Survival of Christianity — Vance Havner

The Church Militant and the Church Triumphant

I saw a book recently titled Survival of Christianity. It did not mean the survival of Christianity, because there isn't any question about that. The gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church, and that doesn't mean that the Church will stand the onslaughts of hell.

It means that hell won't stand a chance before the onward march of the Church. The Church militant will become the Church triumphant. We're not a beleaguered garrison in a besieged fortress waiting to be rescued.

Like a mighty army moves the Church of God, the only trouble is you wouldn't know it sometimes. The summer slump is coming. It won't be long now, and we're the only army on earth, the army of the Lord, that takes a three-month furlough in the middle of a war.

Bishop Arthur Moore used to say that the Lord's day had become the weekend. I get a lot of amusement out of these weather reports. They're all geared to the mountains and the seashore. You'd never think anybody went to church on Sunday.

I go to churches for meetings, and sometimes I haven't been there but a day or two until they say it's a bad week for the revival. When was there ever a good week for a revival? The circus will be here on Monday night, and the sons and daughters of I Will Arise will have a little get-together on Tuesday night.

Then the Ladies' Garden Club meets to discuss how to grow African violets, and there will be bowling, and on Friday night whatever kind of ball there is. I wonder if there ever was a good week for a revival.

A Faith That Overcomes the World

We need a new breed of Christians if we're to survive, but we're not here just to survive. We're here to surmount, and we're not here to endure the world or to enjoy it but to overcome it. This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.

If we're to have a faith that will not shrink though pressed by many a foe, we must develop a new church within the church, a sort of a Gideon's Band and a Master's Minority like the remnant in Malachi and the anyones in Revelation who will hear his voice and open the door and live in fellowship with the risen Christ.

If we don't get hold of God's survival kit, we'll never make it as victorious Christians in a vicious generation such as this one. What is the issue anyhow? What's it all about? The greatest issue of all time has never caught the attention of the news media or of Congress or the U .N. or the universities or the scientific centers.

It was stated a long time ago by Pontius Pilate when he said, What shall I do then with Jesus who is called Christ? This is the crisis, John 3 .19. It says there this is the condemnation, but the word in the original is crisis.

The only difference is it's spelled with a K. And what is the crisis? That light has come into the world and men love the darkness rather than light because they're deep serene. I wish people knew John 3 .19 as well as they knew John 3 .16 because this is what it's all about.

God has visited this world in the person of his son and we're all on the spot because everybody must do something about Jesus Christ. There is no such thing as doing nothing about Jesus Christ. He that believeth is not condemned and he that believeth not is condemned already because he hath not believed in the name of Jesus Christ.

He himself said, He that is not with me is against me and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad. When Jesus came to earth, he faced two forces, paganism on one hand and Phariseeism on the other.

The Danger of Religious Phariseeism

And his worst trouble was not from paganism but from organized religion because the spearhead of that movement that put him on the cross was people who read the Bible, went to church, prayed in public, all of them tithers, lived separated lives, tried to win others and never knew Jesus Christ.

And he himself said to them, The publicans and harlots shall go into the kingdom of God before you. And yet out of that very Phariseeism came the greatest gospel preacher of all time who called himself a Pharisee of the Pharisees and on his way, as you've just heard read a moment ago, to put the church out of business because he was under orders of the religious order of his time.

He met Jesus Christ in a head-on collision and spent the rest of his time putting churches in order. That was the way it turned, and it came out of Phariseeism, converted Phariseeism. If the issue is Jesus Christ, and it was because I read that he was baptized and began to preach that he is the Son of God, the issue is who is Jesus Christ.

There are only two questions. Who are you, Lord, and what do you want me to do? Who is Jesus Christ? He himself asked the question, Whom do men say that I am? And they said, Well, some say you're a prophet.

But then he asked, Who do you say I am? And Peter said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus said to him, You didn't get that by reason, you got it by revelation. Flesh and blood doth not reveal this unto you, but my Father in heaven and upon this rock I build my church.

At the temptation the devil said, If thou be the Son of God, command these stones to be made bread. John 9 .35, the blind man who was healed was asked, Dost thou believe on the Son of God? That was the test of it.

