Hey all...

I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

I got into a discussion the other day regarding the effect the “seeker-sensitive” movement has had on the church as a whole. To be sure, some good things have come out of it – a renewed focus on reaching the lost, a challenge to re-think the way church reaches a post-modern culture, and a call to be more aware of those visiting in our midst (I have talked to countless people who have said they visited a church only to be completely ignored!).

But troublingly (is that a word? – must be, my spell check didn’t go nuts!), I have dealt more and more with people who feel that it is o.k. to leave a church, or disregard its teachings, simply because they were confronted with the truth of the Word, and didn’t appreciate someone doing so. There is a dark side to the seeker sensitive and emergent church movements that has enabled people to feel entitled to be comfortable in the presence of the Lord and while sitting under His Word. But this certainly wasn’t the case in the early church. Acts 5:11-13 says that “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events. The apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders among the people. And all the believers used to meet together in Solomon's Colonnade. No one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people.” Did you catch that? The Bible is telling us that there was so much power in the early church’s worship services that people were actually afraid to join them. I can already hear someone saying “That doesn’t make any sense – that would keep people away from God!” But read on. The very next verse says “Nevertheless, more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.”

Here’s the problem… when we sacrifice God sensitivity to be more sensitive to the wants and desires of sinful man, man becomes more comfortable and God less so, in our midst. We are, at that point, relying on the rational programs and systems of man to win the lost, rather than on the power of God to draw people unto His Son (John 6:44). But also, we have then introduced the dangerous idea that the job of the church is to make someone, who is separated from a holy, absolutely righteous God by their sin, comfortable in His presence! What happens when you then try and confront the very sin that separates them? They become indignant, and often walk away! I have seen this happen more and more in this generation: where I have preached a timeless truth of God’s Word, and someone behaves like I had absolutely no right to do so. One man, several years ago, became upset when I preached that God hates divorce (Mal. 2:16), because his wife had once been divorced. Another questioned my right to offend people with the idea that Jesus is the only way (John 14:6). I have seen couples who were living together outside of marriage, leave the church because sexual immorality was denounced (1Cor. 6:9,10). People in open sin who are removed from ministry ask “Who are you to tell me how to live?” (Heb. 13:17). Well, the truth is I’m nobody. I’m just a messenger and a servant. But the real question is “Who do you think you are, to wear the label of Christian, and yet reject the very Word of God?”

The reality is that we are seeing a shift in our generation. The “old guard”; the pastors, Christian leaders, evangelists, etc., who would preach holiness, repentance, and the need to “Get right with God” are passing off of the scene. They are being replaced with “feel good” leaders, who tell you that coming to Christ is about making you happy, and who cause you to believe that preaching anything else is crossing the line. The pastor of the largest church in the U.S. recently said “You will never hear me preach judgment from my pulpit” (he’ll have to tear out a lot of the teachings of Jesus from the Bible then!). The pastor of perhaps the most well known church in America placed on his website that his church had no problem baptizing couples who were living together (what is baptism but an outward statement of what is supposed to be an inward transformation?). One well known pastor of a mega church wrote that he wanted every Sunday in his church to be a celebration like Easter Sunday. But how much room does that leave the Holy Spirit to call us to mourn, repent, or become broken? On top of that, many televangelists command multi-million dollar salaries, and teach that following Christ is about securing blessing after blessing, and hold themselves up as the model that you should be emulating (there’s no way they could hold up the one who “had no place to lay [his] head”, or His early followers who said “silver and gold have I none”). The truth is that we are seeing a generation that is choosing to either reject the portions of the Word that they do not like, or distort it to where it no longer says what it clearly says.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer tackled this when he dealt with how we distort scripture to conform to our desires. A good example of this is what I call the "altar call scenario". The Holy Spirit convicts us of something during a worship service and says, "Go to the altar", and we say "What God is obviously after is repentance of course, not for me to go to a specific location, so I'll simply do my business with God right here". The problem was that God didn't say "Repent" -- we inferred that from His call. Bonhoeffer's point was that God's will is only achieved through obedience, not by "figuring out God" and then trying to do what we have determined was His intent – something we are not capable of. As Bonhoeffer said "Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes".

How about you? Are you surrendered to the molding process of God? Does it anger you, or does it exicte you, when God's Word "steps on your toes"? Are you hungry and thirsty to become like Jesus, or are you simply looking for someone to tell you how "o.k." you already are?

Have a great new year!

Dave