Reforming our Worship

The question that I would like to consider in this blog post is: how should we approach God in worship?

Does it really matter how we worship God?

Before we consider how we ought to order our worship in a way that is pleasing to God, it is important for this to be fully rooted in what the Bible teaches us about worship and to understand why worship is so important in the life of the church and the Christian. In “Reformation Worship”, co-editor Jonathan Gibson in his chapter “Worship on Earth as it is in Heaven” presents a very helpful biblical overview of worship in Scripture. He begins by explaining how the story of human history and that of creation itself is the story of worship, and that since the fall of humanity, every single person will either worship through Adam or Christ. Since fallen humanity has inherited the fallen nature of Adam, they will naturally be an idolator and have inherited a “fallen liturgical orientation towards idolatry.” Gibson comments that:

“We are born worshipping the creature, not the creator; we live our lives seeking salvation and satisfaction in pseudo-redeemers, not the redeemer. We are a restless race, wandering “east”, away from the divine sanctuary. But, through the Second Man Jesus Christ, we have the invitation to return and worship God in spirit and truth, in His presence." [1]

Sadly, we are seeing how worldly entertainment and pragmatism has taken a hold of modern church worship, as worldly practices have been brought into the modern church and inevitably this has a corrupting effect on our worship. It is now clear to see that there is a mandate for the modern church to reform her worship and teaching so that it is fully in line with Scripture, and Jonathan Gibson elaborates further to remind us of the staggering fact that our worship of God will be for all eternity:


“The consummate experience of this truth must await the final day when we will feast on, and with, the glorified Son of God Himself, at the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. For now, it is right, fitting, and delightful to worship as God’s redeemed people; then, it will be right, fitting, and delightful to do so as God’s glorified people. It is why worship matters now — because it will matter then, forever.” [2]

Worship matters now because it will matter forever! This is why it matters how we worship God, and it is why the sixteenth Century reformers took a stand against the established church of their day. We will now explore the impact that the Reformation had on the church’s worship and why it still matters today.

Going back through church history over the centuries and right up to the eve of the sixteenth Century Reformation, the Roman Catholic church had all but removed the Bible from the heart of the worship and it had become little more than a dead religion steeped in superstition and heresy. The German monk Martin Luther rejected several of the teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, renouncing the idea that the Pope had supreme authority and control over the church which allowed him to infallibly exercise his authority as the supreme ruler. Luther renounced this claim that the pope had infallibility as well as the correct interpretation of the Bible, particularly as the papacy was twisting Scripture to laud power over its subjects. [3]

The question of where the authority was to be found - in the Word of God or the Pope led to the famous Latin term ‘Sola Scriptura” meaning ‘only Scripture.’ It was through the Reformation, led primarily by Martin Luther, that the Word of God was brought back to its rightful place, at the centre of the Church’s worship and teaching.

As the Reformation began to filter down into the local churches, there were two main approaches to Christian worship: the “Normative” and “Regulative” principles of worship. The “Normative” approach to worship was implemented by the reformer Martin Luther, who prescribed that the worshipper had the freedom to order their worship services in any way that they chose, just so long as it didn’t contradict the teaching of Scripture. However, in contrast, the Regulative principle which came later through the reformer John Calvin states that worship should be ordered only on what is prescribed in Scripture and nothing else.

The pastor-theologian Sam Waldron explains:

“The difference between Puritans and Anglicans may be helpfully illustrated by means of two builders intent on building the temple of God. Mr. Anglican must use the materials of the Word of God, but has no blueprint and may use other materials. Mr. Puritan must use only materials of the Word of God and has a blueprint. It takes no special genius to discern that the two completed buildings will differ drastically or to discern which will be more pleasing to God.” [4]

In practice, as Sam Waldron points out, both of those principles are going to lead to worship that looks significantly different since the Normative principle allows for freedom to experiment with worship. This worship principle has given way to another more pragmatic approach to worship called the “Inventive Principle” which states that “whatever works, do it!” This means that, instead of being guided by the Word of God, the church is ordering her worship by the whims and fancies of man - who by nature are idolatrous creatures.

The pastor-theologian Ligon Duncan puts it like this:

“In contrast to all human creativity and initiative, the Bible is to be our rule for how we worship God, because the Bible is our rule for how we are to think about God— and how we worship in turn impacts our concept of God. Put another way: how we worship determines whom we worship. That is why both the medium and the message, both the means and the object, must be attended to in true worship. So, the Bible (God’s own revelation regarding Himself and His worship)— and not our own innovations, imaginations, experiences, opinions and representations— is to determine how we worship God." [5]

This is why a creative and inventive approach to worship will inevitably lead the worshipper away from God because the worship is driven by our own desires and not by the Word of God. The Regulative Principle, however, orders the worship of the church on what the Scriptures actually teach us about worship and the important lessons that we can learn about what kind of worship pleases God.

The Regulative principle

This naturally leads us to explore the regulative principle of worship. The reformer John Calvin considered the worship of God to be the most important part of Christianity, even more so than salvation:

“The first foundation of righteousness undoubtedly is the worship of God. When it is subverted, all the other parts of righteousness, like a building rent asunder, and in ruins are racked and scattered.” (Institutes, Book II, Ch 8, Art. 11) [6]

Faithful worship has to be the believer’s priority and reason for living, after all, our adoption into sonship to God through Christ is “according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace” (Eph 1:5-6) So if God has created us, chosen us for adoption and redeemed us through Christ on the Cross, then surely we should approach God in worship in accordance to His will and how we are told to worship as laid before us in Scripture?

Herman Bavinck explains the relationship between God and the worshipper:

“Accordingly, if there is truly to be religion, if there is to be fellowship between God and man, if the relations between the two is to be also (but not exclusively) that of a master to his servant, of a potter to a clay, as well as that of a king to his people, of a father to a son, of a mother to her child, of an eagle to her young, of a hen to her chicks, and so forth; that is, if not just one relation but all relations and all sorts of relations of dependence, submission, obedience, friendship, love and so forth among humans find their model and achieve their fulfilment in religion, then religion must be the character of a covenant. For then God has to come down from His lofty position, condescend to His creatures, impart, reveal, and give Himself away to human beings; then He who inhabits eternity and dwells in a high and holy place must also dwell with those who are of a humble spirit (Is 57:15).” [7]

We have to remember who we are in light of who God is, He is the Almighty and omnipotent creator of everything, including us and we must play by His rules and not ours. When it comes to the worship of the Most High God, we do not get to decide how He is worshipped based on our earthly whims and fancies. Bavinck also goes on to say:

“But this set of conditions is nothing other than the description of a covenant. If religion is called a covenant, it is thereby described as the true and genuine religion. This is what no religion has ever understood; all people pantheistically pull God down into what is creaturely, or deistically elevate Him endlessly above it. In neither case does one arrive at true fellowship, at covenant, at genuine religion. But Scripture insists on both: God is infinitely great and condescendingly good; He is Sovereign but also Father; He is creator but also Prototype. In a word, He is the God of the Covenant.” [8]

This means that we do not get to pick and chose what we believe about God and salvation from Scripture, and neither do we get to choose how God is worshipped either. So the Regulative Principle asserts that the corporate worship of God is founded on the specific directions of Scripture and that, not only do we take our belief and doctrine from Scripture, but we also order our worship from the Scriptures. Since it is through the Word of God that salvation comes, so should we not also approach God in worship in line with His word?

The Westminster Confession of Faith says:

“But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited to his own revealed will, that he may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representations or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture” (WCF Article 22:1) [9]

This is the very opposite of the pragmatic approach of using modern culture to drive the worship, the regulative principle orders church worship around the Word of God so that the worship and teaching of the corporate church gathering are driven by Scripture and not by the culture, to be kept faithful to God. Another Reformed doctrinal document “The Belgic Confession of Faith” states that:

“We reject all human inventions, and all laws which man would introduce into the worship of God, thereby to bind and compel the conscience in any manner what-so-ever. Therefore we admit only of that which tends to nourish and preserve concord and unity, and to keep all men in obedience to God.” (BCF Article 32) [10]

When we read through the Word of God we will see time and again, God prescribed to His people the worship that is pleasing to Him. The first example we find in the Old Testament is of God’s disdain for Cain’s offering after being pleased with his brother Abel’s offering. God in His mercy and patience reasons with Cain: “Why are you angry and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted?” Whilst Abel had offered the firstborn lambs from his flock, his brother Cain had not honoured God with the first fruits of his crops and instead just offered what he decided that he wanted to give, rather than that which was required by God.

Later on, in the time of Moses, God gave Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments, the first two commandments making it very clear that the people of Israel were to have no other gods, and nor were they to make a carved image or likeness of anything in heaven or on earth. Later on, Israel’s direct disobedience in worshipping the golden calf as they waited for Moses to return from the mountain led to God’s severe judgement on them which shows us that God’s people are not free to worship however they please. We also see as we read through the second half of Exodus and the book of Leviticus how specific God is about how He is to be worshipped, this was very significant and important because everything that the Israelites were ordered to do in the worship of God was a copy and shadow of heavenly things.

In the book of Leviticus (10:1-2) we read about the disturbing story of Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu who were struck down dead because of their unlawful worship. Throughout the Old Testament there is a very strong emphasis on worship that honours God in faithful obedience, another example of this is when God rejected King Saul because of his disobedience, and the prophet Samuel said to him:

“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice.” (1 Sam 15:22 ESV)

In the New Testament, the apostle Paul addresses how public worship should be ordered, rebuking the Colossians for the self-made, religious elements in their worship (Col 2:23) and the Corinthians Christians for the chaotic nature of their gatherings (1 Cor 14:26-33). As we read through Paul’s epistles we also get a clear picture of what a church worship service should look like, there would be people gathered to sing “psalms, hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph 5:19) they would sit under the Word of God being read out and preached (1 Tim 4:2;13) the church should also be a “house of prayer” (Matt 21:13) and there are also the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper (Matt 28;19; 1 Cor 11:23-26). [11]

Another way to look at the Regulative Principle more simply would be to ask the question: could your church hold a worship service without using electricity? If all you had was a small group of people with some hymn books and Bibles and you sang hymns and psalms, read the Word of God out loud and someone preached and prayers were offered to God, then you would be worshipping just like a New Testament church! This is also the kind of simple worship that is being faithfully offered by brothers and sisters all over the world, who are not limited by needing buildings and an energy supplier. Who knows, if and when persecution comes in the future, many of us may find ourselves in underground house churches worshipping in this way.

