10 Years of Beholding God: Richard Owen Roberts, pt 3

Welcome to the WHOLE Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and I'm here to commemorate the 10th anniversary coming up for our

Behold Your God study, Rethinking God Biblically. You're about to hear material from the interview with Richard Owen Roberts.

Mr. Roberts is a unique man, really kind of a maverick in many ways.

He is a very conservative, theologically careful, godly, older man, and he is a

Congregationalist minister. Mr. Roberts has been, I would say, the most influential minister on my life personally.

He has changed the way I think about God, about walking with God, about helping other people walk with God more than any other minister.

I still am in contact with Mr. Roberts. He's still alive and he is still running all the way to the end.

Sometimes he'll talk about what he's learning about holiness, you know, or whatever topic it is, and it's like talking to a little kid that just came out of a candy shop.

He's just so excited that there's so much yet to know, so much ground yet to be taken for Christ.

I hope you benefit from these interviews. Well, I don't believe that the vast majority of people are in any position to focus on God.

The level of preaching has been so low, and it's been so man -centered, and the gospel of salvation so thoroughly cheapened, that multitudes of people who wouldn't know where to even begin in any way to seek

God, are in the church and crippling it. It seems to me that things have to work together in combination.

I don't believe we're going to see any genuine return to God while the prayer meeting is either being crowded out of existence, which it is in most churches, or else the focus of the prayer meeting is upon the temporal rather than upon the spiritual.

If you don't have a praying people, then what do you have if you don't have a people seeking

God, and they're not praying? There's a combination of things. If I were in charge, which obviously

I'm not, and would be totally incompetent to be if I were, my conviction is that what we need is a core of men raised up by God who are orientated themselves towards God, and who can then begin to proclaim a gospel that is

God -centered. Apart from that, I don't really see much hope for the church.

I know this is blunt and maybe even sounds critical, but don't believe that a typical church rises above its pastor.

It would be a truly exceptional church that did. I can say, out of deep conviction,

I believe the biggest problem in the church is its leadership. The change of leadership is what is mandatory to a change in the pew.

That could be brought about by God himself in a true revival. That certainly has been what has happened on occasion.

Maybe this is naive, but I hope that possibly men could be pulled aside in some fashion, exposed to more serious biblical truths, urged to reorientate themselves personally toward God, and when they had done so, then lead their people in that direction.

I don't think that's a very good answer, but what I'm saying is I don't think the church can change by itself other than a genuine intervention of the

Holy Spirit in the glorious revival of true religion. I believe that if somehow you could get pastors, one by one, rethinking everything they are and do, and begin to see numbers of them turning toward the

God of the Bible and the God -orientated life, then their preaching would begin to reflect that, and there would be hope.

But apart from those two things, I don't see hope. Well, I would say that the biggest burden on my heart, if indeed

I were in charge of my own life and could do what I felt urgent,

I would spend the rest of my day speaking to pastors. I believe that that is where the hope lies.

If pastors would rethink their own position and, as I said already, reorientate themselves toward God.

There's a sense in which this is a very hopeful season for that, because so many pastors are beaten down to such a low level that it's either a personal renewal or dropping out of the ministry.

But if pastors were to be, as I said, reorientated toward God and began to preach as they ought, then the prayer meeting of the church would revive, the whole view of the congregation toward holiness would alter.

They would dump all these cheap and shoddy methods of evangelism, and God could do a wonderful thing.

There is a multitude of that group of people in the various conferences where I'm privileged to preach.

They'll come and they'll say, this is the only inspiration, the only biblical food

I've had for ever so long. I believe that where many of them are making their mistake is that they have developed a negative spirit.

They see what's wrong in their church. They feel helpless to affect it.

I believe the impact comes from a person who is living what they believe.

When one's view of God has not only gripped their mind, but immensely impacted their whole life, that has its effect.

There are others who catch that. These people, for the most part, those that I've talked to, are not doing what they can.

They're wanting someone else to feed them. They're finding they don't have anybody in their community that's doing so.

They are languishing and taking these trips off here and there to hear something that they consider worthy.

I'm not in any way speaking against their doing that, but they ought to be so fervent in seeking

God themselves that they become radiant with the presence of Christ. Then I think they could have wonderful impact on their own home church.

