Our Canadian Christian Heritage Under Fire #2 - Modernism Wrecking Churches — Ian Goligher

Canada’s Transformation from 1900 to 2000

Tonight, we sweep again across some of the history of this nation, and we're going to do a little bit of comparing between the beginning of the 20th century, the turning into 1900, and the year 2000. And I think that you can agree with me that that century, that 100-year period, has been a century of vast and tremendous changes in this nation in so many ways.

The population itself, vastly different. In 1900, the total population of Canada was just under 5 million people. And so the present-day population of Toronto, greater Toronto, would be the total population of Canada in 1900.

Today, there is somewhere over 30 million living in this dominion. Then, in national heritage, in the year 1900, colonialism was really the main heritage of Canadians, and that was the backbone of national life.

And at that time, of course, the English throne, the English parliament, and the English laws were predominant and very much rejoiced in by Canadians at that time. Due to that, Canadians have supported the British Empire and country through two world wars, sacrificing thousands and thousands of our young, finest men to go in defense of the British Isles and in Europe.

Today, in the year 2000, not colonialism is the moving spirit, but pluralism is the moving spirit of this nation. And Canada today is a mosaic. It has been described as a nation of nations. And one key distinctive between our country and the U .S. to the south of us, that in the United States, it is a melting pot.

Everyone is expected to assimilate and to adopt America as their homeland and be loyal to that country and not be a hyphenated citizen. But in Canada, our immigrants are not, to the most degree, melting into the Canadian paradigm.

But rather, there is this mosaic. You can still maintain your motherland nationality and be Canadian. You can live side by side, equally, with those of other nationalities, other cultures, and even other languages and other religions, and you are as important and you are as equal as any other within this nation.

Pluralism, Relativism, and the Loss of Objective Truth

The fruit of that ideology was in our newspaper yesterday in the plan to build a huge statue of Buddha in Richmond. And you may have seen the comparisons with the Statue of Liberty. You may have seen how it will be a very sizable statue, very visible for many miles around.

And this is Canada today. Pluralism. You can be Buddhist, you can flaunt that, you can promote that, and yet live alongside your Canadian citizen of another religion without shame, without hindrance, without danger, ostracism, and be accepted in this society.

Now, this seems a wonderful idea, a social experiment of which there is none the like in any part of the world to this date. The difficulty is that in this nation, truth is based upon a man's opinion.

Truth is based upon what an individual thinks. And last week I dwelt a little bit about individualism, and that leads to neutralism, and neutralism leads to polytheism, and we end up with a nation of idolatry, a nation of many gods, and all are given the same standing, the same stature.

An author called Reginald Bibby concluded that this spirit of individual opinion as freedom and pluralism leads to relativism. And I give you this little quote, it's not mine, so I'm going to be above board here and quote this clearly.

The only truth that is everything is relative. Cultural relativism is accepted as a given, and those who dare to assert that their culture is best are dubbed as ethnocentric. That means that their nationality is the only one that matters.

Those who dare to assert that they have the truth are labeled bigots. Truth has been replaced by a personal viewpoint, and that is the spirit of Canadians today. Now in 1900, Canadians did not think that way.

Most were either locked into traditional values, which certainly amongst Protestant churches were orthodox values on morality, on the social values, and few dared to question the Bible, and few dared to question the church.

And so at that time there was stability, there was community based on those traditional values. So Canada today has greatly changed in its way of thinking, and you know, and I know, that as you try to witness the gospel in Canada, this is the response.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion, I'm entitled to mine. And that is very much to the fore in the education system of today, that's the humanist agenda, and youth are receiving that all the time in our educational system.

Urbanization, Affluence, and Declining Church Attendance

Another huge change in Canada is in demographics. In 1900, approximately 80 people lived rurally, on farms or in the country, and only 20 lived in city life. Today, give or take a little, that has totally reversed.

