American Church, Is Your Christ Too Cheap?

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/16814238/american-church-is-your-christ-too-cheap

Audio Transcript

Worldliness — a theme addressed many times here over the years. Especially worldly media. I just glanced at the APJ book here, on pages 291–307, to be reminded of how big a theme worldliness has been for us over the years, Pastor John. A permanent challenge for the church. But not one every preacher wants to address in the pulpit, it seems, according to this note of concern from an anonymous young woman, who sees worldliness creeping in around her, in the lives of the professing Christians in her life.

She wrote us this: “Pastor John, thank you for the innumerable ways in which this ministry blesses me and other Christians around the world, as well as for your and Tony’s books, which also contribute to that. I don’t want to exclude myself; I am sure I also have blind spots, but when I see the ways in which Christians today use their free time and celebrate events in their lives, my heart feels heavy and saddened because of what I perceive to be worldliness. The celebrations are just like those of unbelievers; they often go to concerts by popular artists, stay out late on Saturday nights, then skip church the next day or arrive one hour late. They’re usually absent from prayer meetings. They vacation without giving Sunday worship so much as a moment of consideration. Christ is not present in most of their conversations.

“Some of these individuals are locally seen as mature, model Christians. My own church has solid Bible- and Christ-centered preaching. Yet I don’t see the subject of worldliness mentioned often. Nor do I see it even on websites with solid theology. In APJ 603, titled “What Qualifies as Worldly Music?” you said, ‘Worldly isn’t a sound; worldly is leaving Christ out. That is why it is called worldly and not Christ-ly. And it approves of what he disapproves. It is called worldly because it treasures the world above the one who made the world.’ Could you expand on that in relation to my concerns above? What can Christians do to encourage one another in faith and treasuring Christ? I am saddened and worried about the future of the church and Christianity because of what I see being normalized in the church today.”

I share your sadness and your concern for the church. In fact, I see most of my ministry as a ministry devoted to weaning the church off of the world and its pleasures onto Christ and his pleasures. I try to speak and write in such a way as to create spiritual taste buds in people’s hearts, so that they find distasteful things that don’t honor God and find desirable the things that do.

We Long for Revival

I think what we are longing for together has historically been called “revival” — a work of God in the church first. We call it “awakening” when it touches the world, but in the church first, “revival,” a work of God that causes the hearts of God’s people to burn — like in Luke 24:32: “Did not our hearts burn within us when we walked with him?” Revival causes our hearts to burn with love for God’s word and love for God’s people, love for God’s service, all rooted in an increasingly intense love for God himself, and for communion with God in prayer and meditation, with a growing delight in holiness and a growing horror at sin (especially our own), and a growing concern for lost people.

I think one of the greatest signs of worldliness is little concern for the reality of hell and people going there because they don’t believe, and in all of that, a greater intensification of our sense of spiritual truth and spiritual realities. That’s my sense of what revival is and what the church needs today. This is a sovereign work of God. We can pray toward it and we can preach toward it, teach toward it, write toward it, embody in our individual lives as much of it as possible, but in the end, it’s a gift God gives to his church with irresistible, sovereign power, and I agree that we are certainly in need of it.

Why Such Worldliness?

When I was in college, a popular little book by J.B. Phillips — called Your God Is Too Small — was very effective in many of our experiences and lives. It was a provocative little book that pleaded with the church to stop treating God as though he were a side issue in life and to wake up to his massive centrality — the fact that all things are “from him and through him and to him” (Romans 11:36). It had a significant awakening effect upon me.

“We can pray toward revival, but in the end, it’s a gift God gives to his church with irresistible, sovereign power.”

About forty years ago, David Wells wrote a book called No Place for Truth, which made the case that in the American church, God rests far too lightly on the people of God. He doesn’t have weight. It was the same heart cry from Dr. Wells as from J.B. Phillips. God is marginal. God has little weight in our worship services and little weight in our lives. He’s taken lightly. He’s simply one among many factors rather than the all-consuming factor, and I have thought that if I were to write a book today with a similar burden, it might have this title: Your Christ Is Too Cheap, Your Heaven Is Too Distant, Your Earth Is Too Big.

Christ Too Cheap

When I say, “Your Christ is too cheap,” I have in mind Philippians 3:8. Do the people who flirt with the world and seem to be totally at home in secular entertainments that are void of God, Christ, Christian morality — do those people really say, with the apostle Paul, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ”?

For Paul, Christ was the supreme and all-pervasive treasure of his life, and I would ask all of us, How does our treasuring of Christ compare to our treasuring of entertainments offered us by the world? Where are our affections? Because that is the key bottom issue. Where are our affections? Not first our behaviors, but our heart.

Heaven Too Distant

When I say, “Your heaven is too distant,” I mean that the reality of the afterlife is simply not operational in the daily mindset of many believers and virtually all unbelievers. But as I read the New Testament, the call to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven and not on earth is pervasive (Matthew 6:19–21). We are called to set our minds on things that are above (Colossians 3:1–2). We are called to look to things that are eternal, not transient (2 Corinthians 4:18). We are called to bank our hope on the rewards of the resurrection, not the rewards of this life (1 Timothy 6:17–19).

Heaven is a dominant, life-shaping reality in the New Testament, but a minor reality in most people’s lives today. It is too distant and, therefore, ineffective, leaving us sitting ducks for worldliness.

Earth Too Big

When I say, “Your earth is too big,” I mean that people are simply not thinking clearly when it comes to how tiny this earth is — not only in the universe, which is not very significant, but in the scope of eternity, which is very significant. I wonder if people ever think that, in one hundred years, virtually every person alive today will be gone — eight billion people gone. There is a complete turnover of humanity on the earth every ten decades, which seems very short to me now because I’m in my eighth. The number of people who live longer than one hundred is 0.0002% of the population. It is statistically insignificant. Every one hundred years, there is a complete turnover of humanity. Virtually everybody who was 22 years old when I was born is gone, and in 22 years, everybody born before me will be gone. That turnover has been happening for thousands of years.

We tend to think of humanity in terms that don’t really fit individual experience. Humanity has been around for thousands of years on the earth, but the earth has been home to individual humans no more than one hundred years and, in most cases, way shorter than one hundred years. And after that brief eighty to one hundred years (or less), every single one of those humans enters eternity and, compared to eternity, those one hundred years on earth were nothing. The Bible calls it a vapor (James 4:14). It lasts two seconds when you breathe it out on a cold winter morning.

If people were rational, they would not be earthly minded; they would be heavenly minded. And if they were heavenly minded, they would not find their greatest pleasures in the entertainments produced by earthly minded people. So, we pray and we teach and we live with the hope that God would break in with sovereign, reviving power, and cause his word to be so loved that it will no longer be, as Jesus says, choked out “by the cares and riches and pleasures” of this world (Luke 8:14).

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