The pneumoniac in Mark 5 .7, What have I to do with thee, thou Son of God, the Most High? The Ethiopian eunuch said, I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and they baptized him immediately. John 19 .7, when Jesus was put on trial, his enemy said he ought to die because he made himself to be the Son of God.

Jesus Christ: More Than a Moral Teacher

That's what it's all about. He is he who he claims to be. See as Lewis said, A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic on the level with a man who says he's a poached egg or a devil of hell.

Either this man is the Son of God or else he is a madman or something worse. We can shut him up for a fool, spit at him, kill him as a demon, or else fall at his feet and call him the Son of God. But let us not come to him with this patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He has not left that option to us. He did not intend to. That is the statement that led Elton Trueblood, who has preached in this pulpit, to make a turnaround in his own theology according to his own biography.

And Cook Coulson said either he is God or a lunatic. There is no better way of rejecting him altogether than to remake him into something he wasn't or something he isn't. Thomas Jefferson made himself a New Testament out of the sayings of Jesus, what he liked about it.

And Jefferson said the sum of all religion is expressed by its best teacher, love God and thy neighbor, and contains no mystery. I wonder if he had never read, great is the mystery of godliness, God was manifest in the flesh, justified of the spirit, seen of angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, received up into glory.

And Jefferson also said Jesus never believed that he had any other than human excellence, because of course Jefferson was just a theist, a deist. America started with a double heritage. We got half of it from the pilgrims and the Puritans and out of the Reformation, and the other half from Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and the Enlightenment and the perfectibility of human nature.

And to this day we're divided in this country between the two crowds, the one crowd, the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man crowd, and the other, the gospel and the church of the born again crowd.

The Gospel Cannot Be Reduced to Self-Improvement

The devil is delighted to have people settle for Jesus Christ, the mark. They're satisfied with the paragon, but not with the propitiation. When Jesus hung on the cross, his enemies said, let him come down from the cross, we'll believe him.

Certainly they would. They would today. Not necessary, they say, to be washed in the blood and regenerated by the Spirit. Just be a positive thinker and realize your great potential. That's the new note.

You cannot whittle down Jesus Christ to your own little image of who you think he is. When the rich young ruler came to him and said, good master, my Lord said, there is none good but God, and the preachers have argued about that ever since.

What did Jesus mean? Well, he simply meant, are you calling me good or are you calling me God? We must take him on his own terms. There aren't any other options. Jesus Christ is not standing with his hat in his hand like a marked-down bargain on an auction block to be accepted by us at our terms, but at his terms.

When the early church was having so much trouble, you remember that Gamaliel stood up and made a speech which I used to think was quite a good speech, but I decided later that he was the greatest compromiser of his day.

He said, we've had insurrectionists and troublemakers before, we had Thudas and we had Judas, and this will all blow over, so let's see what happens. But Jesus Christ is not Thudas and Judas. You don't compare Jesus Christ with anybody.

No mortal can with him compare among the sons of men. Fairer is he than all the fire that fill the heavenly train. It's fashionable these days to call God in for special occasions, political campaigns, ball games, business advantages.

It's always a good thing to be a church member, looks good on your obituary after you're dead. But Jesus Christ is not on call to lend a religious aura and put a halo on human endeavor. We have a new word we haven't had in many years, additive.

Everything has an additive today. But Jesus Christ is not an additive to what you already have, your education, your personality, your prestige. That was the trouble with Nicodemus. Nicodemus said, now I'm a teacher of the law, and if I can just add what he has to what I have, I'll have it made.

Jesus said, I'm not a new chapter in your book. We begin a new book. You must be born again. And may I say to you this morning, if you're what you've always been, you're not a Christian. A Christian's not what he's always been.

Something has happened. The rich young ruler was beset with this same trouble. He said, I've been a good boy. I have marks to my credit. Now, I'd like to find out how to get eternal life, and if I can add that to what I already have, I've got it made.

Jesus said, you sell out what you already have. We start over. And in Luke 9, when those three disciples, or prospective disciples, said they wanted to follow him, you remember the second man said, I must go bury my father.