There are now 80 of people living in larger population centers, and approximately 20 living in rural areas. And that switch would seem to continue, that trend would seem to continue due to manufacturing, also due to immigrants coming to this country are more inclined to settle in larger population areas than they are in the country.

And so Canada has shifted from being basically a rural people, whose lives centered around the church and their school community, to now city dwellers, who have so many alternatives, so many choices, so many opportunities to utilize their time, to the point that church attendance today is at a record low.

And it has been estimated that only 11 of Canadians attend a church even a minimum of one hour per week. And so today, the interest in church, the interest in the things of God is very low. Another vast change is in the area of economics.

In 1900, Canada was very much a pioneer's country. It was a place to arrive, to eke out a living, and to establish things. And especially in the prairies and west, the infrastructure of this country was still being set up.

And so most people subsisted on smaller incomes and with less material goods. Today, in the year 2000, we have a very affluent society. And to try and just hammer this home, could you imagine taking someone who lived in 1900 and died in 1900, and then just bringing them back to life and taking them to a modern appliance store, like a future shop or somewhere, and you take them for a walk around, and they see this big wall of televisions, they'd never had a television.

They see computers, they'd never known such a thing. They see washing machines, never known such a thing. They see dishwashers, PDAs, unheard of, unknown. In 1900, they didn't have cars, didn't have electricity, didn't have telephone, and life has changed dramatically.

And yet today, as people go to these appliance centres, these are must-haves. People think they're deprived if they don't have one of every sort of these things. So we're living in a very affluent society in comparison to the year 1900.

The Decline of Orthodox Christianity in Canada

Now that has an impact upon the spiritual mindset of a population. And people who have so much materially don't want to hear of the grace of God and the needs of their soul. Then we narrow this down to the area that we really want to talk about tonight, and that is Orthodox Christianity.

In 1900, the major Protestant churches held, by and large, to clear-cut Reformation doctrines. Their creeds, their form of worship, their evangelical doctrine and outreach was sound. You can read of the endeavours, as we learned last week in the City of Toronto, of mission work, city missions, missions to native peoples in this country, overseas missionary work, and their desire was to propagate the Christian gospel in all its fullness and Orthodox position.

Today, a hundred years later, we have the unthinkable in those very same mainline churches. We have those sins that were, I suppose, not unknown, but certainly unimaginable to the churchgoer, now being encouraged and tolerated.

And, unfortunately, Canada has promoted within their church circles things that grieve any Bible believer. And this spirit of pluralism that is in the secular world, this idea that we're a nation of nations, we are a culture of various cultures, we are a people with all kinds of ideas forming a mosaic in this country, that same spirit has come into Christian churches, has come into, certainly, the mainline Christian churches.

And the tragedy is that the Canadian mainline churches have been at the forefront of pressuring the social engineering of this country. They have been the people promoting the agenda of the mosaic way of life.

The churches have been the experimental ground for secular society. The churches have found a new mission to promote high tolerance for all peoples, all religions, all cultures, and in that, promoting that change, departing from Orthodox Christianity.

T. T. Shields, Canada’s “Spurgeon”

Now, so you might be asking, where did the churches go wrong? And that is really what we want to take a look at this evening. Now, I'm not going to go down the line of denomination. They have their own history.

They have their own timeline of truth and evangelistic effort turning to apostasy. What I want to do tonight is to talk about a Canadian Spurgeon. I'm sure you know and have heard of, the Reverend C .H. Spurgeon, the City of London, England.

He was called the Prince of Preachers. He had a long ministry of preaching in the same pulpit in London to the same congregation from 19 years of age until the year he died, I believe he was 57 years old.

So, he had a long ministry and he saw in those years revival in the City of London. These were the days of poverty and social change in England. And through those years of ministry, Mr. Spurgeon saw great things done for God.

As a preacher, as a writer, as a builder of orphanages, a man who God greatly blessed in that country. Now, what if we had a Spurgeon in Canada? What if we had such a ministry in this country? Well, we have had such a man.

