The church in North America is dying. Oh, I know it doesn’t look like it when you see all the mega churches popping up with their multi-million dollar facilities, and hey, we have six churches in this little town, but the number of Christians is decreasing, not increasing every year on this continent.
But someone named Paul once said to one of his pastors Timothy, “…in the last days people will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power”.
Now that certainly describes today even in the church, but that’s not the main reason I say the church is dying. Everytime in history when God’s people started conglomerating in large man made temples to themselves, the church died. Go back to the tower of Babel, God said don’t gather in cities and build monuments even if it is an attempt to get closer to me. God scattered them.
After the temple was rebuilt in Jerusalem, God scattered His people through exile. After Jesus ascended back to heaven, the church in Jerusalem grew like crazy, God brought heavy persecution and Christians scattered. For centuries the Catholic Church in Europe became very huge and very political and powerful, building massive cathedrals. The reformation came and scattered the believers, and some of them came to North America. Now most of those great cathedrals are either museums, or empty shells, very few are churches anymore and Europe by the year 2040 will be a Muslim continent.
Today, in North America, we are doing the same thing, Christians are conglomerating in these massive modern cathedrals we are building and becoming spectators of the faith. Have a look at these slides, Europe and their dead cathedrals, and then North Americas modern cathedrals. See any resemblance?
And many predict we are on the same path as Europe was. The reason is that the church was never meant to be a place where thousands gathered for services, it was meant to be an equipping centre where people come for a time and then get sent. Jesus said I am sending you as the Father sent me. Great buildings are usually the downfall of God’s people, because they cause people to get comfortable, selfish and stagnant in their Sunday Morning faith.
Supposedly we used to live in the Bible belt, but I think a more accurate term would be church belt. The church can become our idol, above Christ. I was surprised and somewhat disappointed at how many of my fellow long time Christians treated the Word of God. It was given a place in their faith but was largely neglected and often if it said something very clearly that involved our taking action in obedience, I found Christians explaining it away or rationalizing, or somehow suggesting that’s not really what it meant.
I think many people are mature in the ways of the modern church, but much fewer are mature and knowledgeable in the ways of the Bible. They put the man made church into practice but not so much the Word of God, certainly not the commands of the New Testament.
Jesus specifically said in his great commission when he said for all of us to make disciples, that we are to (didasko) or continually teach them to obey all that He commands. It’s easy to say OK I stood up here and told you what Jesus commands are, but that’s not what it means. What good would it do a teacher to stand in front of the class give them a textbook, and say learn math now, then walk out of the room never to return? Or a coach who said go be a player and then had no more involvement with the children he was coaching.
This teaching requires ongoing instruction, testing, correction, and accountability to see if the learning is being accomplished and put into practice. We do it with our children’s education but we refuse to do it in the church. It’s not learning about his commands its learning to live out his commands. I want to be your coach as players, not the concession stand guy handing out hotdogs.
When I received the call to be a pastor, God made it clear to me that I was to preach and to bring the Bible back to the center of the Christian faith in its completeness and truth. Two passages were key in what I saw as the biblical role of a pastor, Eph 4:11-16 was primary, and 1 Pet 5: 1-3. Let me briefly summarize them.
In 1 Peter, he commands elders/pastors to shepherd the flock of God. Now this word shepherd is not the same as “care for”. It is to lead, to spiritually feed, and protect. The next word we see is oversight in a humble way and by example. These terms reflect leadership and guidance more so than what we might call pastoral care. We are all supposed to be ministering pastoral care in that way to each other.
So when I answered the call, I told God I would dedicate myself to these things, primarily teaching, not just from the pulpit, but through counselling and so on, and to prayer, leadership, protection, and guidance of the congregation. God has gifted me somewhat in pastoral care as well, but this is not where He’s has given me the passion, otherwise I would have remained a counsellor, and I need to be careful I don’t overdo that area, taking the opportunities away from you.
This teaching and leading is for the sole purpose, we read in Ephesians, to equip others for the work of ministry so that the body will grow in dedication to God and build itself up in love. Therefore, this is how I evaluate my ministry. Are more people working in ministry (primarily spreading the gospel and caring for others), and is there more love between the people in my flock? Is this unbiblical gap between clergy and laity closing? So that is the platform I’m working from today and for this year.
