OFF-TRACK: The American church is far from what we should be.
- I think this is largely beyond dispute, so I won’t belabor the point.
- Let me simply share one proof that I think is instructive.
- When you look at the early chapters of Acts, there are many people who are coming to know Jesus. The church is expanding quickly and exponentially.
- There are, though, still many who don't step across the line to belief. One thing that is striking about that, though, is what those outside the church thought of the church. They were impressed.
- Now, here I don’t mean the religious leaders. They were out to destroy the church, just as they were out to destroy Jesus. It was a power issue.
- But among the people the early church was held in high esteem. They saw how they loved each other. They saw how they cared for the poor. They saw the Godly fruit that their lives were producing and they admired it, even if they weren’t ready to invite Jesus into their own lives.
- That is not true today.
- When you look at public opinion polling, the American church is not admired by those outside the church. Instead, we are seen as being primarily political and lacking in love. It’s a consistent result over years of polling.
- Now, please let me say that I am not arguing that the ultimate test of the faithfulness of the church is what the public thinks of us. Our ultimate test is God’s opinion of us. And there are certainly some situations where the church might be perfectly faithful and be rejected by the public because of extenuating circumstances.
- Still, I think the point holds here. The polling reflects something real. And it doesn’t speak to a deficient understanding on the part of the public. No, it speaks to deficiencies on the part of the church in not being Christlike.
WHAT EZEKIEL TELLS US: Religious knowledge and authority is no guarantee of faithfulness.
- Ezekiel 22:26, 28.
- It would be nice to think that if you’re the resident religious authority that you are of course going to be faithful to God’s vision, mission, and calling. But that’s not true.
- Here we have a detailed critique of the ways that Israel wasn’t measuring up. There are also pieces here that have to do with the political leaders and the people, but for this sermon we have plenty to cover in just focusing on the religious leaders.
- This definitely includes pastors and ministers but I also want to include leaders within congregations as well. All those with religious authority in some measure or another.
- I want to unpack the details that the passage shares about how exactly they were off-track but let me start by asking a simple question: why?
- That is, why would religious leaders get off-track to the extent that is detailed here?
I’ll limit myself to four of the reasons.
a. People pleasing.
- Many people, even religious leaders, get focused more on making people happy than making God happy. It may be that the pastor feels his job is in jeopardy and he needs to soft-pedal certain truths. Or that congregation might be angry with him if he pursued what he feels is really God’s will.
b. King pleasing.
- Today, of course, we don’t have a king but the principle is the same. Back in Ezekiel’s day the priests might have wanted to say what was going to make the king happy. They don’t want to face exile, execution, or unemployment. - So when you know the king wants a certain thing, you find a way to “prove” that God’s will just happens to be the same as what the king wants.
- Today, at least in America, it manifests more as wanting to gain political or cultural power. We see that certain things get the approval from powerful people so we figure out ways to make that “God’s will” so that they will elevate us.
c. Wanting power.
- I alluded to power a moment ago in the political context but it can be much broader than that.
- It can be that pastors find that saying certain things gives them a bigger audience, so they find ways to prove that such statements are “God’s will.” It can be that we become pragmatists and presume that anything that brings in more people and tithes must be “God’s will.”
d. Cultural accommodation.
- We don’t like being the ones standing out by ourselves so when we see that certain Biblical truths are widely panned within the culture we find ways to make the Bible say something else. We make arguments about the church needing to stay “relevant” and presume that justifies what we do.
- This, of course, creates a situation where rather than the church standing as a rock against the flow of society we are like a leaf carried by the fad and thought of the day.
- Now, I want to unpack the specifics that our passage mentions.
- We could drill down into each one but because we have a lot of ground to cover I am just going to explain what Ezekiel is getting and then offer one example of that happening in the American church today.
a. “do violence to my law”
- v. 26.
- The law for the priests of Ezekiel’s day was the Mosaic Law. That was what they were to lead the people in following in order to honor God.
