◈Ten Indictments Against the Modern Church source
By Paul Washer
Preached Wednesday, October 22nd at the Revival Conference in Atlanta
◑Let us go to the Lord in prayer.
Father, I come before you in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Lord, you know all things. They are all before you like an open book. Who can hide their heart from your presence and your eye? The deeds of the most clever men are exposed before you. Your omniscience knows no bounds and if it were not for grace I would be of all men most terrified, but there is grace, abounding and glorious, poured out upon the weakest of men and abounding to your glory. Father, I praise you and I worship you and I thank you for all that you are and all that you have done. And there is no one like you in the heavens or the earth or under the earth. You are king and there is no other. You are Savior and you share that glory with no one.
Father, this night you know me and my great need of grace. Why am I here except that you called the weakest among men, the most ignoble among brothers and that by your grace, often times, the lesser teaches the greater? That is always my case and I praise you. I worship you.
Father, help us tonight. To the wind with eloquence, to hell with the brilliant intellect, Father. Let the truth go forward. Let me be changed that the state of your Church be more glorious. I pray for grace upon grace and mercy upon mercy for myself and for the hearers who are present here. Help us, oh God, and we will be helped and we will boast in that help in Jesus’ name. Amen.
◑ It is a great privilege for me to be here this evening, an astounding privilege to stand here before you and to speak about things such as revival, reformation, the working of God among his people and among men. But tonight I am going to share with you an indictment, an indictment, but it is an indictment of hope.
As I was praying through what I should do in this series of meetings I came to a great conclusion, a great burden that was laid upon my heart. We need revival. We need an awakening, but we cannot simply expect the Holy Spirit to come down and clean up all the mess we have made. We have clear direction from the Word of God with regard to what he has done through Christ, how he expects us to live, how he expects us to order his Church. And it does little good for men to cry out for extra biblical manifestations when biblical principle is violated all around us.
I want you to know this. There is little need for the devil and evil men to oppose a man praying for revival unless he is also laboring for reformation. We have been given truth and we cannot simply do what is right in our own eyes and then expect the Holy Spirit to come down and bless our labors.
As we look into the Old Testament we see that Moses is given very, very detailed explanation how to build the temple. Now was that given for Moses’ sake or for the Church’s sake? I think that what is being explained here is that God is specific in his will and that we are not to presume that we can take the smallest detail and ignore it.
Now I know that I am frail man and I know that I am buffeted by many weaknesses, but I have an indictment and I can’t call it my indictment because who am I to indict anyone. And I dare not call it God’s indictment for how can I presume upon his name. But I will say this. As I look around at the Church and compare her to Scripture, I see that there are certain things that must change.
I am not Martin Luther. This is not 95 declarations nailed to Wittenburg’s door, but this is a burden on my heart and I must share it. I must share it.
Now let me say this. What I am going to say will anger some of you, but let me warn you. It may be true that you will be able to accuse me of arrogance. It may be true that you do not like my delivery. I have many times been arrogant and I have many times delivered truth in a wrong way, but don’t allow that to be an excuse for you. The question is. What I am saying, is it true whether it is delivered through a faulty messenger or no?
Others of you will be rejoicing in what you hear and you will want to say, “Amen,” and maybe pump your arms. But don’t do that because all of us bear a measure of guilt. And if you have attained to some spiritual state, then I would say what my brother has said. “What do you have that you have not received and if you have received it, why do you boast?”1
Would it not be better to worship God in humility?
If you are a younger minister, I do not want you to get caught up in these truths and take them back and storm your church without love. I would make one suggestion. See to it that your knees are bleeding before you begin any sort of reformation. And if you are an older minister serving the Lord for many, many years I beg you not to be arrogant.
An old foolish king can learn from the weakest of his servants. And also I beg you this. Have the courage to change everything even if it is the last day of your life, at least you can go into glory knowing that you attempted a reformation that was biblical.
And I will say this as a warning to the older men. Now, listen to me carefully. I know the admonition in 1 Timothy chapter five of the way I am to address you and so I address you this way, but there is a great awakening going on in this country and not only in this country and Europe where I have been and in South America and many other places, I see young men going back to the rock from which we were cut. They are reading Spurgeon and Whitefield. They are still listening to Ravenhill and Martin Lloyd-Jones and Tozer and Wesley and it is a great, incredible movement. Just because popular media and Christianity today hasn’t discovered what is going on, I want you to know that I would have never dreamed 15 years ago that I would see the awakening I am seeing, not through my ministry, but as I go to different places and see what God is doing without any of our ministries.
