theology

Moral Relevance – The Rabbit Trail to Dissipation

September 14, 2017 by Beryl Smith Leave a Comment

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

“The great business of Satan at the present time is to seek to deceive the people of God with things that seem to be in accordance with His mind, but which are really deceitful imitations…Let the precious truth of the indwelling and gifts of the Holy Spirit be declared, and Satan will follow with false gifts and another spirit, leading even earnest souls into the wildest fanaticism. Let the truth of the new birth be insisted upon, and the devil will raise up teachers after his own heart to tell men that being born again means simply ‘rising out of the self-life into the spiritual, reaching out after the higher ideals, seeking to make that which is highest, noblest and best of ourselves; thus saving ourselves by character.’ This is a sample of the teaching heard in many a supposedly orthodox pulpits at the present time.” (H. A. Ironside, Lectures on Daniel the Prophet, p. 182, 187, 1920)

In a promotional statement from the pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, we are told, “In his new book, The Power of I Am, Joel Osteen shares the secret to changing your future. Osteen encourages readers to think positively and improve their lives by speaking the promises of God. Filled with practical advice and encouragement, The Power of I Am shows readers how they can redirect the course of their lives through the words they say. When you speak the right ‘I am’s,’ you’re inviting the goodness of God. I am victorious. I am blessed. I am talented. I am anointed. Your words have creative power. With your words you can bless your future!”

The greatest myth ever propagated by religionists of any flavor for centuries has been the simple statement that one can get to God for success and blessing by lifting themselves up by their own bootstraps and endeavoring to live a good life in relation to others.

You might ask, “What is moral relativism? Well, it’s a mindset and lifestyle that says, “My sense of morality is whatever I think it to be according to whatever is happening around me. My morality depends on my present circumstances in relation to everything and everyone around me. It may change from time to time, depending on how our culture changes.”

At one time in America, morality was based on the Ten Commandments found in the Judeo-Christian religion. Those commandments express the moral character of the God of Jews and Christians. Devout Jews are rigid in their efforts to keep the Law God has placed upon them in Scripture. Christians are faced with the words of Jesus Christ, who said, “If you love me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15). Christ’s commandments expanded the Ten Commandments to a deeper moral responsibility, imposed upon those who would profess belief in Him. Added to the moral degradation observed in our current culture, we now have a form of moral relativism that insists on tolerance and inclusivism. To be considered acceptable we must abandon the exclusivism of Biblical morality.

It really doesn’t matter what you think as an autonomous individual. Believe whatever you want. One is a bigot who says a candidate for high federal office should have to refrain from using what was once termed “filthy language” and boasts of a lifestyle based on the moral depravity embraced by many starting in the 60s and 70s. And what’s worse is that many in the Evangelical World care not what a presidential candidate’s lifestyle and past are. Isn’t morality relative to the times in which we live? Is there really anything wrong with wanting to have our ears tickled, accumulating for ourselves teachers in accordance with our own desires; and what’s wrong with turning away our ears from the truth, and turning aside to myths? Isn’t this the way we should all do things in this age of myths?

We American evangelicals and biblical fundamentalists had better wake up and smell the roses. I fear we are satisfied in smelling what is normally put under the roses and are willing to accept the judgment God is sending us through our devolving culture and ungodly leaders.

The time has come for believers to get into their closets and onto their knees. It’s time we believers speak out, lifting the Biblical standard of righteousness. Our nation is sliding into dissipation and ruin.

A Frightening Prospect

June 2, 2015 by Beryl Smith Leave a Comment

“For whosoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
(Mark 8:38 ASV)

John MacArthur begins each of the broadcasts we see on the NRB network with this statement:

“What in the world makes us so embarrassed about the Gospel?”

There are some good answers to this question. It would do us well to look at them briefly.

Statistics tell us that less than six percent of professing evangelicals honor God by tithing. Some have convinced themselves that the first ten percent of their income is theirs – not God’s. It’s no wonder many evangelicals meet in warehouses or other rented buildings. Our churches are filled with tithe thieves. But that isn’t the statistic that really disturbs me.

Less than five percent of professing evangelicals have ever witnessed to another individual who needs Jesus Christ as savior. For various reasons they have totally missed the New Testament teaching on evangelism. Many professing Christians would say, “Witnessing must be someone else’s responsibility…not mine.” [Read more…]

Another Look at the Emergent Church

December 10, 2014 by Beryl Smith 1 Comment

“Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize that about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you – unless indeed you fail the test?” (2 Corinthians 13:5).

Self-examination is usually a positive thing. I am Type 2 diabetic. I frequently check my blood glucose level to assure that I am in a healthy range. I go to my cardiologist to get a checkup on how my ticker is doing. Are the particular blood tests within a healthy range? Do I need a medication change? It’s always nice when I can walk out of his office, having heard him say, “Your cholesterol is looking good and I see you’ve lost some weight.” Wow, having reached three-quarters of a century in age, that’s enough to make me sing, walking back out to my car.

