I am so thankful that our sovereign God has revealed to us through the scriptures the victory that we will have upon his return. But, while we look forward to that day, we are called to doing the work of carrying out the Great Commission with all of its implications today.
Part of doing all we humanly can to be used by God to grow his Kingdom and bring him glory requires an ongoing assessment of our victories and defeats. While we can rejoice in the work that some churches are doing, we should be deeply concerned about the vast majority of churches and their woeful lack of faithfulness to the mission God has entrusted to them.
Sad State of Affairs
I begin by referencing a sermon preached by John MacArthur in February 2022 titled, “One Lord, One faith, one God: the exclusivity of Christianity.” MacArthur was citing reports that he had seen and stated, “66% of American Christians say many religions lead to eternal life. That’s two out of three. 52% of evangelicals say many religions can lead to eternal life. 48% of evangelicals say that God accepts the worship of all religious people.”
This is just one example of many surveys and studies that have been done over the last 25 years that clearly shows the incredible ignorance of professing believers in America and calls into question how many churchgoers are actually true followers of our Lord. This also illustrates one of the core problems in the American church- that many, many, churchgoing people do not know (nor care to know) God’s truth revealed in the Bible, and without the truth intellectually known and believed from the heart, professing Christians will be fools, but not fools for Christ.
How can this be? How did we get here? Have not Christian leaders poured themselves into many things to advance the gospel? Yes, much blood and sweat has been spent but the question is, has it been spent on the right things?
Wrong Headed Strategies and Bad Theology
I became a Christian 30 years ago at the ripe age of 36. Since that time, I have lived through years of observing church leaders and run of the mill Christians that were passionate about getting more Christians elected to political office. Do you remember the Moral Majority? Do you remember how we were going to make our country a Christian nation through control of the legislative process? Yes, we have a stewardship to be informed and vote for the men and women who would best represent what is best for our local communities and nation as a whole, but somewhere along the way, the desire for political victories and the energy and money invested therein seemingly became more important than the gospel itself for many.
However, we will not advance the Kingdom by using the tools that the world uses. Spiritual weapons must be used to accomplish spiritual things. Conservatism cannot save us. At best it will help us live in a better society, but it will never save one soul. Our help and salvation is in the name of the Lord, the blessed gospel of Jesus Christ.
I have also witnessed the rise of the seeker driven church. Fundamentally, the seeker driven church fails at the start because it doesn’t understand that God’s design for the church is to equip the saints (believers), not to have strategies to serve the lost. We will not advance the cause of Christ by making our churches more comfortable for those who do not believe in Christ. This has been a plague on the American church for several decades and has greatly contributed to large churches that are filled with nice people who are on the road to perdition. They have not been told the hard sayings from the Bible (you have a wicked heart), have not truly repented, and are not striving for holiness without which no one will see the Lord. This wrong-headed notion of God’s design for His church has also served to stunt the growth of true believers who attend those churches and have been trained to have a low view of God and a high view of man.
In addition, we have seen the rise of the faith healer and the false teaching of the word faith preacher. They are money grabbers who teach that man can manipulate God for his own gain. Blasphemy.
Concurrent with the rise of the seeker driven/friendly church, churches have been more open to reconsidering what the Bible teaches regarding sexuality and gender. It opened the door to the bad theology of accepting women as pastors and has subsequently moved on to a push for the acceptance of other gender and sex related issues such as homosexuality in church leadership. Sadly, all of this is a symptom of the church taking its cues from the culture rather than the Bible.
More recently, we have had the devastating battle over the implications of Critical Theory. Churches have split, relationships have been severed, and the gospel has been replaced by a new gospel that is in fact, no gospel at all. Add to that all of the negative effects of social media. Besides being a great time suck for many that has led to a kind of bondage, social media has brought us a venue for lies, hate, bullying, the cancel culture, and all sorts of sexual and financial temptations.
The Church and the American Culture
As the salt of Christianity has been on the wane in our society, the devil has not been slow to encourage the government to squelch the preaching of God’s Word. This will continue because the message of the gospel is literally hated by the unconverted. Note the recent case in Indiana where a medium sized church that had operated a free biblical counseling ministry for the last 45 years, came under pressure from the local City Council who proposed a penalty for anyone who talked with minors to help them overcome unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Thankfully that proposal did not go through, but there are many such challenges to teaching from the scriptures throughout North America. In an upside down world where wrong has become right, we are seeing the loving gospel of Jesus Christ become classified as hate speech.
How about our young people? Many churches have been posting their weekly, monthly, and yearly statistics on how many young people accepted Christ and were baptized. Yet, we have also seen numerous reports for the last 25 years saying that 70-90% of our young people fall away from the faith after they leave their parents’ home for college or to live on their own. What happened to their faith? Or, what kind of faith was that? Has it not become plainly clear that in the words of Jesus, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” In other words, many churches have coerced young people to verbally assent to the truths of the gospel without the appropriate follow up for real fruit that necessarily comes after an actual heart change.
The Church’s Response
What is the church’s answer to the devilish history of the last 50 years? Many articles have been written and speeches made with solutions for how the gospel can once again gain traction and move the culture towards God. Significant efforts to support more Christians to choose a political career, get more Christian professors in the universities, plant more churches, address cultural hot topics, and so on, have born little fruit. Do we need to have more conferences, write more books, or do more studies of our declining culture? While these things certainly serve to feed and encourage the faithful, I submit that it will never be enough to turn the tide for Christ.
