Last week we covered 5 indictments in a great sermon from Paul Washer. This week the other 3. Read with prayer, my friends. Think what you could do to get closer to God.
Indictment #6: Ignorance regarding the nature of the Church.
God has only one religious institution. It is the Church (I do not mean Roman Catholics when I say “Church.” I mean, believers of whatever stripe.) Jesus gave his life for the Church, His beautiful pristine betrothed wife. God is the upcoming husband. Today because of the lack of biblical preaching, the so called Church is filled up with carnal people. And then because of all the goats in the midst of the lambs, the lambs are blamed for all the things the goats are doing and then the name of God is blasphemed. Just because someone says they are of the Church or they are Christian doesn’t make it so. The real Church is one. She has always been one. Yes, there are denominations. But in the Last Days, that won’t matter. What you have got now is a bunch of goats and tares among the sheep. And because very little biblical, compassionate Church discipline is practiced, the wicked ones live among the sheep, they feed on the sheep and they destroy the sheep, and those of you who are leaders in the Church are going to pay a high penalty when you stand before the one who loves them because you did not have enough courage to stand up and confront the wicked.
In North America, the churches are mostly democracies. Because the preaching of the gospel is so feeble, the majority of members are carnal, lost people and yet those people mostly govern the direction of the church. And because the pastor doesn’t want to lose the people and because he has wrong ideas regarding evangelism and true conversion, he caters to the wicked in his church; and his little group of true sheep that belong to Jesus Christ are sitting there in the midst of all the theater, in the midst of all the worldliness.
You are saying, “Oh, you are just angry.” If my wife was at Walmart late one night and you walked by as a man and you saw that two men were abusing her, three, four, five, ten men were abusing her and hurting her and you put your head down in the name of self-preservation and you walked by, I want to tell you something, my friend. I will not only look for those 10 men, I will look for you. Believers are the bride of Christ and she is precious to God. Don’t get in the Church’s way, don’t abuse the church’s reputation--you will have to answer to God.
Most evangelical pastors in America today take Matthew 18 (on church disciplining its members) and rip it right out of their Bible. Their theology gets left behind when they come out of their office; they run the church by carnal means. Discipline is a hard business, I agree; but it has to be done. We need loving, compassionate church discipline that does not begin with excommunication. It begins with, “Ye who are spiritual, restore them… (Galatians 6:1).
We say, “We can’t practice discipline. We just… we are just too loving.” You are more loving than Jesus? He is the one who commanded this. Then you say “Yeah, it will cause so many problems.” But here’s how it goes; we approach and say, “If your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private; if he listens to you, you have won your brother.” Oh, what a wonderful thing. “But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you, so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses every fact may be confirmed.”
It is not that these witnesses are “on my side.” They are going to listen and judge. Maybe you are the one that is wrong. Maybe your brother is not in sin. Maybe you are overcritical and legalistic. Who knows? And then, if the brother is wrong, here’s what we do: “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”
I am not talking about critical, legalistic, hateful men as judges. I am talking about a group of elders, leaders who love enough to lay their life on the line because they know this is not a game. But we copped out, and have joined Rome in this matter. Rome’s view: “The baby is baptized, the baby is Christian. The baby is Rome’s. Never again deal with conversion. Just create all sorts of worldly means to try to keep them in the Church.”
But evangelicals have fallen and have really done much of the same. Give a half an hour of preaching, 5 minutes of which was very funny stories; then we draw the net after 25 minutes of seriousness. Then, if they come forward, after two or three minutes of counseling, we pray a little prayer with them, counsel them for a little bit and then declare them saved--and then unlucky pastors spend the rest of their days disciplining them and wondering why they don’t grow. Yes, I believe in personal, one-on one correction, but, my dear friend, the Church got along for a thousand or more years without it. Just as many people are going out the back doors as are coming in the front door, and the reason why that is happening is because we are not reproving people. It starts out that people didn’t get converted. If they were His sheep, they would hear His voice and they would follow Him. If you make every sermon on evangelism, so nobody grows in their knowledge of Scripture, and if you make a sinners’ call, and hold their hand and have them repeat a few words, you are trying too much in the flesh.
