8 Indictments of Church in Today's Culture (Part 1)
Below is a speech delivered by the fiery Paul Washer. I guarantee you will love what he says. A slightly Cliff Notes version follows:
We need revival; we need an awakening. The Holy Spirit is involved, but we have to do our part. We have clear direction from the Word of God on how He expects us to live, how He expects us to order His church. But Biblical principle is violated all around us. We have been given truth in Scripture; we cannot simply do what is right in our own eyes, and then expect the Holy Spirit to bless our labors. God is specific in His will, and we are not to take the smallest detail and ignore it.
I know that I have weaknesses, but I have an indictment. As I look around at the Church, and compare her to Scripture, I see that there are certain things that must change. You may be angry to hear it, but please, this is the burden on my heart, and I must share it.
Indictment #1: A practical denial of the sufficiency of Scripture.
Look at II Tim. 3:16-17:
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Over the last several decades there has been a mighty battle with regard to the inspiration of Scripture. But when you come to believe that the Bible is truly God’s Word, you have only fought half the battle. You must then depend on the Bible in your decisions. But you ask, "it's old; will it do the job today? Is it sufficient?" But the Biblical rules are true when you run a church, or design a growth package. Pastors say “Gee, maybe we can bring in secular psychology, social science and cultural studies to know how to run a church.” But these studies, in my opinion, have been relied on too often as gospel truth instead of God’s instruction in His Word. We call these “experts” so they can creep into our evangelism and missiology so that what we do now can hardly be called Christian. What do those verses above say about the profitability of studying Scripture...that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. Sounds like sufficiency. The social “sciences” were created by men to provide an alternative to the Word of God. They do not know the power of God. Given that reason, shall we rely on these experts? No, every idea we get for church ought to flow from our Scripture and from godly theologians. We should have but one answer to the question “how do we get church growth?” Simply this: What is thy will, Lord?
We should not send out questionnaires to carnal people to discover what kind of church they would attend. A church can be “seeker-friendly,” IF we realize who is the seeker we should be friendly to--God. Let us accommodate Him and seek to demonstrate His glory. We are not called to build empires. We should not be concerned about being accepted. We are called to glorify God. If you want the church to be hip, to avoid the word "peculiar"(but see I Peter 2:9), then you want something God does not want. Worldly persecution we can ignore. After all, every two or three years the church social scientists change their mind—they introduce yet another fad that “will make the church change the world.” Isaiah 8 seems to fit this situation:
And when they say to you, “Seek those who are mediums and wizards, who whisper and mutter,” should not a people seek their God (instead)? Should they seek the dead (the worldly wise) on behalf of the living? 20 (Go) To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them.
Mediums, wizards, the dead, having no light--these are harsh pronouns—but remember what is said about their origins! Let us all repent and return “to the law and to the testimony” for guidance on church-growth.
Indictment #2: Our ignorance of God.
This ignorance is deeper than we think. If I begin instructing about the whole of God, not just His lovingkindness, but also about His justice, His wrath, His sovereignty, His pruning—you’re going to have some of your finest and oldest church members stand up and say, “That’s not my God—I could never love a God like that.” That's because they have a god that they have made with their own mind, and they love what they have made. Jeremiah 9:23-24:
“Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, Nor let the rich man glory in his riches; 24 But let him who glories glory in this: That he understands and knows Me, That I am the Lord, exercising lovingkindness and judgment, and righteousness in the earth.
God knows about our egos and all our thoughts. He advises us to retrain our thoughts to get to know Him. Also note these verses speak of the two sides of God—His lovingkindness and His judgment.
Or consider Psalm 50:21-23:
You thought that I was altogether like you; But I will rebuke you, And set them in order before your eyes. 22 “Now consider this, you who forget God, Lest I tear you in pieces, And there be none to deliver: 23 Whoever offers praise glorifies Me; And to him who orders his conduct aright I will show the salvation of God.”
God sees that we imagine Him like us, easy on sin, but when He tells us about His disciplinary side, we may complain. We do not like His pruning, especially not Him “tearing us in pieces” if we profess to love God and yet totally ignore His Word and His commandments.
I Corinthians 15:34 also ties this knowledge of God and focus on avoiding sin:
Awake to righteousness, and do not sin; for some do not have the knowledge of God. I speak this to your shame
Sunday morning is the greatest hour of idolatry in America—because people do not know the God they are worshiping. They have another god. He looks more like Santa Claus than he does Yahweh.
Indictment #3: Our failure to address man’s malady.
