Current Trends Facing The Church

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If you do it wrong, everybody knows where to look. So you look at that little hole back there at that wonderful godly man and he's going, no, don't look back here at me, no one ever looks back at me, except when the microphone doesn't work or it feeds back or it does something like that.
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So it was indeed a trying task that I had at that time.
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It is good to be with you. Someone was reminding me of the last time I was here this morning. You can tell you're getting old when you look at someone and go, oh,
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I've been here before. It was 1994, I guess, fall of 94 when
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I was last in the New England area, in Southbridge actually. And so it is good to be back and I appreciate the nice cool weather.
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I've been gone longer than, I'm away from my family today longer than I've ever been away from my family in the 20 years of marriage that I celebrated only a few weeks ago, in fact.
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I left July 4th and I get home on Mondays. So I'm afraid you get the, it's sort of like the bottom of the coffee cup is what is left of me.
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We had a debate. I was in Atlanta first and we had a debate on Long Island just a few weeks ago with a
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Roman Catholic apologist, Patrick Madrid, on the subject of the veneration of saints and angels. That's the seventh of the debates we've done there on Long Island.
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Chris Arnzen is the one who puts all those things together and does a marvelous job. And then speaking in various sundry places, a weekend before last
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I drove to New Jersey. And those of you who know what that means, being on the island in Seaford and driving to New Jersey, can be just amazed that I'm actually here, that I'm still not sitting there.
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Drove about 112 miles in four hours and 20 minutes. It was so much fun doing that.
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Actually, I drove about 1 ,200 miles on Long Island. And I'm very concerned about when
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I get home because we don't drive in Phoenix the way we do on Long Island.
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And if I drive when I get home the way that I did on Long Island, not only will the police be chasing me, but my fellow citizens will be shooting me.
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So I'm very concerned about that particular incident as well. It is good, though.
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I drove with Pastor Mike and you're one of the better pastoral drivers that I've experienced.
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Because for some reason, pastors tend to just drive horribly. I tell you, the first time
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I got on Long Island, someone that Pastor George knows, Ed Moore, picked me up.
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Ed, did you ever drive with Ed Moore? Many times. Too many times. Once is too many times, driving with Ed Moore.
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I'm going to tell you something. He puts cars into spaces that just were not designed to have cars in them at all. It's just an amazing thing.
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This morning I've been asked to talk to you about current trends in theology.
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And generally, when you see that particular title, that means that the folks who've asked you to speak are basically leaving it up to you.
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Whatever you want to talk about this morning, you go ahead and do that. And so that's sort of what I'm going to be doing.
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There are a number of issues I'd like to raise with you, mainly because I have a very strange perspective.
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I guess I could call it unique. I'm really not in the loop, and many of you would already be saying that, in the sense that I don't live within academia.
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I don't go from campus to campus and ETS meeting to ETS meeting and stuff like that. In fact,
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I'm a little bit of an outcast from that particular perspective, because I take my work and every six months we go up to the
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General Conference of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, and we stand out on street corners, and we pass out tracts, and we witness to people, and we go out to the
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Easter pageant of the Mormon Church in Mesa. And a lot of folks look at that like that's just sort of a weird thing to do, and therefore
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I don't really fit in in the academic scene that well. And yet, at the same time, we will go out there and we'll encounter folks.
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We had some problems this last time we were up there. There were some folks who showed up with just nasty signs.
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They were there to abuse the Mormons, in essence. They were yelling and screaming and just doing everything they possibly could to offend the
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Mormons, including hanging Mormon temple garments from their signs while the Mormons are walking by.
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That's a real perfect way to open up communication. Those folks will look at me as some sort of academic snob, because I say, no, wait a minute.
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Have you studied what these people believe? Have you found out how to communicate with them? You've been up here one year.
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This is my 18th year up here. Will you take godly counsel? No, no, no, no. So I don't really fit in really comfortably anywhere, even as an apologist, someone who gives a defense to faith, because sadly, one of the marks of most of apologetic ministry in our land today, which shouldn't be, but is, is a disconnection from the local church.
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A large portion of those who are engaged in apologetics are rarely in any one particular church and couldn't be said to have a ministry within one particular church.
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That's one of the reasons this is the longest I've ever been away. I don't like to be away from my church. This many weekends in a row,
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I'm an elder in that church. I'll be preaching most of August in my church, in fact. And there's this disconnection that takes place with most apologists in the local church.
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And I, again, I don't buy into that, too. So I'm a pretty strange bird. And as a result,
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I have some interesting insights, I think, into current trends in theology and what's going on and things that we should be concerned about, things that we may see happening within our own churches.
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We live in an age that believes that everything needs to be updated if it's going to be truly good.
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I bet there is a number of people sitting in front of me who, like myself, have a deep streak of techno -geek.