- But they did not follow the Law themselves nor did they faithfully lead the people in following the Law.
The idea of “do[ing] violence” evokes the image of destroying something precious that had been entrusted to them. Think of someone coming to your house early in December and setting up a beautiful Christmas tree with magnificent, antique, expensive ornaments. They come back after Christmas to find that you’ve not at all cared for what they entrusted you with. You’ve bumped the tree with your vacuum and broken some ornaments. You’ve taken some of the decorations that you liked and kept them for yourself. You’ve let your children run into the tree while playing and smash in one side. The tree topper has been knocked to the ground and is shattered. You were entrusted with something beautiful and precious and you were extraordinarily negligent in taking good care of it. Instead you did violence to it.
- The priests had done the same thing to the Law. They had been entrusted with something precious from God and rather than carefully preserving and attending to what they were given, they allowed it to become broken.
- What’s an example of this happening today?
- I think one example is the accommodation of major denominations to the prevailing thought on homosexuality.
- There is a clear sexual ethic and standard in the Word and that has been destroyed and something wholly different has been presented. And, of course, it is not just presented as being true but as being what the Word says. In doing so, they are doing violence to God’s Word.
b. “profane my holy things”
- v. 26.
- There were specific duties that the priests were to fulfill as part of that role. For instance, taking care of the Temple sacrifices. Those things were considered “holy” because they were part of how God wanted Israel to come and offer sacrifices.
- The priests had profaned that. The most obvious example that we are probably all thinking of is in the New Testament when the priests had allowed the Temple to become a marketplace where people coming to honor God were abused and financially ripped off by the prices of animals and the exchange rates. You could say they were more interested in profits than prophets.
- What’s an example of this happening today?
- One example would be self-centered worship services.
- In the American church the focus of worship is often what will please those in attendance. If we want to increase our attendance we need to do what people like. The problem with that is that whether people like the service is not the measure of the value of the worship. The question isn’t “was I pleased?” but “was God pleased?” But few churches are prayerfully asking in their worship prep, “Will God be pleased with this?”
c. “do not distinguish between the holy and the common” and “no difference between the unclean and the clean”
- v. 26.
- Distinguishing between the holy and the common (a.k.a. the unholy) has to do with knowing what things God had set aside as being part of honoring Him.
- There were standards about what was clean and what was unclean and they were not properly making those distinctions.
- The overall point was being able to know what God’s standards are and being able to apply that understanding to making wise choices.
- What’s an example of this happening today?
- A current example is the mess in the United Methodist Church. Although the homosexuality statements have gotten the most attention, when you read the larger statement it’s so breathtakingly distant from the Biblical standard that I was honestly left thinking, “How do you get to the point of thinking this is correct?” It was so outside of Biblical norms that I feel like leaving the denomination was the only choice left to those in the UMC pews. They seem to have completely lost the ability to make those important distinctions.
- Distinctions and discernment that should be basic has become lost. They’ve lost the ability to figure out what’s clean and what’s unclean.
d. “shut their eyes to the keeping of my Sabbaths”
- v. 26.
- The call to keep the Sabbath is a clear command from the Mosaic Law, yet they were not keeping it. The importance of it lies both in our need for rest as well as (and this is the more important thing here) in worshiping God. They weren’t doing that.
- What’s an example of this happening today?
- Ironically, you don’t even have to switch subjects. The Sabbath is an issue for us as well.
- We don’t make the Sabbath day the distinctly different day that it’s supposed to be.
-Let’s focus on the rest aspect of the Sabbath day. It’s supposed to be a day where we don't continue our relentless pace. We put aside our to-dos and take a break. That is obviously something we desperately need in our frantic and frenetic world, but instead we live the same way on our Sabbaths as we do the rest of the week. It’s a day to get lots of things done before the start of a new workweek.