Whether it is Holland, a thousand young men declaring, “Things have to change,” crying out all night in prayer for the power of God and the truth of Scripture or South America recognizing that they have been so influenced by psychology and all sorts of superficial techniques coming from America with regard to evangelism and now weeping and broken are going back and evangelizing their churches, or the inner city of the United States where I have sat up at times until two and three in the morning discussing theology with young African Americans in the hood whom God is going to raise up to do more preaching than anyone will ever be able to imagine on this day.
There is an awakening.
And I am going to say this with tenderness. Most men over 40 don’t even have a clue about it. Many of the young people who are turning back to the old men and the old ways and to truths that have brought awakening time and time again in this world, most of these young men are quite young. And they will go to their pastors, they will go to their leaders and say, “Look at this, what we have discovered. Look what happened in Wales. Look what happened in Africa. Look at this and look at this and look at this teaching. It is absolutely amazing.”
And most of them will either turn it away or say, “It is nothing any different than what I have been preaching for 25 years,” when, in fact, it is completely different than what they have been preaching in 25 years.
And so we need to be very, very careful to understand that God is doing work. And he who began a good work will finish it.2
Many people have the idea that they are going to pray in a revival. And other people say, “Revival will come whether you pray or not.”
I am not in either one of those camps. But I know this. When I see men and women and young people all over the world praying for an awakening, to me that is the first fruits of revival. And I can count on the fact that he who gave those first fruits will bring in the full harvest.
Now I want to look at 10 indictments, if we have time, things that I believe that we must change.
◑First of all, the first indictment:
a practical denial of the sufficiency of Scripture,
especially my denomination, a practical denial of the sufficiency of Scripture.
2 Timothy 3:15 and on says:
And that from childhood you have known the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.3
Over the last several decades there has been a mighty battle with regard to the inspiration of Scripture. Now some of you have not been a part of that battle, but many of us in more liberal denominations most certainly have, a battle for the Bible.
But there is only one problem. When you come to believe as a people that the Bible is inspired you have only fought half the battle because the question is not merely is the Bible inspired, is it inerrant. The major question following that that must be answered: Is the Bible sufficient or do we have to bring in every so called social science and cultural study in order to know how to run a church? That is a major question.
Social sciences, in my opinion, have taken precedent over the Word of God in such a way that most of us can’t even see it. It has so crept in to our Church, our evangelism and our missiology that you can barely call what we are doing Christian anymore. Psychology, anthropology, sociology have become primary influences in the Church.
Several years ago, many years ago when I was in seminary I remember a professor walked in and he started drawing footprints on the blackboard. And as he marched them across the blackboard then he turned to all of us and said only this. “Aristotle is walking through the halls of this institution. Beware, for I hear his footsteps more clearly than those of the apostle Paul and the team of inspired men who were with him and even the Lord Jesus Christ himself.”
We have come to believe that a man of God can deal in certain tiny areas in the life of the Church, but when it really gets tough we need to go to the social experts. That is an absolute lie. It says here in Scripture that the man of God may be equipped, adequate, equipped for every good work.
What does Jerusalem have to do with Rome? And what do we have to do with all these modern day social sciences that were actually created as a protest against the Word of God? And why is it that evangelism and missions and so called church growth is more shaped by the anthropologist, the sociologist and the Wall Street student who is up on every cultural trend?
All the activity in our church must be based upon the Word of God, all the activity in missions upon the Word of God.
Our missionary activity, our church activity, everything we do ought to flow from the theologian and the exegete, the man who opens up his Bible and only has one question. What is thy will, oh God?
We are not to send out questionnaires to carnal people to discover what kind of church they would attend. A church ought to be seeker friendly, but the church ought to recognize there is only one seeker. His name is God and if you want to be friendly to someone, if you want to accommodate someone, accommodate him and his glory whether it is rejected by everyone else. We are not called to build empires. We are not called to be excessive. We are called to glorify God.
And if you want the Church to be something other than a peculiar people, then you want something God does not want.
I want you to listen to Isaiah just for a moment, chapter eight. Listen to what he says. “When they say to you, ‘Consult the mediums and the spiritists who whisper and mutter...’”4 This is a perfect [?] and the church growth gurus and everything else because every two or three years all their major theories change. Not only on what is a man or how you fix him, but what is a church and how you make it grow. Every two or three years there is another fad coming down the line of what can make your church into something super in the eyes of the world.
Just recently one of the greatest or most well known church growth experts said that he discovered that he was entirely wrong on all his theory. But instead of turning them to Scripture on his knees broken and weeping, he goes out to find another theory.
They give no clear word. It says here in Isaiah, “Should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?”5
Should we as churchmen, as preachers, as pastors, as Christians, should we go out and consult the spiritually dead on behalf of those whom the Holy Spirit has made alive? Absolutely not, absolutely not.
The second indictment: An ignorance of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment