 3) holiness. In seminary, my professor taught that the DNA of the church is described in one line of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” These four qualities describe the essential makeup of the church. We are unified as one in the body of Christ. We are holy and set apart to God. We are catholic or universal, which means that the church is made up of all people who have ever been or will be saved. And we are apostolic – that is, we are a church whose teaching and practice has been handed down to us from Jesus through the twelve apostles as recorded in the New Testament.
But here is the fascinating thing about those four qualities. One of them – catholicity, is a quality that doesn’t vary. It is a static, unchanging fact that the church is universal. There is nothing we can do to affect that quality in any way.
But the other three qualities are qualities that, while they are always true, can also be greatly affected by our behavior. While it is true that the church is one in essence, she can be split apart by conflict and factions. While the church is founded on the teachings of the apostles, she can drift in her doctrine and practice. And while the church is set apart as holy, she can become quite corrupt.
And so it stands to reason that everything we must guard and defend for the church can be summed up in those qualities of the church which are affected by human sin: unity, holiness and doctrine.
Embracing this as a hypothesis, I have been rewarded with ample Scriptural proofs over the years. No single passage of Scripture has been more affirming than Ephesians chapter 4. Paul succinctly describes the need to uphold 1) “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:3), 2) “the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” (4:13), and 3) the need to “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness” (4:24).
And so, beloved, let us work together to study, understand and guard what God guards for his and our precious church at Abingdon: peaceable unity, apostolic doctrine and practice, and holiness. As we do, we will grow together! Amen.
Pastor Joseph