Then it always makes me wonder, “How is the Evangelical Church doing in our nation? A nation which appears to be declining morally, spiritually, economically, politically and culturally.” My opinion of the status of the Evangelical Church has been declining for almost four decades.

The visible Evangelical Church in America moved through several transitional periods: the invasive liberalism of the 20’s and 30’s, the increasing separatism of the 40’s and 50’s, the cultural isolation of the 60’s and 70’s, the political joy of the 80’s, the thrill of the mega growth of the 90’s, and the emergent mish-mash of 2000 and beyond. What are some of the current characteristics of the Church, now somewhat embedded in its “emergent” state of affairs? I see several. And they continue to disturb me.

First: A continuing abandonment of the teaching of theology. Liberalism scared us with its quest for higher scholasticism, so we decided to simplify the doctrinal aspects of our teachings. The Gospel became watered down to where the average church deacon could not define for you what the Word teaches about justification.

Second: The almost total lack of catechism – teaching what we, as Protestants, believe. Pastors avoid catechesis, and most parents don’t even press their children to memorize Bible verses, let alone memorize a catechism and understand the fundamentals of Protestant belief. “After all, we’ve got so many other projects and activities demanding the kid’s time; and we can’t seem to get their hand-held communication and entertainment devices out of their hands.”

Third: The continued embrace of the methods of secular marketing to try to get people into church. Our culture’s emphasis is youth driven. Hype up the advertisement, jazz up the music, provide some pastry and coffee, and try to talk folks into considering the Christian faith as though it was an insurance policy for heaven, without any payment of repentance. Besides, that’s a sticky theological word and we avoid those today. Let’s all just be happy.

Fourth: Mediocrity in the Pulpit. Jack Van Impe, with whom I served as an Associate Evangelist in the early 70’s, used to grieve over the ministerial mediocrity he saw in his nation-wide ministry. So it’s said today, whatever you do, don’t say anything that might offend someone. Don’t preach on hell. Goodness, that might make you have to explain why most folks are going there – and already have the sentence of eternal death on them. So what if Jesus preached on hell more than anyone else recorded in Scripture. Do we have to, also?

Fifth: Identity Avoidance. What’s the name of your church? “The Gathering,” “Celebration,” Freedom Church,” “Ocean View,” “Real Life,” “The Crossing,” “Bayside,” “The House,” “Cornerstone,” “Elevation,” “Friends,” etc., etc. Emergent churches often avoid any identification with a particular denomination. Quite often the church is either “independent” or built around a charismatic man. Some emergent churches are quick to avoid describing the sheep and the goats in the audience. After all, we have turned the sheepfold into a zoo. We’ve got to make folks go home feeling good about themselves, not that they are sinners needing a savior. Don’t all churches desire to make people more morally upright and helpful to the community?

Sixth: The lack of Biblical teaching and preaching on evangelism. Have you heard a sermon on soul winning lately? What is it, anyway? Is Proverbs 11:30 applicable to our day? What is a “tree of life,” anyway? Isn’t that why we hire a professionally trained pastoral staff? Is it really true that less than 5% of professing Christians feel it is their personal responsibility to share the Gospel with those with whom they come in contact?

Seventh: The increase of Christian Theft. Less than 6% of professing Christians observe the Biblical requirement to tithe ten percent of their income. Today is the day of the “tipper” not the tither. Did Jesus really say that tithing is the responsibility of a believer? (Matthew 23:23). Did God really say that His people are robbers? (Malachi 3:8-11). No wonder we resort to building warehouses for churches instead of cathedrals. No wonder we can’t afford to tithe. We don’t believe in it. Our churches are filled with thieves! Or perhaps you don’t think it matters to God any more.

Eighth: The abandonment of prayer. As a youth and up to the 70’s, it was a common practice to go to prayer meeting at church on Wednesday nights. No longer. Prayer meetings are a thing of the “traditional” past. Today, pastors are too busy performing their duties as “life coach,” and promoting “recovery” as opposed to prayer for spiritual revival. They may suggest that people pray; but they don’t command it. Should the imperative statement of I Thessalonians 5:17 be changed to a suggestion? It’s only my opinion; but the Evangelical Church in America has abandoned personal and corporate prayer for God to revive His people from their lukewarm, apathetic state.