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In fact, it's a little bit surprising that I have a paper Bible in front of me. I have my Handspring Visor Pro down there with a 128 megabyte expansion card, seven translations,
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Greek, Hebrew, and all of my books in eText loaded on it. And that's normally what I utilize. Some of you are going, oh, cool.
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The rest of you are going, what is he talking about? There's a real divide on the technological level with some folks.
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But for those of you who are geeks, I'd rather listen to something in MP3 than in any other format, if you know what
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I mean. And so you know that in our culture, whenever the newest version comes out, well, that's what you need to have.
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You've got to upgrade, man, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. If you're stuck with the BibleWorks 4 .0, well, you poor benighted soul, you need
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BibleWorks 5 .0. And that pressure is always there. We understand that in that realm. Unfortunately, it has come over into the church as well.
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And I think a lot of the things that we see around us in evangelicalism come from this idea that, well, we need to, in essence, give the gospel an upgrade.
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We need the newest version. Gospel 1 .0 just won't cut it anymore.
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We need to do some alterations. We need to jazz it up. And I am not decrying the proper attempt to communicate the gospel in a way that is understandable within any particular cultural setting.
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I'm not saying there's anything wrong about that, because the apostles gave us that example to do that. But there is sometimes a fine line between choosing the proper terms to use to communicate the whole substance of the gospel and the incessant desire on the part of man to form the gospel so that it is less offensive to the natural man.
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Those are two very different things. One safeguards the substance of God's truth.
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And I hope we're all on the same page when we consider the fact that the gospel is the power of God and the salvation, that it is the only power that has been given to the church that can change the hearts of men, that to seek any other kind of power is to, in essence, abandon the gospel.
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To try to seek power for the church within the context of political maneuvering, within the context of voting blocks or anything else, is to ignore the actual message of the
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Scriptures. That the only way to truly change a person is to change that person's heart and mind, and that takes place only through the power of the gospel when
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God draws rebel sinners unto himself. And so, when we keep that in mind, then we should be,
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I think, very concerned that when people start talking about, well, you know, we need to get in step with the culture.
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Well, since this culture seems to be stepping quite lively toward oblivion and destruction,
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I'm not really sure why anyone would want to be in step with the culture, personally. I think if we will settle it in our minds that a culture of death, a culture that celebrates death and not life, a culture that is so focused upon self -gratification in sexual matters, in matters of responsibility, in matters of possessions, in matters of the murder of innocent children, in the matters of getting rid of elderly folks that are no longer a joy to have around in the entire degradation of our society as it tries to rid itself of a
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Christian worldview, that a culture that is intent upon destroying itself in general in history,
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God allows those cultures to do exactly what they want. In fact, Romans chapter 1 tells us that God gives men over in the lusts and desires of their hearts to the destruction of themselves.
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And so, when we talk about the future of our culture, we certainly pray for God's grace in the sense of bringing repentance, but we also recognize that historically, normally,
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God has done that through judgment, that it is judgment that brings repentance, and ours is a nation that cries out for that judgment.
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We pray for mercy. We pray for repentance, but we should be very quick to recognize that God may well bring that repentance through the means of judgment.
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And if we are in a land where the light is not growing brighter, and I've always been amazed at people who are just constantly saying, things are going so great, things are going so wonderful, well, if that's the case, you know, after 9 -1 -1, everybody's going, oh, isn't it wonderful?
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Everyone's running around saying, God bless America. And I have to admit,
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I was one of those wet blankets going, why? Why is that wonderful? First of all, we can't even define who that God is anymore, and if you dare do so, the 9th
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Circuit Court will shut you up. And some of you are going, oh yeah,
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I live in the jurisdiction of the 9th Circuit Court. That's a scary, frightening thought.
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But not only that, but I had to point out, excuse me, I know there's much discussion of God now after 9 -1 -1, though there's not nearly as much today as there was right after 9 -1 -1, isn't there?
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But the problem is, it seems to be the idea that you can't define which
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God it is. You can't say it's the Christian God. We all have to get together, hold hands, and pray to this nebulous, unnamed, unrevealed, unworshipable
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God, if we're going to be politically correct about it. But not only that, as I look around the culture, I don't see any change in the culture, do you?
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Do you hear less debauchery? Do you hear a concern for life? Do you hear a concern for any type of godly living?
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No, once the shock wore off, we went right back to the same debauched humor, and the films are just as debauched as they ever were, if not more, and I'm sorry,
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I don't see where there's been this great change. Well, more people are going to church. Well, the problem is what calls itself the church in our land, if it's not preaching the gospel, what does that mean to a
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Christian? If you're going to a place that just simply applies some sort of analgesic to your soul to numb it, that's not honoring to God.
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That's not preaching the gospel. We have a radical perspective because we have a king.
