The Ministry of Being Wrong
I was born again in March of 1975. In 1976 I began Bible college at a conservative school affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. I learned many wonderful things at that school and appreciate the years I spent there. It was in those formative years that I learned the core doctrines of the faith and I learned how to study the Word.
But in those days most conservative evangelicals were taught not to think outside the box and to be suspicious of most conversations that contained any unfamiliar thoughts or ideas. And we were very suspicious of any emphasis on humanitarian works since our reasoning was that they diluted the message and came dangerously close to a “social gospel”. The fundamental system of how the church was to function was etched in stone and most everyone fell in line with it. It was so simple back then as we reclined inside the well worn parameters ranging from the King James Bible to our mandatory short hair and everything in between.
And with all our rigidity we created a self fulfilling spiritual martyrdom, and we felt so proud to be different and verbally persecuted, supposing we were favored by God. Sure we loved Christ and His Word, but there was an ecclesiastical clique that constructed an artificial wall of separation that Jesus never intended. In reality, in our genuine attempt to please God we had set up a New Testament law that in many ways abrogated grace and cultivated self righteousness. We did not mean to, but we did.
And now those of us who lived out those days are still around in this spiritual climate, and we are faced with some searching issues that demand perspective and honesty. That is not to say that the dangers of spiritual and Biblical departure are gone because they will always be with us, but it is to suggest that the church of the living God could be, MUST be, entirely more expansive in its revelation of the person of Jesus Christ. It is pitiful to pat ourselves on our backs because we lift up Christ in our pulpits while the dark and blind world sees and hears very little of Jesus lived out in His followers.
I would now suggest some tangible things about which I was wrong.
I was wrong for criticizing lost sinners. Back in the fundamentalist heyday we were accomplished at preaching against rock stars, movie stars, and an array of public sinners who provided much sermon fodder and elicited many a self righteous “amen”. We would castigate people like Madonna or Elton John or the movie star activists, and when I think about that type of self serving ungraciousness I realize that I was wrong. God’s love understands what sinners do and what condition they are in, but His example is the cross. His answer wasn’t to come into the world to condemn the world, no, He came so that the world through Him might be saved.
This issue goes all the way back to the Anita Bryant crusade against homosexuals and the church championing her as a hero of the faith only to see her own marriage crumble in divorce. Churches would hold youth record burnings with the latest “out of the closet” rock star becoming the target, and all the while we had our ears and eyes on moral targets and not on Christ Himself. This type of "attack Christianity" galvanizes the base but leads us all astray and veering far off the redemptive journey set before us by our Redeemer.
We do a disservice to Christ and His message when we take cheap shots at the unbelievers, regardless of who they are and what they do. It breeds self righteousness and denigrates the concept of grace wherein we all stand. Our message is the everlasting gospel and our motivation is love, love for Christ and love for the sinner. We need to teach about sin in our midst, but we need to march outside the camp with a banner of loving redemption unfurled before us.
I was wrong for being political. Perhaps no other issue has clouded the greatness of the gospel and the concept of justification by faith than the church’s participation in politics. During the 70’s there arose many religious right organizations whose expressed purpose was to change the morality of a nation through political leverage. Millions of unbelievers have gotten the idea that to be a Christian you must be moral, and specifically you must be aligned with certain issues like abortion and homosexuality. While those issues may be pertinent within the church, they are the spiritual carts before the horse among the lost.
In many ways the church has projected America as God’s new Israel, and patriotism has become a tenant of discipleship. Supporting conservative causes has become a part of Christian moralism, and in fact this view has led the church to join “forces” with a range of denominations including Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, conservative Judaism, and all sorts of organizations that we would not agree with spiritually but cooperate with morally. This, as Paul noted, sends an uncertain sound and even projects a works based Christianity.
And it isn’t just those issues that have ecclesiastical sway, many believers project a conservative view of the government’s monetary policy, foreign policy, and many tangential issues that again are not germane to the gospel of Christ. We cannot be spiritual Martha’s, always worried about earthly issues that cannot be solved at the ballot box, no, we must walk in the footsteps of Mary and sit before the Savior and learn of Him. The government is in God’s hands, we must be about our Father’s business.
I was wrong for downplaying humanitarian issues. I came to believe that feeding the poor, helping the sick, and generally reaching out to people’s earthly needs were unattached to the gospel and minimal in God’s redemptive economy. I failed to see the importance and the attached spiritual revelation that good deeds can have when passionately invested in people and accompanied with a redemptive fragrance that unmistakably comes from Jesus Christ. I sincerely believe I have missed many opportunities to walk through doors that would have been opened by a more fervent outreach to people in need, motivated by God’s eternal love.
