Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.
— Hebrews 13:8
The contemporary world is a result of radical changes down the generations amounting to revolution: the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the communications revolution, the philosophical revolution and the social revolution. Are we going to accept the belief that the Bible must be interpreted anew in the light of these developments? Are we going to allow ourselves to accept the doctrine that the prophets and apostles were mistaken about God? Are we going to allow society to tell us that the Bible is outmoded and largely irrelevant and must therefore be reassessed in the light of modern advancements? Has God changed? Are we going to accept it? Is there a change in the purpose of God? Have the changes in human society startled or shocked God? Must we, in order to remain intellectually respectable and have good standing with these who doubt the Word, humbly say, "Well, I do not believe in miracles"?
Or have we got enough of our Protestant protest and courage to stand up and say, "I believe in miracles whenever God Almighty wants to perform them. I believe that whenever God wants to do anything that is out of the ordinary and contrary to or at least above the common processes of nature, He is able to do it. I believe the miracles of Jesus Christ were real miracles. I believe the miracles of the Old Testament were real miracles." Are we going to allow ourselves to be brainwashed along with all the rest? Or are we going to dare to stand and protest and be known over the country as being Protestant indeed? We would be people who refuse to adjust but who make the world adjust to us. When you adjust, you are dead. The same is true if a church adjusts to these ideas. If you adjust, you are done. But if you dare to stand, the world will adjust to you. I can promise you that. Not all will adjust to you, but at least some will.
thought
God has not changed but we mortals sometimes try to change Him. We want to make God more acceptable to contemporary thought and culture, to technological revolution and postmodern perspective.
prayer
Lord, You do not change. Change me to be a man, a woman of the changeless God.
Instead, they were longing for a better country?a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.
— Hebrews 11:16
The second prominent tragedy is that the gospel churches are confused and intimidated by numbers. They accept the belief that there has been change and that Christians must adjust to the change. The word used is adjustment. We must get adjusted, forgetting that the world has always been blessed by the people who were not adjusted. The poor people who get adjusted cannot do much anyhow. They are not worth having around. In every field of human endeavor progress has been made by those who stood up and said, "I will not adjust to the world." The classical composers, poets and architects were people who would not adjust. Today society insists that if you do not adjust you will get a complex. If you do not get adjusted, you will have to go to a psychiatrist. Jesus was among the most maladjusted people in His generation. He never pretended to adjust to the world. He came to die for the world
thought
Those spiritual heroes of Hebrews 11 never became adjusted to the here and now. They kept looking for a country, a heavenly one, a city God had prepared for them.
prayer
Oh for a holy dissatisfaction with what is and a consuming yearning for what in You, Father, can be.
Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity . . .
— Hebrews 6:1a
I challenge the idea that we are advanced. I know the majority of modern educators, newspaper writers, TV personalities, radio reporters, politicians and all the rest do not agree with me. Nevertheless, I challenge the idea that we are any further advanced than they were in the days of Jesus. If we are so advanced, then I want to ask some questions. Why do we kill thousands of human beings each year with automobiles? Because we ride automobiles instead of donkeys, we are advanced? If we are so advanced in our day, why are the penitentiaries packed full and the mental hospitals crowded?
If we are so advanced, why is the whole world a powder keg? If we are so advanced, how is it that we have weapons that can annihilate the world? If we are so advanced, why is it that people cannot walk alone in the parks anymore? Why is it that workers who get out at midnight never walk home alone anymore? Why is it in this advanced age that drugs, violence, abortion and divorce are soaring? There is a mind-set that thinks every motion is progress. Every time you move you are progressing. Then there is the mind-set that thinks whenever you move in a straight line you are going forward, forgetting that you can move in a straight line and be going backward. The tragedy of the century is that Protestants have accepted this as progress and actually believe it. ...
thought
Has humanness changed over the centuries? Are we who are living today inherently different than those who lived before?
prayer
Lord, in another 50 years this modern age will not be so modern. But heart thirst remains constant and finds fulfillment only in You. I want to go on, Lord, on to maturity.