Apart from that, they're just sort of like sores in the church. Pastors, for a while, are tolerant of these muttering people, but sooner or later they wish, why don't they just leave?

They're doing no good here. They're doing a lot of harm. I hope that somehow this series can impact those persons and lift their spirits and say, well, if nobody else joins me,

I'm going to do this. No one has been successful yet in persuading me that anything is really different today from what it was a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago.

I find people being affected by the very truth that affected the

Apostle Paul and David. My conviction is that we don't need any fresh approach or any new way.

We need to get back to the ancient ways. I believe the message of the gospel is unchanging because the nature of man is unchanging.

There are churches where I'm invited to preach where they have no

Sunday school, they have no program at all for youth or for children.

Everybody is together in the services. I find the children often listening with incredible intensity and asking the most urgent kind of questions and demonstrating in various ways their comprehension of the truth and their growing love of it.

At the same time, women and men of every age and circumstance in life, the message of the gospel,

I believe, is a universal message that appeals to every heart. When the message is presented with authenticity, when it is the true message and there's the accompaniment of power from on high, no number of new approaches is going to make any difference at all because the

Holy Spirit is not blessing every novelty that comes down the road.

He's not with every preacher who thinks he's discovered a fresh way of approaching people.

We have that incredible story in 2 Samuel 6 of David with the burden to bring the

Ark of the Covenant home. The Ark of the Covenant, as near as I can tell, was missing from its rightful place not less than 62 years.

David draws together a great crowd, I think some 30 ,000 who rushed with him down to get the

Ark, but they don't take the time to ask God how to do it.

Instead, in a sense, not that they literally asked the Philistines, but it's almost as if they did.

The Philistines moved it on a new cart, so David and Israel move it on a new cart.

God strikes the young boy dead who reaches out to steady it when it hits a bad place in the road.

When God strikes the boy dead, David flies into a rage and names the place

Perez as God has made a breach among us today. But later,

David came to his senses and he realized we didn't do it right. We didn't carry it on the shoulders of the co -wives.

I believe that the great curse upon us is we think if we have some of the truth right, it's up to us to introduce that truth to the people by any methodology that we think works.

And with all the changes, with all the innovations, with all the novelty approaches and even messages, things grow steadily worse.

We have not had an upturn in 40 years, as far as I can see, and things are steadily going downward.

The upturn will come when we come back to the Word of God and back to the power of the

Holy Spirit and forget all about methods and simply do what God told us to do.

If the other things worked, we might feel we had some responsibility to at least think about them, but they don't work.

They gather crowds but they don't result in conversions. They certainly have not turned a downside into an uprise.

So why bother with them at all? It's a bit similar to the whole situation with novelty doctrine.

People are forever asking me, what do you think about this or what do you think about that? And my standard response is, what year was that introduced?

Oh, I'm not sure, maybe 1840. Well, what do you want anything to do with anything that came around 1844?

Let's go back to the beginning and I think that's the answer to that matter.

I have been observing, this may not be completely accurate, but I have been observing that you could pretty well divide the population, the church population, into three groups.

The aged, say 65 and older, the young, we'll just say 35 and under, and then the middle.

My observation is the aged love the ancient way. Probably the most common comment to me when

I preach is, oh, that was wonderful. I haven't heard a sermon like that for 56 years or some such thing as that.

The young people, I find, are incredibly interested in the truth. They hate falsehood.

Hypocrisy just makes them boil inside. Anything truly authentically

Christian interests them. The problem is that group in the middle who are so caught up in gold and goods, in security, in fun, that somehow they don't have time for God.

But I think we can disregard them. If God's going to save them, he's capable of it.

We'll preach to them. We'll pour our hearts to them. But let's focus on those who are ready to hear the truth.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the whole concept of the Lord's day over against the

Lord's hour. In a typical church situation, if the service is not over in an hour, it is thought to have made itself worthless.

You got to cram it into an hour. But what's wrong with a service that takes all day?

What's wrong with the concept of the Lord's day? Same to me again, in just a little area like that, just getting back to the beginning and saying

God did not design things so that we gave him one hour out of the week.