Well, his father wasn't really dead, but it was the custom to stay around until the father passed away and attend to those matters. But Jesus said, let the dead bury their own dead. You go and preach.

That's the way one of our new translations has it, and it's exactly what he said, because if he had gone back home to stay until his father died, he would have gotten over the inspiration, the glory would have faded, and he never would have followed.

And the next man said, I'll follow you, but I want to go bid the family goodbye. Well, what's wrong with that? But Jesus said, no man having put his hand to the plow and looking back to the kingdom of God.

If you go home to mix with the family, they'll tone you down, and they'll say, don't get excited over this new preacher. This will all blow over. If you forget everything else that I say this morning, remember this.

Jesus Christ Must Have First Place

Jesus Christ never comes next. He is Alpha and Omega. He's the first and the last, but he's not playing second fiddle to anything. He's not an additive. There are two absolutes today, the written word of God in the scripture and the living word of God in the Savior.

They're not additives, they're absolutes. Now, there's a corollary to that. If Jesus Christ is who he claimed to be, I must accept him on his terms about himself and on his terms about myself. Lord, what would you have me to do?

Not only what he claims to be, but what he requires me to be. We cannot settle for a modified, abridged, watered-down Christian life that leaves out what I don't want to do and what I don't want to be and lets me be my kind of Christian.

He didn't give us that option. Some people tell us today, now, I don't want to get too deep in this religion business. I don't mind being baptized and joining the church and paying my church dues and going when I feel like it, but I'm not going too deep in this religion business.

May I say to all such, if you're not going all out, you may as well stay out. I'm not marking down the price of discipleship to get a lot of half-hearted, half-time, fair-weather followers. Jesus didn't.

I'm not wasting my time recruiting that kind of volunteers. No dictator ever demanded what Jesus Christ demanded. Charlemagne, Caesar, Hitler, no dictator ever demanded what he did. But the difference is, he has a right to.

Love so amazing, so divine, demands what? My soul, my life, my all. That just about takes it all in, doesn't it? And he does. Love so amazing. Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me. I've read of a grandfather who had a habit of taking his young grandson with him on little trips around the place.

One day he asked the youngster to go along, and the boy asked, where are you going? Granddad took off without him. When he came back, the youngster asked, why didn't you take me? He said, you wanted to know where you were going.

If you had wanted to go with me, it wouldn't have mattered where I was taking you. May I say this morning, if you really want to walk with Jesus Christ, you're ready to sing, anywhere with Jesus I can safely go.

Anywhere he leads me in this world below. Complete sellout, lock, stock, and barrel. Jesus Christ doesn't want compliments. He wants commitment, not smile and condescension to accept him. We always use the term, accept Christ.

I can't find it in the New Testament. I find, come, receive, believe, follow. The big question is, will he accept us? Thank God he will, because he said, him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.

The Christian Life as Christ Living in His People

If Jesus Christ is who he is, it follows that his disciples must be a different breed from the rest of the human race, because Paul said that the preaching of the gospel is foolishness, moronic, really, that's where you get the word moron, moronic to this present world.

And if you believe this moronic doctrine, as the world calls it, if you believe it, the foolishness of God and the foolishness of preaching, not the preaching of foolishness, but the foolishness of preaching, as Paul called it, that will automatically make you, in the eyes of this world, a fool, because they go together.

Billy Graham said Jesus never promised that believers would be anything else than a minority swimming against the stream of the world's thinking, those who really mean business or business. It means a lot more than glibly singing to the old rugged cross, I'll ever be true.

It's shame and reproach gladly bear, and then we feed on TV garbage all week and return next Sunday to saying Jesus is all the world to me. Christians are a persecuted minority, scorning the values of this world and living by stringent discipline.

There's never been a culture since Christianity began in which a Christian can feel at home, because we're exiles and aliens, pilgrims and strangers. We are not citizens of earth trying to get to heaven.

We're citizens of heaven trying to get through this world. But you say, but I can't live that kind of life. You're right. You certainly can't. There's only been one Christian life lived, and Jesus Christ lived it, but he lives it again in anybody who will let him, who will say, make yourself at home in my heart and be yourself in me.