His name is Dr. T .T. Shields of Toronto. He preached for 45 years in the Jervis Street Baptist Church in the City of Toronto. He is one of Canada's outstanding Baptists. This shows you that I'm not as narrow-minded as some people have thought.

I can hear, speak warmly and delight in the grace of God in one who baptizes with great zeal. Hallelujah! I wish that I had all the souls to baptize that Dr. T .T. Shields had to baptize. That we were seeing the souls saved today that he saw through the years of his ministry.

Dr. Shields was a Bible teacher. He believed in the doctrines of grace. In other words, he was a Calvinist. He believed in the sovereignty of God and the salvation of men. In a volume of his midweek lectures called The Doctrines of Grace, it is evident from reading through that, that there was a man that was steeped in the glorious doctrines of the Gospel and delighted in preaching the fullness of Christ to all who would come to hear the message of salvation.

Shields’s Evangelistic Influence and Fundamentalist Leadership

He was an evangelist in one summer campaign held in Massey Hall in Toronto when he invited J. Frank Norris, an American fundamentalist preacher, to come and preach a campaign. It is said that during that summer, and I couldn't learn how many weeks the campaign ran, but during that term of special effort in Massey Hall in Toronto, there were a turnover of 50 ,000 people.

Now, I use the word turnover to make it clear that there was not 50 ,000 at any one particular meeting. But over that time, there were 50 ,000 people that attended at least once at that campaign. Now, in those days when Toronto's population was much smaller than today, that was a sizable number of the local population to come to hear the preaching of the Gospel.

Dr. Shields was also a controversialist and a contender for the faith. He is important to us tonight because he fought against the modernism that was creeping into Canadian churches in his time. Starting 1910, 1920.

Modernism’s Attack on Biblical Supernaturalism

Now, modernism, just to broaden our understanding here a little bit, modernism was a new way of treating the Bible. You and I tonight, I hope, are Bible believers. We say we believe the Bible from cover to cover, and hallelujah, we believe the cover too.

We have no interest in quizzing and questioning the authenticity of any book of the Bible, of any chapter of the Bible, of any verse of the Bible. We believe in its canonicity, that it begins here and it ends there.

We believe in its verbal inspiration, word for word, the very word of the living God. Even when I don't understand it, even when my little mind has no understanding of the implications of these statements, that statement is God's Word to me, and it's my task to pray and study and yearn that I grow to know the mind of God in His Word.

Modernism, very different. It was the scissor approach to the Bible, and it believed in cutting out the supernatural. It believed in taking out the miracles and explaining them away. They did not want a miracle-working Christ.

They did not want a Bible that was miraculously inspired. And modernism from one of the first modernists in North America was a man called Harry Emerson Fosdick. In New York, he was the first Robert Schuller of North America.

If you ever listen to Robert Schuller, you will get the kind of ministry that Fosdick was bringing upon the world. And tragically, in the name of scholarship, this modernism was like an evil leaven permeating Bible schools and seminaries.

Young men were coming forth with this new approach. To the Bible. This was all happening in the heyday of Dr. T .T. Shields in Toronto. It raised its head in McMaster University as early as 1910. Dr. Shields, who was an influential member of the Baptist Convention at that time, raised the flag of warning, and it would appear that at that time certain safeguards were put in place.

Then the First World War broke out, and the issue seemed to sit on the back burner, but it did not go away. And later, he brought allegations of modernism through one particular professor at McMaster University in Toronto, and they weren't being listened to.

And when he turned up the heat of protest against particular professors that were destroying young men that were being sent to seminary by godly parents to have them trained as preachers and teachers of the Word of God, T .T. Shields protested at the Baptist Convention until in 1927 they turned him out.

They didn't want to hear him anymore. They were tired of his charges, and they shut him out of the convention. And that was not going to be the end of Dr. Shields because that led to the formation of the Union of Regular Baptist Churches in Ontario and Quebec, and Dr. Shields became the president of that convention.