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Ever thought about that? We, in America, are individualists.
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We like to sing with Frank Sinatra, I did it my way, and I remember the first time
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I traveled out of the nation, I just went up to Canada to preach once, and I was taken aback.
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I walked up to the customs guy, and he looks at me, and he says, where are you from, and I told him, and he says, why are you here?
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And the first thought in my mind was, excuse me, sir, but I am from the
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United States of America, and we are a free people, and you do not have the right to ask me why
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I am here. I'm a free man. That's what I wanted to say, that's not what I said, because I never would have gotten in if I had, but I told him what
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I was there to do, and he said, fine, I went on my way, but that was the first thought in my mind was, who are you to ask me a question like that?
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We are individualists. We have our freedoms. God is bound by at least the Bill of Rights, and so that's how we think anyways, and so it's difficult, especially for Christians, to really understand that we have a king.
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Our citizenship is in heaven. We are called douloi. You are a doulos in Greek.
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Now that's a servant, and that's frequently how it's translated, but it is just as accurately translated by the word slave.
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You have been purchased with a price. You have been redeemed, and the freedom that you have is a freedom in righteousness to give your life in service to the one who gave his life for you.
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We tend to think that, well, Jesus paid it all, and so now I'm free to just go off and do whatever
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I want to do. Well, that's not exactly how that relationship works. We are servants, disciples of Christ, and that means he tells us, he gives us the standards of what is right and wrong, what is true and false, and how we are to think.
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That phrase in the New Testament, that we are to have the mind of Christ, seems strange to most modern
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American evangelicals, let's be honest. The mind of Christ, that sounds sort of mystical, doesn't it?
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What does it mean to have the mind of Christ? What does it mean to take every thought captive in obedience to Christ?
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Well, first and foremost, it means that we look to him as our source for determining how we are to think, and how we are to determine what is right and wrong, how we are to live, and when we do that, we discover that we need to think in a way that is radically different than what is comfortable in our society around us.
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That is why the Bible tells us, friendship with the world is enmity with God. You cannot love the world and love the
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Father, if you love the world, love the Father is not in you. Those are pretty well black and white categories, aren't they?
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And so it's a radical way that we are to think, it's a radical way that we are to look at the world around us, and if we are in a nation that is under judgment, that God is allowing more and more to pursue its own self -destruction, which is what man does outside of the grace of Christ, what are we to do?
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It's not always a pleasant thing to be in the minority. It is not always a pleasant thing to be constantly having to stand for the truth and to have to count the cost of discipleship.
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But I believe that more and more in the future, that's exactly what we're going to have to do. We are going to have to so love the truth that we are willing to count the cost to continue to believe it.
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I was mentioning to someone just yesterday as I was driving to the airport, we were talking about evangelicalism as a whole, just Christendom in a broad sense, and I said, what do you think would happen if this coming
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Sunday morning there were agents of the government standing at the doors here, and you were allowed to come in, however, your social security number would be taken as you came in, and the next time you file your taxes, your tax rate will be three times higher than if you don't walk through that door.
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How many churches would last a month? That's what the
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Muslims used to do. When the Muslims swept across North Africa up into Spain during the centuries of Muslim expansion, yes, they conquered those nations by the sword, but they generally didn't just sort of chop up all the
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Christians that were there. Instead, what they found to be most effective was to penalize
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Christian profession by economic means. If you were a
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Christian, you could still be a Christian. You could even meet in your churches, however, you could only have jobs up to a certain level.
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You had to pay taxes at a higher level than a Muslim would. You were disadvantaged in every aspect of social and economic life.
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And they pretty much, with a few exceptions, wiped everything out of North Africa. It was very effective.
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It's one thing to stand up for Christ when someone puts a gun in your face one time. It's different to do it every single day, every single day, day in, day out, in that kind of persecution.
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And the enemies of the cross know that that's the most effective way to do it. What would happen in our own land?
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Where would the church be if that were to happen? And that really gets to the question of how much do we value truth?
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We live in a postmodern society, and postmodernism, we were joking a little bit, if you want to know all there is to know about it, there's about a 900 page monster of a book you can try to swallow called
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The Gagging of God by D .A. Carson, but for those who may not want to muddle through 900 pages, let's just put it really simply.
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Postmodernism says there is no such thing as truth, therefore God didn't say it. How's that for a summary of The Gagging of God?
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Nice, short, very to the point. That is the mindset of the vast majority of people with whom we have to deal today.
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There is no objective truth. If I even use the term truth, it's my truth and your truth, and my truth is true for me and your truth is true for you, but there's no truth that's binding on both of us.
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And it is a, let's put it in its proper perspective. We have been taught to think, well, that's just a different viewpoint.
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No, my friends, that's sinful. It is sinful to think in that way.