Footnotes:

[1] “Reformation Worship” Edited by Jonathan Gibson & Mark Earngey, (New Growth Press, 2018) p20

[2] “Reformation Worship” Edited by Jonathan Gibson & Mark Earngey, (New Growth Press, 2018) p20

[3] As explained by Matthew Barrett “God’s Word Alone: The Authority of Scripture” (Zondervan 2016) p38

[4] Sam Waldron, “How Then Should We Worship?” (Evangelical Press, 2022) pp45-46

[5] Ligon Duncan, “Does God Care How We Worship?” (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 2020) p29

[6] John Calvin “Institutes of the Christian Religion” - Book II, Ch 8, Art. 11 (Hendricksen Publishers, 2008) p239

[7] Herman Bavinck “Reformed Dogmatics, Vol II, God and Creation” (Baker Academic, 2004) p569-570

[8] Herman Bavinck “Reformed Dogmatics, Vol II, God and Creation” (Baker Academic, 2004) p569-570

[9] The Westminster Confessions of Faith (Article 22.1)

[10] The Belgic Confession of Faith (Article 32)

[11] Biblical references as cited by Derek Thomas “The Regulative Principle of Worship” https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/regulative-principle-worship/

A Great Falling Away

In the last few years it has become evident that the true biblical Gospel is no longer being preached in the majority of the mainstream churches because their objective is to be attractional and to draw numbers in. Since the emphasis is on drawing a crowd and building up the numbers in attendance, pragmatism takes precedence over the spiritual, which means that they are no longer concerned about true conversions. This means that many of the attendees in these mainstream churches either are not truly regenerate or have a faith that is so shallow that it will not take much for them to turn away from the Christian faith, particularly if they are not being built up and nurtured by a faithful pastor, the modern worshipper is in very real spiritual danger.

It is no great surprise then that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the majority of churches lost a large percentage of their congregation, in many instances, as many as half of a local church’s congregation failed to return to fellowship. Whilst there may well be other reasons for this decline in attendance one thing is for sure, and that is a substantial falling away has been happening in the British Church over the last few years which has accelerated significantly during the pandemic. How do we make sense of this falling away and why is it happening? These are important questions that need answering and I believe that a deeper study of Scripture will enable us to understand what is happening spiritually in the Church in these times.

Firstly, I believe that the cause behind this great falling away is diagnosed very effectively by the twentieth Century pastor and author Ernest C. Reisinger in his short booklet entitled “What Should We Think of the Carnal Christian?” where he points to the “carnal Christian” teaching. This is the idea that there are three distinct groups of people: unbelievers, “carnal Christians” and “spiritual Christians.” To put this another way, a Christian who is serious about their faith and walking faithfully with Christ will often be described by other lukewarm Christians as being a “radical” or “fundamentalist” Christian. This faithful, follower of Christ is being derided and ridiculed by their so-called fellow Christians for living a life of obedience which makes them feel uncomfortable because it challenges their lukewarm “carnal Christianity.” Reisinger argues that this teaching is a fundamental misunderstanding and misinterpretation of what the apostle Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians:

“And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men? For when one says, ‘I am of Paul,’ and another, “I am of Apollos,” are you not carnal?” (1 Corinthians 3:1-4 NKJV)

Reisinger points out that:

“They are rebuked in Chapter 3, not for failing to attain to privileges which some Christians attain to, but for acting, despite their privileges, like babes and like the unregenerate in one area of their lives. This is very different from saying that the Apostle here recognises the existence of a distinct group of Christians who can be called ‘carnal.’ When Paul comes to speak of classes, he knows only two, as is clear in Chapter 2 of this same epistle where he divides men into ‘natural’ and ‘spiritual’ (1 Cor 2:14-15)” [1]

In other words, Paul is not dividing the Corinthian Christians into three separate groups and claiming that a Christian convert can either grow to maturity or stay on spiritual milk. This is a huge fallacy that has led to many professing Christians being under the illusion that they are saved when they are still unregenerate and are not in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit. This is the warning that The Lord Jesus gives in His parable of the Ten Virgins in Matthew 25 where the five foolish virgins took no oil with them on the way to meeting the bridegroom and were unable to keep their lamps burning for the last part of their journey. Commenting on this terrible moment in the parable, the Anglican bishop J.C. Ryle warns:

“We may settle it in our minds, that there will be an entire change of opinion one day as to the necessity of decided Christianity. At present, we must all be aware, the vast majority of professing Christians care nothing at all about it: they have no sense of sin; they have no love towards Christ; they know nothing of being born again. Repentance, and faith, and grace, and holiness, are mere ‘words and names’ to them; they are subjects which they either dislike, or about which they feel no concern. But this state of things shall one day come to an end. Knowledge, conviction, the value of the soul, the need of a Saviour, shall all burst on men’s minds one day like a flash of lightening. But it will be too late! It will be too late to be buying oil, when the Lord returns. The mistakes that are not found out until that day are irretrievable.” [2]

The great danger, as Reisinger points out, of holding to the belief that there is a “carnal Christian” group of professing Christians is that:

“If it can be established that the preponderance of Scripture teaches only two classes or categories of men - regenerate and unregenerate, converted and unconverted, those in Christ and those outside of Christ - the ‘carnal Christian’ teaching would be confronted with an insurmountable objection. It would be to conflict with the whole emphasis of Scripture and of the New Testament in particular.” [3]

That is not to say that there are not some immature Christians who are stuck on spiritual milk, but as the writer to the Hebrews points out, this is a very dangerous place to be spiritually and often becomes the graveyard for apostate believers.

“About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” (Hebrews 5:11-14 ESV)

A true believer is someone who wants to learn and grow in their faith - that is the outworking of the Gospel in their life, a desire to go deeper into the Word of God and to grow to spiritual maturity to be useful to God in building up others in the faith. A person who is happy just to remain on spiritual milk is the most susceptible to being led astray morally and by false teaching, all it takes to fall away is to drift morally or doctrinally. Time and again I have observed that if a person drifts into a liberal view of God’s Word then they will naturally drift morally into sin, and if a person falls into sin and is unrepentant, then they will naturally adopt a liberal theology to suit. “Progressive Christianity” is the graveyard of professing Christians who did not want to follow the Jesus Christ found in Scripture. The American missionary-preacher Paul Washer argues:

“This idea of the carnal Christian has destroyed more lives and sent more people to hell than you can imagine! Do Christians struggle with sin? Yes. Can a Christian fall into sin? Absolutely. Can a Christian live in a continuous state of carnality all the days of his life, not bearing fruit, and truly be Christian? Absolutely not, or every promise in the Old Testament regarding the New Testament covenant of preservation has failed, and everything God said about discipline in Hebrews is a lie (Heb 12:6). A tree is known by its fruit (Luke 6:44). [4]

This is the great problem with shallow professing Christians, if they have not discovered the beauty and wonder of The Cross of Jesus Christ and deeply desire to grow in their knowledge of God and their relationship with Him, then they are going to be easy prey for the enemy. I have lost count of the number of professing Christians who have fallen away from the faith after being content to wallow in the shallow end of Christianity because they had no desire or hunger for spiritual things. The writer to the Hebrews goes on to warn of this apostasy:

“For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt. For land that has drunk the rain that often falls on it, and produces a crop useful to those for whose sake it is cultivated, receives a blessing from God. But if it bears thorns and thistles, it is worthless and near to being cursed, and its end is to be burned.” (Hebrews 6:4-8 ESV)

The Puritan John Owen describing this falling away in the Letter to the Hebrews says that it is “a voluntary and resolved renouncing and an apostasy from the Gospel, the faith, rule and obedience thereof which is not without casting the highest reproach and insult imaginable onto the person of Christ Himself.” [5]

So to summarise this part of the argument, a true follower of Christ is not going to be willing to remain on spiritual milk, they would respond positively to the kind of warning and rebuke that the apostle Paul and the writer to the Hebrews were giving to their respective congregations. But a professing Christian who is willing to remain on spiritual milk and sees nothing wrong with being lukewarm, like the Church in Laodicea, is ultimately a false convert who is almost certain to fall away from the faith.

The American author and pastor Dean Inserra in his book “The Unsaved Christian” reflects on the cultural Christianity that has become so common in the modern church and particularly how a member-driven rather than a discipleship-driven model of church has led to this cultural Christianity. Commenting within the context of an American Southern Baptist Church context he says:

“What does it mean to be a member of a church? For us, as I look back to our early years, it only meant we were the church you said you were going to come to on Sunday morning until you decided to go someplace else. As I considered the Cultural Christian climate of the city we had set out to reach, I came to the humbling realisation that I had been unaware that our model of church membership was the very type of church practice that allows Cultural Christianity to flourish. We had it in place because we thought we were supposed to, I guess, but we couldn’t really describe why it mattered. Unsaved Christians thrive where church membership means nothing and is available to all, without anything changing the day after you “sign up.” [6]

Reflecting on this as an ordained Anglican minister myself, this is an even more acute problem in a parish system where any parishioner who lives within the parish boundaries can consider a particular church to be their local church. This is why so many unbelieving families will request to have their child baptised in their local Anglican church because the Canon Law of the Church of England allows them the right to infant baptism. This then leads to unbelieving couples making a mockery of the sacrament of baptism as they stand in the house of God, making promises to bring up their child in the Christian faith that they have no intention or means to be able to keep since they are not true believers themselves. Even more disturbing is the fact that many Anglican parishioners believe that by merely attending a Holy Communion service on a Sunday morning and taking communion, they have done enough for salvation.

But this frivolous approach to taking Holy Communion in the Anglican church is putting a great many people in grave spiritual danger. The apostle Paul warns the Corinthian church: “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgement on himself.” (1 Cor 11:28-29 ESV)

In Article 82 of the Heidelberg Catechism, the severity of abusing the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper is made abundantly clear, with a call for church discipline for those who abuse the sacrament:

“Should those be admitted to the Lord’s Supper who show by what they profess and how they live that they are unbelieving and ungodly?

No, that would dishonour God’s covenant and bring down God’s wrath up on the entire congregation. Therefore, according to the instruction of Christ and His apostles, the Christian church is duty-bound to exclude such people, by the official use of the keys of the kingdom, until they reform their lives.” [7]

However, whilst this “Church Country Club” is particularly prevalent in the Anglican church, with its historic parish system, the cultural Christianity of our day is much more widespread and a look across several different denominations will lead us towards the same conclusion: a member-driven approach to discipleship so often produces consumers and attendees rather than disciples.

The bottom line is that Churches have been full of unsaved, nominal Christians for years, I know this for a fact because I was a lifelong church attender before coming to faith in my early twenties. But nobody really noticed until after the pandemic when it became more noticeable when large numbers of church attendees failed to return to their churches. So whilst the deeper problem of a consumer-driven approach to Church has already been diagnosed well before the Covid pandemic, it does now appear that the ‘stable door is being closed long after the horse has bolted,’ the damage has already been done and we are now seeing a great falling away.