And they also commenced the seminary right in his own church in Jarvis Street that would supply the future preachers of that convention. Now in 1923, I'm going back just a little bit on this one. On this issue of modernism, Dr. Shields formed what was known as the Bible Baptist Union with like-minded American fundamentalists, of which Shields again was elected as president.

They as a union or an association of like-minded fundamentalists drew up a short statement of their fundamental beliefs of the very bare minimum as an evangelical, you must adhere to, to be a fundamentalist.

The Five Fundamentals of Christian Doctrine

And with a little bit of paring down, it came really down to five particular tenets. Now to you and me here tonight, you would say, boy, that seems to be just some discipline work. But let's hear just these five particular tenets.

The inerrancy of the Bible, no error in the Bible, simple as that. The virgin birth and deity of our Lord Jesus Christ, miraculously born. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the blood, the finished work of Calvary.

Fourthly, the bodily resurrection of our Lord, that he truly did ascend into the presence of the Father. And the fifth one, the bodily return, second coming of our Lord Jesus. Five points. Now, these fundamentalists, some were dispensationalists, some were reformed, some hardly knew their theology very well.

But these five very basic points of Christian doctrine would sort out the men from the boys. Those who believed in the miracle and the supernatural of the gospel, and those who were modernists. Now, Dr. Shields at that time, just to show you how this weeded out many at that time, he became chairman of the board acting as the president of the Baptist Bible Union's newly purchased Des Moines University in 1927.

Seems that he chaired quite a number of faculties and was a no extraordinary man. But when they set up that university or more or less bought it over, this was trouble. Because the faculty in the departments of chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics left almost immediately.

They objected to their statement of faith with all the faculty members were required to sign. Since it included a highly articulated clause on creation and stipulated belief in the direct creation, not only of human, but also vegetable and animal life.

So, if you're going to serve in that university, you needed to be a creation. You needed to believe in the miraculous beginning of the world, a six day creation. But that faculty designed, they were not prepared, they were not creation.

So, the leaven of modernism had already done its work. And as they took over that university, they ended up having to close it. The faculty design would not serve under that creed. And so, Dr. Shields had ongoing battles with modernism in churches and seminaries.

Shields’s Wider Defense of Fundamentalism

In 1941, he protested in Parliament Hill in Ottawa against the very first day of the Roman Catholic mass. He protested vigorously. You may ask, was he a loner? Was he an eccentric man to the point where just nobody would line up with him?

The answer to that is no, he wasn't. He was actually invited to England in 1934 to preach at the centenary of the birth of C .H. Spurgeon. He was, in 1940s, invited by a number of Toronto clergymen, Baptist, Anglican, Presbyterian, Salvation Army churches.

And they founded the Canadian Protestant League and asked Dr. Shields to be the president of it. So, he wasn't a loner. He was a contender. He was unflinchable in his contending for the faith. But there were many who were thankful for his leadership, even beyond his own particular congregation, which I should say, from the time that he took on its ministry, doubled in numbers.

He regularly preached to over 2 ,000 people in Jarvis Street Baptist Church. The man was not just a ranter and a raver. He was not just someone that was so eccentric, you would only want to hear him once and then never want to hear him again.

There were people who sat under his ministry for years and years and his church grew through those controversies and battles for the faith. In 1948, when the World Council of Churches was formed and the battle was on in a more global way to defend against ecumenism, he assisted to form the ICCC, the International Council of Christian Churches, along with Dr. Carl MacIntyre.

And in that year, they raised the banner against the ecumenical trend. Now, Dr. Shields died in 1955. He was shunned at that time by a number of evangelicals, even Baptists, but he was loved by his own church and by many fundamentalists in North America and around the world.