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Does that sound strange to you? I bet it does. I bet it sounds strange to you, because see, we've been taught to think that having different viewpoints is a non -moral issue.
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The Bible does not allow us to think that way. If it is opposed to God's truth, if it comes forth from the rebellion of the heart of man, it is sinful in God's sight.
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It's not just some other viewpoint. It is rebellion against God. Yea, hath
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God said, Genesis 3? Nothing new there. It may parade under something, you know, some new terminology, but there's really nothing new under the sun.
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We live in a postmodern society. People don't believe in such things as objective truth, and that's why they look at you like a three -headed monster when you start talking to them about how
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God has a standard that they have to live up to, and that God has a law, and that we have sinned against Him.
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How dare you say I'm a sinner? How dare you say that I have done something to violate
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God's standard? I may have violated your standard, but I haven't violated my standard.
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Now that's a lie right there. Remember what C .S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity?
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I think it was in Mere Christianity, it's been a number of years, but the illustration of if you could put a tape recorder around someone's neck that would only turn on and off every time they made a moral judgment about somebody else, and then you judged them on the basis of just that at the end of their life, everybody would stand condemned.
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And it's true. But, if you were just judged by the standards you used for everybody else, we'd all fail.
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We would all fail. And so, when then someone says, I may have violated your standards, but I've not violated mine, oh yes you have, you've even violated your own, and yours aren't even close to God's.
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But that whole concept of a universal truth and a universal standard is denied by postmodernism, it is denied by our society, and therefore we live in a society where, yes, we need to learn how to communicate with postmodernists, we have to learn, for example, to demonstrate that they're not consistent with themselves, that they don't really, they can't live their lives in such a way where you can just simply allow for everyone to have their own truth.
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Thankfully, yesterday, as I and the gentleman drove over to Northampton and back, we drove sort of a back way because we went and stood on a rock for a while.
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Well, I guess I should explain that. It was a rock that Whitfield preached from, and I am absolutely amazed that anyone can find it.
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I was a little bit scared when the pastor just said, there it is, off into the grass and toward the trees, and I thought, well, this is it, you're going to die in an obscure field in Massachusetts.
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But we took all these back roads, and two -laners and stuff like that, we came back by a little bit different route, and thankfully, all the way there and all the way back, we did not encounter anyone who was a consistent postmodernist, who had, in their truth, decided that the left hand of the road was where they wanted to drive.
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It was their truth that you drive on the left hand of the road. We didn't run into anybody like that because we literally would have run into someone like that, and that would have been it for them and for us.
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They would have discovered that their truth was not our truth, and that there is a universal truth that when two vehicles smack into each other head -on, it's not a good thing.
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So that didn't happen because people are not consistent postmodernists. We don't live our lives in that way, but we retreat into, our society retreats into this never -never land of there is no objective truth, only when faced with the uncomfortable fact of the existence of that God, with whom we know we have to do, but as Romans 1 tells us, man is actively holding down, suppressing the knowledge of that God, and that is the means that most of our fellow citizens use to do that today.
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So we do need to learn to communicate with these individuals. We need to, in essence, learn how to pry their fingers up as they're trying to hold the knowledge of God down.
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I think one of our apologetic tasks is to pry their fingers up as they're attempting to do that, which they may not enjoy, but that's the process of grace that God can use us to bring the truth to them.
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But it's not so much the apologetic task that concerns me as I look at the church. It's the fact that that thinking is flooding into the church, and the result is a stunted proclamation, at best.
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When the people come into the church, and part of it is due to the evangelistic means that we use, when you're begging people to come into the church, when you're using unbiblical means rather than having the
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Holy Spirit bring conviction of sin and seeing the church as the body of Christ and we're called to serve
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Christ and minister within the bounds of that church, instead when you turn into something that's begging for anybody to come, just come on in, we'll make you feel comfortable, we won't say anything that will offend you.
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It's no wonder then that that kind of thinking is flooding into a church that does that.
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But even in those churches that recognize you can't build a true church on the back of non -Christians, even in those churches, we are so surrounded by this way of thinking, this godless way of thinking.
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It's on the billboards, on the highways, and it's on the radio and it's in the newspapers and the magazines and the movies and everything that we watch and see, it's all around us.
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It's coming into the church. And the result is we've developed this strange idea that somehow we can edit the gospel.
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We can form it like it's putty in our hands so that it becomes something more pleasing to the society around us.
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The gospel has never been pleasing to any society that was focused upon the satisfaction of selfish needs rather than the service of God.
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And it never will be. The gospel is only pleasing to a regenerate man.
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It cannot, by definition, be pleasing to an unregenerate man. Indeed, it's called a stench of death to those who are perishing, to those who refuse to receive a love of the truth.