Ninth: Forsaking any concept of traditional liturgy. Our good old American sense of individualism and entrepreneurship has led some pastors to throw out any type of traditional liturgy (like praying the Lord’s Prayer). Liturgy is simply defined as “a rite prescribed for public worship.” Many of today’s church leaders say, “Let’s do it my way. It will help bring in the un-churched.” So they prescribe their own order of service, establishing their own liturgy. After all, if it’s new, it must be true. But it’s only the liturgy of the contemporary. Nothing unique. Only a parody of the inferiority of a devolving, dying race, in some cases, a ridiculous imitation of something that had more beautiful, theological substance.

Tenth: Surrendering to our culture’s passion for youth dominance. It has been wisely said that our culture, including the church, has been juvenilized. We’re just a big bunch of kids trying to get by, having a good time. Let the old folks step aside and the young and the restless lead the way. And juvenilization leads to a failure of transmuting the wisdom of older, mature believers to the current crisis.

“Dwarfed by the vast complexity of the universe, towered over by technology and its environment, people see themselves reduced to insignificance and their initiative is drained…people lose their sense of individuality. Inaction becomes elevated into a principle. The result is a generation suffering from cultural failure of nerve.” [1].

In his remarkable book, The Dust of Death, published twenty years ago, Oz Guinness spoke pointedly about the state of the church:

“The Christian community needs first to put its own house in order and regain its integrity and clarity from its compromise with the present confusion…Christians face a subtle danger of creating a new Christian subculture, long-haired instead of short, but equally narcissistic and self-contained…What is needed is nothing short of reformation and revival in the church, a rediscovery of the truth of God by his people and a renewal of the life of God within his people. This is our crying need individually and corporately. Needles to say, both are the prerogative of God, so the probability of revival is beyond the scenarios of futurology. But it is exactly I these nonhumanist hands that the future of Western civilization lies.”[2]

With the decline in our nation in so many ways, one wonders just how long the Ship of State can stay afloat. And what has happened to the faith that once turned the world upside-down with the preaching of Christ by Christian converts? But for any true believer there is always hope.

Things that encourage me: 1.) A return on the part of some preachers to preaching the whole counsel of God and a return to a renewed emphasis on the five Solas of the Protestant Reformation. 2.) An awareness that abandoning theology has sprung open the door to all kinds of doctrinal aberrations and wholesale ignorance on the part of the laity as to what we should believe and why we should believe it. 3.) A realization that God is still on His Throne and that Jesus Christ is still building His church. 4.) Another look at the concept of liturgy. Some are realizing that abandoning traditional liturgy and replacing it with a more “modern” or culturally acceptable liturgy has forced older generations of believers to flee the church or surrender to the dominance of today’s youth culture.

So, we ask the question, “Is there any hope”? I can only answer with the Word:

“Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within s, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen” (Ephesians 3:20-21).

Suggested Reading

December 3, 2014 by Beryl Smith Leave a Comment

To my Friends Across The Country:

I have wanted to write you about a series of books that I would like to recommend to you.

David F. Wells (PhD. University of Manchester, Distinguished Senior Research Professor @ Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) received a Pew grant, “Exploring the nature of Christian faith in the contemporary modernized world.” From his study he has produced a series of very good, relevant, Christ-honoring books that I feel every spiritually minded Christian should read.

Here are the titles of books written by David Wells that I hope will peak your attention:

No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (1993)
God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (1994)
Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (1998)
Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World (2004)
The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (2008)
God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World (2014)

I have been deeply moved and blessed by David Wells’ ministry. He has appeared on the White Horse Inn and his books are sound, relevant, and filled with Biblical Truth.

From his latest book I quote from his concern regarding worship in many, if not most of the evangelical churches in America:

“If we look at the way in which many evangelical churches have actually been worshiping since the 1970s, it is rather different from what I have been describing. It has become far more culturally defined than Biblically. It has often catered to generational niches. It has been about marketing a ‘product’ in a way that attracts new customers. The new customers, though, tend to belong to one of the generational tribes. Christian faith is pitched to them often without doctrinal truth. Pastors who have been in this business have mistakenly thought that doctrinal truth is ‘off-putting’ to believers and unbelievers alike. And the outreach that has been done often has far more in common with the entertainment world than with the truths at the core of Christian faith. Too often it has been about the worshipers, and giving them a pleasant experience as they express themselves, rather than about the God whom they have come to worship.

…Now, along the edges of the evangelical world, this disposition is producing a lot of bleeding. It has propelled an exodus out of evangelical churches. Some have moved out into Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglo-Catholicism, and Catholicism. Others have simply moved home. Born-againers, in significant numbers, are dropping out of church. This is not true everywhere, or of everyone, or of every church. But many who were once part of the born-again world are now turning away from evangelical churches. In one study done in 2013, it was found that in the recent past, 70 percent of the young people who had been raised in evangelical youth groups had dropped out of church attendance once they became independent adults. Why?”

