Now, before we pick up again today, do any of you have any questions on the things we've been talking about so far that we've been looking at here on these basic Bible studies? Remember, you're not on the video, okay? They were written both for believers and for unbelievers. He actually wrote them initially for a person who he was discussing the truth of the Christian message with, and the person who got to the point where he was saying, I want to really know what the Bible has to say. And so, Schaefer prepared these for him, and he would go over them and they'd talk about them together. So they were actually prepared in that context of somebody who was seriously seeking. And I would say that's the best context in which to use them, for an individual to use them with somebody who's got to the point where they really want to know what Christianity says, and then to go through them with them. I've done that on several occasions with individuals. Now, all that, that's one of the points I've kept trying to make, but he always thought, not so much philosophically but apologetically, I don't think he was interested in philosophy for its own sake, that's not why you get references, I'd say, to what we were saying about the Trinity or the abnormality of the world. What he's trying to do is to show people how the biblical message really does explain the reality that exists today, so he always has that apologetic purpose in mind. They're also very useful to use with somebody who's a brand new Christian, who just needs instruction on some very basic kinds of issues. That's a good question. How many people come to Libri as unbelievers and levers unbelievers? I couldn't answer the question in terms of giving you a percentage, but looking back over my 19 years, I suppose, of working in Libri, we had many, many non-Christians come through, though the number would vary, sometimes you would have maybe half of your group of people would be non-Christians. Other times just maybe one or two, but as I look back, I would say probably, this is just a guess, probably more than half of the unbelievers who came, left as believers, but there was never any pressure put on people to come to faith while they were there, and I think that's important. It's not our place to put pressure on people. As we seek to communicate the gospel to people, we really have to have sufficient confidence in the sovereignty of God, and in his desire to save people being far greater than hours, that we don't feel the need to put pressure on somebody, so that if somebody leaves without becoming a Christian, we don't feel, therefore, that we have failed, or that it wasn't worth there while being here. In fact, I remember Shae for a sometimes actually encouraging people to leave for a while, and to just get away from the situation, because of course there is some pressure simply by being surrounded with Christians who are answering your questions and presenting the gospel to you, just to leave and go away and think about it alone for a while, and he would sometimes encourage people to do that, rather than saying where you've got to believe right now while you're here, otherwise it'll be too late. He really did believe very passionately that it was God who bought the people there in the first place, so that you didn't have to see results right then, so that you could relax in a sense, and leave this person in the hands of God. In other words, you really practice Calvinism, that's what I'm talking about, actually, we might say, to put it that way, rather than feeling that it's all up to us. We really do believe that God is the one who desires to save and who works to save people, but I think of people who left as non-Christians. I know quite a few who became Christians after they left and who would write and tell us so, sometimes a week or two later, sometimes months later, sometimes years later. I know a few people who came through our branch of Lebris who left as unbelievers and to my knowledge are still unbelievers, but that doesn't mean I've given up on them, and when I think about those individuals, I continue to pray for them, because I believe God bought them there in the first place, so I don't feel well. The fact that, say, ten years has passed means that this person has had it, and I think this is a very important thing that we were talking about this in apologetics this morning, but Edith used to use, or still uses, the image of the tapestry to describe the way God weaves together different threads into a person's life, and when somebody came to stay at a branch of Lebris, I think we all recognized, shape, or recognized, that this was one thread what God was reading in that person's life, that there were many threads he'd already been weaving into their life. Other people who were prayed for them, the person who encouraged them to come to Lebris, often, whether it was an individual they met on a train or somebody back home, somebody in their family, somebody in a church nearby, their doctor, perhaps, just all sorts of people who've sent people to Lebris, social workers, probation officers, divorce lawyers, just all kinds of people who've sent people, school teachers, with their pupils. We had dinner last night here in St. Louis with a girl who became a Christian at Lebris when she was a high school student here in St. Louis. One of Schafer's daughters was teaching, one of the schools here in St. Louis, teaching French, while her husband was here at the seminary and this was a girl who was in one of her French classes and they got to know each other and they started praying for her and she went to stay in Switzerland and became a Christian there and still a faithful believer in that, I guess, thirty years later, something like that, a very active member of our P.C.A. Church is here in the city, but always we have to see ourselves as being very finite, as being one tiny part in God's work of salvation in a person's life. That's why I personally have very serious problems with those who teach evangelism as if everything rests upon me and if I don't bring this person to a decision in