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And so this editing of the gospel, I would say, is by far the most disturbing trend that I see within what calls itself evangelicalism today.
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Oh, I'm not saying that there aren't those who, in sort of a procrustean,
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I -like -just -to -disagree -with -everybody -around -me -type attitude have adopted a viewpoint that I'm just going to be disagreeable for the sake of being disagreeable and I'm not going to reach out to the community around me and I'm going to attract people by being as unattractive as possible.
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I'm not referring to that. There are some who seemingly have adopted that. But I am very, very concerned at a much wider trend that would, in essence, say, let's stop talking about the difficult things of the gospel.
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Let's get people in, let's show them we're nice folks, and then over time, maybe, we can introduce them to those less pleasant things.
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And I'm not talking about areas where there's disagreement amongst godly men.
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There's not a person in this room who has ever heard me discuss or argue eschatology.
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You haven't. I don't. Do I have a view? Yeah, sort of.
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If someone put a gun to my head, I suppose I would say, okay, that's the view I take. But we have all the major views in the sense of pre -mill, post -mill, and omill in our church.
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And I listen to the conversations and go, hmm. And people all the time are going, so, what's your view?
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I don't do eschatology. What? I'm not saying it's not important. But there are a dozen books
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I'd have to read before I could make a meaningful statement on the subject. And as I was saying to our friends yesterday as we were traveling around,
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I don't get to read good books. I get to read heresy. That's pretty much, I mean, think about it.
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My last two books were the same -sex controversy and a book refuting Harold Camping. I mean, that's what
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I get to read, or listen to. Transcribing Harold Camping.
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That's exciting. Some of you don't know who I'm talking about, but those of you who have, think about listening to him in slow motion for about ten hours.
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That'll put you into a coma. And then I've got a section of books, the
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A -wide, on my shelf now, written by supposed Christians promoting homosexuality.
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Oh, those are fun to read. Not really. And so that's the stuff I get to read. You'll never hear me arguing about those things.
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I just don't get into that stuff. When I say there's an editing of the Gospel, I'm talking about fundamental aspects.
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Let me give you what I think is one of the most important examples of this. And I would, especially those of you who are involved in ministry and in the proclamation of the
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Gospel, hope that you will consider this. And I will make reference to this tomorrow, those of you who will be here in the services.
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Let me just, for the moment, sort of focus upon this. I believe that we should preach the
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Gospel the way the Apostles taught us to preach the Gospel. Now, does that mean that we have to utilize
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Jewish categories of thought as they would often do? No. Do we have to try to imitate their cadence or their very words?
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No. But I think what we need to do is take from the biblical text the example of what they recognized needed to be communicated so that you could say the
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Gospel itself was being communicated. Today we have dumbed that down.
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It's almost like the New Testament is superfluous. Why did we need 27 books? We could have fit this into a very much shorter package and everything would have been much simpler.
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There are elements of the Gospel message that we all know are offensive to the unsaved person, to the person who continues in their rebellion against God.
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You know when you're about to say something that they very well may take in the wrong way.
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You get that little rush of blood in the face, the little quickening of the heart rate when you feel you now must say something that, oh, it's one of those things.
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It's generally when we have to bring up the issue of sin. It's generally when we have to bring up the issue of God's wrath against sin.
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That's why there are entire theologies today that remove God's wrath. God's not wrathful.
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Those terms in the Bible really aren't meant to communicate a settled attitude of God towards sin that we would properly understand as to be wrath.
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No, we need to understand that that's just the old style and that needs to be gotten rid of and that perspective has been around for a long time but it never makes much headway amongst the people of God.
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But we know what it means to feel that hesitation and as a result there are entire means of evangelism today that say, well, here's a list of words you never want to say in your initial encounter.
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These are words that while they may be biblical, we never want to use them and in fact, and this is where the problem comes in, we don't want to discuss the concepts that they communicate either.
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We just want to meet people where they are and examine their felt needs and then give a message that in essence is tailored to that particular individual.
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Well, I'm not saying that you don't recognize the situation that a person is in and communicate to them in the way that's most effective.
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That's not what I'm saying but when entire elements of the Gospel message get deleted as a result, then we've got a problem.
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And I've always found Paul's letter to the Romans to be a tremendous corrective to the tendencies that we seem to have in skipping over the tough parts.
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Why? Long before Paul ever got to the good news,
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Paul clearly explained the bad news. And that's where we're having a real problem.
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Humanists don't like to hear the bad news, but if you look at Romans, beginning in Romans chapter 1 verse 18 through chapter 3 verse 20,
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Paul spends that entire time, not with nice warm sermon illustrations, he's not doing what many of us have been taught in homiletics class, to grasp the audience and to establish repertoire and rapport, but instead he focuses upon the universal sinfulness of man.