I now wonder how I could have been so blind and entrenched. Why could I not see that helping and ministering to people’s physical needs was a partner in the proclamation of the everlasting gospel? Maybe it was because we were always so worried about the “social gospel” that we eschewed the notion of worldwide humanitarianism energized by the love of God and ushering in the life changing message of the Risen Christ. We were so reactionary in those days, and we cultivated a climate of the “defense of the gospel” when in reality it was often just defensiveness.
No one can be saved without faith in Jesus Christ, that is clear throughout the New Testament, but we have become so obsessed with avoiding the social gospel we have sometimes become blind to binding up the wounds of people first and allowing the Spirit to open their hearts to the Savior later. Loving and prayerful process has given way to pigeon holing and windshield tracts. All of such attempts to spread the gospel are legitimate and necessary, but meeting people’s needs are our calling as well.
I was wrong about doctrine. I believe doctrine, which just means the study and organized expression of God’s truth, is important. Without doctrine, based upon the written Scriptures, we would have chaos. And it is no secret that there are always doctrinal aberrations that range from unorthodox all the way to rank heresy. So the core elements of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings concerning salvation by grace through faith are vital to the health of the body of Christ. But so often we have elevated the side issues of doctrine to a status they were never meant to have, and even used portions of doctrine as artillery toward others and self righteousness toward ourselves.
Everything we know, every truth that has been revealed to us is completely by grace through the illumination of the Spirit and surely not the spiritual prowess of our intellects. And yet we sometimes act as if we are the protectors of the Holy Grail and that we ourselves have sought and found God’s truth and have been assigned to protect it from the hordes of doctrinal barbarians. To be sure there are always movements and teachings that seriously change Biblical understandings of truth, but our calling is overwhelmingly a redemptive offensive and not protectionism.
And just a quick perusal of church history reveals a host of brothers in Christ whose doctrinal teachings were anything but satisfactory. Wesley brushes with legalism; Finney veers significantly off course; Luther carries over some Roman Catholic views; Calvin changes the nature of the atonement; Graham quotes the pope; and almost the entire catalogue of former and present evangelical preachers had their own doctrinal idiosyncrasies at best and variances at worst, but yet they were brothers in Christ and used of God. So the core doctrines are vital, but all the rest are not fellowship breakers and most assuredly not an excuse for careless and ungracious attacks .
I was wrong about love. The church has carefully crafted a counterfeit love that masquerades as the love of God but is in reality a self serving conscience salve that is no more the love of God than our love for sports. All believers know we are taught to “love the world” as God did and “love one another” as God commanded, so we are aware that we must project some teaching concerning these issues or risk being “unbiblical”. But if we are honest and sincere, and if we willing to let the Spirit speak to our hearts with conviction and discomfort, we will see that what we preach, and certainly what we practice, seriously misses the Scriptural mark concerning love and even exposes the love we teach as Biblically flawed and spiritually diminutive.
The love of God that we are called to emulate and practically illustrate is violently sacrificial and selfless, and when demonstrated in the power of the Spirit it must stand forth as incongruous to earthly love and a conduit that draws the saint and sinner alike to Christ. How is it that the body of Christ can claim to be walking in the power of God’s love and yet be so unnoticed and unremarkable in the midst of such a selfish and unloving generation? Why were sinners, so blatant in their sinful lifestyles that they were ostracized by society, drawn to Jesus? Why was a woman who practiced a sinful sexual lifestyle bold enough to approach Jesus with her worship, and yet sinners are driven away from our churches?
Where is the “God so loved the world that He gave” kind of love today? We were always so worried about rubbing shoulders with the world that we withdrew from them and in so doing projected a God that exhibits an aloof disdain rather than a gregarious love. We were more concerned with reputation than redemption, more concerned with acclamation than salvation, and more concerned with earthly separation than spiritual emancipation. We were reserved in our love even among ourselves, and if we cannot love each other with abandon how can we claim to love the sinner? In the end, we loved our ecclesiastical constructs more than we loved God and His Word.
But in those days most conservative evangelicals were taught not to think outside the box and to be suspicious of most conversations that contained any unfamiliar thoughts or ideas. And we were very suspicious of any emphasis on humanitarian works since our reasoning was that they diluted the message and came dangerously close to a “social gospel”. The fundamental system of how the church was to function was etched in stone and most everyone fell in line with it. It was so simple back then as we reclined inside the well worn parameters ranging from the King James Bible to our mandatory short hair and everything in between.