Footnotes:

[1] Ernest C. Reisinger “What Should We Think of the Carnal Christian?” (Banner of Truth, 1978) p13

[2] J.C. Ryle “Matthew: Expository Thoughts on The Gospels” (Banner of Truth, 2012) pp266-267

[3] Ernest C. Reisinger “What Should We Think of the Carnal Christian?” (Banner of Truth, 1978) p10

[4] Paul Washer “Ten Indictments Against The Modern Church” (Reformation Heritage, 2018) p39

[5] John Owen “Hebrews Vol 5” (Banner of Truth, 2010) p87

[6] Dean Inserra “The Unsaved Christian” (Moody Press, 2019) p73

[7] The Heidelberg Catechism, Article 82, Chad Van Dixhoorn “Creeds, Confessions & Catechisms” (Crossway, 2022) p316

The Spirit of AntiChrist

The evangelist and pastor of Times Square Church in New York, David Wilkerson delivered a chilling warning about the “mystery of lawlessness’ that the apostle Paul warns about in his second letter to the Thessalonians (2 Thess 2:7), and a great falling away that is already happening as a result of this “spirit of antichrist”:

“(The apostle) Paul warns that there will come false prophets who will preach another Gospel and another Jesus and that other Jesus is the antichrist. They are going to be of the Spirit of antichrist. And there are going to be many apostate Christians in the last days. But folks, whilst we have been looking for this man (the antichrist) Satan has been creeping in and by his spirit preparing (people). You see, antichrist is not going to suddenly appear on the scene and try to overwhelm mankind. antichrist is not going to come and try and influence people. By the time he has come there will have first been a trickle, because Paul the apostle said that the (antichrist) spirit is already at work. It was at work in the primitive church and it’s been working now, it’s up to a stream, it’s up to an ocean flow. The Bible says that by the time the antichrist is revealed he will already have prepared hearts for his coming. They will receive him. How will many receive him? Why would certain, so-called backslidden, apostate Christians ever turn to the antichrist? It is because they are of his body, his spirit, and likeminded. And he is now in the world preparing hearts for when he comes.” [1]

As David Wilkinson warned his congregation in New York during his ministry there, the question of who the antichrist is and when he emerges is not our primary concern, however, of much greater concern is the “spirit of antichrist" - the worldliness that gets into our hearts and the church and misleads many away from the truth about Christ and salvation.

We will now take a deeper study of apostle John’s first two epistles, since the term “antichrist” is peculiar to the apostle John, which provides us with some teaching on this spirit of antichrist enabling us to understand why so many churches are losing their lampstands in this hour.

Writing to Christian congregations across what is now modern-day Turkey, the apostle John warns:

“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” (1 John 2:15-17 ESV)

Before we look more specifically at the antichrist spirit that John talks about a few verses later, it is important to interpret it in the context of what the apostle is saying in these verses. He is warning them (and us) that there is an attitude in the world that is set firmly against God, a clear dividing line is drawn between those who love worldliness and those who love God. This is going to make sense of how professing Christians so often fall away from the faith and why it is so dangerous for churches to embrace worldly values. Notice the order in which the apostle John places these worldly desires: “the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride of life,” or to put it another way: the body, mind, and soul of an individual.

As humans we are made up of body, mind, and soul - the soul is also referred to in the Bible as the heart or the spirit - it is the essence of who you are, whilst the mind is the creative ability of an individual to think, dream, imagine or scheme with the physical body interacting physically with the material world around us. And these three are all connected: the heart drives the mind which drives the body, so to have a corrupted heart means that the mind is driven by the evil that is in the heart so that the body then carries out the will of the heart and the mind. In the first chapter of his letter to the Christians in Rome the apostle Paul describes this unregenerate state of being because their hearts were impure, they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and this led to the “dishonouring of their bodies” (see Romans 1:24-25). Another biblical example of this can be found in Genesis:

“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:5 ESV)

What is so significant about this verse is that the Hebrew word (‘yetzer’) that is translated into English as “intention” is the same word that is used at the beginning of Genesis to describe God “forming” Adam out of the dust of the ground (see Genesis 2:7). In other words, the same creative ability to form, plan and make that God used to create humanity and bestowed on His creatures, is now being used by them to form and make evil plans and actions against God. It is what theologians refer to as “Total Depravity.” Now that might sound rather extreme and a person might think “Well I’m not that bad” but total depravity does not equate you to being an evil person like Hitler. However, it does mean that every part of us - mind, body, and soul are corrupted by the fall. The heart which is full of evil desires drives the mind to scheme ways to carry them out and the body gets pleasure in carrying out whatever the heart wants it to do. The theologian Jonathan Edwards argued that all the choices and decisions that a person makes are determined by the will of the individual:

“It is the motive which stands out in the mind’s eye which is the strongest influence on a person, and that motive determines the person’s will.” [2]

Edwards goes on to further explain:

“By motive, I mean the whole sum of that which moves, excites, or invites the mind to volition, whether that is one single thing or a collective of things. Many particular things may agree and unite their strength in order to influence the mind, and when this happens, they all act together as one complex motive.” [3]

As Edwards explains, there is a reason behind every choice that we make, the heart drives the mind and the will of a person, who is now emotionally committed to a particular course of action. It is very deliberate, there is nothing spontaneous about the choices that a person makes, the choice is self-determined and that is what makes sin so destructive, it is a wilful choice that is driven by the heart. This is why the apostle John warns his hearers not to love the worldly things that unregenerate people desire since those desires are set against God. When we desire that which is of the flesh we are making ourselves easy prey for Satan, but if we put to death those fleshly desires rather than giving into them, we are doing the will of God and will abide with Him forever.

The apostle John goes on to address the subject of the antichrist and the spirit of antichrist:

“Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.” (1 John 2:18 ESV)

If the apostle John thought that it was the last hour when he was writing this two thousand years ago, then how much sooner must we be to Christ’s return today? Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones made this observation about the reality of living in the last days, which would certainly resonate today, seventy or eighty years after his message was preached:

“We are living in the last time in that general sense. We may be living in a last time also in a more particular sense. Not only Christians, but also many secular writers and historians at the present time are teaching us that we are living in what they call an ‘age of transition,’ in one of the great turning-points of history and there can be no doubt but that this is perfectly true. We are living in a time when essential changes are taking place in the history of mankind; there has been no such period at any rate since the Renaissance of the Protestant Reformation. It is one of those turning-points when things which appeared to be stable are being shaken; there can be no doubt at all but that Western civilisation is coming to an end." [4]

We can certainly see this in our modern times with significant social, political, and economic changes occurring in just a couple of years since the Covid-19 pandemic began. There is also the dwindling witness of the established Church, having all but lost her voice for upholding biblical truth in preference of commenting on political issues rather than proclaiming the Gospel and calling the nation back to God. There is a shift happening in our world that is taking us further and further away from God. The question of where society is headed is addressed by Francis Schaeffer back in 1976 in his famous book “How should we then live?” At the end of the book, Schaeffer reflects on how the course of human history points to the rise of a coming political elite:

“As we consider the coming of an elite, an authoritarian state, to fill the vacuum left by the loss of Christian principles, we must not think naively of the models of Stalin and Hitler. We must think rather of a manipulative government. Modern governments have forms of manipulation at their disposal which the world has never known before.” [5]

Schaeffer concludes by making a sobering observation about the irrelevance of political parties and positions in the future rise of an authoritarian elite:

“At that point the words left or right will make no difference. They are only two roads to the same end. There is no difference between an authoritarian government from the right or the left: the results are the same. An elite, and authoritarianism as such, will gradually force form on society so that it will not go on to chaos. And most people will accept it — from the desire for personal peace and affluence, from apathy, and from the yearning for order to assume the functioning of some political system, business and the affairs of daily life.” [6]

This is key to understanding how society is being conditioned to willingly receive this political antichrist figure when he eventually arrives on the world stage. People will value peace and affluence over freedom, and their desire for a comfortable earthly life will take precedence over anything else. So to return to the biblical text in 1 John, the apostle warns that it is the last hour and this antichrist is coming, there are also the “antichrists” - the false teachers who had led many astray in the church then, but the warning is clear to them, “it is the last hour.” Picking up on this topic again a couple of chapters later on in his epistle, the apostle warns them to be careful who they listen to because there are deceitful and lying spirits in the Church:

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.” (1 John 4:1-6 ESV)

On the 28th of July 2022, the BBC covered the live opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games being held over ten days in the City of Birmingham. The ceremony began with a call for unity: “In times of darkness, we carry a dream of light that calls us all together.” But this unity was not Christian unity and the light was not Jesus Christ “The light that shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5). This unity was the very opposite of Christian unity, and the opening ceremony was nothing more than a Pagan ritual full of imagery straight out of Scripture, two of which were particularity significant: the Tower of Babel and a giant Bull of Baal with the ‘Whore of Babylon’ arrayed in purple and scarlet riding on top of the beast (See Genesis 11 and Revelation 17).

And this was not an isolated event either. In 2023 we have also witnessed the pop star Sam Smith dressing up as Satan and performing a song called “Unholy” at the Grammy Awards, the pop singer Rihanna’s satanic ritual performance at the NFL Super Bowl, and in Brazil there was a demonic parade for the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Fast forward to the 2024 Eurovision song contest and Ireland’s entry was a chillingly satanic ritual performed by the artist ‘Bambie Thug,’ a spectacle so sinister that it awakened a great many Christians to the realisation that there is something very dark happening in the modern world.

I believe that what we are seeing right in front of our eyes is Mystery Babylon (see Revelation 17-18) and the spirit of the antichrist in our world. In the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, this call to unity was lit up on the Tower of Babel with all the nations of the world represented gathering around the Tower of Babel. This is a symbolic uniting of the nations against God where the religion is tolerance, inclusion, and aggressive liberalism, it is a unity that requires the individual to agree with the beliefs and worldview of the antichrist culture, where The Lord Jesus Christ is rejected and true, biblical Christianity is scorned.

This is why the established, mainstream Church has gone quiet, it is because the culture has become increasingly hostile towards Christ and instead of taking a stand for Christ and the Gospel, the mainstream church has gone silent on the truth and started affirming the antichrist narrative.

