THE HEART OF THE REFORMED FAITH

Stephen Rees has sent me a correct text of his article on "The Heart of the Reformed Faith: To glorify God and enjoy him for ever," which I am posting here with his permission:


The heart of the reformed faith - the heart of biblical Christianity - is God-centredness: the conviction that God himself is supremely important. We define all our doctrine in a God-centred way. Sin is horrible because it is an affront to God. Salvation is wonderful because it brings glory to God. Heaven is heaven because it is the place where God is all in all. Hell is hell because it is the place where God manifests his righteous wrath. This God-centredness is the distinctive feature of the reformed faith. A Christian may say lots of true things, for example, about sin. He may declare that sin is damaging, that it leads to wretchedness, that it degrades the sinner, but if he fails to declare that sin is abhorrent to God, the most important emphasis of all has been missed. I remember how struck I was years ago, reading an essay by Leon Morris entitled ‘The theme of Romans’1. He asks which word Paul uses most frequently in Romans. What would you guess? Grace? Faith? Believe? Law? No, when we have omitted such words as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘in’, the most frequent word in Romans is God. As Morris says, ‘It is clear that in Romans Paul speaks of God so often that no subject comes even remotely near it’.

Just skim through the opening chapters and you see it immediately. All the great theological statements in Romans have God as their subject: ‘God gave them over...’ ‘God will give to each person according to what he has done...’ ‘God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ...’ ‘God set him forth as a propitiation...’ ‘God justifies the ungodly...’ ‘God has poured out his love into our hearts...’ ‘God demonstrates his own love to us in this...’

We can preach things that are true - we can even be five-point Calvinists - but if we lose that ‘from him and through him and to him are all things’ awareness, then we've lost the heart of Christianity.

And God-centred doctrine must work itself out in God-centred piety. Again this is the distinctive note of reformed Christianity. We are obsessed with God himself. We are overwhelmed by his majesty, his beauty, his holiness, his grace. We seek his glory, we desire his presence, we model our lives on his attributes. Other Christians may say that evangelism, or mission, or revival or reconstruction is their great concern. But we have only one concern - God himself: to know him, to mirror him, to see him glorified. We refuse to absolutise any other objective. The salvation of the lost is only important to us in as far as it leads to the hallowing of his name and the coming of his kingdom. The purifying of society is only important to us in as far as it leads to the doing of his will on earth as in heaven. Bible-study and prayer are only important to us in as far as they lead us into communion with him.

This has been the great hallmark of reformed Christianity down through the centuries. Whether you're reading the journals of Presbyterians like Andrew Bonar, or the letters of Anglicans like John Newton, or the sermons of Baptists like Charles Spurgeon, this is the note that comes throbbing through. These men are obsessed with God himself. They live their lives and do their theology and fulfil their ministry in passionate admiration for God himself. Everything else flows out of their awed worship of God and their trembling love for him.



1. Leon Morris, ‘The Theme of Romans’ in Apostolic History and the Gospel (Festschrift for F F Bruce) eds W W Gasque & R P Martin, Paternoster Press, 1970, pp 249-263