Christianity in North America

Raising Up the Broken-down Things of God

Standard

We need a new vision.

If God is going to shake up his people, it has to happen inside the Church.

Recently, God has shown me that whenever a righteous king took over the thrones of Israel and Judah, two things happened:

1. The heathen idols and temples were torn down.
2. The broken-down things of God were raised up again.

I’ve already talked about tearing down idols. Now we need to think about raising up God’s standards again.

1. God’s Word – We have got to start preaching the inerrancy of Scripture and start getting back to the idea that the Bible interprets the Bible. We need to get preaching and teaching back into the pulpit, and I don’t mean this emphasis on topical preaching that we have so easily fallen into.

Correctly handling the word of God is critical, but in most churches anymore the primary teaching is being performed by people who have little or no biblical training, and certainly cannot put together a systematic theology. Poor discipleship is part of this (see below), but the biggest issue is that the very people who are best trained to teach and preach, pastors, have abandoned expository preaching from a set Bible passage and have moved to topical preaching, leaving the less educated small group leaders to handle teaching passages out of the Bible. This is completely backwards. It is far easier for a “layman” to lead a topical Bible study than an inductive, passage-based one.

The result of this is that few people in the seats have a good overview of how Scripture fits together. It is seen as nothing more than a series of sentences in several books that can be pieced together to say something.

Ironically, pastors believe that their teaching is becoming better and better (90%, according to George Barna), but then look at these positive responses from adults who identified themselves as born-again Christians in a poll by George Barna:

– 68% agreed that the Bible says that God helps those who help themselves.
– 53% said that the Holy Spirit does not exist.
– 47% said that Satan does not exist.
– 31% agreed that good people can earn their way into heaven.
– 30% claim that Jesus died, but was never resurrected physically.
– 24% believe that Jesus committed sins.

Does that sound like people are getting Bible-based teaching and preaching? I don’t think that pastors/preachers should be so high on their own opinions of the quality of their teaching and preaching, if these responses are typical.

2. The Holy Spirit – Without the Holy Spirit, NOTHING we do will work. We will wind up with a sad, man-made “attempt” at church, but will lack all the qualities of the New Testament Church. Having given short shrift to the Spirit, we have substituted clever programs, marketing gimmicks, and a million other tricks to hide the fact that the Spirit isn’t here. So much of the preaching we are getting possesses little or no unction of the Holy Spirit. I don’t know about you, but I can’t believe that the Holy Spirit today is only speaking via three points and a conclusion.

When was the last time you saw someone raised from the dead? Has your shadow fallen on the lame and they are healed? Are you operating in the power of the Spirit? I’ve written elsewhere why the Spirit still works today, but what are we doing to cultivate a Spirit-filled life? Do we believe the Bible when it talks about being filled with the Spirit?

3. Holiness/Counterculture – Christians are called to be the “peculiar people,” but increasingly – due largely to churches’ obsession with cultural relevancy – we look exactly like the world. How then are we to model Christ to a dying, sin-obsessed world if we look more like the world than like Christ? People wonder why we don’t see the miracles of the Book of Acts today, and my simple answer is that we are not willing to live lives unadulterated by the world.

4. Community – People talk about community, but most of us still live like islands. With society showing signs of strain (e.g. – three million American white collar jobs will go overseas by 2005, health care costs are punishing families, and culture is becoming increasingly perverse), we Christians have got to find new ways of pursuing community or else we will find our families being taken down one by one. This is increasingly the case, but the churches are doing little to stop it. In my own church it was noted that the number one request by people seeking prayer was for jobs, yet no program was in place within the church to make that happen. If churches are unable to address these issues with cutting edge community approaches, then people are going to lose heart. The lost can spot hypocrisy a mile away, so if the churches can’t model a community that buffers that community from harm, then we’ll be seen as just another option that doesn’t work in reality.

5. Prayer – Prayer makes things happen. A prayerless church is a powerless church. Increasingly, times of focused prayer are falling prey to harried lives, or have been converted into “practicing the presence of God” – an admirable spiritual discipline, but one that was never supposed to supplant focused prayer time.

