Bigotry, in modern parlance

Now-a-days, if a man is very reverent towards the word of God, and very desirous to obey the Lord’s commands in everything, people say, “He is very precise,” and they shun him; or, with still more acrimony, they say, “He is very bigoted: he is not a man of liberal spirit;” and so they cast out his name as evil.

Bigotry, in modern parlance, you know, means giving heed to old truths in preference to novel theories; and a liberal spirit, now-a-days, means being liberal with everything except your own money—liberal with God’s law, liberal with God’s doctrine, liberal to believe that a lie is a truth, that black is white, and that white may occasionally be black. That is liberal sentiment in religion—the broad church school—from which may God continually deliver us.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon – Sermon “Living Temples for the Living God” 1872

A Step Backwards

My wife and I recently left a church that we had been members of for over twelve years, to begin attending a Reformed Baptist church. It’s not that the old church was necessarily “bad”; there was much that was good about it, and we should be grateful whenever God’s people gather together to worship Him. And we certainly don’t believe that only Reformed Baptists are true Christians. We simply came to the conviction that the most important thing in the Christian life is the worship of the true and living God, and we could no longer do that where we were. This sounds odd to the modern American evangelical. “Sure, worship is important, but doesn’t God also care about…” Fill in the blank: “the poor”, “evangelism”, “global warming”, “the culture”; there are any number of things that we assume God is “concerned” about. Jesus said to the woman at the well,

“But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.”  (John 4:23)

We left the old church not because we wanted everything “just our way,” but because we wanted to be with people who believed that the worship of God is the most important thing that happens on the Earth: more important than how “successful” the church is, more important than who the President is, more important than the latest Hollywood offering (even if there IS some kind of “redemptive theme”), more important than our own personal peace and prosperity, more important than someone’s notion of “relevance.”

So now we attend a church that is a sixth of the size of our previous church, and takes us three times longer to drive to, in the middle of nowhere instead of “strategically positioned”, singing out of old Trinity hymnals, and pastored by a faithful man who has been in this one place for decades, and who very simply and eloquently opens his Bible each week and preaches to us “the whole message of this Life.”

To some it may seem to be a step backwards, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Losing God in the Church

. . . Where Christian faith is offered as a means of finding personal wholeness rather than holiness, the church has become worldly.

There are many other forms of worldliness that are comfortably at home in the evangelical church today. Where it substitutes intuition and feelings for biblical truth, it is being worldly. Where its appetite for the Word has been lost in favor of light discourses and entertainment, it is being worldly. Where it has restructured what it is and what it offers around the rhythms of consumption, it is being worldly, for customers are actually sinners whose place in the church is not to be explained by a quest for self-satisfaction but by a need for repentance. Where it cares more about success than about faithfulness, more about size than spiritual health, it is being worldly. Where the centrality of God to worship is lost amidst the need to be distracted and to have fun, the church is being worldly because it is simply accommodating itself to the preeminent entertainment culture in the world. Is it not odd that in so many church services each Sunday, services that are ostensibly about worshiping God, those in attendance may not be obliged to think even once about his greatness, grace, and commands? Worship in such contexts often has little or nothing to do with God.

David F. Wells, “Introduction: The Word in the World,” in The Compromised Church: The Present Evangelical Crisis, ed. John H. Armstrong (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998), 31.