the short time that I've got with them, that somehow I have been unfaithful to God, I don't see that in Scripture, I see rather the opposite, that God is the one who in his time will bring people to himself and what he calls us to do is to be faithful. So I think as you look at the Schaeffer's in-libri and just the whole work of the Bri, I think what people have been attempting to do, what the Schaeffer's attempted to do was to be faithful with the opportunities God gave them, with the individuals who came through. Now one of the points I was going to make here is that Schaeffer feels and this comes over very strongly in these Bible studies and in everything he wrote, the evangelism is every Christian's responsibility. On page 74 in these studies he's commenting on Acts 1-8, it's in Lesson 21, he says, the third is witnessing for Christ, this command is to all Christians, you can do your part, you can be a teller no matter where the Lord places you in life. They were passionately personally committed to evangelism. So what I'm saying about a confidence in the sovereignty of God does not mean that we don't then take us a responsibility seriously. Just the opposite, they took their responsibility very seriously, every time he flew anywhere on a plane. It's the same with Edith now when I went to pick her up from the airport when she came to speak on the day of prayer a couple of weeks ago. She came out of the plane with a man who was carrying her bag and she had clearly been talking to him all the way from Minneapolis to here. And she really takes her responsibility seriously to try to communicate the gospel to everyone she can. And he always did, too, when you read his account of his travels around Europe. Those three months he was over here, he talked to many, many people, to waiters and porters in the train and people he sat next to and people he met on the street. People in hotels, people in the hospital, he just saw himself as having an obligation before God. So you can have two things side by side. And I think this is one of the central emphasis actually of his teaching, that you have a tremendous confidence in the sovereignty of God, which enables you to know that this is God's work and that therefore you don't have to kind of try and force conversion before a person is ready to come to faith. You really can leave this in the hands of God, but at the same time, very strong sense of your personal obligation to be faithful to say what you can, to declare the gospel fearlessly boldly, clearly to every person where God opens a door for you. And he would have said over and over again, he did say over and over again, you've got to hold those two things together, I'd recommend to all of you, his tape, the absolute limits of Christianity, I think it's one of his best lectures where he talks among other things about God's sovereignty and human responsibility and how you can fall off a cliff on either side. That was the expression that he used to use, you can fall on a cliff on the side of stressing God's sovereignty in such a way that you make our choices, our actions, our words meaningless, and Scripture never does that, it insists that what we do really has significance. On the other hand, you can fall off the cliff on the other side and say it's all up to us and forget that God is sovereign and that he's the one who says and he used to use that image over and over again that there is a very narrow way to walk as we seek to be faithful to this double emphasis in the word of God. The other examples he uses are the trinity, the person of Christ, various other issues like that, where you hold two things together, which seem at first sight to have some element of contradiction or paradox, so he would never have used those words. He didn't call God's sovereignty and human responsibility a paradox in the way that say some new orthodox theologians would, or even some evangelical ones, he would say, these have to be held together because Scripture clearly teaches them, and they fit together clearly in God's wisdom, and it's not up to us to try and see how they fit together, it's up to us to be faithful to God's word in what it teaches. But that's right, coming back to your question, there were certainly people who left Lebrie without becoming Christians, and that, of course, saddened everybody because you long to see people come to faith, not for your sake, but for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of Christ, and for their sake, so it always hurts if somebody turns away from you and says, well, no, I'm not convinced, you know, I'm not prepared to believe, and you keep on praying for them sometimes with tears, or we had several examples of people who came to us and who professed to become Christians, and then later left and appeared to have turned away. We have a person who came to stay with us. She had been an orphan who was rejected by her mother at the age of about six months, nine months, and was then put in the children's home, and on half a dozen occasions she was taken temporarily in by couples while they considered whether they wanted to adopt her, and then they decided they didn't, and she was put back in the orphanage while in imagine what kind of a wounded person she was, well, how she came to stay with us was one of my colleagues, was pregnant, and the last month of her pregnancy, she had quite serious problems, and she had to go to hospital, and was therefore a month just having to lie still, just to keep the baby safe, and the girl in the next bed happened to be this girl who was expecting an illegitimate child, and they got to know each other and got talking together, and this girl then came to stay with us afterwards after she had her baby, and lived with us there for two years, made a commitment to the gospel, in fact worked with us for a while, and was very helpful to other people. Still a very, very damaged person, and I think the turning point for her was that we had this very dear fellow Stangwins, an Norwegian fellow who fell in love with her, and asked her to marry him, and at first she said yes, but then she was just so terrified of that kind of human commitment after her childhood, after the experience she had, surely this will fall apart like everything else in my life, but that she kind of ran away at that point from him, and from us, the relationship she left, and the last I know of her, and we've kept in contact with her, she joined a lesbian permanence community and brought her and proceeded to try and raise her little boy in that situation, you can imagine