He deserves a full day and a whole lot more as well.

I'm not myself able in a flash of a moment to think of anybody in the

Christian religion who is literally worshiping idols. I'm sure that there are some, but they're hardly the major issue.

But there are multitudes who are caught up in a message that is theirs, not

God's, in a method theirs, not God's. In a belief system, making

God, as I've already stated, more of a Santa Claus than the

God of eternity, it seems all of those are areas of idolatry.

The difficulty that we're facing is that it's not really profitable to speak against idolatry in the present setting, any more than it's profitable to speak on any of the

Ten Commandments. In order for any teaching or preaching on the commandments on the issue of idolatry to be effective, there's got to be the knowledge of a

God who has the right to insist that all of that sort of thing be eliminated.

Because we are in the grip of this grievously low view of God, we obviously are in the grip of all kinds of idolatrous beliefs and practices.

We deal with idolatry on the same way that we deal with sin, and with pride in particular.

Come back to the God of the Bible. Certainly, when you get a true view of the

God of the Bible, there is a sense of fear that accompanies that, a fear lest you go in the direction that others have gone in idolatrous practices or beliefs.

But if your view of God is not right, it's not going to be possible to correct the problem of idolatry.

I remember from years ago, a young man attended with regularity a serious prayer meeting

I was leading, an early morning prayer meeting, not anything he could just sort of trip into.

It's something you have to set your heart to be part of. He came steadily for about a year,

I believe. He came to me after the prayer meeting one morning. He said, Mr.

Roberts, I'm not sure what to do. I said, what are you making reference to? Well, he said, you know,

I've been in the prayer meeting for a year now and nothing's happened. Well, I said, that's a matter of opinion.

I don't believe that's true. I believe a great deal has happened. But what do you have in mind?

Well, he said, we've been praying for revival and no revival has occurred. I'm wondering what to do.

So I said to him, will you be praying for revival a year from now? And he got very indignant.

He said, that's the trouble with you, Mr. Roberts. Somebody asked you a question, you turn right around and give it back to them.

That's why people don't like to talk to you. Well, I said, answer the question. Will you be praying for revival a year from now?

Well, I tell you, I don't know. I said, now look, God, when you started praying for revival, knew that you had not set your heart on revival.

Now, why should he have paid any attention to your prayers over the last year? Then I cited

James chapter 1, the double -minded man, unstable in all his ways, not that man think he shall receive anything from the

Lord. I believe the church is cursed with a double -mindedness.

We want to worship God. We want to be holy. We want the presence of God in our midst, but we also want this and that and the other.

We've never made up our minds. And it's not until your mind is made up that prayer has any significance whatsoever.

And just coming under a spirit of concern, well, I know

I haven't been using the Bible rightly, and I think I should do better.

Maybe now for the next week or two, I'll be more diligent in seeking

God in Scripture. That isn't going to make any difference. These little improvements soon turn down again.

But when the heart is set, God is worthy of my love, of my life.

I am not going to waste another month fiddling around thinking maybe the day will come when

I'll become more sincere. I don't think we've paid adequate attention to the first and greatest commandment.

My observation is that multitudes who have something of a

Christian attitude are balking seriously at the notion of loving

God with all of the heart, with all of the soul, with all of the strength, with all of the mind.

It's when our view of God rises incredibly high that we begin to sense how worthy he is of our love.

So our devotion is immensely impacted by our view of God, that when we entertain this low view of God, we question even the necessity or the wisdom of loving

God. So somebody says, oh, well, I kind of love God. Well, do you love him with all your heart?

Well, no, I don't suppose I would state it quite that way, but I do love

God. So I'm with a man who's living in adultery.

He's a preacher of the gospel. I confront him with the absolute impossibility of loving

God and living in adultery. And he says, well, you see, now this may not be generally known, but the truth is

I'm an exceptional man, truly red -blooded, very viral.

God knows me. He's made a provision in my case that an extra woman or two is acceptable.

I mean, I've had that actually said to me by someone in ministry.

Now, that kind of a view exists because there is this degraded view of God.

And it's not until we return to a high view of God that we'll even become serious about the subject of loving

God. And until we love God, we're not going to see anything happen of any magnitude and importance that brings glory to God.