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He proclaims it in chapter 1. He grabs the Jewish hypocrite in chapter 2 and says, you may agree with everything
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I just said in chapter 1, but I was also including you in that, in essence. And then in chapter 3, he wraps it all up with that tremendous passage beginning in verse 10 through 18, where he draws from all these
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Old Testament passages and he puts together this lengthy discussion of man's sin that concludes with there is no fear of God before their eyes.
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Certainly a description of our nation, certainly a description of Northampton yesterday anyway. There was no fear of God walking around those streets other than the four of us,
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I guess, the few minutes that we were there. And as a result of putting all this together, then the apostle can launch into a perfect savior once he has established the need of a perfect savior.
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But that's where there is hesitation in the church today, to press the real condition of man's heart.
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And one of the problems I see here is really brought out in just these two verses. Let me just read these two verses to you,
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Romans 3, 19 through 20. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God, because by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified in His sight, for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
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There's a little phrase there at the end of verse 19, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God.
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Now, theologically, vitally important, it has to do with the fact that Jews and Gentiles stand on the very same basis in need of redemption in Christ.
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That's why there's only one way of salvation, it's by faith in Christ. Everyone's justified in the same fashion.
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There's not one way of justification for the Jew, and another way of justification for the Gentile. If you don't have that, then you have the
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Jewish Christian church over here, and the Gentile Christian church over there, and the body of Christ is divided, and we know what
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Paul thought about that by the way he responded to Peter in Galatians chapter 2. But there's something else here that I think is extremely important.
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The terms that Paul uses refers to what you might see if you're watching, for example, court
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TV, and a trial has come to its conclusion, sentencing is now going to be done, the convicted person is brought in, and one of our brothers here works in corrections from California, and I would imagine that you have seen this kind of convict, who comes before the judge, judge
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I didn't do it, I just, I did not do it, I don't care what that jury said, and I don't care if they do have a videotape of me doing it,
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I did not do it. And no matter what, they simply will not own their crime, and they probably come into your facility and they still won't own their crime, but they still have to do the time, right?
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That sort of rhymed, anyways, don't use that, that would be a bad thing.
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Anyways, we've seen those folks, that's not the picture here. There's another picture we've seen, and that is the person who comes in, the head is down, and most importantly, the mouth is closed.
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There is no yapping, there is no constant giving of excuses, there is no assertion of self -righteousness, there is an acknowledgement of guilt and the righteousness of punishment.
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That's the attitude that Paul makes reference to here in Romans 3 .19. So that every mouth may be closed.
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May I suggest to you that a person who is still talking to God about what
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I've done, still talking to God about, well, you know,
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I know I've done some bad things, but look at my neighbor across the street.
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I mean, I know what he's up to, and he invited me to get involved with some of the stuff he's doing, and I wouldn't do it.
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See Lord, I know I've done some things bad, and I do need some grace, but better than he is.
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And man, I know this other guy, my goodness, I'm not nearly as bad as they are. Yapping, self -righteousness, still doesn't understand what came before in Romans 1, 2, and 3.
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That person who is still making excuses, that person who is still clinging to any form of self -righteousness, is not the person who's ready to hear what starts at Romans 3 .21.
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But you see what the Church does, is it's uncomfortable to get folks there. You know why?
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Because we can't do it. Oh, you can browbeat somebody into silence,
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I suppose. I suppose you can use various emotional means to run somebody over, quite literally.
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But to get a person to the point of acknowledgement of their own sin and the righteousness of God in punishing that sin, that's a supernatural thing.
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That's something that requires us to depend upon the Spirit of God. There's no program ever designed by man that gets somebody to that point.
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And so, since it's uncomfortable to proclaim those things, and since we have to rely upon the
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Holy Spirit of God to do that, the tendency is, let's just skip all that. Let's get right to the good news.
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Let's get right to the heart of the matter. Well, wait a minute. This is the heart of the matter.
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Because you see, when Paul starts talking about verse 24, being justified as a gift by His grace through redemption which is in Christ Jesus, the person who understands why it must be free, why it must be grace, why you can't add anything to God's grace, is the person who is first seen in verse 19.
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If you don't get them to verse 19, and you throw verse 24 at them, you know what they're going to develop?
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Cheap grace. Cheap grace. They're not going to see the loveliness of grace.
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They're not going to see the need for a perfect Savior. And that's where all the isms and heresies of the world come from.
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Is that as long as that supernatural miracle of the conviction of sin and the righteousness of God in verse 319 doesn't take place, well then all the religions of men can step in and say, oh yes, you need some of God's grace, but God needs you to do this, and God needs you to do that, and you can add this work and that work and that sacrament and this thing and that thing and all the rest of that stuff.
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That's where it comes from. The tendency must be fought, because we may, and believe me
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I understand this part, you may be looking around the churches in our land.