(God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients our World; pp. 198-199)

Now, having been a believing Christian for over three-quarters of a century and a minister of the Gospel for over a half-century, this is what I have observed:

In the evangelical churches in America in the 1920s to the 1930s, liberalism and higher criticism invaded the major evangelical denominations, churches, colleges, and seminaries. The cancer of European liberalism, skepticism, and unbelief became embedded in evangelical circles. Out of this came those often condemned as “fundamentalists.” They started new denominations, colleges, seminaries and churches. They were called “fundamentalists” because they held to the major biblical truths of the Protestant Church. I am a fundamentalist! No apologies. No hedging my theological beliefs in the faith of our Protestant for-bearers. One of my ancestors, Ralph Blaisdell, was a Puritan who left England in 1635, to be a “planter” in the New World. He left the skeptical liberalism of the Church of England so he could worship God according to the dictates of his Puritan heart.

Since the 1970s, a profound change has taken place in the evangelical world. To put it simply, the “emergent movement” has done to the professing evangelical church in America what liberalism did to the church in the 1920s and 1930s. Today the church has forsaken sound theology, and expositional preaching, and has turned its emphasis into what Christian Smith in his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers called “moralistic, therapeutic, deism.” Today the church has forsaken any claim to be “fundamental” and is producing “another gospel” that offends no one, leaves theology in the back room, welcomes all into the “gathering,” and lets them leave with a gospel not demanding repentance of sin and absolute trust in the Christ of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.

The invisible Church of Jesus Christ in America is in desperate need of a spiritual revival in the hearts of her leaders. The nation crumbles in moral and spiritual darkness while the Church stumbles in dim light.

I urge you to pray for a genuine Holy Spirit rejuvenation in Christ’s body. We “come out from among them and be separate” (II Corinthians 6:17-18) or we perish with a nation that has turned itself from the God of the Bible to the god of secular humanism.

Dumbing-Down the Evangelical Scene

May 4, 2013 by Beryl Smith 1 Comment

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

We live in a Semi-Palagian, Arminian world. It’s a world where so-called evangelical churches no longer preach about man’s radical corruption and God’s absolute sovereignty. It’s a religious world where in a real sense the Humanist Manifesto is given credence unwittingly, as though it had the answers to our sin-cursed world. So pluralism, inclusivism, individualism, and skepticism regarding absolute truth seem to hold sway in the minds of many professing believers.

A recent blog, lamenting the same sense of decay, caught my attention:

“Why are there so many different Christian churches?” asked someone to this blogger. “Well… there are two reasons I would suggest to you. One is something that is legitimate and one that is not legitimate. What I mean by that is that the first reason is that God didn’t make us out of a “cookie-cutter” mold, and I think that there are legitimate differences between certain churches. There are some churches that have one style of worship. Some churches where the pastor is, you know, dresses one way and another dress another. I think there are legitimate differences between some churches; I don’t think the church at Rome was identical to the church at Corinth or the church at Thessalonica. But, in reality, the reason that there are all sorts of different churches is primarily due to the fact that people will pick and choose what they will or will not believe out of the Bible! That is, men bring their traditions to the text of scripture, their ignorance to the text of scripture, and they have certain things they want to find. So instead of believing all that the Bible has to say, they’ll pick and choose certain sections they like better than others and choose to ignore others. They’ll just pick and choose. I think that’s why you have the illegitimate differences that there are – simply false teachings that divide people in various churches.” (Dr. James R. White; “Lane’s Blog”)

A phenomenon of our 21^st Century evangelical scene is the movement of many true believers from one church to another, longing to find a church where the traditional elements of Evangelical Protestantism are not thrown out in an effort for contemporary church leaders to market the church by embracing the marketing methods of our secular culture.

Contemporary, political commentators complain about the very large percentage of American citizens who are simply ignorant about the real issues facing us today. Having had the history of our nation pushed to the perimeter of the public school curriculum, and getting political information from the national, liberal news media or TV sound bites, many citizens simply can’t be bothered about the ways in which our nation is declining – morally, politically, and internationally.

The same attitudes are seen in churches. Theology is like a foreign language that no one wants to learn; and few seem to grasp the fact that biblical theology is the foundation of the Christian religion, like the Constitution is the foundation of our American liberty. Since it appears that both are sliding toward oblivion, those who know what they hunger for are wandering around trying to find it. In the churches where they visit, the ear ticklers try to get them to join by providing religious entertainment, dressed up like a city pop concert, where everyone can get some kind of a therapeutic shot in the arm.

A revival of preaching the whole counsel of God, as found in the infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of God is the answer to our spiritual hunger. A revival in the lives of our seminary professors and their students – now filling their churches with what they think are “seekers” is what is needed. Our church leaders need to spend more time in the Book and on their knees rather than in the coffee shop or in seminars on “church growth”. God help us to pray for and seek the Father for such a revival!