- Some might protest: “I have too much to do to take a day off.” In that case, you have things in your life that you need to drop. If you’re too busy to obey God’s command and take a day of rest, you’re too busy. Often we have added commitment after commitment without stopping to ask if we should do that. Most of us need to say “no” more than we do. The important principle here is that in such a situation saying yes to one thing is saying no to another. Specifically, saying yes to endless additions is saying no to a restful Sabbath.
e. “whitewash these deeds”
- v. 28.
- This speaks to hidden motives. They do things for questionable motives and find ways to make them sound all holy and Godly.
- They take things that are questionable and put a nice coat on them to make them seem like it’s something they are doing to honor God.
- What’s an example of this happening today?
- I think one clear example is culture war power plays.
- Many Christians pursue “winning back America for God” and make it sound like it’s all about honoring God and lifting Him up. In reality, it’s really about power. They don’t like the fact that they see themselves as having less political power than they used to and they want it back. So they pursue political power but they whitewash their work with Christian slogans to make it sound like they’re doing it for religious reasons, not political.
- One evidence of this is how many people you see claiming a desire to “win America back for God” who simultaneously aren’t in any meaningful way living for Jesus. To quote one pastor, they want Jesus in charge of this country but not in charge of their heart.
f. “false visions and lying divinations”
- v. 28.
- They claim to speak for God when it’s really ideas that have come from their own imaginations.
- The public in many cases defers to the religious leaders when they say, “Thus saith the Lord.” They presume that the experts wouldn’t steer them wrong. In reality, though, the visions may come from the agenda the religious leader wants to see enacted and the divination may come from a skewed reading of the Scripture.
- What’s an example of this happening today?
- To continue with the example that I just gave, we see many religious leaders in America saying that the current goal of the American church should be to regain political power and influence. That is not and never was supposed to be the vision or purpose of the church. We should be focused on winning souls. Certainly, as we are salt and light in pursuing that, we will have influence on the culture around us, but we are not supposed to be fixated on our own power. We are servants.
g. “They say . . . when the Lord has not spoken”
- v. 28.
- This is the last one I want to unpack. It ties closely into what we’ve just been discussing.
- As they go forward into the public with their false visions and divinations, they proclaim messages that aren’t true. Instead of leading the people toward God, they lead in other directions. The people trust their religious leaders to faithfully lead them and are largely unaware that they are being led astray.
- What’s an example of this happening today?
- One prominent example is the prosperity gospel.
- God wants you to have financial prosperity, they say, and if you don’t then you don’t have enough faith in Him.
- The teachings, for instance, of Joel Osteen is a radical perversion of the actual gospel. It uses God rather than loving God. It makes God your servant rather than you being His servant. It makes the things of this world the whole point of our journey, pushing aside a focus on the eternal.
- And, of course, this is all sold as being the will of God. Judging by the sadly packed house at Lakewood, there are apparently a lot of people who are buying it.
A DIAGNOSTIC QUESTION: How recently have we been made uncomfortable by a Biblical truth?
- Often we get caught up in what we’ve always done. It’s an easy pattern to fall into.
- Habits do make our lives simpler. It would be difficult to have to actively think through every decision every day. It would lead quickly to decision fatigue.
- That can create some problems in our religious life, though, especially for those of us who have been Christians a long time. How so? We can get into the habit of just doing what we’ve always done. Our faith becomes habit.
- One particularly dangerous way this manifests is that our faith habits become for us the way to properly live a Christian life. When we read a Bible passage that pushes in a different direction, we just keep reading. We don’t stop and do the hard work of asking insightful questions.
- “What does this mean for my walk of faith?”
- “How can I incorporate this into my walk of faith?”
- “What do I need to change to be able to live this out?”
- This raises a challenging diagnostic question: how recently have I been made uncomfortable by a Biblical truth?