The great writer C.S. Lewis, in the third book of his space trilogy “That Hideous Strength,” describes a tyrannical organisation called “the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments” (or “N.I.C.E” for short) whose aim is to free humanity from nature to increase the overall efficiency of humanity. However, unknown to the humans, there are evil forces at play hovering above the earth whilst the main evil character in the story is ‘Alcasan’s head’ a dismembered head that is kept alive artificially, who is also the forerunner of a new species of dismembered heads that never die. In his book “That Hideous Strength: A Deeper Look at how the West was lost,” the pastor-theologian Melvin Tinker refers to this third book from C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy, bringing it alongside the biblical account of the Tower of Babel, he explains how this push for unity in the world is an agenda to deconstruct God’s created order and rebuild it. Tinker highlights three ways (or “Three C’s”) in which ‘that hideous strength’ attempts to exert itself over and against God:

“Communalism - the group identity and solidarity in rebellion. While the rest of the Genesis narratives have individuals who are identified as playing significant roles, here we have humankind as a group acting to the detriment of the individual.

Constructionism - literally in the building of a city and a tower, but also in using language to reshape reality, believing and declaring that we can bring God down and so ‘de-god’ God as it were, who is the ultimate reality. It is then a short step from this idolatrous construal to reimagining everything else.

Connectivity - being in one place and having one language enables people to connect and so perpetuate their blasphemous ideas and actions even further.”

Tinker concludes by explaining the thought process behind the aggressive woke, inclusive, liberal thinking that we see in our culture today that is determined to shut down the Christian narrative:

“What we have in the Tower of Babel episode is in effect a rival cosmology or ‘social imaginary’ to that of God’s; it is an unmaking and a remaking of the world — a blasphemous human ‘let us’ over and against the holy ‘Let Us’ of the Triune God.” [7]

Now you may be wondering what all this has to do with the spirit of antichrist in the Church, and the truth is, it has absolutely everything to do with it! Being able to correctly observe what is happening spiritually in the world around us is key to understanding why it is so spiritually dangerous when the church abandons biblical teaching and doctrine for a worldly narrative because it wants to be acceptable to the culture. By doing that, the church has brought this antichrist spirit in, they are “tolerating that woman Jezebel” like the church in Thyatira (see Revelation 2:20). They foolishly believe that by bringing this worldly teaching into the Church they can become more relevant and appealing to the culture. But in doing this they will spiritually pollute the church with the spirit of antichrist, the result of which is to paralyse and shut down Gospel discipleship and evangelism in one fell swoop, the lampstand will disappear and what they are left with is little more than a religious Sunday social club that engages in social action. It is no longer a Church anymore, they were deceived as they took Satan’s bait and lost their lampstand.

Footnotes:

[1] David Wilkerson “Falling Away to the Antichrist” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCKy_zwMIig

[2] Jonathan Edwards “Works Vol 1” (Banner of Truth, 2009) p5 (my modern paraphrase)

[3] Jonathan Edwards “Works Vol 1” (Banner of Truth, 2009) p6 (my modern paraphrase)

[4] Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones “Life in Christ: Studies in 1 John” (Crossway, 2002) pp232

[5] Francis A. Schaeffer “How Should We Then Live?” (Crossway, 2021) p261

[6] Francis A. Schaeffer “How Should We Then Live?” (Crossway, 2021) p282

[7] Melvin Tinker “That Hideous Strength: How the West was lost” (Evangelical Press, 2020) pp49-51

Pragmatism in the Church

Pragmatism (noun): an approach that evaluates theories of beliefs in terms of the success of their practical application.

Before we begin to explore the subject of pragmatism it is important to clarify that pragmatism itself isn’t wrong, there are many occasions where a pragmatic approach is sensible and even common sense being applied to a situation. For instance, if I know that I am at my most productive and creative in the morning and early afternoon then it would make no sense for me to work late at night instead. Another example might be a business that has found a profitable strategy that leads to a steady revenue and would naturally want to sustain that, or a sports coach with a successful team and formation will want to be pragmatic in keeping a winning formula.

So there is a time and a place for pragmatism in life, but when we look to apply pragmatism to spiritual things this is when it becomes problematic - when we try to employ it as a philosophy in the area of truth and faith. The American theologian R.C. Sproul defines it like this:

“Pragmatism is the only philosophy native to America. Pragmatism eschews any hope of discovering ultimate truth. It is skeptical with respect to objective principles of righteousness and defines truth as ‘that which works.’ In this philosophy, the end always justifies the means. The driving force behind decisions within the scope of pragmatism is the force of expediency.” [1]

You may well have noticed that in more recent years there has been an increased move towards church growth and attendance, many churches now have large staff teams and run several different mid-week courses and programmes that cater to many different age groups and needs. Whilst it is always heart-warming to witness a church that is genuinely growing numerically and spiritually, the shadow side to this is that the larger a church fellowship becomes, the greater the risk of succumbing to pragmatism.

The philosophy of pragmatism is: “If it works, then it is true.” Taking its origins from the 1870s, Pragmatism has continued to be a popular means of evaluation and assessment, particularly in the area of business and commerce. It is the idea that if something works and can be successfully replicated, then that idea or model is desirable since it has been proven to work and consistently yields good results. This would certainly be an advantageous philosophy in business and commerce, since the aim is to sell products and services and produce revenue, with the proven “cash cow” being the desired byproduct of a successful strategy and product. This same approach has been transferred across into church leadership, and in more recent times there have been several different leadership books and conferences aimed at church leaders which are essentially little more than merely importing business management strategy into church governance.

The result of this has been the cultivating of a pragmatic philosophy that if the church is growing greatly in number, then the leadership must be doing something right. There may also be the belief that God is blessing the ministry in the church because of the growth in numbers in attendance. But this philosophy is spiritually naive and unbiblical, for the simple reason that if a church minister is taking their lead from a book that takes its roots in worldly business management techniques for commercial success rather than the Word of God to pastor a church, then they are not building a true church but rather, a religious institution. The author and theologian Dustin Benge makes this observation:

“Some churches view their governance as though the church were a business, with a chief executive officer to rule over their congregation. Others want entrepreneurs who are continually innovating because they think numerical growth comes through clever techniques. However, these worldly leadership models nowhere resemble the biblical pattern of leadership within the body of Christ. Biblical offices are incompatible with management of earthly organisations because they have the utmost honour of representing the Lord Jesus Christ, the church’s supreme head.” [2]

Many church leaders today are in real danger of thinking that they are leading spiritually when in reality they are merely using worldly, tried and tested methods to draw people into attending a religious institution that is being run like a corporation. Many of these leaders are “running an organisation” rather than leading a church, and their barometer for success is not measured by discipleship but by numerical growth. Some of these leaders do not appear to be concerned that most of their congregation are stuck on spiritual milk, many of whom may not even be born-again believers but merely attendees who are under the illusion that they are Christians.

This is where the idea that “if a church is growing numerically then God is blessing that church” does need to be held up to humble and wise spiritual discernment. Could it be that the very thing that is attracting great numbers of people on a Sunday isn’t God at all, but a potent combination of worldly attractions? With regards to the young people, could it be the lively worship band on the stage and the sense of enjoyment and catharsis that comes from being in a large gathering of people? Could it be down to a large number of attractive, single young adults and an engaging and humorous speaker? When it comes to the families present, could it be the children’s ministry and the belief that the church will disciple their children for them so that they don’t have to?

The important question we need to ask is: what is attracting people? Is it God or something else?

Understandably, one of the biggest concerns over the last few decades has been the decline in number in the local church, with church members growing older and fewer families and in particular the teenagers and young adults noticeably absent. The church seemed to be “dying out,” and with the concerning absence of young people, the issue needed urgent attention. Now the obvious answer to this should be a devotion to prayer and bringing this great need to the Lord in fervent prayer and intercession, recognising that only God can bring regeneration of the heart and transform the desires of our hearts. It is after all only God who can draw people to His Son, something that Jesus put great emphasis on explaining to the crowds during His earthly ministry:

“All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” (John 6:37 ESV)

That is why prayer is so vital concerning church growth - unless the Holy Spirit is moving people’s hearts toward Jesus Christ and drawing them into church fellowship, the church is going to be full of carnal-minded, unregenerate people who think that they are Christians when they are not. Therefore, we are not doing anyone any favours spiritually when we try to use a “bait and switch” approach by luring them into the church by using entertainment as a Trojan horse for Christianity without calling them to true repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. It is a worldly philosophy that removes the supernatural and relies purely on the material when our reliance should be on God and the power of His Holy Spirit because spiritual fruit cannot be produced by human means, regeneration does not come by using attractional church models but by supernatural rebirth brought about by the Holy Spirit. (See John 3:8)

However, instead of dealing with the problem properly and spiritually, church leaders started turning to business strategies to start building the church numbers up again, ambitious as they were to make the church a “successful institution.” The main catalyst for this “Church Growth movement” was the American missiologist C. Peter Wagner, Professor of the Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary. Wagner’s principle was that congregations needed to be built up from groups of people who were of the same kind to each other, the idea being that if they had more in common with each other they would be more likely to remain in fellowship because they identified with their own kind of people. [3]

The Church Growth movement saw segregation as being desirable since it would be more effective to draw people into groups that catered for their particular social class and age range. This could well explain the modern church’s approach to Sunday services, where a traditional service would be attended by older people who preferred formal, liturgical worship, family worship which catered for families and kept the children entertained, and contemporary worship, with its soft rock worship band, atmospheric lighting, and smoke machine, which would appeal to the youth and young adults. What we have in reality are several different churches determined by age demographic who are using the same building. It is my deep conviction that this approach is hurting the church’s discipleship since a family is made up of children, parents, and grandparents and if the Church is the family of God then why are we dividing ourselves up like this? This can be explained in one word: pragmatism, and this pragmatic approach is going to compromise everything in the life of the church, resulting in a church that is full of unregenerate, spiritual goats who will end up outnumbering the true regenerate sheep, as the American missionary-preacher Paul Washer warns:

“If you use carnal means to attract men then you are going to attract carnal men and you’re going to have to keep using greater carnal means to keep them in the church. So what has happened is this: we have these large churches filled with many unconverted, carnal people - but in those churches, we also have this small group of people that honestly want Christ and honestly want His Word and they honestly want to be transformed. They don’t need anything else, all they need is true worship of the true God and Scripture being preached to them and lived out before them, that is all that they want. Now I want to tell you the great sin of the American (and British) pastor, and this has got me into a lot of trouble, but it’s true — that small group of converted people in that local church, all they want is Jesus and all they want to do is the right thing, they want purity, they want truth — they want Christ! But the pastor, in order to keep this larger group of unconverted people, caters to them. So while he is feeding those carnal men and women with carnal things he is letting the sheep of God starve to death and he is going to have to stand before God one day in judgement.” [4]

We have all too often heard tragic stories of children and vulnerable adults being neglected and starved physically, and it is right that we should be outraged at this and want to right this injustice. But what is even more chilling is when we remember that the soul is infinitely more valuable than the body, as the soul is eternal, and yet the idea of the sheep being repeatedly starved spiritually in order to entertain the goats in our churches barely even registers any concern with many modern church leaders. The painful reality is that many of us as church leaders have become carnal ourselves, our focus has often been directed toward money, buildings, and attendance. I do often wonder how we managed to deviate from responding to a call to ministry out of a deep love of Christ, His Word, and His people to becoming soulless entrepreneurs treating people like commodities to build earthly church empires. Since when was the heart of the pastor and shepherd replaced with the ruthless ambition and ego of a corporate CEO? Since when did we stop leading churches and start running businesses in church buildings?