And with all our rigidity we created a self fulfilling spiritual martyrdom, and we felt so proud to be different and verbally persecuted, supposing we were favored by God. Sure we loved Christ and His Word, but there was an ecclesiastical clique that constructed an artificial wall of separation that Jesus never intended. In reality, in our genuine attempt to please God we had set up a New Testament law that in many ways abrogated grace and cultivated self righteousness. We did not mean to, but we did.
And now those of us who lived out those days are still around in this spiritual climate, and we are faced with some searching issues that demand perspective and honesty. That is not to say that the dangers of spiritual and Biblical departure are gone because they will always be with us, but it is to suggest that the church of the living God could be, MUST be, entirely more expansive in its revelation of the person of Jesus Christ. It is pitiful to pat ourselves on our backs because we lift up Christ in our pulpits while the dark and blind world sees and hears very little of Jesus lived out in His followers.
I would now suggest some tangible things about which I was wrong.
I was wrong for criticizing lost sinners. Back in the fundamentalist heyday we were accomplished at preaching against rock stars, movie stars, and an array of public sinners who provided much sermon fodder and elicited many a self righteous “amen”. We would castigate people like Madonna or Elton John or the movie star activists, and when I think about that type of self serving ungraciousness I realize that I was wrong. God’s love understands what sinners do and what condition they are in, but His example is the cross. His answer wasn’t to come into the world to condemn the world, no, He came so that the world through Him might be saved.
This issue goes all the way back to the Anita Bryant crusade against homosexuals and the church championing her as a hero of the faith only to see her own marriage crumble in divorce. Churches would hold youth record burnings with the latest “out of the closet” rock star becoming the target, and all the while we had our ears and eyes on moral targets and not on Christ Himself. This type of "attack Christianity" galvanizes the base but leads us all astray and veering far off the redemptive journey set before us by our Redeemer.
We do a disservice to Christ and His message when we take cheap shots at the unbelievers, regardless of who they are and what they do. It breeds self righteousness and denigrates the concept of grace wherein we all stand. Our message is the everlasting gospel and our motivation is love, love for Christ and love for the sinner. We need to teach about sin in our midst, but we need to march outside the camp with a banner of loving redemption unfurled before us.
I was wrong for being political. Perhaps no other issue has clouded the greatness of the gospel and the concept of justification by faith than the church’s participation in politics. During the 70’s there arose many religious right organizations whose expressed purpose was to change the morality of a nation through political leverage. Millions of unbelievers have gotten the idea that to be a Christian you must be moral, and specifically you must be aligned with certain issues like abortion and homosexuality. While those issues may be pertinent within the church, they are the spiritual carts before the horse among the lost.
In many ways the church has projected America as God’s new Israel, and patriotism has become a tenant of discipleship. Supporting conservative causes has become a part of Christian moralism, and in fact this view has led the church to join “forces” with a range of denominations including Roman Catholicism, Mormonism, conservative Judaism, and all sorts of organizations that we would not agree with spiritually but cooperate with morally. This, as Paul noted, sends an uncertain sound and even projects a works based Christianity.
And it isn’t just those issues that have ecclesiastical sway, many believers project a conservative view of the government’s monetary policy, foreign policy, and many tangential issues that again are not germane to the gospel of Christ. We cannot be spiritual Martha’s, always worried about earthly issues that cannot be solved at the ballot box, no, we must walk in the footsteps of Mary and sit before the Savior and learn of Him. The government is in God’s hands, we must be about our Father’s business.
I was wrong for downplaying humanitarian issues. I came to believe that feeding the poor, helping the sick, and generally reaching out to people’s earthly needs were unattached to the gospel and minimal in God’s redemptive economy. I failed to see the importance and the attached spiritual revelation that good deeds can have when passionately invested in people and accompanied with a redemptive fragrance that unmistakably comes from Jesus Christ. I sincerely believe I have missed many opportunities to walk through doors that would have been opened by a more fervent outreach to people in need, motivated by God’s eternal love.
I now wonder how I could have been so blind and entrenched. Why could I not see that helping and ministering to people’s physical needs was a partner in the proclamation of the everlasting gospel? Maybe it was because we were always so worried about the “social gospel” that we eschewed the notion of worldwide humanitarianism energized by the love of God and ushering in the life changing message of the Risen Christ. We were so reactionary in those days, and we cultivated a climate of the “defense of the gospel” when in reality it was often just defensiveness.