For a few months this spring and summer I felt quite stuck, and didn’t seem to be hearing from God as I asked for more vision about the direction of this church now that were a little healthier, and my own Christian life. Then I remembered something I learned going through the “Experiencing God” program in seminary, “If you don’t seem to be hearing from God, go back to the last thing he told you because you’re probably not finished with that yet”.
So I did, and I started digging back into the word of God focusing primarily on the book of John. Then one night I kind of desperately asked God for a dream to help clarify my vision. Now I remember maybe three or four dreams in a whole year, but God came through that night and this one was very vivid, and I remembered every graphic detail and what they meant when I woke up.
I won’t go into all the details because frankly they were very graphic and disturbing, but the dream began with a very bad man who I knew in the dream was a pimp, holding my wife at knifepoint. I was scared and didn’t really know what to do, but eventually knew I had to intervene, so I just lunged at the man and the next thing I knew my wife was free and I had the knife. Together (that’s important) we tied up the man and began to torture him with his own knife. We also put some food and water in front of him but didn’t allow him to have any for several days.
During this time we were both asking God if we should have mercy, if we should let him go because it was very disturbing for us too and we felt kind of guilty. But God very clearly said no, I want you to kill him, if you show mercy he will just come back stronger and inflict more pain and damage. So we did, and in the process we very graphically mutilated him with his own knife and put his dead mutilated body on display in the middle of a busy street where many people knew him.
When I awoke, I immediately knew that he was Satan, and my wife was the bride of Christ, the church. The message was very clear, Satan was holding the church hostage and I, we were to show no mercy in getting him out, keeping him out, and putting him on public display showing him for the nasty creature he is.
Needless to say this dream affected me for several days and I didn’t really know what to do with it, and then I was off to the conference in Winnipeg where I was again deeply convicted and affected by what I was hearing there. But I think the conference was simply instruction on how to practically do what the dream had shown me.
So I am using this process I went through for the past several months to bring us a new series for the New Year entitled simply, “The Jesus Way”. And the focus is to look at what Jesus and the Bible says about how we are to be disciples, and how we are to do church, while cleansing the world’s ways and Satan from our theology and practice.
I’m starting today with the Jesus way vs the American way. Of course when I say American I’m including Canadian, because for these purposes they are pretty much the same. Another way of putting it may be what the Bible says vs what the culture says, or Christianity vs consumerism.
Now this entire series is based on a foundational verse in the Bible from John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” The Jesus way, wedded with the Jesus truth (his words), brings about the Jesus life. You can’t proclaim the Jesus truth but then live it out any old way you like. And we can’t follow the Jesus way without speaking and believing the Jesus truth.
But listen to the first verse in chapter 14 of John, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” Have you ever had a troubled heart, do you ever question where you’re life is headed, what your children are doing, are you ever afraid? Do you understand what Jesus is saying here? “I’m going to heaven, you can come too and you know the way, don’t call me a liar because if this wasn’t the truth I’d tell you. If you don’t want to have a troubled heart, follow me to heaven using my way, my truth, and my life. I guarantee this is the truth”.
And notice also, he’s not saying you just come to the Father using Jesus name as a reference so to speak. He’s saying that he is the way, the truth and the life. So we can only get to the Father using His way, his truth, and his life, which he gives us through His Word and the Holy Spirit. As a follower of Jesus, our goal is to follow Him to heaven and hopefully bring some friends with us, and he says you can’t follow me there doing it your way, I have shown you the only way.
What I have come to learn is that the Jesus truth gets much more attention than the Jesus way, but even the truth is getting less and less emphasis. Jesus makes it very clear in that verse that “the way” comes first. In fact I would argue that the more we are in the way of Jesus, the more we understand the truth, it becomes more than just words and concepts.
Now here’s where many people will say, “Isn’t Jesus being kind of narrow and arrogant here.” Well, he is God, and actually I would say he’s being very loving by being very clear and specific. Would you rather have to sift through a few billion opinions that the world would be happy to give you? “Isn’t it great that the truth is relative, there’s no absolute truth other than what you want it to be?” NOOOO. That’s confusing and gives me a very troubled heart. Jesus is trying to be helpful. Would you rather live by your opinion, the world’s opinion, or God’s?
So here’s the conflict. The biblical metaphor for worship all through the Old and New Testament is sacrifice, giving. Communion kind of symbolizes this voluntary giving of your body to be distributed to others. Jesus death on the cross was the absolute perfect act of worship.