Lessons from Shields’s Example and the Advance of Modernism

He was a contender, a separatist for the cause of the gospel and he believed, in what we read tonight in the book of Jude, in contending earnestly for the faith once delivered. Now, I have used Dr. T .T. Shields tonight because, number one, I think not nearly enough Christians know about him.

And secondly, I think we need to correct the idea that he was an eccentric. Eccentric, for the Lord, can always be bad. He certainly believed in turning the world upside down and not following the trends of modernism and new thinking in this country.

He believed the book and he preached Christ with all his heart, with all the fullness that God could give to him. I want us tonight to take some lessons from his example and from the trends that we see that developed during those years.

Now, I did say a couple of weeks ago, even last week, that we would get to talk about a Bible school in North America or in Canada, within a thousand miles of here, that had a thousand students at its peak time.

We'll have to wait till next week to get to that one. We'll have to wait to give that due justice. What I want to do next week is put you into that Bible school and give you a taste of what it's like to be in its daily schedule and see what kind of Christian that school was trying to produce.

But the number of lessons that we have from this tonight, I think, are very important to us. Number one, I think you'll see that in the 1900s, evangelical Christianity in Canada was changing very rapidly.

From traditional steadfast orthodoxy in all the mainline churches and evangelical movement to the rapid influx of modernism to the dividing line of men who would stand on the fundamentals and those who would go in the modernistic trend.

To be a fundamentalist by 1950, you were no longer in the mainstream of evangelicalism in this country, but rather in the minority. And Dr. Shields was willing to separate from those unfaithful to the very basics of Christianity.

Now, that is where we have to stand today. Because if that was the issue 50, 60 years ago, I can assure you that modernism has advanced and has been at work in this land to a wider, wider extent than at that time.

You could say modernism was in its seed form then. It was still mostly in the seminary, not yet full blown in the churches. Today, churches have been destroyed and the gospel has been rejected and ejected because of that leaven of modernism.

Preaching the Gospel Without Surrendering Orthodoxy

And so we have to stand today, although we're living in a pluralistic society, we are living in this Canadian mosaic experiment. And we're not out to fight the social changes directly as dead leaves on the tree.

Our task is to preach the gospel to every creature. Colour makes no difference. Nationality makes no difference. Rich or poor. Learned or unlearned. Our task is to reach men with the gospel of the Lord Jesus.

But we're not going to sell out orthodoxy, the fundamentals of the gospel to do it. We must not. And while we can be a Canadian and in some uncertain elements rejoice in the acceptance of all peoples in this country, that we can rejoice in the freedoms of religion and the liberties that are enjoyed by all peoples in this country, that does not mean when it comes to my preaching, the gospel that we present, that we're going to become pluralist and say, oh, it doesn't matter if you have a Buddha.

It doesn't matter if you worship another God or not. This is truth. This is truth. And I say, as last week, I'm not here tonight to preach my opinion. I gave up my opinion 30 years ago the night I got saved.

My opinion ceased. What I wanted, what I stood for counted nothing when I came to the cross. Now I am a slave of the cross. I am a preacher of the gospel. I have no apology that this is the only way of salvation.

And Jesus Christ is the only savior of sinners. God had one son and he gave him into this world. This book, the written word, presents to us the living word. I am not to change the message of the gospel one iota because I live in a pluralistic society where the in vogue trend is to be all things to all men.

Now, I'm not going to persecute other people of other faiths. I have neighbors of other persuasions. I live in this mosaic in my area as much as any other Canadian. Well, maybe not. Maybe there are some people that have more nationalities immediately around them than I have.

But we're in the same spirit of Canada. And as we seek to evangelize in the Canada of today, which is very different from the Canada of 1900, we must be as steadfast, as fundamental, orthodox to the gospel as our spiritual forefathers who have gone before us to preach the gospel and preach the Bible.

We must get back to the Bible and we must not enter into this neutralism. Now, the root, the extension of pluralism in evangelical circles today is what I would call the explosion of community churches.