No one can be saved without faith in Jesus Christ, that is clear throughout the New Testament, but we have become so obsessed with avoiding the social gospel we have sometimes become blind to binding up the wounds of people first and allowing the Spirit to open their hearts to the Savior later. Loving and prayerful process has given way to pigeon holing and windshield tracts. All of such attempts to spread the gospel are legitimate and necessary, but meeting people’s needs are our calling as well.
I was wrong about doctrine. I believe doctrine, which just means the study and organized expression of God’s truth, is important. Without doctrine, based upon the written Scriptures, we would have chaos. And it is no secret that there are always doctrinal aberrations that range from unorthodox all the way to rank heresy. So the core elements of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings concerning salvation by grace through faith are vital to the health of the body of Christ. But so often we have elevated the side issues of doctrine to a status they were never meant to have, and even used portions of doctrine as artillery toward others and self righteousness toward ourselves.
Everything we know, every truth that has been revealed to us is completely by grace through the illumination of the Spirit and surely not the spiritual prowess of our intellects. And yet we sometimes act as if we are the protectors of the Holy Grail and that we ourselves have sought and found God’s truth and have been assigned to protect it from the hordes of doctrinal barbarians. To be sure there are always movements and teachings that seriously change Biblical understandings of truth, but our calling is overwhelmingly a redemptive offensive and not protectionism.
And just a quick perusal of church history reveals a host of brothers in Christ whose doctrinal teachings were anything but satisfactory. Wesley brushes with legalism; Finney veers significantly off course; Luther carries over some Roman Catholic views; Calvin changes the nature of the atonement; Graham quotes the pope; and almost the entire catalogue of former and present evangelical preachers had their own doctrinal idiosyncrasies at best and variances at worst, but yet they were brothers in Christ and used of God. So the core doctrines are vital, but all the rest are not fellowship breakers and most assuredly not an excuse for careless and ungracious attacks .
I was wrong about love. The church has carefully crafted a counterfeit love that masquerades as the love of God but is in reality a self serving conscience salve that is no more the love of God than our love for sports. All believers know we are taught to “love the world” as God did and “love one another” as God commanded, so we are aware that we must project some teaching concerning these issues or risk being “unbiblical”. But if we are honest and sincere, and if we willing to let the Spirit speak to our hearts with conviction and discomfort, we will see that what we preach, and certainly what we practice, seriously misses the Scriptural mark concerning love and even exposes the love we teach as Biblically flawed and spiritually diminutive.
The love of God that we are called to emulate and practically illustrate is violently sacrificial and selfless, and when demonstrated in the power of the Spirit it must stand forth as incongruous to earthly love and a conduit that draws the saint and sinner alike to Christ. How is it that the body of Christ can claim to be walking in the power of God’s love and yet be so unnoticed and unremarkable in the midst of such a selfish and unloving generation? Why were sinners, so blatant in their sinful lifestyles that they were ostracized by society, drawn to Jesus? Why was a woman who practiced a sinful sexual lifestyle bold enough to approach Jesus with her worship, and yet sinners are driven away from our churches?
Where is the “God so loved the world that He gave” kind of love today? We were always so worried about rubbing shoulders with the world that we withdrew from them and in so doing projected a God that exhibits an aloof disdain rather than a gregarious love. We were more concerned with reputation than redemption, more concerned with acclamation than salvation, and more concerned with earthly separation than spiritual emancipation. We were reserved in our love even among ourselves, and if we cannot love each other with abandon how can we claim to love the sinner? In the end, we loved our ecclesiastical constructs more than we loved God and His Word.
There were other things about which I was wrong, and most assuredly things about which I am still wrong, but I ended on this one since if you are wrong about God’s love you are wrong about everything.
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4 comments:
Amen. I am so happy I stopped by your blog today. Thankful that these things are being said.
(Sorry Rick, this may be off topic) How do you pronounce your last name? I asked you once in Mike's blog, but I don't think you came back in and saw my question.
Josh
I was there, too, Rick, and confess to being wrong about these very things as well. While I have many regrets about this I find it amazing that we are yet being transformed from glory to glory by His abounding grace. It's just a matter of daily surrendering the will and letting the Holy Spirit do the rest.
Rick~
Well said!
Who is the author of this? There is no link to his blog.
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