the devastating effect that's what had on his life, but it really has devastating, and he's exactly the same age as my eldest son. I last saw him about six years ago, I suppose, and he was just a total mess, he was in trouble with the police for all kinds of juvenile crimes, but when you see something like that, obviously it just fills you with terrible sadness, when somebody turns away from the Lord who you feel you really have seen evidence of his work in at the beginnings of transformation, of course it's very, very painful, but it's very difficult to know how to pray in such a situation, I think that for myself as I think of her, which I do from time to time, and for her boy, you know, I really believe that God bought her there in the first place, the circumstances were really so remarkable, we really did cease and dramatic changes in her life over that period of two or three years, and I just continue to pray with confidence that God is not going to let her go, that at some point in her life he's going to bring her back to himself, but he's going to complete the work that he's started, and that has to be our confidence at the same time, you why you have that confidence and you pray for somebody with confidence, at the same time you can't help but feel afraid for them, you have to, and it's only appropriate, and you think of the way Scripture describes people who come to the point of seeing clearly that this is true, and then turn away, now I think Scripture clearly teaches that people who are genuinely saved are always saved, that there is a perseverance of the saints, but sometimes it's very difficult to know exactly at what point a regeneration takes place, because people changed substantially before they were generated, I've seen many people whose lives have been dramatically transformed before they actually became Christians that happened to me, my life was radically changed, simply by knowing that Christianity was true before I actually became a Christian, I have been so miserable, I've been suicidal, and really miserable all the time, and meeting Christians, and learning from them, learning from their lives, seeing what God had done in their lives, seeing the answers to my questions that they had, that really made sense to me, I really pulled me out of the pet, long before I came to the point of of being prepared to bow before God, and saying Lord forgive me, I'm the sinner, I need you, I need you mercy, and you see this over and over again with people, but as they come among the people of God, and hear his truth, it can have a very powerful effect upon them before they actually converted, so we can't always tell whether a person has reached the point of regeneration,
or just exactly when that point is, we have to leave that in God's hands, that's why it is so mistaken to try and make people say well when was the point you became a Christian, a lot of people haven't had any idea, they have no idea at all, with some people it is a moment like the impossible, with other people they can say well sometime in the last two years, I've come from darkness, the light, and I couldn't tell you when, and many people especially those growing up in Christian homes have absolutely no idea at all, they can't ever remember a time when they were believers, and that's the way to what to be, that's the way to what to be, but as we think about that, you see somebody like this person I described, you don't know, we believed at the time that she was born again, on the basis of that we trust that God will bring her back to himself, will humble her in her rebelliousness, certainly she's been humbled by the appalling nature of her life since that time, let me give you another illustration, this is a very dramatic one, I'll see if I can get through without crying this time, but this was a fellow who came to stay with us, I always remember the day he and his wife, well they weren't married then, but the day he and his girl arrived,
at first we couldn't tell, he came in the door, he came in the door first and I wasn't sure, we'd heard this couple were coming, and I wasn't sure whether the one who came in was the male or the female, he was wearing a green and gold and scarlet kind of dragon suit, and he had his, he had makeup on and perfume and you know they had come straight out of the drug scene just totally, and when the girl came through the door then it was obvious which one was the woman, but because she was a mistakenly feminine, but they came to stay with us and they had just been living on drugs for the previous couple of years, just all the time, I mean they were really completely spaced out, just constantly, and they came and they both became Christians and they were married and they had three children, three little boys, and then he started committing adultery, they became members of my church there, well we had to discipline him and my capacity is one of the pastors of the church, we disciplined him for his adultery and of course is what often happens in a case of discipline, he left, you know the person either responds to the discipline or they get at, it's very difficult to be in a place where you're being doubly disciplined by people, so he left, it went off with the other woman, and then eventually that relationship broke up and he stopped the adultery, this was while the discipline was still going on, but there were other things going on in his life which were, which were not good, and I remember one of the most dramatic things that ever happened in my life, I heard this tremendous knocking on my door, it was at three o'clock in the morning, and I went downstairs and this fellow was at the door, it was just after New Year's, New Year's day or something like that, and he was absolutely wild, and I thought at first that he'd been taking drugs but he assured me that he hadn't, and he kept saying to me over and over again, you know, the devil is after me, I'm going to hell, when he was half out of his mind, I managed to calm him down a little bit, he stayed for, I guess, getting on for an hour, there was some three to four o'clock in the morning, and I assured him, when we talked about where he stood before the Lord about his faith,