Now we ought to reprove, but in doing so, they may leave. That’s to be expected. “They went out from us because they were not of us.” So we spend a fortune disciplining goats, hoping they will become sheep. You can’t teach a goat into a sheep. A goat becomes a sheep only by the supernatural working of the Spirit of almighty God. When they surrender. Believers in Church discipline means you say: I moved my family to this church because they practice Church discipline. I want the watchful care of elders and other members who take this seriously. I want you to tell me if I am in a wrong. If my children are converted one day, and then go awry, I want to know what’s going on. Maybe my children will be brought before a Church leader, to keep them on the straight and narrow, for the salvation of their soul.
Some of you in here would get so mad if a pastor walked up to you and said, “Honestly, I have been praying about your child and I fear that they are unconverted.” You would get so mad you would rally up a group to have that pastor kicked out instead of realizing, “Oh, praise God, we have got a man of God here. Maybe we need to do something here.”
Indictment #7: A silence on separation.
There is a void of serious teaching about holiness. Everyone agrees, let’s be holy. But when you get specific about what that means, digging deep into sin, that’s when everything turns into a turmoil. “Pursue peace with all men,” Hebrews 12:14 tells us, “and sanctification, without which no one will see the Lord.” Does anybody believe anymore that we will not see the Lord without sanctification?
You say, “Brother Paul, I have been criticized so often for teaching works religion.” Listen to me, it goes back to regeneration. If God truly converts a man He will continue working in that man, through teaching and blessing and admonition and discipline. He will see to it that the work He has begun will be finished. If there is no growth in holiness, it’s because you are not letting God work in your life. If he is not working in your life it is most likely because you are not His child. Look at the difference between Jacob and Esau. “Jacob I loved…Esau I hated.” Yet God fulfilled all his promises to both of them. Jacob was blessed. Esau was blessed. How did God demonstrate his judgments and wrath against Esau and his love toward Jacob? I will tell you how. He disciplined Jacob almost every day of his life. He gives His loving pruning, the correction of God to bring us to holiness.
Now there is so much teaching on this, but let me just say this. “Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice.” Romans 12:1-2. Why does he say “body?” I think to avoid all this super spirituality: We think we’re OK when we say, “Well, I have given Jesus my heart, but for the rest, you can’t judge a book by its cover.” Well, as a matter of fact, you can judge a book by its cover. Jesus never said you couldn’t judge a book by his cover. After all, He said “You will know them by their fruit.” And if you think that you have given him your heart, then he will have your body. And I will tell you why. The heart, my friend, is not some blood pumping muscle or some figment of a poet’s imagination. It refers to the very essence or core of your being. Don’t tell me Jesus has the very essence and core of your being and it doesn’t affect your body. We go through Scripture, what, legalistically? No, drawing inferences? No. Just doing His commands.
I do not agree with everything the Puritans said, but I love the Puritans and one of the reason why I love them because I believe they honestly made an attempt to bring everything in their life under the lordship of Jesus Christ. They wrote 800-page books on what should I think about according to the Scriptures. What should not enter into my mind according to the Scriptures? What should I do with my eyes? What should go in these ears and what should not go in these ears? How should the tongue be ruled? What should be the direction of my life? And yes, here’s a question no one wants to discuss: How should I dress? Now I am going to be careful here. My dear friend, my wife says it this way: If your clothing is a frame for your face from which the glory of Christ springs forth, it is of God. But if your clothing is a frame for your body, it is sensual and God hates it. Enough said?
Now holiness isn’t just outward expression, but we have become a people who stubbornly think that the Spirit doesn’t require us to change anything on the outside. “It’s the inside that counts.” And that is not true. Some of you young men, you cry out probably more than I do that the Spirit of God would fill you and work in you, but it only takes one half hour of television to so grieve Him, and He will be miles from you. One time I was struggling and Leonard Ravenhill sent me a tract. I still have that tract. It said, “Others can, you cannot.” You say, “I want the power of God on my life.” Then I assure you that He will show you that something you do has got to go. Everyone else is running around, and their “proof” of change is all their little retreats and all their conferences and getting together with group hugs and singing Kumbaya and all. Maybe you need to get alone in the wilderness with God and fast for seven days on your knees studying the book of Psalms, just being alone with God, learning about loving and belonging to Him.