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You may be pastoring a church, and you may be involved in leadership in a church, and you look around and boy there's these big churches, and they seem to have all the money to do what they want to do, and we struggle all the time, and everything's always tight.
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You know, I'm an elder in a church where I don't do most of the preaching.
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Actually I teach the Sunday school, but I don't do most of the preaching. My fellow elder Don Fry does, and he's been in that church preaching for 27 years.
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Now if you look at the growth charts that are so popular in many denominations today, of how big a church should be after you've been there a certain amount of time, what the receipts should be, what the
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Sunday school attendance should be, my fellow elder is a miserable failure, because we have 53 members.
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27 years, 53 members, it doesn't quite, almost, not quite double, you know, the number of years.
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And you might go, wow, only 53 members. Yeah, only 53 members. Wow, there must be a real problem there.
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The whole idea in the back of the mind is, well we look over at these other places. This church just started, it's got 900 people at it now.
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They seem to be blowing out the walls, and they've got building programs going on. But you know, in your heart of hearts, after talking to the folks involved there, and so on and so forth, that in many instances, not all of them, there are some great big churches, but in many, many instances, the reason they're blowing out the walls is because they're not proclaiming the entirety of the gospel.
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They're using non -biblical means of getting people in the door. And you know what that ends up being like when you try to counsel people to godliness.
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You try to preach godliness in a situation like that, you end up being ridden out of town on a rail.
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But they grow. You see, when you preach the gospel and the
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Holy Spirit applies that truth in the heart, banishes self -righteousness, brings conviction of sin, which brings repentance, and that repentance does not make any claims upon God.
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That repentance recognizes the justice of God, recognizes the depth of our sin, and the righteousness of His punishment thereof.
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That's a person who goes, well, my sins must be punished. Either in myself or someone else.
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But that someone else must be a perfect Savior. That someone else cannot just be a helper. That someone else must bear the entire punishment of my sins.
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Who would do that for me? Well, that's when you can start telling somebody about Jesus Christ.
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And so, here's just one example. There are other examples. They all sort of feed into the same issue, and that is, we don't want to offend natural man.
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Yet, how does the Bible describe Christ? Stone of stumbling, rock of offense.
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Isn't there all this language in the Bible about the difference between those who are being saved and those who are perishing?
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And those who are being saved, what? They love the truth. And those who are perishing refuse to receive a love of the truth.
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And therefore, God sends them delusion. They believe the lie. Those kinds of words don't fit well in post -modernism.
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I confess that. As I travel around once a week,
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I find that one of the biggest issues I've seen is this recognition of the fact that the
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Gospel is very much out of step with our society, in the sense of not pandering to our society.
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But then this willingness to, instead of simply then communicating more clearly the fundamentals of why we must believe in absolute truth and so on and so forth, there's this tendency instead to try to truncate the
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Gospel, remove those sections that are offensive to the natural man. I've said many times, the Gospel is ours to proclaim, not to edit.
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We dare not shave off the rough edges. And it really comes down to whether we will trust the
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Holy Spirit of God to make the Gospel alive in the hearts of people all around us.
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We see the fact that he keeps doing that. He may not do it in the numbers that the charts say we're supposed to have.
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Who's to tell God what he's to do? We live in a land that has had much proclamation of the
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Gospel. And that letter was just perfect, that Terry read. Can you imagine what would
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Edward say today? Would he even make it down two blocks of the
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Northampton today without passing out cold in shock at what he was seeing?
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I doubt it. I doubt it. He talks about how New England has had so much light of the
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Gospel and yet has sinned against it. Well, 244 years later,
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I don't know when that was written, but 244 years after his death anyways, how much more true are all those words?
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We are called to be faithful in how we live despite what happens around us.
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Even when Israel was under the judgment of God, they still had his faithful people, but it couldn't have been very comfortable to be one of those 7 ,000 who hadn't bowed the knee to Baal.
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It couldn't be easy to be a part of that faithful remnant. It had to grieve the hearts of those faithful people who continued to serve only
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Jehovah to see the idolatry of the people around them. Are our hearts still grieved when we see
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God's law mocked in our land? In Psalm 119, the psalmist talks about the fact that he cries rivers of water because people do not keep
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God's law. They despise his testimonies and his statutes. I think one of the dangers that we as men face in this land today is we are so surrounded by debauchery that we become numb to it, that it no longer grieves us.
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We hardly even see it. It's around us, next to us.
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It's in our ears. I was working out about a week ago, a week and a half ago up on Long Island.
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It was back days and all the machines for back workout were in one particular area.
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The manager of the club was doing legs and I was right next to it and was talking to one of his people.
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I would say that in the, and I actually cut my workout short. I just couldn't handle it. But in the period of time that I was over there, and he's talking very loudly.