he assured me that he was a believer, that he was overwhelmed by the sins that he'd committed, and he felt he deserved the judgment of God, my own feeling in the situation was that the devil was really after him, really just seeking him to drive him to despair, and that really was the situation, and he left, finally come down while the next night, his body was spanned, on a road on solsably plain, he was start naked, and he had been crushed, his head was crushed by truck, he driven into a field apparently, then run along the road, taking off his clothes as he went, and he was just horribly killed, I personally have no doubt that he is with the Lord, and that we will see him one day, but I think what we saw in practice, and it tells us how very serious biblical discipline is, I think often we completely ignore what Paul actually says in 1 Corinthians, he says, hand the person your disciplining over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, but his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, and I think that's what we really saw happening in practice, he had been put out of the church, he had been disciplined, and I think the devil really did destroy him physically, I have absolutely no doubt about it, but I have confidence particularly after that last conversation I had with him, so I was the last person to see him before we died, but he is with the Lord enough, the whole situation was one which had a very dramatic effect upon our church, I mean you can imagine, just the way it made everybody feel, I think it was so good, everyone, anybody who was considering doing anything unfaithful or sinful really, but shaken out very dramatically by it, and the funeral service was one of the most moving things I've ever been to, his favorite piece of music was Mahalia Jackson's, that's the song I'm sure, some of you know well, we played that at his funeral, with the confidence I think from everybody present that that he had indeed moved up a little bit, a little higher, and he was genuinely delivered from his situation, but you know we really do need to take God's word very seriously, and when we practice church discipline, it's a tremendously sobering thing that we're doing because we really are putting somebody out of the church, outside of the protection of God, I mean I'm sure that's what poor means by that, when he says we hand him over to Satan, well what can he mean but that, this person is no longer for the purpose of bringing them to repentance, in a situation where they receive the kind of protection that they believe and normally receives, and God's purpose of course is to bring the person to repentance, well I think, well the individual, we should excise that from the tape,
did certainly, did indeed come to repentance, and what we saved, but we so often find situations, we'll find ourselves in situations where we really have to leave ourselves in the hands of God, a person leaves as an unbeliever, you keep praying for them, convinced that God bought you in contact with them in the first place, that therefore he will carry on doing his work, weaving his tapestry in their life, another person comes to faith and then appears to turn away, you keep praying for them with confidence that God will carry on working in them, but often we can't answer the specific questions about people, there's a rather long experience that's on your question, and my apologies for my tears along the way, there's anyone have any other questions there because this is, this is all actually very important issues, that's a good question in rising in relationship to the issue of discipline, it's evident that Lebrie wasn't a church but what was its relationship in fact to the church, yeah, I think it's a very important question because Schafer tried to always make it very clear, it's written into the consensus of Lebrie's principles of operation, that Lebrie is not a church, therefore it doesn't have the same structures of church, it cannot administer baptism, the Lord's supper, or discipline people, in the sense of church discipline, obviously when disciplines people just as parents do their children you have to treat people with significance who come and stay with you but Lebrie wasn't a church but the most certainly is not, but it may give you the illustration of our situation there in England as that's the one I'm most familiar with, we started a church as soon as we could for our own needs, well first I'd say out of the mediums to God because God commands us to be part of His people in the formal context of the church, so we started the church out of obedience to God, there wasn't an evangelical church in the area which we could happily go to