In the book of Romans, Paul spends the first three chapters doing one thing: Bringing all men into condemnation. That was essential in his goal of bringing salvation to his listeners. Men must be brought to a knowledge of their dark self before they see their inability to reform on their own. After repeated failures at reform, a person who knows he is an unregenerate sinner may finally do what needs to be done: Surrender himself over to God. They must cut away every hope in the flesh before they can go to God. This is especially important in evangelism. An old preacher once told me, “We would preach for two and three weeks and give no invitation to sinful men; we would plow, and plow, the hardened hearts of men until the Spirit of God began to break their hearts.”
Now we just walk in and talk to them, give them three exploratory questions and ask them if they want to pray a prayer and ask Jesus to come into their heart--and as a result--we make a two-fold son of hell for whom what you promised "didn't work," who will never again be open to the gospel because the religious lie that we, as evangelicals, have spewed out of our mouth.
If we treat sin superficially, we are fighting against the Holy Spirit. When pastors speak, they should be an instrument for convicting people—that means being blunt on the subject of sin. As John 16:8 says about the Spirit:
“And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin.”
There are very popular preachers today who are more concerned about giving you your best life now than they are about your eternal life. And they brag about the fact that they do not mention sin in their preaching. I can tell you this. The Holy Spirit has nothing to do with their ministry. Why? When a man says he has no ministry dealing with the sin of men, he is the opposite of the Holy Spirit. So know this: When you do not deal specifically, passionately, lovingly with men and their depraved condition, the Holy Spirit is nowhere around you.
Also we are deceivers when we deal with the malady of men lightly like pastoral “shepherds” of Jeremiah’s day. Look at Jeremiah 6:14:
They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, Saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ But there is no peace.
There’s that word “superficially” to avoid. If we don’t deal with this, we are not only deceivers, but we are immoral, like a doctor who denies his Hippocratic oath because he doesn’t want to tell someone bad news because he thinks that person will be angry with him, and will be sad. And so he does not tell them the news most necessary for them to prepare their souls for eternity.
I hear preachers say, “No. No. You don’t understand, brother Paul. It is not like the days of John and Charles Wesley. We are not like the culture that Whitfield addressed or Edwards. We are not as hearty as those people were. We don’t have as much self-esteem. We are feeble. We can’t bear such preaching.”
Have you ever studied the lives of these men? What they preached, their culture couldn’t bear it either. No one has ever been able to bear the preaching of the gospel. They will either turn against it with a fierceness of an animal, or they will be broken by it and converted. Look at Acts 2:37 and 7:54 for proof of each of those reactions. And about us “not having the self- esteem,” our country and this world is overrun with this disgusting malady of self-esteem. Even the convicts plead innocent. Our greatest problem is that we esteem ourselves more than we esteem God.
Let me ask you a question: Where did all the stars go this morning? They were there, but you couldn’t see them. But then later, the sky grows darker and darker and as that night turned black as pitch the stars came out in the fullness of their glory. Likewise we cannot appreciate the glory of God for salvation, unless the darkness of sin of is realized first. Think of the other Mary; Scripture shows that she loved much because she has been forgiven much and she knew how much she had been forgiven because she knew how wicked she was before. Oh, we are afraid to tell men of their wickedness--and they can never love God because of it. We have robbed them the opportunity to boast not in self, but to follow the admonition, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
Indictment #4: An ignorance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I want to submit to you tonight that this country is not gospel hardened. It is gospel ignorant because most of its preachers are, too. And let me repeat this. The malady in this country is not liberal politicians, the root of socialism, Hollywood or anything else. It is the so called evangelical pastor of our day and preacher of our day. Fact is, we as a people do not know the gospel. We have taken the glorious gospel of our blessed God and reduced it down to patriotism for how God has blessed the U.S., or four spiritual laws with a little superstitious prayer at the end and if someone repeats it after us with enough sincerity, we declare them to be born again. We have traded true regeneration for “decisionism.” The new wave.
Here is the gospel: it begins with the nature of God and it goes from there to the nature of man and the fallenness thereof. Thus, the greatest problem in all of Scripture is this. How can God be just and at the same time the justifier of wicked men, when Scripture such as Proverbs 17:15 says:
He who justifies the wicked is an abomination to God
That is the greatest problem. You see, you have got to present all this to people. If God is just, then He must condemn wicked man. But continuing with the gospel: then God, for His own glory, loved us, and sent forth his Son who walked on this earth as a perfect man. And then according to the eternal plan of God, he went to that crucifixion tree. And on that tree he bore our sin and he became a curse. Christ redeemed us from the curse of sin by becoming a curse in our place (Galatians 3:13).
So many people have this romantic, powerless view of the gospel that the Christ is there hanging on the tree suffering under the wounds of the Roman Empire and the Father did not have the moral fortitude to bear the suffering of his Son so he turned away.
NO!! The Father turned away because his Son became sin.