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.
— Isaiah 40:8
...Here is where we need a reformation, a purgation, a removal of the faults and a restoration again of the faith of Christians to a belief in the truth. May Christians say, without a question, "Yes, that is true." Actually, I suppose they would not like to have it put to them like that: People do not like the most realistic constructions. What would the liberals and modernists say if you backed them in a corner with the question, "Do you think God has been forced to change His mind?" I do not think anybody would quite have the courage to say yes. Nevertheless, they do say it little by little until they have brainwashed their people. In effect, they say that the Bible must be interpreted in the light of new developments. A book that was written in the day when people rode donkeys must be reinterpreted to mesh with contemporary society. They say that the prophets and apostles mistook what God intended to do. The Bible is outmoded and largely irrelevant. Irrelevant means that it is not related to anything
Outmoded means we have new modes of thinking and living now, so the Bible is out-of-date?a back-issue magazine. We must, therefore, reassess its teachings and rethink our beliefs and hopes. I am not overstating this at all. This is what is being taught today. It gets into the newspapers, and people are saying that the Bible must be interpreted in the light of all these changes. The apostles and prophets were mistaken. They had ideas that were good and advanced for their day, but not advanced for our day. We know more about ourselves, human motivation and the nature of things than they did back then. Therefore a book written when people thought the earth was flat and the sun rose in the morning, crossed over the earth and went down into the sea cannot possibly be taken seriously. While it certainly contains some beautiful poetry and some marvelously inspiring thoughts about human nature and the world in which we live, nevertheless all this is to be understood and reinterpreted, reassessed and rethought.
thought
Each generation in its peculiar context must understand God's universal truth, translate it into their particular situation and live it out.
prayer
Lord, open my mind to understand Your self-disclosure, to distinguish eternal truth from its particular context and to apply that truth to my own context in order that I may grasp Your truth and digest it. In Christ's name.
. . . Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.
— James 2:18b
One area of thinking that needs reform is our practical beliefs about God's design for mankind. I emphasize practical beliefs, because there is a difference between nominal beliefs and practical ones. A nominal belief is what you hold in name, and the practical belief is what you hold in reality and what holds you. While probably there are not many faults to be found with the nominal beliefs, there are a great deal to be found with the practical beliefs. These practical beliefs need restoration to their happy and bright state with faults and abuses purged. It has been a long time since Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on the cross, rose again the third day, ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty and sent the Holy Spirit to establish His church. Since those days there have been changes in the world so radical, sweeping, all-pervading and revolutionary as to be entirely incredible to anybody living in Jesus' day. Today's world was entirely unimaginable to the people of those times. Have these changes forced God to modify His plans for His church and for mankind? Here is where we have fallen by the wayside. . . .
thought
Our daily living expresses our real beliefs, not the beliefs or theology we say are ours but that which determines our daily living.
prayer
Lord, I invite You to examine my belief system. Expose the sham. Enable me to embrace truth and live by it. May others be able to read my beliefs by the life I live.
Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me?put it into practice...
— Philippians 4:9
Then there is the removal of faults and abuses. Where are the faults and abuses? Look around at the religious scene and you will see the faults, the abuses and the desperate need for change. Where are the model saints? We ought to be raising model saints, the kind Christians could take as examples and say, "I want to follow these men and women and be like them as they are like their Lord." But we are simply not producing saints in this generation. Most Christians are bad examples to other Christians. We work hard to get people converted, and we think we do God's service. Then after we get them converted and they get to know us, we are bad examples to them. I consider this an abuse in the church of Christ. . . . Another fault is carnality. The Apostle Paul talked about the carnal Christians of Corinth, and he labored and prayed and wept over the carnality of those Christians.