Community Churches and Doctrinal Shallowness

Community churches are not all bad. It's possible that people can go to a community church, hear something of the gospel and they can live for God. But here's the ideology behind the community church.

It is a mile wide in seeking to attract all manner of men. And it's an inch deep substance, an inch deep of doctrine. And the modern trend in evangelicalism today, if you want to be a big church, if you want to be a growing church in the Canadian mosaic society, you have to have this common denominator on everything pleases.

You bring your opinions, your ideas. We're not heavy on doctrine. We just want to have fun in the spurt. That's the new trend in the typical community church, and I'll call it a neo-evangelical church.

This clear-cut position on the fundamentals, back in T .T. Shields' time, caused a separation, a clear divide. Fundamentalists versus modernists. That's the history of the church in this country. Now, one big question is, T .T. Shields drew his line in the sand.

Cooperation with Churches That Reject the Fundamentals

Five fundamentals. Do you believe these clear doctrines of the gospel? I'm not asking for picky little details. The big five essentials of the gospel. Can you subscribe to these? If so, I can preach with you.

I can pray with you. I can labor with you in the gospel. If not, we cannot stand together on the same platform under the banner of the cross and preach two different gospels. That was the clear line that was drawn.

But one big question is, what do you do about those who will not subscribe to the fundamentals of the faith? They are self-professed modernists. They are leading their people away from the scriptures and further into error, perhaps to damnation, should there be cooperation in any way.

What do you think of that question? How would you respond? Does it not seem very clear that the person who wants to contend for the faith, be faithful to the word of God, have a clear structure in which he serves the Lord?

You've got to draw that line. Now, if that church or organization down the road will not subscribe to these very basic doctrines, the inerrancy of scripture, the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, the blood atonement, the supernatural resurrection and bodily return of the Lord Jesus, those very basics, can I go down the road and join with them?

Can we enter into a united effort in the gospel? That leads me in this series to something that I can't really leave out if I wanted to and that is the influence of the Billy Graham organization in Canadian evangelical circles.

Billy Graham and Evangelical Cooperation

Now, I know Billy Graham is an American, but his movement, his way of ministering in this day of two camps, fundamentalists versus modernists, what Dr. Billy Graham did back in 1950s when he was invited to the same city to preach for fundamentalists versus the modernists, he chose to preach for the modernists.

And from that day, the line was drawn. Fundamentalists then could not have Dr. Billy Graham preaching with them because he lined himself up with the modernists back in 1955 in New York City. And from then on, the Billy Graham organization has built its ministry on full cooperation with any Christian church organization, including Roman Catholic.

Now, he made a decision and his organization went a certain direction. Now, I do believe Billy Graham and I believe to this day he holds to the five fundamentals. I would not accuse him of not being a fundamentalist in heart.

I cannot judge his heart, but I give him any benefit of the doubt. He professes to believe those five doctrines and I have seen no evidence that he has refuted any of those five essential doctrines. But he cooperates, has cooperated for many years with men who are modernists, who do reject those five fundamentals of the faith.

Now, it has been done in the name of evangelism and most people have said, well, if you can get a crowd and preach the gospel, that's the best thing to do. But we are now reaping in Canada the fruit of the Billy Graham compromise.

The compromise between a man whom I will accept is a believer of the fundamentals of the faith, but has compromised to cooperate with mainline churches and ministries, giving them a certain credence and the spin-off of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the example that they have set is that we now have untold ministries that are doing the same thing.

I wouldn't judge them as to the five fundamentals if they tell me they're believers in the essential doctrines of Christianity. I accept that. But in their evangelistic or ministry work, they cooperate fully with the Anglican church today, the United Church today, the Roman Catholic organization of today, right down the line.

So, we are in a position in 2004 where the stand of Dr. T .T. Shield as a fundamentalist has now become a very difficult stand for those who do wish to contend earnestly. And we're living in a nation when evangelicals, the vast majority of them are neo-evangelical.