Many church leaders have failed in this regard, and it is high time that we humble ourselves and acknowledge our great failure before God to faithfully shepherd His Church and the serious implications of breaking the promises that were made at our ordination. The American pastor and author Paul Tripp calls on Church leaders to face up to their failure in this regard:

“It is time for leaders to confess that in many places and in many ways we haven’t represented our loving Lord well. It’s time for mourning and repenting as we celebrate the grace that gifts us with fresh starts and new beginnings. It’s time for us to confess that personal ambition often moves and shapes our leadership more than the Gospel does. It’s time to confess that as leaders we have given into the temptation to be ambassadors of something other than our Lord. It’s time to humbly admit that we cannot serve leadership idols and be ambassadors at the same time. How many times are we going to see the same sad story of the demise of a ministry leader, and the destruction of the leadership community that surrounded him, before we recommit ourselves to God’s values and to our ambassadorial calling, and as we recommit, cry out that He would, in love, rescue us from us?” [5]

Paul Tripp’s gracious calling out of wayward church leaders is a vital warning to all of us, and in particular to those church leaders who do not realise that they are in real danger of God stepping them down from their positions in Christian leadership.

Pragmatism in the church is the real pandemic, it has invaded the modern church in the West to such an extent that it has found its way into almost every area of our worship, mission, and ministry. It has been my firm conviction that we are being confronted by the reality that so much of our modern worship is worldly and sensual because we have allowed pragmatism to guide us in our worship and not Scripture. The Covid-19 pandemic had closed many church buildings and greatly limited our ability to worship as we once did and during the lockdowns, I often wondered if God was shaking the church to call us back to true, biblical worship that honours Him. This is significant and it matters for those who are truly serious about God and not just going along for the ride. A true faithful believer understands that there is so much at stake here, you could even say that everything is at stake - salvation and eternal life through repentance and faith in Christ, the presence of God in our Churches, and the power of the Holy Spirit transforming and sanctifying our lives.

I believe that the mainstream Church finds herself in a perilous position, perhaps even having reached the point of no return. The desire to please man and not God has led to a reluctance and in many places a refusal to preach the biblical Gospel and to call people to repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Footnotes:

[1] R.C. Sproul “Principle vs Pragmatism” https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/principle-vs-pragmatism/

[2] Dustin Benge “The Loveliest Place” (Crossway, 2022) pp 95-96

[3] Referenced from Ralph H. Elliot “Dangers of the Church Growth Movement” https://www.religion-online.org/article/dangers-of-the-church-growth-movement/

[4] Paul Washer, “Why most churches are teaching a False Gospel” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ5A-gCkOCc

[5] Paul David Tripp “Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church” (Crossway, 2020) p109

Worldly Worship

There is a time and a place for entertainment, and I will be the first to admit that I enjoy and appreciate the arts, music and sport. There certainly is a right place for fun and recreation and over the years I have greatly benefited from the enjoyment and relaxation of an evening spent watching a football match on television, or perhaps going to the cinema or theatre to enjoy a good film or show. I believe that God has given us all good things to enjoy in their rightful place, so I am not in any way suggesting that entertainment is wrong. However, the worship of God is incompatible with entertainment, the two are like oil and water, they do not mix and they are not supposed to. I believe that it is in the area of mixing entertainment into our worship in the mainstream church that we have adulterated the worship of God with worldliness in an attempt to attract unbelievers. This spiritual adultery has so often polluted our worship to such an extent that the modern mainstream church barely resembles what a true, biblical model of the church is meant to be.

A.W. Tozer, commenting on this back in 1955:

“For centuries the Church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment, recognising it for what it was — a device for wasting time, a refuge from the disturbing voice of conscience, a scheme to divert attention from moral accountability. For this she got herself abused roundly by the sons of this world. But of late she has become tired of the abuse and has given up the struggle. She appears to have decided that if she cannot conquer the great god Entertainment she may as well join forces with him and make what use she can of his powers. So today we have the astonishing spectacle of millions of dollars being poured into the unholy job of providing earthly entertainment for the so-called sons of heaven. Religious entertainment is in many places rapidly crowding out the serious things of God. Many churches these days have become little more than poor theatres where fifth-rate ‘producers’ peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defence of their delinquency, and hardly a man dares raise his voice against it.” [1]

Observing this in the middle of the last century, Tozer was deeply concerned by the idea that was emerging at the time in America, that the best way to grow church attendance was to attract people in with entertainment. It is rather harrowing to see how many of these so-called mega-churches have since graduated from “poor theatres with fifth-rate producers” to slick operations with perfectly choreographed professional dancing and singing that would not look out of place on a TV talent show.

In the UK, whilst we may not go to the extremes of some of the American “mega-churches” who have huge arenas, audiences (since ‘congregation’ would not be an accurate description here), and budgets for big production, we have, for the most part, bought into this idea that if we make the expression of worship in a church engaging and entertaining then we will attract unbelievers into the church. But the saying is also true that ‘what you win people with is what you win them to,’ so if you are attracting people with entertainment and upbeat rock music, cutting-edge sound and visual, and rousing choruses that are enjoyable to sing, you are essentially offering a free rock gig every Sunday rather than calling people into a place of worship.

There has been concern over the years that whilst the production and musicality might have reached a professional standard, the inner worship of the heart has often been missing. We have too often become a generation that loves to make a noise with our mouths but can that same worship be seen in a transformed heart and life? The prophet Isaiah spoke of a people who worshipped God with their mouths and honoured Him with their lips whilst their hearts were far from Him. The American pastor-theologian James Montgomery Boice makes this observation about modern worship:

“The great hymns of the church are on the way out. They are not gone entirely, but they are going and in their place have come trite jingles that have more in common with contemporary advertising ditties than the psalms. The problem here is not so much the style of the music, though trite words fit best with trite tunes and harmonies. Rather it is with the content of the songs. The old hymns expressed the theology of the Bible in profound and perceptive ways and with winsome memorable language. Today’s songs are focused on ourselves. They reflect our shallow or nonexistent theology and do almost nothing to elevate our thoughts about God. Worst of all are songs that merely repeat a trite idea, word, or phrase over and over again. Songs like this are not worship, though they may give the church-goer a religious feeling. They are mantras, which belong more in a gathering of New Agers than among the worshiping people of God.” [2]

The way that our public worship has been ordered has so often in modern times been set up to appeal to man rather than God, and I will confess to my shame that I have been guilty of this myself on numerous occasions over the years. So I am not in any way attempting to take any moral high ground but freely admit that I have been a part of this problem as a church leader over the years and deeply lament it. I am not in any way looking to judge others, since I have been guilty of this in my own ministry, but my honest and deep conviction is that I owe it to God to confess my failings in this area publicly and to write this to explain why I believe that whilst we may have had all the best intentions, we have lost our way in modern worship. I also believe that the mainstream church needs to recognise this, particularly her leaders, and there needs to be a season of repenting of the worldliness that has become so established in the modern church.

At the heart of the problem is mistaking a form of worldly catharsis for the true worship of God. Many of the modern worship songs that we sing today are brilliantly-written songs with catchy choruses and even catchier bridge sections that can whip the worshipper up on a rollercoaster ride of elation, high emotions, and dopamine. A recent study in January 2019 has found a direct link between music and pleasure in the brain explaining how previous research has consistently shown that music-evoked pleasure is accompanied by physiological changes in the autonomous nervous system, as well as modulation of the mesolimbic reward pathway - in other words, music creates a dopamine hit in the listener.

That is why when we are singing a particularly catchy chorus at a conference or a contemporary worship service, or eagerly anticipating the worship band playing a favourite worship song, whilst the chorus or bridge section is being repeated over and over as it builds up to a crescendo, the worshipper is completely wrapped up in the music. Whilst we may not be aware of it, repetition is pleasurable in music, this is why we will often listen to a favourite song on repeat at home or compile a playlist of songs that we enjoy listening to one after another.

Taking all this into consideration, my question would be: in that situation how can the worshipper be sure that they are worshipping God rather than just enjoying a dopamine high? The great Twentieth Century preacher Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones was particularly wary of this back in the last century and on one notable occasion, he gently rebuked his congregation in the church that he was leading in Wales at the time for getting too carried away with the melody of a hymn. He made them sing it again, urging them to pay more attention to singing the hymn with reverence and worship towards God and not as if they were joining in singing a rousing chorus at the theatre.

My desire in writing this is that as the church we would be released into true worship, worshipping God in “Spirit and in Truth”, and grasping what that looks like on the ground as well as in the spiritual realm. But in the meantime, we are going to observe what is wrong in the current church climate, particularly before the Covid-19 pandemic which has at least allowed us to stop, reflect and pray more deeply about this. It was in the first lockdown of 2020 that I first really properly reflected on how our church worship may not be glorifying God and what God might want to say to us through the pandemic. So this leads us to think about the issue of false worship in the church, and since this is such a bold claim the question that is likely to be asked is “Who gets to say what is or isn’t genuine worship?” To answer that question, let us consider what the Lord Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well:

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:21-24 ESV)

Jesus is talking about an attitude and posture of heart, a full surrendering, and bowing of the knee in submission to God. This is not about what style of church service a worshipper goes to, the reality is that in many church buildings, we have been seeing different expressions of tradition rather than people gathering together to worship. Particularly in Anglican churches, it is very common to find a church building serving as a “temple” for more traditional styles of worship and as a “theatre” for the more contemporary style of worship. As an ordained minister who has ministered across a wide range of different expressions of worship over the years, and who loves and values the rich diversity of worship expressions in the Anglican Church, I have no desire to be controversial or provocative. However, for some time now I have had my concerns as to whether a lot of what passes for worship in our modern church today is truly faithful to the Scriptures in leading the worshipper to worship God in Spirit and Truth.

