3. What Really Is Going On?
3
WHAT REALLY IS GOING ON?
We have established a social caste system in our churches and institutions. I thought only Hinduism had a system of social discrimination, but experience proves that religion by itself almost always divides rather than unites people. There are those who congregate in churches for all kinds of reasons other than the biblical one!
Many churches will sell out and move their property if a neighborhood starts to change racially or economically. No cost is too great to preserve the class distinctions that created the church in the first place. We will pay any price to maintain a church without people who are different from us in any way. Could it be that at the root of most of our denominations and local church splits is not a pious struggle for truth—but an invisible system of discrimination against others based on age, race, education and economic background?
And what a tragedy we see on the mission field when some of these same denominations try to export their schisms and divisive teachings to the churches of the Third World.
Let’s face it. We like to be with our own kind. A church that asks us to love and reach out to the unlovely or to those different from us is unthinkable—yet it was the core of Christ’s evangelistic lifestyle. We need to repent of the loveless, intolerant, self-centered Christianity that has become one of the most distinguishing characteristics of the Church today.
Some modern church growth teachers are now openly applying marketing techniques to further divide and create churches based on demographics rather than spiritual birth. This used to be done by tiny committees of racial bigots who met secretly. Today it is being taught as church growth in some of our seminaries!
“But if ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors” (James 2:9).
We are fascinated by having the best and the biggest. Social scientists say that the last sign of life in any movement comes when it starts to build monument-style buildings. Why do we insist on building the largest and most impressive structures in our city when people on the other side of town are hungry, jobless and worshiping in storefronts?
Why do we construct extravagant, inefficient buildings at all? What motivates us to try to be the biggest and the best? Who taught us that “bigger is better” and “nothing is too good for the house of the Lord”? Did God tell us this, or have we learned it from the world? We need to start asking ourselves hard questions.
How can we be making monthly church mortgage payments of $50,000 and still say we don’t have enough in the budget for missions? Can we square this extravagance with the commands of our Lord who said, “How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another?” (John 5:44).
We are taken up with bumper-sticker theology. Any kind of spiritual thought that goes beyond “how to have a happy family” seems to be incomprehensible to modern Christians. The only kind of Christianity we want is a pragmatic kind that shows us how to have a positive mental attitude, get ahead with our career plans, win friends and influence people.
What’s happened is that we’ve made over our theology and preaching agenda into an image of ourselves. When I first began to preach about the necessity for a transformed and obedient life, someone would always come up to me and say, “Let’s be careful here not to put people on guilt trips and teach legalism.”
Such people want the Gospel and the Bible to stop with the phrase, “Christians aren’t perfect; they’re just forgiven.” That’s the end of their theology. That’s all that fits on their bumper sticker!
Whatever Happened to the Teachings of Jesus?
Well, that’s not the Gospel—and I’m not teaching perfectionism either. But we have to question a Christianity that has so distorted the doctrine of grace that a simple call to obedience is mistaken for legalism. Challenging people to live the normal Christian life rather than accommodate themselves to sin is not a guilt trip or manipulation. These phrases are frequently used today as a smoke-screen defense by self-serving believers who don’t want their fantasy-land religion upset by the truth.
This narrow view of salvation has impoverished our faith more than we realize. Whatever happened to the teachings of Jesus on eternal judgment in hell? Why don’t we warn people about the terrible punishment that awaits them if they don’t turn back to God now? It’s astonishing that so-called Bible-believing Christians have, in effect, taken a pair of scissors and snipped out vast sections of the Scriptures. Jesus lived daily with an awareness of the awful consequences of rejecting the grace of God—but why isn’t His Body connected today to the passion of a Savior who died to save men and women from eternal flames? How can we be casual about the lost world when God considered it so important that His only solution was Calvary?
“This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Mark 7:6–7).
We have spoiled our children and youth. Why is it that the young people of our churches are given fun and games rather than the challenge of the Great Commission?
The preteen and teenage years are so critical. This is when most young people choose their careers and mates—probably the two biggest decisions that determine the course of any believer’s life. Anyone who has ever worked with adolescents will tell you that this is probably the highest point in our lives for energy and idealism. Teens want to test out the ethics and morality of their church and parents to see if it really works.
Will Parents Back This Kind of Program?
