This
post by R.C. Sproul Jr. is a significant post that articulates succinctly my
most recent frustrations with the distractions of ministry. Having been involved in Christian Ministry for 23 years now, I have been a part of many hip
and fresh church plants. These churches, carrying the legacy of our churches’
ancestors champion the care and mitigation of gross socially accepted sins.
Take slavery and John Newton for example.
“With the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible
regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair
through the mercy of God, Amazing Grace
is one of the most recognizable songs in the English-speaking world."1 John
Newton penned and arranged this timeless piece in a response to his convictions
against his alcoholism and involvement in the slave trade. Fast forward to
where our churches are today and they must deal with even larger present
tragedies, so much so that we have adopted a colloquialism summing up our
endless battle - the "flavor of the month."
Though human
trafficking, abortion, domestic abuse, hunger, and a plethora of tragic issues
bombard this fallen world, these ills often catch and clamor the modern
churches' attention, inadvertently deceive appropriate attention away from our primary concern
against sin – sin harbored in the so called born-again Christian's soul. God is calling us to be holy, not human. This
is most vividly displayed in the epidemic of sexual sin that ravages ministry
after ministry, thus effectively impeding momentum, which should characterize
the local church. On the other hand, you could think of this as the forgotten
war on sin.
The War on Terror raged
through two separate fronts simultaneously: one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. In
Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom was pooled with superior resources while in
Afghanistan – the epicenter of the terrorist cesspool known as Al Qaeda
responsible for the 9/11/01 attacks – quickly became known as the forgotten
war, until people finally woke up 7 years later and shifted resources and attention to make
the main issue the main issue. But it was too late. Our modern church is in danger of committing the
same buffoonery and slow reactiveness. If the U.S. government (at the time) had
focused full resources initially and primarily on Afghanistan, terrorism would effectively have been
defeated. R.C. Sproul says it better than I can. Here goes:
The serpent is more
crafty than any of the beasts of the field. He attacks while retreating,
retreating while attacking. He concedes this point, all the while making that
point. He is both a tar baby and quicksilver. And we are fools for
forgetting it.
Consider, if you will,
the battles that have dotted the evangelical landscape over the past thirty
years. We had lordship salvation, integrationist psychology, seeker sensitive
worship, Jabez, WWJD, Promise Keepers, Harold Camping, y2k and a host of other
end of the world scenarios, charismatic gifts, modalist elephants, and in one
tiny circle of the evangelical world, federal vision, Shepherdism and the
New Perspective.
Most of these issues are
or were important. There are right answers and wrong answers, and wrong ideas
have bad consequences. What if, however, the devil’s goal was less to encourage
us to end up on the wrong side of these issues, and more to distract us from
more damaging issues? What if some of these were false fronts, and we left
sundry other flanks exposed? What if while we were all scratching our heads the
devil was dropping our drawers?
Though there are
competing studies, some more alarming than others, the hard truth is that
evangelicals are sleeping with partners to whom they are not married. Hundreds
of thousands of them, with barely a word even spoken. How many churches, for
instance, have a reputation for preaching against fornication? How many
denominations are known as those that take adultery seriously? I suspect when
church historians in the next millennia look back at our age they may just
define us as that group that gave up on sex. We could not remain relevant and
faithful to the Word on sex, and we chose relevant. It would be bad enough if
we had allowed ourselves to be swept up in the culture’s sexual tsunami. But
the truth is worse—we have failed to be salt and light. It is less that we are
worse off because we are like them, more they are worse off because they are
like us.
The result is not merely
immorality. The trouble with not keeping your pants on isn’t that you offend
that great Prude in the sky. The problem is that it leads to death (Proverbs 7:27). How many
of our grievous social ills trace their roots to the lie that we can have sex
outside marriage with no great consequence? To put it another way, what would
this world look like if there were no more adultery and fornication? Because
families would be intact, ghettoes and the pathologies that come with them
would fade away. The murder rate would drop precipitously. Little boys would
grow up with fathers, and when grown would be fathers, working and providing
for their own families. Little girls would grow up knowing they were loved by
their daddies, and would be secure. Sexually transmitted diseases would go the
way of polio. Sexual trafficking would be but a shameful memory.
Best of all, babies
would be safe in their mother’s wombs. The murder of babies, which is no mere
social ill but is our greatest shame, would wither from the scene.
That is not the world we
live in. For two reasons. First, we have come to believe that sexual sins have
little reach. Wrong we’re willing to confess. Dangerous we are willing to
consider. Destroying our world? No, not that. The pathway to death? That’s just
biblical hyperbole. Second, and perhaps the cause of the folly of the first, we
won’t preach against this because then people won’t come to church. We think it
more important to not drive anyone away, to not lose one giving unit, than to
see the power of the Word preached to change the world. We sold our prophetic
birthright for a mess of relevance pottage.
Faithful biblical
preaching recognizes that theology doesn’t stop with our minds. Faithful
biblical preaching preaches the whole of the Bible, and calls out our sins,
even if the world thinks them not sins at all. I pray a day will come when we
say of this pastor or that, “You ought to download his sermons. He preaches
sin. He’s a marriage-ist.” I pray a day will come when one believer will say to
another, “I was reading Spurgeon the other day, and he got after it. I had no
idea that guy preached fidelity.” I pray, with Paul, a day will come when
sexual sin is so faithfully preached against that it will not be named once among
us (Ephesians 5:3).
It matters, eternally.
Source:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Grace
http://www.ligonier.org/blog/sexual-destruction/
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