God doesn’t need our help, He doesn’t need us to make church appealing, He doesn’t need us to make Christianity fashionable, He doesn’t need any of us at all. But in His great love, He calls us by name into that relationship with Him to walk obediently with Him and to be a witness to Him through our worshipful obedience. We should not worry about what others think about us, how unfashionable and out-of-sync with the culture we might be, remember that one day every single person who ever lived will have to bow in the presence of Jesus Christ:

“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (Phil 2:9-11 ESV)

I would like to close this blog post with a modern parable that the American missionary-preacher Paul Washer told at a pastors’ conference a few years ago:

“There was a great King who had a beautiful bride who he loved dearly and he always dressed her in the simplest and most elegant white linen. She needed no audacious colours on her face, she needed no wild hairdos, she was beautiful, simple, elegant, pure, godly and beautiful. One day this king went on a long journey and calls you as a steward and he says: ‘I am going to entrust my bride to you, I am going away for a while, but I have laid out for you in a book every rule I want you to maintain, I want nothing changed at all. Stewards, you be faithful to carry out what is written in this book.’

So the king goes and he has been gone for a long, long time, and all of a sudden the steward begins to realise that the people in the kingdom are losing interest in the king because they’re losing interest in the bride. She is too simple, too prudish, rather boring. She’s out-of-step with the times. And so this steward thinks in his mind: ‘A-ha! I’ve got it figured out!’ So he calls her in and takes off her white, elegant, godly dress and dresses her in something far more attractive to carnal men. He paints her face and parades her up-and-down the street and by doing so, draws all the carnal, wicked men back into fellowship supposedly with the King.

That is exactly what countless pastors are doing in America today, they have taken the simplicity of the bride of Christ, her magnificent beauty, her purity, her holiness and they have torn it from her and dressed her up and paraded her in front of carnal men in order that they will be attracted to somehow come back to God. Let me tell you something, on the Day of Judgement, don’t worry about the atheist! Don’t fear for the prostitute, or the murderer. You want to fear for somebody on the Day of Judgement? You fear for a large number of evangelical pastors who have departed from the Word of God and are parading the Church in a dress and garb that God never intended for her to wear.” [3]

Footnotes:

[1] A.W. Tozer “The Root of Righteousness” (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1955) p32-33

[2] James Montgomery Boice “Whatever Happened to the Gospel of Grace?” (Crossway, 2001) p180

[3] Paul Washer, 2017 G3 Conference, Session 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-NDLxlsmOY

A False Gospel

The great writer C.S. Lewis in his book “The Last Battle” - the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia, begins the story with an Ape and a Donkey who discovered a dead lion in the woods. They had thought about burying it but the ape had the idea of making a lion skin out of the dead lion for the donkey to wear and pretend to be the great lion Aslan, the king of Narnia. The Donkey was very reluctant and didn’t want to wear it, but the Ape was offended by this: “I’ve worked so hard on this lion skin and you won’t even look at it or wear it” so the donkey gave in and agreed to put it on. From that moment onwards, the donkey found himself permanently clothed in the lion skin and residing in a stable whilst the ape managed to convince all the other animals in Narnia that the great lion Aslan was dwelling in a stable. So all the other animals would go along to the stable to pay homage to ‘Aslan,’ but they did not know that they were being deceived; it was not the great lion Aslan who they were meeting with, but a lowly donkey in a lion skin. [1]

Sound doctrine is knowing the difference between worshipping the Lion of Judah or a donkey in a lion skin.

Now a donkey in a lion skin might look like a lion from a distance, but the closer you get to it you realise that it only looks like a lion, but it is a completely different animal. A donkey in a lion skin has no power, and it can’t roar like a lion, it has none of the attributes of the lion that makes it such a beautiful yet fearsome animal. There is a form of religion that parades itself as Christianity, looks like Christianity, and even sounds like Christianity. Yet it denies human sinfulness, the judgement of God, the reality of hell and lacks any call to repentance and faith.

This is not Christianity at all, it is not the Lion of Judah, it is a donkey in a lion skin.

A false Jesus can’t save you, a false Jesus leaves you dead in sin and under judgement. That is why the devil, the enemy of our souls works tirelessly to subvert the true Gospel, infiltrate the church with false teaching, whilst undermining and silencing the faithful Gospel minister. The apostle Paul reminds the Church in Corinth of this spiritual fact:

“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:1–2 ESV)

The British theologian Michael Reeves in his book “Gospel People: A Call for Evangelical Integrity” makes this very important assertion:

“Evangelicals look to Scripture to know Christ, and there they find the unique Son of God, exclusive in His glorious identity and completely sufficient as Saviour.” [2]

The Christian faith is rooted in Scripture, our salvation hinges on what we believe and confess, that is why theology and doctrine are vitally important. What you believe about who Christ is, why He had to come to earth and die on the Cross is a salvation issue. I have heard so many professing Christians over the years saying: “Well I don’t believe that Christ died as a substitute to take the punishment for my sin on the Cross, I can’t believe in a God who punishes sin.” But we are saved by believing the Gospel — the good news that “on a hill there is a cross and on that cross is blood, for me” and the believer confesses that Christ died on that Cross, for them, in their place taking the punishment that their sin deserved.

The main theme running throughout scripture is that of man’s failure, sin, and rebellion and of God’s plan to rescue and redeem humanity back into a relationship with Him through the death and resurrection of His only begotten son Jesus Christ. The problem with the church today is that it often avoids the reality of God’s wrath and therefore the reality of the severity of sin and the substitutionary atonement of Christ is omitted. It is often a case of what isn’t preached with regards to the atonement, so the question of why Jesus had to go to the Cross is not dealt with, and the reality of Adam’s sin and rebellion towards God and His holiness, in which justice and the punishing of sin being necessary, is often excluded. The whole purpose of the Cross is to set the sinner free from divine punishment and judgement, so to consider the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross as merely a way of setting an example to humanity or identifying with them in their lostness is to completely disregard the central truth of the gospel. The great preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards in his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” puts it like this: ‘“Divine justice never stands in the way, it makes no objection against God using his power at any moment to destroy them. Yea, on the contrary, justice calls aloud for an infinite punishment of their sins.” [3]

The New Testament scholar Don Carson also explains that the consequences of sin are profoundly bound up with God’s solemn sentence and His holy wrath:

“You cannot fail to see that whatever else the cross does, it must rightly set aside God’s wrath, or it achieves nothing." [4]

To fully understand the idea of God’s wrath and punishment of sin, we need to go back to the Old Testament and look at the sacrificial system of Israel and in particular, the burnt offering. The main purpose of the burnt offering was to make atonement for the worshipper, to expiate his sin so that he would be accepted by the Lord. The worshipper would lay his hand on the head of the animal that was being offered on the altar as a symbol of transferring his sins onto the animal, he would then kill the animal and chop it up and the priest would collect the blood and splash it over the altar putting the pieces of the animal onto the altar fire. It was the blood of the animal that atoned for the worshipper’s sins, the offering was being made as a substitute for the worshipper and propitiated God’s forgiveness to the worshipper.

In the same way, Abraham sacrificed a ram as a burnt offering instead of his son Isaac and on a larger scale, King Hezekiah took seven bulls, rams, lambs, and male goats and made a sin offering with them to make atonement for all of Israel. Having briefly considered sacrifice in the Old Testament it is self-evident that in God’s holy law, there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood, John Stott in explaining the substitutionary sacrifice says:

“There had to be life for life or blood for blood. But the Old Testament blood sacrifices were only shadows; the substance was Christ. For a substitute to be effective, it must be an appropriate equivalent.” [5]

Jesus Christ was the perfect sacrifice for sin- the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). In the same way that the worshipper in the Old Testament would take an animal without blemish and place their hands on the head of the animal symbolically transferring their sin onto the animal, so the sinless Son of God took all our sin on the Cross. In his “Institutes of the Christian Religion”, the great Reformer John Calvin writes:

“Our acquittal is in this— that the guilt which made us liable to punishment was transferred to the head of the Son of God.” [6]

Therefore a faithful proclamation of the Gospel requires the preacher to be faithful to the biblical truth about the sinfulness of humanity and the holiness of God. But once you start removing the offensive parts of the Gospel and replacing it with a culturally acceptable “self-help” message, then it is not the Gospel that you believe and therefore you are still dead in sin and under God’s judgement. Do not be fooled, one of the simplest ways to spot a false gospel is that it is man-centred, it is focused on you and not on God. It is all about your happiness rather than God’s holiness. The twentieth Century theologian Gresham Machen points out that:

“At the very root of the liberal movement is the loss of the consciousness of sin. The consciousness of sin was formally the starting point of all preaching, but today it is gone.” [7]

A false Gospel robs the sinner of the truth, soothes them into a false sense of security as it holds them under condemnation and facing the final judgement without the atoning blood of the Lamb.

Footnotes:

[1] C.S.Lewis “The Last Battle” (William Collins, 1956) pp8-17

[2] Michael Reeves “Gospel People: A Call for Evangelical Integrity” (Crossway, 2022) p46

[3] Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” (Ed. D. Dutkanicz) “Puritan Sermons” (Dover Publications, 2005) p173

[4] D.A. Carson Article on Penal Substitution (2007) http://theocentricview.blogspot.com/2007/06/da-carson-on-penal-substitution.html

[5] John Stott, “The Cross of Christ” (IVP, 1986) p163

[6] John Calvin, "Institutes of the Christian Religion” Book II, Ch 16, Art. 6 (Hendicksen, 2008) p328

[7] J. Gresham Machen “Christianity & Liberalism” (Eerdmans, 1990) p64

The Icabod Church

In 1 Samuel 4 we read about the high priest Eli’s daughter-in-law who was about to give birth at the same time that Israel’s enemies, the Philistines had just invaded. At the time of giving birth, she had heard the news that the Ark of the Covenant had been captured and that both her father-in-law and husband had recently died. As she took her final breath whilst dying in childbirth, she named her newborn son Icabod, which means “where is the glory?” or “nothing of glory.”

“The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of the God has been captured.” (1 Samuel 4:22 ESV)

It is interesting to note that whilst she was grieving the deaths of her husband and her father-in-law, she wasn’t naming her newborn son after either of them, instead, her son was named “Icabod” in lament of the glory of the Lord departing.

As we reflect on this in 2024 with all that is going on in the world around us right now, I believe that as Christians we need to pray and lament how far our nation and the established church has turned away from God. During the Covid pandemic, when all of the churches were closed, it was particularly noticeable that rather than lamenting the godlessness of our nation and how lukewarm the church has become, our response to God was often to pray that things would get better so that we could go back to doing exactly what we were doing before. In fact, it was very noticeable in British churches during the lockdowns that there was a distinct lack of true repentance among many Christians - there was the desire to return to normal rather than return to God.