But this is clearly not the American/Canadian way. The church has been innovated in North America to be a multibillion dollar consumer enterprise like every other thing. We learned that when people didn’t like the idea of sacrifice and Hell and judgment, obviously the quickest and most effective way to get people into church and keep them there is to identify what they want and need and offer it to them, satisfy them by giving them entertainment, emotional highs that we call “the worship experience”, problem solving, whatever they want, and then attach a few friendly Bible verses to it so we can still call it church. Then the money they give is justified as payment for providing this service to them.
This is what we’re good at, what our society is based on today, so why not create state of the art consumer churches. There has never been more mega-churches. The question is, where has all this self-centered consumerism and churches with 20 thousand people, gotten us. Are we better, more moral people? Have relationships improved? Have we solved the world’s problems? Basically all it’s done is make many people rich, and spoiled most of us.
Now I don’t want to stand up here and get all hell fire on you, but isn’t Satan behind the ways of the world that conflict with the Word of God? Eugene Peterson says that the cultivation of consumer spirituality is the antithesis of a sacrificial, deny yourself congregation. A consumer church is an antichrist church”. - Strong words, but I tend to agree, and Jesus suggests this in his letters to some of the churches in Revelation too, especially Laodicea.
This way has tended to make Christianity more impersonal. Technology, programs, techniques, business practices, etc, have made relationship less important both with God and with each other. It has also caused our religious lives to become compartmentalized where we get on in the world, absorbed in the world’s ways, and our spiritual life is just one aspect of life, rather than permeating everything. God’s ways on the other hand, are very personal and the church is to be intimately personal as one body. And our spiritual life is supposed to define everything else, not the other way around.
Let me read a quote from the hard hitting AW Tozer (Oct 27 in moments together for couples)
Now here’s something the gentle Dennis Rainey from family life today says: (same page). Then he quotes Ephesians 1:22 “And he put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave him as head over all things to the church.
My friends, have we, by trying to limit the rule of Christ in our lives and in the church, caused Satan and the ways of the world to take us hostage, to paralyze us from fulfilling God’s purposes for our lives and the church that Jesus died for?
What are those purposes? Well, three things, first of all love. This one covers everything, Paul says anything you do without love is useless. Love covers a multitude of sins, and most importantly for us here, just a little back from our text today toward the end of John 13, we hear the New Commandment Jesus gives to love each other just as I have loved you. By this all people will know that you are my disciples.
Now bouncing forward in the book of John in the next chapter, 15 verse 16, “I have chosen you and appointed you to go bear fruit”. Stop there for a minute. We are the branches from this vine, Jesus. Now, when a plant bears fruit, what happens? That fruit is either fed to someone, or it falls off the branch and spreads its seeds to grow more fruit right?
So bearing fruit means that we will either be feeding others with Jesus, or we will be spreading the seeds of Jesus, or both. That immediately made me think of our church mission statement, which says in a nutshell, we will equip believers to reach their potential through the Holy Spirit (there’s the feeding fruit) and we will reach potential believers (there’s the spreading seed, planting fruit). Do you feel that you are reaching your spiritual potential under the power of the Holy Spirit, or reaching non-believers?
So there’s love and bearing fruit. The third purpose is simply the great commission which is really the culmination of the first two. If we love God and love others and we are bearing fruit, we will go into all the world and make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded.
You see my goal really should be to be preparing the next pastor of this church and many pastors and leaders for several other churches. There is and will continue to be a drastic shortage of well-trained leaders in the North American church, making the church very weak. Unless we start intentionally making disciples as Jesus commanded, not just converts so we have numbers in the pews.
We are all to be disciples who make other disciples, that is the Jesus way. Not just the pastor, but all believers. But this is also not the American way where being a Christian has become about my salvation and my satisfaction in church. And I want to say this with a troubled heart, that if we are not striving to fulfill Christ’s purposes, is that not sin? Sin of omission.
We were created in God’s image, we fell from that image through our own choices, and when we are saved we are again restored to His image. And his image is primarily ruler over all things. This is what God said in Genesis 1:26 “Let’s make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over everything on earth.”
If we look closely here we see that the ruler of the entire universe is creating humanity in His image to be rulers over the earth. But the assumption was that we would continue to be under His rule, and that because we were created in His image we would rule according to His ways. He was basically replicating himself physically to rule over the rest of His physical creation.