Christ liveth in me to live his Christ. And that doesn't make you a robot. It doesn't make you an automaton. It doesn't make you a zombie. You still can decide for and against. You are you. It doesn't change you as a personality with the power of choice.

Hudson Taylor called it first the unchanged life and then the changed life and then the exchange life. Some time ago, somebody said to a great musician after his concert, I'd give my life to be able to play like that.

And the artist answered, I did. That's right. If you're going to play that well, it's got to be your life. Chris Everett has disciplined her mind so that she makes an isolation booth of her mind with only one thing, where to put that ball.

That's dedication. When I think of how this world, how musicians, how athletes give their lives, everything for it, and then think of the way most Christians today give what they feel like it. I remember years ago as at Wichita Falls, Texas, with Landrum Level in a meeting, the great concert pianist Van Cliburn came to church that morning and played the offertory for us.

I had a chat with him after the service. He autographed my Bible, a fine young man, what a master. Everybody would like to play a piano like Van Cliburn, but they wouldn't want to practice like he had to and has to because once you get up there, you still have to do it to stay up there, your fingers, your thumbs, and everybody finds it out pretty soon.

Christianity as a Life of Total Consecration

This whole business is more than a creed or a code or a ceremony. It's Christ in you. I'm sorry we ever used the wrong pronunciation and called it Christianity. It ought to be Christianity, and a Christian ought to be a Christian because that's what we are, and the I-A-N stands for I am nothing.

If you ever meet Jesus Christ and fall in love with him, you can't be an average person again. You can't sit nonchalantly in church while he's being bragged upon from the Pope. I don't remember anything else I saw in the movie that came out about Jesus of Nazareth.

I mean, it was on television. I saw a little of it on that, but I won't forget what Matthew said to Peter. He said, we can't go back. We've had a taste of something that we'd never be satisfied going this way.

I tried. If you've ever walked with me, you don't have to wear a big button that says I'm a Christian on it and carry a Bible as big as a Sears and Roebuck catalog around to impress people with your Christianity.

Just be one. I remember when I came to Jesus as a country boy up in Catawba County, and I remember how that afternoon I was trying the same for my own edification. Although I didn't understand much about the plan of salvation, I don't understand it all now.

If I could, there wouldn't be much to it. I don't understand all about electricity, but I'm not going to sit around in the dark till I do. And I didn't understand all about the plan of salvation. But I came and I found myself singing, Jesus, I, my cross have taken all to leave and follow thee.

Destitute, despised, forsaken, thou from hence my all shall be. That was before this new preaching about the gospel of prosperity got started. God wants every Christian to be a millionaire. And if you have any trouble, there's something wrong with you, if you have any sorrow or suffering and so on.

In those days, the Christian life was not a picnic, it was a pilgrimage. It was not a frolic, it was a fight. It was not an excursion, it was an execution, death to self. And that's why I could end up that verse by saying, perish every fond ambition, all I've sought or hoped are known.

Yet how rich is my condition? God and heaven are still my own. And after 64 years of preaching, I can still sing it in my heart to the glory of God. Who is Jesus Christ? What does he want me to do? Some people seem to have the idea it doesn't matter much what you do about Jesus Christ.

Resisting Pseudo-Christianity and Cultural Accommodation

I have a young preacher friend up in the suburb of Boston who is a coming young preacher. And he sends me his sermon every week. And he expressed himself the other day by saying it is difficult for a person today to catch a good case of Christianity.

We have vaccinated so many people with a strain of spiritual serum. As a result, the souls of such people contain a high level of spiritual antibodies that will resist almost any case of infectious faith.

I think that's terrific. I think he's got something there. I think all over the country, we've been inoculated with a pseudo Christianity under where we've almost been immunized against the real thing.

I'm afraid we badly are in danger of accommodating ourselves too much to the status quo and the spirit of the times. We started out as a poor and persecuted sect. We were regarded as the scum of the earth, the offscouring of all things.

We rose in judgment against false doctrine and worldliness. We had no fellowship with the unproved for works of darkness, but turned the light on them. Dr. Turner says in his history of this church that less than 100 years ago, the first Baptist church was laughed at, and its pastor hissed when he walked down the street.