I wonder, had it occurred to us that God’s great displeasure has led Him to remove His presence from many of our churches? Could it be that the closing of all of our churches during the pandemic was God’s way of wanting to shake us out of our spiritual stupor? Could it also be that God is allowing the nation to crawl around on its hands and knees in order to humble us that we might bow the knee and repent before Almighty God and call on the Lord Jesus Christ for forgiveness and salvation? Eli fell off his chair to his death in shock at the dreadful news that the Ark of the Covenant had been captured, and his daughter-in-law went into fatal labour, so dreadful was the news that the glory of the Lord had departed.

I believe that in our day we are seeing something like this happening in the United Kingdom. Sadly, in many cases we have not been calling out the sin in our churches and the nation, there is a disapproval towards those who take a stand against the great sin in our nation, in particular the idolatry, materialism, carnality and immorality that is now all around us.

The apostle Paul warns of “the works of the flesh” in his letter to the Galatians:

“Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” (Gal 5:19-21 ESV)

Our nation is rejecting God and denying His existence, mocking Him, and blaspheming Him in films, TV shows, and other forms of public entertainment. God have mercy on us.

In the face of all this godlessness, many of our modern churches have been silent, mistakenly thinking that by avoiding talking about the difficult issues and bringing them into the light of the truth of the Word of God that they were being sensitive and avoiding controversy. But in not preaching the whole counsel of God, they are playing their part in being complicit in the sins of our nation. God tells the prophet Ezekiel that in the same way that a watchman who was looking out from over the walls of the city, and upon seeing the sword of the invading army and hearing the trumpet alarm being raised, didn’t warn the people of danger would have blood on their hands:

“So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, that person shall die in his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul.” (Ezekiel 33:7-9 ESV)

But there is good news, there is the offer of salvation and redemption. We have been considering how Eli’s daughter-in-law gave birth to a son and named him “Icabod”- meaning that “the glory of the Lord has departed,” but God also reverses this curse when He gives His people a great promise:

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14 ESV)

Immanuel means “God with us”, the Good news that Christ has come and is with His people. The Old Testament commentator Edward J. Young puts it so beautifully:

“The presence of God appears, then, not in the deliverance from Syria and Israel, but in the birth of the Child Himself. When the Child is born, God is seen to be present with His people.” [1]

In the account of The Lord Jesus’ birth in Luke’s Gospel we read this deeply moving account of how the glory of God came to the lowliest of men, the shepherds:

“And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” (Luke 2:8-14 ESV)

God puts this great choice before us: Icabod or Immanuel, the devastating loss of His presence among us, or through our repentance and humble bowing of our knee in true spiritual worship, God with us. Which one are we going to choose?

Footnotes:

[1] Edward J. Young “The Book of Isaiah, Vol.1” (Eerdmans, 1965) p290

Itching Ears

In his second epistle to Timothy, we read the apostle Paul’s charge to his protégé, who had taken on the daunting task of pastoring the huge church in Ephesus:

“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfil your ministry.” (2 Tim 4:1-5 ESV)

The apostle Paul was warning Timothy of the acute problem of heresy in the last days. where there would be false teachers who would no longer stand under the Scriptures and sound doctrine and teaching. Instead, they would preach a message that would suit the culture - they would have “itching ears.” The Reformer John Calvin helps to explain this unusual expression:

“When he (Paul) wishes to assign a cause for so great an evil, he makes use of an elegant metaphor, by which he means, that the world will have ears so refined, and so excessively desirous of novelty, that it will collect for itself various instructors, and will be incessantly carried away by new inventions.” [1]

There will come a time, says Paul, that the listener’s ear will be tuned in to a form of oratory and message that suits the culture and the worldly generation that is tuned into it. The great Victorian Baptist minister Charles Spurgeon once famously said that a time would come when instead of shepherds feeding the sheep the church will have clowns entertaining the goats. The problem with the Gospel is that it is not going to attract and keep worldly people with unrepentant hearts since the truth of the Gospel is guaranteed to challenge and offend people who very likely won’t return to church ever again. I can remember one notable occasion when I was a youth, I had invited one of my school friends who wasn’t a Christian to attend a church service with me. The minister in the church was preaching a strong word about the immorality of Eli’s sons from 1 Samuel, the message was clear and the call to repentance resounding. But instead of being convicted, my friend, who was living an immoral life, was so angered by the message that he expressed a desire to physically assault the preacher! A strong and faithful biblical message can lead to outrage and anger, but that does not mean that we should soften the message to remove the offence of the Gospel.

Every Church leader has two choices: they can preach the Gospel faithfully and rely on the Holy Spirit to bring people into the church and see true regeneration and revival, or they can preach a soft inoffensive message to keep a church full of unregenerate people entertained with little more than Christian Karaoke and a “Ted talk”. Now just think for a moment about some of the famous old ministers whose ministries we still commend today, the likes of George Whitefield, Charles Simeon, Jonathan Edwards, J.C. Ryle, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, A.W. Tozer, Leonard Ravenhill and Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones (just to name a few) and why they still have so much influence today, even though they are long dead. It is because these men remained committed and faithful to sound doctrine throughout their whole life and ministry, despite their human frailties, there was a passionate conviction and commitment to the shepherding of souls as they taught the Word of God faithfully and called sinners to repent and believe. Their ministries stand the test of time because they were rooted in the Word of God and not in the culture of their day, they spoke very strongly against it and we are still talking about them and being enriched by their writings and books to this day. Church history shows us then, that it is the faithful ministers who stand against the culture rather than appeal to it are the ones whose ministries will be remembered and commended.

This is the heart of the problem today, too many ministers take the soft, easy option and fail to see that the attractional church model is a false premise since it ultimately seeks to attract people to false worship and a false message. If you tell someone that God wants to make their life better and more enjoyable and remove all the guilt and shame from them without calling them to true repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, you are calling the person to worship an idol and not God. You have changed the nature of Christ by your false teaching, and you are calling people to follow a God who is not pure, perfect, and holy and you have replaced Him with a God who just wants them to have an enjoyable earthly life.

Jared C. Wilson shares a powerful story to make an important distinction between true holiness and being a motivational speaker where a young Englishman training for the ministry is said to have complained to his instructing pastor, ‘I’m not the sort of man who could set the Thames on fire,’ to which his elder replied, ‘Young man, I’m not concerned about your setting the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this: if I grabbed you by the scruff of your neck and dropped you into that river, would it sizzle?’ In other words, the fire of your holiness — your passion for God — is far more important than the fire of your oratory or leadership skills. [2]

The call of the pastor is not to make Christianity appealing or to become gifted in a slick, entertaining oratory that keeps people entertained. The pressure now for the Church is to run alongside the culture wanting to be accepted by the culture rather than God, it wants to ask the culture “are we doing this right?” Are we appealing enough? Are we relevant?” But let me ask an important question: since when was the Gospel ever about being relevant? Where in Scripture is the command to be appealing and relevant? We are not called to appeal to the culture and try to attract people to attend Church but rather, we are called to proclaim the Gospel clearly and directly, as the apostle Paul did whilst standing before the Areopagus in Athens:

“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” (Acts 17:30–31 ESV)

Our call is not merely to bring people to Church, it is to bring them to Christ in repentance and faith. To humbly surrender their lives to Christ and be in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit, whilst being transformed into the likeness of Christ. “Churchianity” has led to many a soul facing a lost eternity and it is time to face up to the shocking reality that far too many people attending Church are not born again and are living under the illusion that they are justified by their religious observances when they are still under condemnation and in great need of salvation.

Footnotes:

[1] John Calvin, “Commentary on 1&2 Timothy” (Baker Book House, 1979) p255-256

[2] Jared C. Wilson “Gospel-Driven Ministry” (Zondervan, 2021) p47

The Forgotten 39 Articles

As an ordained Anglican minister, I am astonished and dismayed by the way that the biblical and historic theology of our denomination has been abandoned and disregarded by so many churches. When the Sixteenth Century Reformation came to England, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer worked tirelessly to bring the Church of England in line with the Scriptures. His Book of Common Prayer contains in it the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion that lays a theological foundation for keeping the Anglican Church faithful to the Word of God, as the theologian Chad Van Dixhoorn points out:

“The (Thirty-Nine) articles include significant discussion of Scripture, with high praise for its authority and sufficiency. The testimony of the church in the Scriptures is not dismissed, but the stress is on the testimony of the Holy Spirit to the believer and the self-attesting power of Scripture itself (Article 5).” [1]

The Anglican theologian J.I.Packer commenting on the Reformation ideal in England says:

“The Reformation in England sought to be as constructive theologically and spiritually as it was corrective — a real re-formation of the people of God corporately and individually. As a reformation, it was conservative, communal, confessional and comprehensive. It was conservative because that was the Anglican way, and the Reformers wanted to bring everyone along. It was communal because the Book of Common Prayer was meant to be a book of common worship. “Common” is the phrase “Common Prayer” means what it says. Everybody is to join in. There is to be Prayer Book uniformity all over the country, and that will keep us together as a church community worshipping God. The Reformation was confessional because the Thirty-Nine Articles are a Reformation confession. In the sixteenth century they were regarded as one of the many Reformation confessions being then produced. At the end of the sixteenth century a man named John Rogers produced a survey of the confessions of the Protestant world, and the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles are included. The Reformation was comprehensive in the sense that this theology and churchly set up were intended to bring the life of God and unity in Christ to all the English people without exception." [2]

This is key: “bringing the life of God and unity in Christ to the people” since the call to those leading the Church is never to change its doctrines to suit the culture, but to faithfully exercise the fundamentals of orthodoxy, to remain faithful to our historic faith “contending for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 3) Bishop Colin Buchanan draws particular attention to Article 8 of the Thirty-Nine Articles which says:

“The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the apostle’s Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.” [3]

Buchanan makes this vital observation:

“The Church of England does not receive the creeds simply as coming from General Councils; she does not receive them according to the ‘Vincentian Canon’ as having been believed everywhere, always and by all people; she does not receive them as a valuable ingredient in the inherited riches and the traditions of the Western Church. These attributes and buttressing of the creeds are no doubt of great interest, but the Church of England cuts through all those possible qualifications - the authority for receiving the creeds is to us that they encapsulate the teaching of holy Scripture." [4]

This is such an important point that Buchanan raises here since the reality is that week in and week out, Anglican congregations up and down the British Isles will say the words of the Nicene Creed, and often without giving any real consideration of the implications of what those words mean. So for argument’s sake, let us take just one line from the Nicene Creed and consider its meaning and implications:

“He (Christ) will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His Kingdom will have no end.”

He will come again: Christ is going to return bodily, this is a sure and certain event that Christians should be living in an anticipation of.

In glory: Christ is not coming back as Saviour - let that sink in for a moment; He is going to return in glory as King and Judge over all the earth.