6. Discipleship/Commitment – When we ask nothing of people, we get nothing. That many churches are asking little or nothing of the people that attend in order to keep from driving them away, we are creating an underclass of quasi-disciples. Rather than diluting the message of the Gospel, I suggest we ratchet up what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Let the Spirit of God convict, rather dilute the qualities of a disciple in order not to lose people. The road is narrow. Are we preaching that?

7. Revelation of Jesus – Can’t we let Jesus be Jesus? Do we not trust Him to draw people to Himself? The truth is that people want Jesus, we need to reveal Him to people and let the Spirit work. Deep inside people I think they know that all this talk about getting our felt needs met pales in comparison with knowing Jesus. Do we really KNOW Jesus? Not merely ABOUT Him, but Him in all His glory? Pastors, preachers, teachers – show us Jesus. He said Himself that eternal life was knowing Him. Why are we so afraid to present Him undiluted to people? Let’s get back to that.

There’s more, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Church, are we willing to go God’s way or are we going to continue to play “church?”

Tearing Down Idols

Standard

We need a new vision.

If God is going to shake up his people, it has to happen inside the Church.

Recently, God has shown me that whenever a righteous king took over the thrones of Israel and Judah, two things happened:

  • The heathen idols and temples were torn down.
  • The broken-down things of God were raised up again.

I think that the Church in America has to start tearing down idols and getting back to the “main and the plain” in living out Christ’s life as believers in the 21st Century.

I believe there are a few idols that must immediately go:

1. Psychology
Psychology and Christianity are worldviews. Each has its own set of knowledge and practice. Both attempt to explain how people live. Only one leads to salvation.

Psychology attempts to build up the Self. Christianity deems the Self utterly corrupt and worthy only of death. This is the whole point of the cross. When a person comes to Christ, he crucifies the Self and let’s the Lord give him a new Self, a justified Self, a heavenly Self.

Disciples of modern psychology have overrun the Church, bringing us to a point where psychological theories have equal weight with Scripture. Our sermons are inundated with this syncretistic nonsense.

Transactional Analysis, the Human Potential Movement, B.F. Skinner, Carl Jung – we don’t need that so-called wisdom. We need Jesus. Please pastors, give us a revelation of Jesus! If knowing Jesus is eternal life itself, why are we getting so much Henry Cloud and so little Jesus Christ?

2. Cultural Relevancy
When the Spirit of God departs the temple, we compensate by saying, “Wow! Look at all the fancy gold things in here!”

Our churches have compensated for a lack of true, Spirit-filled preaching, worship, and community by shifting everything to be “culturally relevant”, hoping that by being as hip as the world, no one will notice what is missing.

Instead of being the counter-cultural people that will be hated by popular culture, we have assimilated that debased culture so effectively that we no longer have anything to say to the lost. We look just like what we are supposed to flee.

3. Seeker-Sensitivity
Here is a simple translation of “Seeker Sensitivity” – take the Gospel and remove the difficult parts (like the cross), promote a Jesus that asks nothing of anyone, mix in a man-centered “theology,” some sort of media overload, topical preaching based on tidbits of Bible verses taken from a hundred different translations, and messages that are three points and a conclusion (because we all know that is how the Spirit speaks.)

What you wind up getting is a “seeker” who never really gets a chance to meet the real Jesus, never understands the Bible, never learns how to let the Spirit lead, and never comes to the cross. In short, there is good reason to believe that this seeker, when he/she makes a profession of faith, perhaps is not putting their faith in Jesus, but in some manmade, syncretistic illusion of Jesus. Perhaps we are making them far more a child of Hell than they were when they walked into the church building.

The best way to be seeker-sensitive is to preach the full Gospel and not try to make it palatable. If we truly believe that the Spirit guides into all truth, then we must rely on the Spirit to work in the life of the seeker and not second-guess the Spirit’s ability to truly work conversion. The best way to be seeker-sensitive is to be utterly counter-cultural and let seekers see that we are the peculiar people, people who have rejected the debauched culture of our day and taken on a new culture: that of the Lord of All.

We now believe that it is about numbers and not real conversion or else we would be more willing to let people walk away. Not everyone will make it. We need to try to reach everyone, but compromising our message should not be the way to attempt this.