This describes most evangelicals today: carnal, immature, without miracles, without wonders, lacking a wonderful sense of the presence of the Lord, held together by social activities and nothing else. Another roadblock to reformation is prayerlessness among God's people. For 100 years the Moravians never stopped praying. They staffed a prayer tower as a factory staffs its machines. In eight-hour shifts the Moravians continued their prayer vigil for 100 years. Carelessness is another fault among evangelicals. Careless Christians do not discipline or examine themselves. Plato once said, "A life that is not examined is a kind of death." People who simply live by their instincts and do the best they can, but do not examine themselves are careless and, according to Plato, may as well be dead.
thought
Who among us would be so bold as to invite others to follow our example as did Paul? But we are modeling?negatively or positively?whether we intend to or not.
prayer
O God, make me a discipling instrument to walk beside other believers?teaching them to study Your Word and modeling the living of it. Only by Your enablement can I do it!
Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
— Acts 17:11
Today we need people who dare to question the status quo and say, "Wait a minute here. Where do you find this in the Bible?" The idea that all you have to do is to accept Christ and you are in is a great mistake. It leaves people with the impression that if they accept Christ they have no fight to fight, no warfare, no job to do and no temptations. They are just in. When you accept Christ rightly as your Lord and Savior you are in, but to be honest, you have just started to fight. People get converted and we do not tell them that they must fight all the way through to heaven because of the spirit of degeneration and the tendency to deteriorate. They must fight, pray through, suffer it out and live in praise and worship, because if they do not they will deteriorate. Read the history of the Christian church if you can keep your faith and keep from weeping.
thought
Winning people to Christ is one thing and extremely important. Discipling them is another: teaching them God's Word and how to study it for themselves and apply it to themselves. Have we neglected to disciple?
prayer
O Lord, thank You for those whom You have used to disciple me by word and especially by example.
You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit!
— Acts 7:51
This is hard for people to face up to. Religion deteriorates just as fruit rots and just as people get old in spite of all they try to do at the drug stores. It is inevitable that we get old, and so it is with religion. It is built-in that we start to deteriorate shortly after God comes and blesses us. Look what happened to Israel. God called Israel out of Egypt, and it began to deteriorate before it reached the Red Sea. Then He gave it a revival by taking it through the Red Sea and into the wilderness.
But Israel started to degenerate before it had gone 20 miles in the wilderness. As a result the people eventually wandered for 40 years. You can follow the history of Israel and see the story of the kings. It is a depressing story. Here is a man. He lived and did evil in the sight of the Lord. He had a son, and his son did evil in the sight of the Lord as his father before him. The status quo was maintained.
thought
History demonstrates that each generation needs its own dramatic encounter with God, its great awakening. And each of us personally needs it. Spiritual life is not inherited from our forebears. It is experienced through personal encounter with God!
prayer
O Spirit, I want to be filled with You, not to resist You.
And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little chirldren, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."
— Matthew 18:3
We need sweeping reformation. Let me give a definition of reformation as it is given in a religious dictionary: "Change by removal of faults or abuses, and a restoration to a former good estate." Now that is not so bad. I do not know how anybody who believes he or she is a Christian could ever object to changing in the direction of the removal of faults and abuses toward the restoration to a former good estate. The problem is change, which disturbs many people. They have accepted the status quo as being the very tablets given by God on the mountain. Most people, if they happen to be in any church anywhere, accept the status quo without knowing or caring to inquire how it came to be. In other words, they do not ask, "Oh God, is this of You, is this divine, is this out of the Bible?"
Because it was done and is being done, and because a lot of people are doing it, they assume it is all right. Then songs are written about it, and it gets into magazines. Pretty soon people are called to it, and the first thing we know we have gotten into a religious situation that is not of God. It is not according to Scripture, and God is not pleased with it at all. Rather, He is angry. Yet we do not know it because we do not like the word change. The change took place slowly, before we arrived on the scene, and we think because it is everywhere it is therefore right. We accept the status quo, the existing state of affairs, and say, "This is it," forgetting that history demonstrates that religions invariably degenerate.
thought
Change by reversion to the past seems safe except that a return to external forms does not insure recapture of the inner reality. Nor does the invention of new forms assure heart change.
prayer
Fascination with the new contemporary; nostalgia for the forms of the past; neither guarantee encounter with You. It is You I need, O God, You!