- I don’t just mean that we heard it and quickly moved on. No, I mean we heard something that pushed us and we stayed with it. We thought about how to incorporate it into our life. We thought about the changes we would need to make to live that out. We decided that we wanted to leave behind what was comfortable and follow wherever God leads.
- How does this tie into this passage?
- The people were blindly following their religious leaders and the tradition that was handed to them. We can do the same.
- We, though, have an enormous advantage that they didn’t have. We have access to the source book. Back in that day, the lack of the printing press meant copies of the Scripture were rare and expensive. We have access to the Bible. It’s an enormous gift.
- So we can read the words that God has given to us. We don’t have to rely on the preacher to tell us the truth (although we certainly hope he is!).
- In any faith tradition, there are going to be things within it that fall short of God’s perfect will. It’s inevitable. Each denomination is the result of human discernment and that inevitably is incomplete.
- Add to that the fact that we have cultural pressures pushing on us as well, encouraging us to interpret Bible passages in ways that dovetail with the prevailing ethos of the day.
- Into all that we come with our Bible reading. What do we do when we read a passage that pushes hard against what my religious tradition tells me? Do I quickly move on? Do I automatically cave to my denominational interpretation? Or do I dwell with it? Do I talk to God about it? Do I ponder and pray?
- When is the last time you were made uncomfortable by a Biblical truth? If you can’t think of when that was, it is likely a reason to be concerned on this count.
NO ONE TO STAND IN THE GAP? In our day who will continue to seek God even when it goes against our current religious habits?
- Ezekiel 22:30.
- I’ve been talking a long time and it’s only now that we come to the main point of this sermon.
- Verse 30 has a poignant image: no one to stand in the gap. There are so many, as we have exhaustively detailed, who are leading Israel down the wrong path. Who will be the one to stand in the gap for Israel and point them back toward God? The answer is truly tragic: there is no one. The situation, therefore, will continue to deteriorate and lead inevitably to judgment.
- It’s a horrible place to be that there is not even one to stand in the gap.
- What about the American church today?
- I think it is beyond question that we are not where God wants us to be. We are off track. We are not experiencing the power of the Spirit in the way that we would like to see.
- That’s the bad news.
- The good news is that I don’t think we are to the point where there is no one standing in the gap. I do believe there are still some - certainly not the majority or even a strong plurality - but there are a few who are calling the church back to where God wants us to be. I believe there are a few who are standing in the gap. A few who aren’t going along with the culture. A few who aren’t giving into the church’s pursuit of secular power and cultural respectability. Not many, but a few.
- This passage provides us with a negative example, but one that nonetheless can be inspirational to us. The negative example is that they had no one to stand in the gap. There are times when the people of God get so far out in left field that it gets that bad. We, thankfully, aren’t there yet. We may be few in number. We may not have the loudest voices. But there is something powerful about even a few standing in the gap.
- God doesn’t require a majority. He only needs a few, or even one.
- I think of Bonhoeffer in Germany in World War II, standing against the Nazis. The institutional church bought into the poison of Hitler’s propaganda but a few stood in the gap.
- In my book Christian Pharisees, the final chapter has our one simple action step. After taking the whole book to detail how the church in America is off course, the final chapter doesn’t give a detailed five-point action plan. No, the last chapter argues there is only one thing for us to do: repent.
- We are sufficiently distant from God that we aren't going to be the ones who know how to untangle this mess that we’ve made. Our job is to simply acknowledge the mess, repent before God on behalf of the church, and then patiently wait on God to reveal where we go from here. It’s not a popular idea. It’s not an easy idea. But that’s what we have to do.
- There is another phrase that encapsulates that idea: we have to stand in the gap.
- Standing in the gap is not easy. In fact, it’s a horrible job. It’s unpopular. It’s lengthy. It’s wearying. But God needs someone to do it.
- Will we continue to look to God and not get caught up in the religious-industrial complex? Will we want nothing - less and nothing else but God?
- Will we stand in the gap?