Next time, we’ll talk about raising up the broken-down things of God.

Why the Need for Cerulean Sanctum?

Standard

Every day, throughout the world, children wake up to abuse. A drunken father beats his five year old son – just because. A drug-addicted mother fails to feed her toddler, using the little money she has to buy drugs instead of food. An uncle sexually molests his retarded niece. A hearing-impaired boy is beaten senseless by a school bully.

Does this make you angry? Does it make you want to do something? Do you love those children?

Me? I love the Church. I love the people of God who want to know Him, who want to behold Him with unveiled faces. And I believe that in many ways the Church is being abused by people who want to drive it into the ground. People who are only after acclaim. People who love error and hate the Truth. And even those people who simply don’t know any better.

Aren’t we all meeting people who are thinking, “No church for me please, it’s too screwed up” or “not right” or “not meeting my needs” or “not showing me God” or any of the myriad reasons why people are out there trying to “re-image” the Church?

Why would anyone want to do that if the Church is truly being the Church?

I don’t want the sickly Christianity that I see so many preaching today. This pop-psych, powerless, hopeless, error-ridden thing we are preaching is not right.
When your shadow falls on the lame do they get up and walk? Is God more real to you than your own life? Have you hidden the Word of God deep in your being? Do you go to bed at night thinking, “I can’t wait to wake so I can spend more time with Christ in prayer?”

Where is the Church that turns the world upside down? That confronts injustice? That tears down strongholds? That goes to the lost and says, “We know the way out of the darkness and we will do everything possible by the grace of God to help you out of that darkness.”

Ironically enough, I’m listening to a jukebox of several hundred Christian music MP3s and guess what randomly started playing when I was typing the last couple paragraphs? Keith Green’s “Asleep in the Light”:

Do you see, do you see, all the people sinking down,
Don’t you care, don’t you care, are you gonna let them drown,
How can you be so numb, not to care if they come,
You close your eyes and pretend the job’s done.

Oh Bless me Lord, bless me Lord, you know it’s all I ever hear,
No one aches, no one hurts, no one even sheds one tear,
But He cries, He weeps, He bleeds, and He cares for your needs,
And you just lay back and keep soaking it in, oh, can’t you see it’s such sin?

Cause He brings people to your door,
And you turn them away, as you smile and say,
God bless you, be at peace, and all Heaven just weeps,
Cause Jesus came to your door, you’ve left Him out on the streets.

Open up, open up, and give yourself away,
You’ve seen the need, you hear the cry, so how can you delay,
God’s calling and you’re the one, but like Jonah you run,
He’s told you to speak, but you keep holding it in,
Oh, can’t you see it’s such sin?

The world is sleeping in the dark,
That the church can’t fight, cause it’s asleep in the light,
How can you be so dead, when you’ve been so well fed,
Jesus rose from the grave, and you, you can’t even get out of bed,
Oh, Jesus rose from the dead, come on, get out of your bed.

How can you be so numb, not to care if they come,
You close your eyes and pretend the job’s done,
You close your eyes and pretend the job’s done,
Don’t close your eyes, don’t pretend the job’s done.
Come away, come away, come away with Me, My love,
Come away, from this mess, come away with Me, My love.

We’re wrapped up in technique and we’re “Purpose-Driven.” We’re conferenced, seminar-ed, and meeting-ed to death. We have all the talk in the world and yet there is no revival. I don’t think anyone here can take a look at the Book of Acts and say the Church today resembles what we see written in those pages. Why not???

I have a zeal for the Church. I want the Bride of Christ to be strong, beautiful, unblemished and holy. I hope to think the anger I am said to have is a righteous and holy anger at seeing that Bride reduced to being less than she can be.

Some say the Church of the 21st Century is apostate. That may be true, but I am going to see what I can do to make certain that is not the case. I may be a fool, but I will God’s fool, because I believe Him and because I believe He can do more if we simply abandon everything for Him. The man who sold all he had to buy the Pearl of Great Price did so because he knew the unparalleled treasure he held in his hand.

If you want to join me, please do.