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Tim Challies

Dumb Will Do: Why Satan Doesn’t Need Heresy

By Tim Challies — 2 weeks ago

Dumb Will Do: Why Satan Doesn’t Need Heresy

There is one memory of my earlier years as a Christian that I’ve never been able to shake. It’s a formative memory that I actually don’t think the Lord means for me to shake, for it has often reminded me that, when it comes to the local church’s worship, the stakes are sky high.

One Sunday we were worshipping at a church that was connected to a serious tradition but now dabbling in what some have labeled the attractional model. The leaders of that church had become convinced that to interest prospective attenders and grow the size of the congregation, they needed to make their services more appealing. They needed to remove some of the traditional elements of worship and replace them with ones they deemed fresh and attractive.

Sadly, what they deemed fresh and attractive proved to mostly just be unserious. By the time we attended, the prayers had become perfunctory, the preaching focused on felt needs, and the music relied on bad adaptations of modern hits. It wasn’t all bad: Bland coffee had given way to boutique coffee but, sadly, at the same time, sound principles of worship had given way to pragmatic ones.

After the preacher had told us how to be better people by trying harder and after the pastor baptized a man who told the congregation he was still co-habiting with his girlfriend, the band struck up yet another badly-rhymed and badly-performed adaptation of a pop song from the 80s—a song about partying and drunkenness that they had modified to ostensibly be about Jesus. By this time I was cringing with second-hand embarrassment and constraining what I was certain was righteous anger. I whispered to my family, “This is just so dumb. I’m never coming back here.” I didn’t know how else to describe it. It was just plain dumb. And we never did return.

It struck me that day and has struck me often ever since that to harm a church, Satan does not need to make the worship services heretical. He does not need to replace truth with damnable error. He just needs to make the worship services dumb. He just needs to make them trite and vapid. He just needs to make them unserious. And eventually, the church will diminish in strength and decline in power and lose the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It’s important to consider, then, that if Satan wants to harm your church, it is possible he will raise a heretic to the pulpit or introduce a wolf into the membership. But it is also possible he may cause the members to begin to feel embarrassed by what they consider old-fashioned patterns of worship and to ask for or demand something else. He may cause the pastors to begin to feel sheepish about lengthy prayers, to doubt the usefulness of reading substantial passages of Scripture, to wonder if it inhibits preaching to tie the point of a sermon to the point of a text. He may encourage the church to pursue what they deem fresh and attractive or what they think will draw the community around—perhaps especially in the area of music. He’ll slowly reshape the church from the instructions of Scripture to the whims of the people. He’ll slowly reshape the church’s worship so it slides from holy to worldly, from sacred to profane, from meaningful to dumb.

There is another church I remember from my childhood. My aunt and uncle attended a Presbyterian church that held to a strict interpretation of the Regulative Principle. The only elements the church permitted in worship were the elements the New Testament explicitly prescribes. The most obvious evidence of this was in their singing, for they sang only the Psalms and sang them without any musical accompaniment. I once asked my aunt why, when she visited our church, she would not sing the hymns. Her reply was, “In the Old Testament, God struck people dead for worshipping him the wrong way.” I can’t say that I ever agreed with all the convictions of those Presbyterians or the strictness of their understanding of the Regulative Principle, but I can most certainly say that I respected them. Whatever else was true of their worship, no one could say it was unserious. No one could say they took their instructions from anyone but God.

And this, I think, is the key. The great question each person and each church needs to ask is simply this: Do we believe God tells his people how to worship, or do we think God leaves that to us? Do we need to trust that God knows how we need to worship him and that he has given us specific instructions, or can we determine that God is glad to have us worship him however we see fit? Different answers to those questions will lead churches in very different directions.

The answer that was nearly universal until the rise of the attractional model and the answer that will serve us best in any age is this: God knows us better than we know ourselves and therefore tells us how we ought to worship. His instructions are not to be received with embarrassment or resentment and not with hesitancy or disobedience. Rather, they are to be received with humility, awe, and wonder that God would not only permit us to worship him but tell us how to worship him in the ways that are best. This means that instead of creating ways to worship we can simply receive ways to worship and instead of trusting ourselves, we can trust him. As always, it falls to us to search his Word and then obey his Word. It falls to us to worship him as he has commanded, for he knows best.

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