But what are we giving them instead? The standard answer is to hire a youth director to plan parties and trips based around the premise: “You can be a Christian and have fun too!” How many millions of our youth have been ruined by the introduction of this worldly Christianity just at the moment in life when they most need to see reality?
What would happen if instead we treated our youth with total seriousness, exposing them to mission field learning experiences? Opportunities to love and sacrifice for others? To serve on the front lines of the Gospel?
Will parents back this kind of program? If not, why not? How long can we go on ducking this question?
We have ruled out the supernatural and opted for self-sufficient, computerized Christianity. Technology is the modern-day magic of our culture. It gives its users an incredible but false sense of power and control. To many today, knowledge and information have become equal to doing.
This is why the Church has become the world’s greatest collector of knowledge and expertise. And this is also why we’re so dependent today on consultants. How many pastors spend far more time meeting with church-growth consultants, fund-raisers and salesmen than they do seeking the face of God for His will, plans and solutions?
We are becoming more and more dependent on horizontal, rationalistic, here-and-now solutions to our problems. We’ve become terrific consumers of products, seminars, shortcuts—anything, it seems, that does not require us to wait on the Lord for vertical solutions to our dilemmas.
Stand outside a typical church next weekend and watch the congregation leave the worship service. Why do so many look as if they’ve just left the local movie theater, laughing and casual? Why are others sad and troubled with unsolved personal problems? Why are some so obviously bound by addictions and sin? Are these the faces of people who have had a face-to-face encounter with the Living God? Where is the reverence and awe we would expect from a people who have just witnessed the miraculous? What is really going on in our churches today?
The haunting question that must be asked about the status of Christianity is this: Why do a people who have so much have so little? With all this knowledge and skill, why is there no great move of God in our churches today?
When are we going to look ourselves in the mirror and say, “OK, I know enough now. I’ve trained enough. I’ve consulted enough. What am I going to do about my knowledge of God and His ways? When is my life going to demonstrate His compassion to the needy world around me?”
We are following false shepherds. The Church today is being ravaged by deceived men who spread half-gospels and lead millions of people astray with false teachings. I don’t want to take time and space here to list examples of these religious con-artists, and there would be very little profit in doing so anyway. It’s sufficient to say that they’re everywhere, and many of them sound doctrinally correct.
But we should be asking some even more relevant questions, not resting until we get the answers in our spirits: Why do we let these people into our homes via radio, television and the Internet? Why do we go to their seminars, conferences and churches? Why do we buy their books and DVDs? Why do we give millions of dollars to keep their man-centered ministries going?
Few Christians can say they haven’t been taken in by these wolves at one time or another. What is it, then, that is making us so vulnerable to their seductive doctrines?
But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, ... beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; ... These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest: to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever (2 Peter 2:1, 14, 17).
Hyperactivism and Dead Works
We have fallen victim to hyperactivism and dead works. Modern churches are among the most frenzied organizations in the world. In almost any average-sized community, the calendar is so full that you can keep going almost day and night on a year-round basis. The unwary believer is challenged constantly to join this merry-go-round of religious activities and fellowship.
Because yielding the time and money we control to Christ is such an important test of stewardship, many a sincere but naïve Christian falls into this trap of carnal activism. For many, workaholism is as addictive as alcohol or smoking. Such victims of religious “busy-ness” are little different from cultists on the treadmill of earning their salvation by penance, selling books or doing good works.
Their bookshelves are full of Christian books and videos. They’re always off to another meeting or seminar. Christian broadcasts and CDs play in their cars. They’re the kind of people who are present every time the church door opens.
But in the wake of these busy Christians are often broken homes, relationships and churches. Family, friends and co-workers shake their heads and instinctively pull back. Jesus predicted that the branch connected to the vine would produce much spiritual fruit. But too often our frantic lives are barren.
Where in our oh, so busy, busy lives of Christian service is Christ Himself? Where is the fruit that would authenticate our works? Are we merely acting out the motions of the Christian life, or is the Spirit of God being released in our religious activities?
To answer this question and so many others, we need to cross a bridge. Too few modern Christians even know it exists—but there is no other way for the world-weary believer to go. It means giving up our fairy-tale notions about Christ and Christianity. It means stepping away from the comfortable Christianity—the one we have conformed to our culture. But for the man and woman God uses, there can be no other direction. There is no exit but the road to reality.
In the next chapter, I’ll show you how you can take your first step on the path to authentic Christianity.