"Set Free To Be Free"

Well, next I want you to know that,

CHRIST SET YOU FREE FROM RELIGION

We’ve all heard catchy phrases like, “It’s not religion, it’s relationship”. That’s true. But as I look around me I see an awful lot of people who just don’t get it.

I mean in the church. Not in the world.

Let’s stay with our own denomination for a moment. I won’t specifically talk about other denominations. When I get to generalizing I will also generalize about who is in the trap.

I know there are people in all other denominations with this problem too, but let’s not pick on them today.

Let’s begin with us. Do you know; are you aware; that there is idolatry in the Southern Baptist denomination?

Yes, my friends, there is. It is chained up in the hearts of many a Southern Baptist, so it won’t fall down; and it needs to be chained up good and secure because just like any other idol, it is dead and needs the idolator to give it some resemblance of life.

Do you know what it is?

It is being Southern Baptist.

About seven years ago the annual convention was held in Montrose, at the Pavillion. Some of you may remember it being here; may even have attended some of it.

My wife and I lived in Del Norte at the time and were chosen as two of our church’s messengers to attend the convention.

On about the second day we were there the schedule called for a sermon just before breaking for lunch. I don’t remember who the young man was that preached, and if I did I would not repeat his name here. I only remember that about 10 minutes into his so-called sermon I was so filled-up and fed-up with hearing how important it is that all of us be ‘good Southern Baptists’, I wanted to stand and walk out.

The only thing that kept me from it was my own conviction that it is a severe slap in the face to walk out on a speaker and disrupt the proceedings.

I have witnessed the same problem since, many times, and folks, I’ve seen it in our own association. Let me make this comparison.

The idolatry of the Jews of Jesus’ day was that it was all important to be a Jew and obey the Law diligently. The Law itself had become an idol. And today the new idol in our denomination has become just that; being a Southern Baptist, and the Baptist Faith and Message has taken the very place that the Jews placed the Law of Moses.

A few years ago, although I had just confirmed to a man that I had carefully read the Baptist Faith and Message, still, he handed me a copy he was carrying with this admonition. “If you’re going to be a Southern Baptist minister, be the best Southern Baptist you can be”.

He said it several times in the course of a few minutes, as though being a good Southern Baptist was more important that being a Christian and standing by the Bible.

More recently there has been a very heated and divisive debate within the SBC as to whether to accept the changes in the 2000 edition of the Baptist Faith and Message, over a previous one. It has caused a great deal of disharmony and hurt. Christians, when any document of men becomes the cause for such grief and damaged witness, it should be thrown in the trash. Christian unity and witness is far more important than any extra-biblical statement of men, no matter how accurate or well-intentioned.