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It's not like I was listening in or something. If he didn't say
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F and S at least 500 times in the half hour that I was near him,
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I would be shocked. He simply couldn't use those words enough.
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I mean, he couldn't utter a sentence without using those terms. And you may work in a situation where you hear that constantly.
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The tendency is to just, well, just don't hear it anymore. And the idea of being grieved by the fact that there is this utter disrespect for God's truth and God's way.
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In fact, in our society, it's politically correct to mock God's way. It's frequently done in comedy.
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And let's face it folks, this is probably an area that if we were all to get real honest with ourselves, it's real easy for us to slip into this.
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I know it is for me. So maybe I'm the only one. All the rest of you can counsel me after we're done here. But isn't it easy to repeat some of those jokes that probably shouldn't?
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Isn't it easy to like some of those comedians that ...
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Isn't it sad that there are some tremendous comedic minds in our land?
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Look at Robin Williams. That guy's a genius. But he's filthy.
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He doesn't have to be. That's what just drives me insane. He does not have to be. In fact, his funniest stuff is when he's not.
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But isn't there times when we really give evidence to the fact that, that is pretty funny.
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Isn't there times when you think about it and it's all based upon debauchery? It's easy to slip into those things.
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It's easy to fall into that realm. Because it's all around us.
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That's why we need to be regularly amongst God's people. We need to be regularly in the Word, regularly meditating upon God's truth.
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Because let's face it, if you take the amount of time that we voluntarily expose ourselves to the world's influences and compare that with the amount of time that we voluntarily expose ourselves to God's influence, what do you think?
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What kind of result can we expect from that? It's sort of like the guy who lives next to a
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Dunkin' Donuts shop and has Dunkin' Donuts morning, noon, and night.
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Now, I love Dunkin' Donuts. I love those ones that are nothing more.
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They've got powdered sugar on the outside and they're stuffed full of chocolate frosting or vanilla frosting.
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You know which ones I'm talking about? The vanilla creams and the chocolate creams. I mean, there's got to be a thousand utterly empty calories in that.
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We're talking insulin shock right there. Just boom. And they are so good. I was looking for one over there.
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In fact, I'm going to admit something to you all that you're going to laugh at. I thought the sour, I thought the cream stuff there was actually frosted cupcakes or something like that.
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I looked over there from over there and I thought, oh cool, they look like cinnamon rolls or something like that had frosting all over them.
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I was very disappointed when I went over there and discovered that they were not. Because I was looking for something that had some sugar, you know, some just plain old empty stuff.
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Well, if you had some guy that lived next to a Dunkin' Donuts and that's all he ate all day long. And then he comes to you and he's massive.
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And he says, I don't want to get in shape. Okay, that's a good thing to do.
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It's going to take a while, but if you're committed. And he says, but I don't want to change my eating habits, but I will work out for five minutes a day.
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Well, what do you think the end result of that's going to be? Which side's going to win out? Dunkin' Donuts or the five minute workout?
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And yet many of us on a spiritual level are cramming our faces full of the very same type of spiritual food that's not good for us.
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And we think that we somehow accomplished something because this week, three out of six days since last
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Sunday, we managed to read Our Daily Bread. It's not going to work. So, we sense, basically what
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I'm saying is, we as Christians need to be wise. When you live in enemy territory, you need to modify your behavior patterns.
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Back in 1993, when Delta Force and the
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Rangers went into Mogadishu, resulting in the tremendous tragedy, 19
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American soldiers killed, over a thousand Somalis killed. You've seen, you've read the story.
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It was put out in film recently called Black Hawk Down, which we now know was very relevant to what's happened since 9 -1 -1, since the people who were fighting there are basically the same people who are fighting now.
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You know that one of the biggest mistakes was they walked into extremely hostile territory and they weren't quite as prepared as they thought they were.
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And a lot of them lost their lives. We live in hostile territory. We live in a land that is hostile to the
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Gospel. Well, they didn't go in there without a lot of preparation. Still didn't do enough.
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Many Christians walk around in very hostile territory, don't even bother to bring their weapon with them.
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And are we overly shocked at what happens as a result? We shouldn't be. We shouldn't be.
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We need to focus upon God's truth, be students of that truth, be wise in the way that we apply those things.
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Now, brother, I'm not sure, one of the most important things you need to remember when you have people speaking, visiting, is right before they get up, remind them of when they're supposed to be done.
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Otherwise, they just go on and on and on and on. That was the idea, huh?
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Yeah. Well, I discovered a long time ago, especially on Sunday morning, if you want to come back to a church, try to get done about the time they normally do.
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Because generally, you know, when you see those certain people in the back doing this number, that generally is a subtle communication that they want to beat the
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Methodists in the cafeteria. So questions? Anything on the board?