When he was in that garden and he cries out, “Let this cup pass from Me,” people speculate, “Well, what was in the cup? Oh, it is the Roman cross. It is the whip. It is the nails. It is all this and all that.” I do not want to take away from the physical sufferings of Christ on that tree, but the cup was the cup of God the Father’s wrath that had to be poured out on the Son. Someone had to die, bearing the guilt of God’s people, forsaken of God by His justice and crushed under the wrath of God, for it pleased the Lord to crush him. It had to be a blood sacrifice.
Well, when the gospel is preached today and when it is shared in personal evangelism today, do you ever hear these things? Almost never. It is never made clear that Christ was able to redeem because he was crushed under the justice of God and having satisfied divine justice with his death God is now just and the justifier of the wicked. No, we have "Gospel reductionism" now. And then we wonder why it has no power. I’ll tell you. When you leave the gospel behind, then you have got to go to all the little tricks of the trade that are so prominently used today to convert men. But truth is, none have any lasting power. They do not work.
Indictment #5: An ignorance of the doctrine of regeneration
My dear friends, I know that there are Calvinists here and I know that there are Arminians here and I know that there are all sorts of strange animals in between, but I want you to know this: these are not the issue. The issue is regeneration. Being born again; showing that you are a new creation.
There is a great manifestation of the power of God in the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit; remember that it is the Spirit that gives life. Every one of us who proclaims must proclaim our witness. If you truly know this, you will no longer give yourself to tricks, or the manipulation that is so often carried out in the name of evangelism in this country. You will proclaim the Word of God with Spirit-approved power.
Examine yourself. Be diligent to make your calling and election sure (II Peter 1:10). Here in America, the idea of being “born again” is totally lost. It seems to only mean that at one time in a crusade you made a decision and you think you were sincere. But what if there is no evidence of a supernatural recreating work of the Holy Spirit in your life? Which happens too often. “If any man be in Christ he is a new creature.” Ask yourself: Is that me? Totally different thoughts, actions, responses to people who push my buttons?
What do we face as an alternative to the truth? I will tell you what we face. It’s not infant baptism. It is not a high church confirmation by an ecclesiastical authority. What we’re against now is the sinners’ prayer. And I am here to tell you, if there is anything I have declared war on it is that. You say, “What?” Yes, in the same way that infant baptism was the golden calf of the Reformation, today the sinners’ prayer has sent more people to hell than anything on the face of the earth. You say, “How can you say such a thing?”
Go with me to Scripture and show me, please. I would love you to stand up and tell me where anyone in the early church was evangelized that way. The Scripture does not say that Jesus Christ came to the nation of Israel and said that “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, now who would like to ask me into their hearts? I see that hand.” That is not what it says. He said, “Repent and believe the gospel.”
Men today, if you ask them, “Are you saved?” they do not say, “Yes, I am because I am leaning unto Jesus and there is mighty evidence and fruits giving me assurance of being born again.” No. They say, “One time in my life I prayed a prayer.”
And they live for the world; seeking God was for the foxhole or Sunday. But, hey, they prayed a prayer. They were told it was enough. Insurance against hell. We will go to extremes to get that “confession” out of him. I heard of one evangelist who was coaxing a man to do that thing. Finally the man felt so uncomfortable the evangelist said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I will pray to God for you and if it is what you want to say to God, squeeze my hands. Well, behold the power of God,
my people! The idolatry of decisionism.
my people! The idolatry of decisionism.
When Paul came to the Church in Corinth he did not say to them, “Look, you are not living like Christians so let’s go back to that one moment in your life when you prayed that prayer and let’s see if you were sincere.” No, he said this, “Test yourselves, examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith.” The evidence of conversion is the on-going fruit in your life. Only you and God know.
Oh, my dear friends, look what we have done. Isn’t a tree known by its fruit? Here we are, 60%, 70% of America thinks it is converted, born again. But--we kill how many thousands of babies a day? We are hated around the world for our immorality.
And I lay this squarely, the blame, at the feet of the preachers.
Students get a flawed idea from the “youth minister” about living for Christ. Then they go to college, and live like the devil. And then, after college, maybe around 30, they drift back to church wanting us to instill morality in their new family. And they may even rededicate their life and they join right in with that pseudo Christian morality that encompasses churchianity in America. BUT in the end they hear this from God: “Depart from me you worker of iniquity. I never knew you.”
You say, “Brother Paul, you are so angry.” Have I not right to be? Somebody must be. We cry out for revival, but we haven’t even got the foundations straight. My dear friend, everybody wants to go to heaven. They just don’t want God to be looking at them when they get there. Do you want God? But are you ignoring God, because you are ashamed? Is honesty with Him too uncomfortable?
God bless us to respond to these Holy Spirit wrought words.
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