So what I’m trying to say in all this is: There is silence from the pulpits on the important doctrine of separation from the world. I think, “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness?” Nothing. “Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” Nothing. Darkness is the opposite of God’s revelation. But people want to crawl to the edge of what they think God would allow. They want to become double-minded, and be schizophrenic. Why push to the world, away from God, all the time? He says, “Come out from their midst.” Come out from the midst of what? Come out from the midst of lawlessness, darkness, and the life and worldliness of the unbeliever. Come out from it.
Indictment #8: Psychology and sociology have replaced the Scriptures with regard to the family.
Our Sunday morning services are so cosmetic. If you want to see proof of the Lord’s presence, it’s easiest to look at an individual’s home, his marriages, his family. If I find a godly man who has raised godly children, I’m ecstatic. In church, most of what I hear are wives’ tales and sociology and what is right in their own eyes; and they can’t give me one Bible verse. But every once in a while I find a man and a woman who set themselves to raise their family according to Scripture--and the difference is overwhelming.
What does it matter if a man wins the whole world and loses his family? God sees its great importance. Look at Genesis 18:19. “For I have chosen him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring upon Abraham what He has spoken about him.” God is pleased with that. But if you ever come up with this idea that you can be a man of God, and say “I am sacrificing my family for the sake of the ministry,” I will tell you, you are a bald faced liar. I do not have to violate the will of God with regard to my family in order to fulfill the will of God with regard to the ministry.
Let’s talk about Sunday school. Millions of dollars spent on doing everything in the book to promote Sunday school. I know that for a fact. But how much money does your denomination spend and how many conference and man hours are put in to teach fathers to teach their children? So now you have found it, haven’t you? God doesn’t have a plan B. He has a plan A. You circumvent plan A, plan B won’t work.
Now I am not saying that children can’t come together in groups and be catechized or be taught or anything, but if that ever even begins to hint to supplant the ministry of the Father in the home, blow it to pieces. But most of the time in the Sunday school it is nothing more than entertainment because the Sunday school teacher doesn’t have the authority to discipline your child; he has to let them interrupt and talk to one another, and mock the lesson. And even if they did have the right to discipline, they wouldn’t do it because they don’t believe in it.
Let’s look at youth groups. You say, “Well, youth need to be together.” Ok, well, let’s look. Proverbs 13:20. “He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm.” If young people only listen to young people, the likelihood of being led by fools is greater. Whoever told you youth ought to be together? Whoever told you that? I’ll tell you who told you that: 1960s psychologists; they helped us formulate the generation gap. Youth are to be with adults so that they stop acting like naïve fools. We should urge them to join adulthood and put away foolishness which leads to destruction. Now I am not saying you can’t bring youth together, but I submit if you do, have all their parents there. And you say, “Well, what about the lost youth that come into our church?” Well, what are they seeing now? The lost youth come in to your Christian youth in Church and they see almost the same thing they see in their own home--no parents, young people teaching kids. But what would happen if a lost youth came into your church and they saw the children there, the youth in a loving, wonderful relationship collectively with their parents and they would go, “Whoa. I have never seen anything like this before. His dad, look at him. He loves…I mean he loves his dad. I mean look at the… So is this Christianity?”
It is like one old dear saint; someone asked him one time, since he wouldn’t let his teenage son go out with a young lady to be in some private place: “Don’t you trust your son?” He said, “No, I don’t trust my son. Whatever made you think that? I don’t even trust his dad. I wouldn’t put his father alone with another woman. Yet I have much more control of my will than a teenager with raging hormones. We violate biblical principle after biblical principle after biblical principle and then we wonder why everything is a mess.
I was listening a few months ago to all the horrendous things that are happening to our country. I Timothy 4:1 says:
But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.
God is telling young Timothy that all hell is going to break loose in culture, that everything is just going to be maddening--we’ll see the veneer of civilization melt away; we’ll see men as beasts. We’re swimming against a high current of septic water. Protect your family from exposure to this. Give them home schooling, examine Christian colleges for them. As I Timothy 4:6 says, we simply have to “be constantly nourished on the words of faith.”
Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching and preserve these things, for as you do this, you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you. May God Bless His Church.
May God help you to meditate on these words.
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