A lot of water has run under the bridge since that day. We're no longer in the wilderness. We're in the promised land of success and prosperity like a cat drowning in cream. We're no longer the Gideons 300 and the David's Bend and the Cave of Adullam.

I stood in Park Street Congregational Church in Boston, the church where they sang America for the first time, and I said to them, you can't keep a Baptist down. You ran William Scraven up in New England.

He came to Charleston, started the Southern Baptist Convention. I was pastor of that old church five years in Charleston, not at the outset, because it started in 1683. That is a little remote from it.

But I was steeped in the history of that thing. We paid a price for what we believed. They say that the history of any movement can be traced. It begins with a cave and ends in a cathedral. We'd better do some thinking in these days, like the Israelites of old.

We're tempted to say, my power and might have gotten me this. And the danger is we become like Laodicea. Have you ever stopped to think Jesus said he'd rather have a cold church than a warm church? He said so.

I'd rather you were cold or boiling, but not lukewarm. The trouble about lukewarm is it's comfortable. And Laodiceanism is comfortable Christianity. When I'm in the restaurant and the waitress comes around to refill my coffee and I haven't drunk but half of it, I said, no, pour that out.

Let's start over. Because if you put hot coffee in what I've got, we'll have Laodicean lukewarm coffee, neither cold or hot. Well, she didn't know what Laodicean coffee was, but that's what it is. We're rather proud of ourselves today, and we'd better watch it.

Humility never hurt anybody, but pride can. Sometimes I think we ought to have one of our conventions in Los Angeles. They've got a lot of smoke out there. I think we could blow it out in three days. We're too much impressed with things as they are, but the world passeth away in the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.

Pilgrims and Strangers in a Narrow Way

We are not out to make Jesus Christ acceptable to big business and to the press and to the world of sports and to modern education. We are not diplomats arranging a truce. We are prophets declaring an ultimatum.

It's always been that way. We'd better let this world know that Christians are pilgrims and strangers on the old S &N, the old straight and narrow. Straight is the gate, and it's still straight, and narrow is the way, and it's still narrow, and it doesn't get any broader as you go along.

That great black preacher from Los Angeles, Dr. Hill, tells how he spoke to one of the ladies of his congregation one Sunday. He said, how are the children doing? Oh, they're doing fine. They've each got a good job making money.

You've got a split-level house and two cars and getting along well. He said, how about church? Well, now, she said, you know how these kids are. They don't go to church much. He said, I said to her, they're not doing well.

Any time you ignore Jesus Christ and put him in the background, you're not doing well. You can have the biggest house on the main drag, have a pool big enough for a herd of elephants to swim in and drive a gold Cadillac like Elvis and have a yacht as big as the Queen Mary used to be.

But if you don't know Jesus Christ, you are a flat failure in God's book. I think of that old preacher who was visiting one of his wealthy members out on a big farm, and he said, as far as you can see this way, it's all mine.

As far as you can see that direction, it's all mine. In that direction, the old preacher said, how do you fix this direction? It's about time we asked ourselves that today. There's coming a day that will show us all up, and it won't matter whether you lived in the backwoods or on the boulevard, whether you drove a limousine or pushed an apple cart through town, whether you bought your diamonds at Woolworth's or Tiffany's.

The only thing that will matter is what did I do about Jesus Christ. The news media today has conditioned us to thinking in terms of three categories, for, against, and undecided. Adlai Stevenson, when he went to the U .N. as our delegate, said, I've learned a new word since coming here, the word yo, y-o.

He said, what does that mean? Well, he said it means yes or no. That's a good word for politicians and for a lot of other people, too. But Jesus Christ declared plainly that there are no undecided people about Jesus Christ.

He that is not with me is against me. He that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad. I ask you this morning, do you assent to all that he claims to be, and do you consent to what he asks you to be? That thou shalt confess with thine mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in thine heart, God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

And that confession ought to be visible before men, it ought to be audible with the mouth so that people can hear it, and it ought to be credible with the heart. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth, with the mouth, out loud, confession is made unto salvation.

I hope you don't accept this as information, and the next thing to do in your mind is simply to be dismissed. I'm not asking you to make a decision you've already made one, for or against. But if you have made a decision against Christ, and by not making one for him, you make one against him.