or which we could take our own children to or anybody who came to stay with us and that's the situation in many parts of England but it may be some distance before you can find a faithful church and there simply wasn't one that we could feel really happy within the situation, so in obedience to God's word we started a congregation, we felt the need for ourselves to be in a fellowship of God's people and Lebrie is not a church and by itself does not meet those needs that one has, we felt the need for our children that they be raised in a church, we felt the need for all the people who are coming to stay with us that as well as the context of Lebrie day by day they also needed to see a church in action and to be part of it at least for the time that they were there and we felt also that we had a responsibility to actively reach out to our neighbours, Lebrie as Lebrie operated in a way that the church really can't quite, it prayed that God would bring people for us to take care of and to communicate gospel to rather than actively going out to get people, our church has the responsibility to actively go out and get people so all of us were kind of wearing two hats all the time and we were very aware of that and sometimes that was complicated, within the context of Lebrie we would pray that God would bring people to us as a pastor in the church, I would be involved in thinking and praying about how we could go out and reach out into the community and we sought out as a very much as a responsibility that not as Lebrie is such but in terms of as part of the church of Christ that was our calling so the church got started there and that church is now got approximately 300 people in it, it started just the two families and two kind of single people, most of those people are people who've been converted from the area, some are people who became Christians at Lebrie and then settled in the area, just a real mixture of people but we always tried to very carefully distinguish between what Lebrie was doing and what the work of the church was and all Lebrie members and this was something written into the consensus by Schaefer who required to be members of the church somewhere that it was very clearly it's not sufficient simply to be working in Lebrie alongside other believers, the way Schaefer would have put it is this that the church is the only organization which Christ has established to last till the end of this age until Christ's coming, he believed that God indeed raises up paratured organizations at from time to time for specific needs in the church and that's how he regarded Lebrie as an organization which he firmly believed God had raised up alongside the church to meet some great specific needs of the church at this present time but he had no commitment to Lebrie lasting forever in fact the Schaefer's prayed regularly that God would show his desire to keep the work of Lebrie going by providing for the financial needs of the work and the if he no longer wanted the work to exist that we wouldn't have our needs made in Lebrie but he would close it down and a lot of people found that very difficult to understand they would say this is a good thing it's such a good thing it's being so helpful for people you want to be starting new branches here and there and everywhere why aren't you why and you aggressively going out and spreading the work of Lebrie and our response was always win-not the church
if we feel God is calling us to start another branch we will know and as I've mentioned I think in an earlier class we were often quite a few properties which we would turn down because we didn't feel that was the right moment or the right place so we very carefully did make this distinction and in the English to be one of the things we would do at the end of every semester at the end of every term where the group of people was the very last session we would have together with the group before they left before we closed one of us would give a talk about their responsibility to get involved in a church when they got home
that we didn't want them to to just forever sort of hang on to Lebrie as their spiritual home but of course you can't break ties that are there they're real ties and they're very precious ties you look at somebody and you say yes that person is is my child in the faith or my younger brother in the faith or however you want to express it and that's a very precious thing that God gives us and those those relationships will carry on into eternity that's why Paul is able to say what is my crown of joy or of boasting on the day of the Lord Jesus is it not you you are my glory and joy and he's he's not being arrogant he's just acknowledging that God really did use him in people's lives and that people are going to be in heaven because of his work and so he can say you are my glory and joy when I stand before the Lord your God's mark of his approval of my ministry and that's a wonderful thing to be able to say but even though that is so we would say to people okay you you you you as many people staying with us would would become very close to us personally would regard Lebrie as a kind of spiritual home and often for people who came from really bad family situations was more than that it was their home we had so many weddings because of that of people saying well I didn't want to go home to my parents I don't care for any way we want to be married here with you people because you're a family which made a lot of extra work but organizing weddings and things that and but you understand that reality but at the same time we would say to everybody when you go back to wherever you going you must get involved in a church there because God commands you and his word to become part of a church to get active to learn to sit under somebody's discipline and regular teaching of the word to be involved in a body of people where you're praying for them where you're using their gifts to serve them and so on so we've tried very hard to challenge people to to make sure they became involved in a church when they went when they went back with regard to Shaffer when the International Presbyterian Church started in Switzerland there were some people who left Lebrie who had no church to go to they were going back to parts of the world but there was no church at all and those people often became members of the International Presbyterian Church some of them for years until they found a place where where they could be where they could have fellowship and teaching and and serve but that clearly wasn't ideal and it was understood not to be ideal and the Shaffer's tried to take very seriously their responsibility to have some spiritual oversight over those people still in terms of writing letters to them and seeing them when they could encouraging them and so on Lebrie worker and Lebrie never held the Lord's supper was always held in the context of the church the church is making and we're going to have to stop there I hope to get back