Maybe there is something else we can do that we have not properly considered or given the weight it deserves. Maybe it is something that God has made manifestly clear in His Word. Maybe we have not been striving after the things that God has commanded us to do and be. After all, we cannot expect God to bless the things that He has not called us to do while we ignore the things that we have been clearly taught to us. Have we been neglecting the weightier things of the law?
The Greatest Conspiracy Ever Attempted
I believe the church has not been shrewd as serpent and wise as a dove. But, there is one who has been shrewd and wise and crafty. He is committed to the “long game” and has been willing to invest in a strategy and methodologies that bear fruit not in years, but in decades. He is focused and determined and never tires, and his name is Satan.
Satan has used the sinful heart of men to blind them to the truth, and to manipulate and destroy them by tempting mankind to love the things of this world. He has taken the blessings that God has given us and has refashioned them into all kinds of idols so that in the end, people have become worshippers of the gifts instead of the Giver and have no interest in giving thanks to the King of kings. I believe our churches are filled with these Romans 1 people.
But true Christians are not impervious to these same temptations, and many go about their Christian lives walking with the Lord in a manner that comfortably fits around their many worldly interests. This is manifested in their lukewarm giving, their lukewarm serving, and their lukewarm daily worship. They do not fully embrace the fact that they have been bought with a price and that their lives are no longer their own. Yet, they view their walk as one that is very pleasing to God.
However, God has made it very clear that you cannot love God and this world. And sadly, because most churches are unwilling to confront this kind of so called, “Christian life” they are now complicit in this ongoing unfaithfulness to Christ.
A Powerful, God Pleasing Strategy
Worldliness, ignorance, idolatry. How is the church going to conquer these powerful forces of evil? Well, the answer is not a new idea. In fact, it is a very, very old idea. It’s called obedience. We have the means to defeat the wiles of the wicked one and advance the cause of Christ by simply obeying the commandments of scripture.
No, shortcuts, no quick fixes, no new ideas. This is not a political or patriotic idea or concern. This is a transcendent idea, a divine initiative that would transform the culture and country if it were obeyed. If we are to accomplish what Jesus has charged us to do, it must be accomplished God’s way.
And here it is: The church must become a body of believers that has a Christian worldview, a Christian spine, a high view of God, low view of man, a love for His Word, are in pursuit of holiness, and are completely focused on the gospel. And the way to move away from our lukewarm state is to go back to the first things. I believe one of those first things is found in obedience to Ephesians 6:4. That is, the lives of true Christian parents must become wholly committed to training their children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
And if the Lord is pleased to bless obedience to His command, it will probably take 50 years, or at least 2-3 generations of faithful obedience to see the fruit. We will be doing what Paul called planting and none of us reading this article will see the full harvest in this lifetime. It is the long game. It is what God has gloriously given us to do and because He is faithful, it will produce a bounty of salt and light in the world.
That kind of sea change in our churches and church families will demand a turning away from a love of the world and renewed love of God and all that He has commanded. Our obedience will bring great joy, but it will also bring things that most evangelicals are not accustomed to-persecution, suffering, division, and hate.
In particular, there are two areas that must be addressed by the church leaders who will need great courage and trust in the Lord. The first is how Christian’s spend God’s (not their) money. There are huge implications of Christian stewardship. The second area that is explicitly tied to the Ephesians 6:4 commandment is education both in the home and the local community school.
Church leaders, how is it that we have seen 50 years of anti-Christian change in the secular schools that most of our Christian families’ kids attend and have not shepherded our Christian families to remove their children from hearing the daily doctrines of the devil? In using that terminology, am I being a little dramatic? Maybe hyperbolic? No, I am not!
Did church leaders not notice that the primary responsibility for training children has been delegated to the community secular school? Have church leaders not realized that training children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord was not being done as it should be by the parents? Furthermore, have the shepherds of the flock never realized that the daily training of the minds of children in Christian families was being done by organizations that completely ignore God for Who He is and teach all kinds of things that God hates (Romans 1:18-32)?
Or is it something else? Could it be that church leaders did watch education in America become increasingly anti-Christian, but were hindered from speaking the truth on this matter because of the possible pushback, even anger, from their congregations?
After so many years of fostering unbiblical ideas like, “our kids are being salt and light,” or, “it is up to the parents (that part is true) what to do with their children so we don’t speak to that”, are church leaders now trapped in a situation where decades of overt or tacit approval of secular education have them boxed into silence? (See Biblical Mandate for Church Leaders for more).
These children have not and will not be prepared for this world to represent Christ or even remotely think Christian thoughts. They will not withstand pressure or persecution or being ostracized by friends and family if need be. They will have no stomach for it. And they certainly won’t prepare their kids for the same. That statement is not a forward-looking prophetic statement; it is now historical fact.
So, whether we assess education from a spiritual perspective or simply use common sense, we cannot expect to have a God honoring outcome in the children when their minds are being instructed day after day with an anti-Christian belief system. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say this: we will never see a change in the culture for Christ while we continue to have our kids educated in anti-Christian schools. Never, because God will not be mocked.
In conclusion, I’m making a call for an honest assessment. Many like to talk about an ongoing reformation in the church. But in a practical view of the last 50 years, I would have to say that we are in a negative reformation. And frankly, I do not think there can be a return to positive reformation without obedience to a clear commandment (Ephesians 6:4) that has such massive implications for the family, The Great Commission and the church as a whole.
May the Lord give us wisdom, strength, and courage to help His church return to the first things.