They are not the old evangelicals as of Dr. T .T. Shield and others. We have in Canada a vast array of neo-evangelicals. Now, let me, in a nutshell, describe to you what a neo-evangelical is. A neo-evangelical professes to hold to Christian doctrine, but will not contend for it.

You will never hear them. You will never have them exposing error. You will never have them contending for doctrines that are being sold out by the modernists of today that have destroyed the churches.

We're not living in the ecumenical experiment anymore. We're not living and seeing what the seeds of modernism will really do in Canada. We do see it. And the results are abominable in our eyes. Why then do we have to ask?

Should we have any cooperation whatsoever with modernists? The neo-evangelical today says, I accept all under the umbrella of Christianity as fellow Christians, believers and servants of God. I will work with them.

I will not draw the line as a fundamentalist. And so they do not contend. They do not expose. They do not stand for the essential doctrines of the faith. And a generation is growing up and they know nothing about contending for the faith.

And young people, I'm going to say to you tonight as your pastor, this series of messages about Canada, its history and how come we're at in the generation that you're growing up on, this is for you. This is for your benefit.

This is for you to get your teeth into something that you might realize why it is a lonely stand to be a Bible-believing, contending Christian today. That you might understand what men and organizations have fought for and stood for down through the generations.

Jude’s Call to Contend for the Faith

Now, what does the Bible say about this? Are we right? Turning to Jude verse 3. Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, I want you to notice that there are not two salvations.

There's only one salvation. We are living in a pluralistic society, but there's no such thing as salvation plural. There's only one way to heaven. There's only one salvation. It was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you.

Couldn't avoid it. If I'm going to be a nice guy, I perhaps wouldn't have done it. But it was needful. And exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

Now, when did Jude live? He was the very first century. Not thousands of years later or hundreds of years later. He was in the very first century. And even from the beginning, the gospel of our Lord Jesus needed to be contended for.

Against what? What was the danger? Down at the end of verse four, we'll read it all. For there are certain men prepped in unawares who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness and denying the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Enemies creeping within, hijacking the church, and they come in. You'll notice that they're creepers, and they come in unawares. And in the Bible seminaries of our country, modernists crept in and they took the teaching chair positions in the seminaries, professed, subscribed to the doctrines of the seminary.

Then unawares started to teach another gospel, denying the fundamentals of the faith, the supernatural of the Bible and the essence of the gospel itself. And we have in the Bible this mandate, which is needful for us.

We can't avoid it. To contend earnestly for the faith against such that deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ. We are called to be contenders. Now, we're not to be obnoxious contenders. I am a little weary sometimes of the name fighting fundamentalists.

Sometimes people have the idea that you're not being faithful to God unless you're always in a fight, unless you're always in a protest, unless you're always in a controversy. I don't believe that. When issues come, we must take our stand.

And I believe we must do it out of love, love for the Savior himself, love for his church, love for the souls of men. Separatists, fundamentalists ought not to be motivated negatively, but rather it is because of this great gospel that we have been entrusted with.

And we are stewards of this gospel. And the generation of this day rising up requires that this gospel be handed down to them. If we feel what loss, grief, what darkness may prevail, we need to, as a congregation, as a denomination in this country, pray that God will give to us the power and the light to serve him in this thick Canadian mosaic, this social experiment that's going on in this country, that we may never lose sight of the gospel and never lose sight of our mandate to go into all the world and preach the gospel.

Let me tell you, we have a lot of work to do. We have a mountain to move. With the Lord, we can move mountains too. And I plead with everyone here tonight to recommit and dedicate yourself to the old gospel, not some new contemporary compromised message.

The gospel in all its fullness for a generation rising up in all its need. May we be found faithful in our day. And may the Lord give us a ministry when our work is done, that the light will burn on and glory will be to our Savior's name.

Let's conclude with a hymn, please. Number 592. 592. Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war.