We were created to be spiritually ruled, the church is to be spiritually ruled, and there are two choices as stated by Paul in the Book of Romans. Be slaves of Satan, or the Spirit of God. You see, we think we’re free and ruled by no one, that’s what the unbelieving Jews thought too, but the truth is that that is impossible because of how we were created. We will be conformed to either Satan and the world, or Christ, and obviously depending on the area of our life it may be a back and forth combination.
What I have learned is that the process of sanctification and discipleship is simply getting back to the image of God that we were created to be. And royal rule is very much the primary image of God, so that our purpose in reflecting God’s image is in essence to reflect God’s rule, over our lives, over our churches, and over this world. When someone sees a child of God they should see that God is in charge. So I ask you, is that what someone sees when they look at you or our church? Not that you rule, but that God does.
So, if that’s the case, what is the first most logical thing a person has to do when they become a Christian? Submit to Christ, and allow Him through his Spirit to transform you back into His image, and to come back under His rule. Now rule is the primary image, but there are many other character traits of God that we are also to reflect, like love and mercy.
But we live in a culture that puts self first, and says that whatever you have to do to accomplish something is acceptable if it accomplishes the goal. Whatever the means, it’s Ok if you get what you want. We call it opportunity. The Prophets of old warned God’s people all the time of making their religion their own kind of religion rather than doing it as God commands.
Think of Uzzah in 1 Chronicles. He loved Israel, he loved the Holy Ark of the covenant.
The oxen carrying it stumbled and Uzzah does what he thought was a good thing by reaching his hand out to steady the Ark, but because God said no one was to touch it that way, he was struck dead on the spot. Now that makes me angry, why would God do that?
King David was angry and afraid too, but it shows that ends do not justify the means in terms of God’s commands. We are to do church, and worship, and live our Christian lives as he has instructed, not as we would like.
Someone has called this the “purification of the means”. I think this is important. We are not involved in our work with the help of God, we are involved in His work, to be done His way. Not just because he demands obedience, but because His way will be most effective. “What would Jesus do” is not the only question to ask, but we need to also ask how would he do it. We can’t pick our way and expect God to come along and bless it, we must go where God leads, it is His kingdom after all.
God’s people can no longer uncritically go along with the ways of our culture that seem to be effective primarily in pleasing people and growing numbers through popularity. Whatever apparent success we create will end up being a curse if we don’t do it God’s way. Many consumer oriented churches are finding this out now, and scrambling to find a way to change the culture of the church while still staying alive. Because like I said before when Jesus gives us the truth, many fans will leave. Getting things done, getting results other than creating true disciples, was never the intention of Christ or his church, but that is what our culture instils in us. What is consumer success, more people more sales.
The task of the prophet was always to show people the truth, how far from God’s ways the people were, and to let them know the consequences. None of the prophets was perfect, none of them wanted to be prophets, but when they got the call they couldn’t refuse.
That is what I believe God called me to be, and though I love serving God, I also don’t really want to tell people that they’re off course, that God would be displeased with them as He is with me, and that there are consequences to disobedience. That His word is the ultimate authority. I don’t like doing that, and it exhausts me. Prophets are never popular, Jesus was and is not popular except to a relative few.
Jesus way was to tell the truth as a prophet and take those who were willing to follow and make them into disciples that would continue His ministry when he left the earth. He basically said, you can do more with me in heaven than you can with me here. So as long as I am the pastor here at Calvary, I am going to strive to do this thing Jesus’ way. I am going to tell God’s truth, I am going to work to equip those who are willing, and I am going to help us be accountable to one another in fulfilling our God given purposes.
That is what I believe God is calling me to do, that is what He is calling all of us who claim to follow Jesus to do. And frankly, it scares the heck out of me, makes me want to run away as every other prophet in the Bible wanted to, but like Jonah and Elijah who both escaped to apparent safety, you can’t find a place where God can’t find you.
And once he decides to use you for His purposes, you can’t say no to Him if you’ve given Him your life.
If it sounds like I am trying to scare us this morning, maybe I am a little bit. God has scared me, not about my salvation, but about the state of his church, his people that we are stewards over. I am asking you all today to make a commitment to be the Christians Jesus wants, not the Christians we want to be, because we will always choose the path that we want, the path of least resistance and most comfort – the wide path that leads to destruction.
I will do everything I can through this series and our Wednesday night growth group to give the knowledge and practical tools you need to grow closer to God and live the Jesus Way. That is my commitment to you, and God in 2012.