To judge the living and the dead: Returning as King and Judge, He is going to judge everybody who has ever lived! The wheat and tares, sheep and goats will be divided into two groups, one group to eternal life and the other group to the eternal lake of fire.

And His Kingdom will have no end: There will be the eternal state - the heaven and the new earth and eternal life dwelling with the Lord for the Saints. But for those whose names are not written in the Lambs Book of Life eternal judgement awaits for the condemned, who will be thrown into the Lake of Fire. His Kingdom will have no end, the question is: which side of God are you on? His love and grace or His wrath and punishment?

This is the truth that is contained within just one line of the Nicene Creed and the scary reality is that an unregenerate person who affirms this creed week in and week out in church is condemning themselves with their own mouth! They are saying in essence: “Christ is coming back to judge me and I’m indifferent about it.” And yet these kinds of truths are often too uncomfortable for ministers to openly preach in Anglican Churches, sadly many vicars today would run a mile from that kind of biblical revelation, and yet here it is in Scripture and our Creeds!

Returning to the Thirty-Nine articles and particularly considering how we now find ourselves in 2024 and on the brink of complete apostasy and throwing away everything that the established Church stood for and believed in, it is sadly the Anglican Church’s neglect of Scripture that is to blame for this. If the aim and purpose of Cramner’s Thirty-Nine articles were to keep the Anglican Church faithful to the Scriptures and in following Christ, then its neglect of them comes at such a great cost. As an ordained minister, over the years I have heard endless complaints and narratives about how the Church of England is headed towards extinction, but in discarded her theology and faithfulness to the Scriptures, all that the established church can now do now is look at the empty place where her lampstand once stood. It is a great tragedy and a travesty, and J.I. Packer also makes this humorous and yet deadly serious observation about the state of the Anglican Church:

“‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ asks the capstan-pushers’ work-song. Is there not the need to ask a parallel question about the Church of England? Not that one could call so staid a body drunken, exactly; but there are aspects of churchly sobriety which Anglicans in England (to look no further) have largely neglected for a long time. One of these is the maintaining of a responsible relationship to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The work-song makes its picturesque proposals for getting the drunken sailor sober again, and I have some sobering suggestions to make about links with the Articles which we urgently need to set up.” [5]

In his continued assessment of the Anglican church’s plight, Packer continues to explain how the Thirty-Nine Articles are missing from Anglican Theological education and how they have no voice in Anglican liturgy or the Anglican community. He concludes by arguing that neglecting the Articles causes a problem of Anglican integrity and calls for them to be reinstated back at the heart of the Anglican communion:

“It is my firm conviction that the Articles are true enough, profound enough, biblical enough, evangelical enough, and magisterial enough to sustain such a role amid the babel and bustle of present-day theological work, and that we greatly need to have them fulfilling it among us. They have been silent too long.” [6]

I think that this conviction that Packer has echoes with what God says to His people Judah through the prophet Jeremiah:

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’” (Jeremiah 6:16 ESV)

If ever a Bible verse so succinctly summarised the plight of the Anglican church it is this one, the only way forward was to reform and return to the ancient paths that lead to life, but sadly they would not walk in it.

Footnotes:

[1] Chad Van Dixhoorn “Creeds, Confessions & Catechisms” (Crossway, 2022) p114

[2] J.I. Packer “The Heritage of Anglican Theology” (Crossway, 2021) p70

[3] Colin Buchanan “Is the Church of England Biblical?” (Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, 1998) p30

[4] Colin Buchanan “Is the Church of England Biblical?” (Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd, 1998) p30

[5] J.I. Packer “The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today” (The Latimer Trust, 2006) p24

[6] J.I. Packer “The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today” (The Latimer Trust, 2006) p37

Reading the Bible Properly

In more recent times I have found myself reflecting on how often we put the cart before the horse in our relationship with God. There have so often been times when we have gone along to church looking for a word or encouragement that will be enough to get us through that particular problem or challenge, only until the next one comes along, and then we need a word to help us with that one. We can also read the Bible with that attitude as well, just looking to find something that will encourage us with a specific problem or situation. In saying this, I am not denying the fact that God speaks to us in all manner of different times and seasons through His Word, and of course, we will always find encouragements that speak into our specific trial or situation in life, particularly for instance, when we read the Book of Psalms. But it becomes problematic when we only ever read Scripture in that way - looking for a word or encouragement to help us in our particular circumstances rather than looking to meet personally with the One who is the Word!

Do we read our Bibles like a self-help book to find encouragement to help us through a difficult situation - or do we read the Bible because we want to meet with Jesus Christ? What we believe and understand about God matters — a shallow, superficial faith is not going to help you when all hell breaks loose. A sure sign of spiritual maturity is when we no longer need to be spoon-fed truth but actively seek it out for ourselves. Our desire should be for a deeper revelation of who God is! In the longest Psalm in the Bible, Psalm 119, the whole Psalm is devoted to the Law of God and how the Psalmist enthuses: “Oh how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day.” (Ps 119:97) The American theologian William Plumer commenting on this part of the Psalm observes:

“Through divine grace, God’s people may have a heaven upon earth. They have tasted and so know the preciousness of Scripture. Communion with God in His Word and ordinances is not equal to communion with God in heaven, but it is like it. Heavenly-mindedness is heaven anticipated. Let each one diligently study God’s Word. It gives a knowledge true and influential. What dying saint ever deplored that he had too assiduously studied it?” [1]

Rather than looking for a short-term word to “fix our current problem” I have always found that the answer is to be taken out of myself and all my worries and cares for a moment and just marvel at how big and awesome God is. This leads me to contemplate God’s great plan for my redemption, what it cost Him when He sent His Son to the Cross for me, and the fact that He had planned my salvation from before the beginning of the world.

As this truth sinks in, you start to realise how transitory life is and how even the worst of problems and disasters are only momentary in light of the glorious eternity that we are promised to spend with Christ. We need God’s Word and we need to be dwelling in the Word, if we are not getting to know God through His word “the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 3:15) then how are we supposed to have a real relationship with Him? The idea that we can know God and have a relationship with Him without the Scriptures is an idea that the contemporary American theologian John Frame argues strongly against:

“People often claim to have a personal relationship with Christ, while being uncertain about the role of Scripture in that relationship. But the relationship that Christ has established with His people is a covenant relationship and therefore a verbal relationship, among other things. Jesus’ words, today, are found only in Scripture. So if we are to have a covenant relationship with Jesus, we must acknowledge Scripture as His Word. No Scripture, no Lord. No Scripture, no Christ. And no Scripture, no salvation.” [2]

But this is where it all goes wrong, many people now do not belong to churches that teach sound doctrine and prioritise Bible teaching and prefer instead to attend churches that are entertaining and have good facilities and children’s work. This naturally leads to a shallow faith and an ambiguous understanding of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, perhaps based on a few coffee mug Bible verses and experiences that they have had over the years at Christian conferences. The alarming reality now is that most church-going Christians could not even articulate the biblical Gospel, let alone share the Gospel with the lost.

This alarming modern trend has been rather bluntly pointed out by the American preacher Voddie Baucham: “The modern church is producing passionate people with empty heads who love the Jesus they don’t know very well.” [3]

The truth is that anyone can pick up a Bible and make it say what they want it to say, as the satirical phrase goes: “I can do all things through a verse taken out of context.” Without a deeper understanding of scripture which comes from devoting meaningful time to reading and studying the Word of God, we can very easily misinterpret and misapply it. This is why the church needs mature Christians to assist in helping other Christians in their understanding of the Word. We see this in the book of Acts when Priscilla and Aquilla took Apollos to one side to explain the Gospel more accurately to him (see Acts 18:26). But when church leaders persistently misinterpret and misapply the public teaching of Scripture, then we have a serious problem, since they are complicit in spreading false teaching and will be answerable to God for this.

Please understand that my comments are not motivated by any desire to be critical, but if we were to consider this from another perspective for a moment: think back to a time in your life when someone said something slanderous or untrue about you, how did you feel about it? In that situation, your anger would have been justified because you were misrepresented and made to look bad and the truth about you was not upheld which led to a distorted view of your character. So likewise, when we do not take biblical truth seriously we can so easily misrepresent God by distorting His Word. How much worse is that than just a fallen human being misrepresented? Doesn’t God have the right to self-expression, and the freedom to determine His own representation? Our charge is to be faithful to that and not our own interpretation of what we would like the Word of God to say or how we would like God’s character to be.

When we read and study Scripture properly, we will learn the truth about the character and attributes of God, our fallen sinfulness and inability to ever please a perfectly righteous God. We will also read about how God in His great mercy sent His one and only Son, Jesus Christ to pay the punishment for our sin and rebellion against God and through the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit, brings the sinner to repentance and faith and into an eternal relationship with God. As we read and study the promises of God’s word, we also learn about how following Christ faithfully brings inner transformation in our lives - the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, changing us to become more like Christ. Then there is the promise of eternal life, the new heaven and the new earth, the reality of the Lord Jesus’ bodily return and the final resurrection of the dead and the eternal state. All of this is laid out for us in Scripture, there is everything that we need for salvation, to grow deeper in our walk with the Lord as we grow to know Him and love Him deeper and to be able to look forward to the promises that we have in Christ.

Footnotes:

[1] William S. Plumer “Psalms” (Banner of Truth, 2016) p1064

[2] John M. Frame “The Doctrine of the Word of God” (P&R Publishing Company 2010) p212

[3] Original source of quote unknown

Doctrinal Drift

In the famous story “Pilgrims Progress” by the Puritan John Bunyan, there is a moment in the story when the two pilgrims, Christian and Hopeful were journeying along the path that led to the Celestial City but they had become weary of the path that they were on and wanted to find an easier route. Noticing that there was a more scenic route in the adjacent field known in the story as “Bypath Meadow”, they hopped over the stile and walked along the new path. This initially proved to be much easier for them and it was on this new path that they also met a man called “Vain Confidence” who assured them that the path would lead them to the Celestial Gate. But when it got dark “Vain Confidence” fell into a pit that had been laid out as a snare, a storm came and the two pilgrims realised that they were stuck and could go no further because of the flooding and they subsequently fell asleep. The following morning they were accosted and caught by the Giant named “Despair” and locked up in “Doubting Castle.” [1]

I believe that there is a real parallel to this part of the story and many modern-day Christians, there is a shallow Christianity that seems to be an easy path, and yet it is fraught with snares and ultimately leads to despair and doubt. I have tragically seen many professing Christians who were not concerned about maturing in their faith who have fallen away into all kinds of false teaching and are no longer walking with God. In the letter to the Hebrews, the writer warns the Jewish believers:

“Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” (Hebrews 2:1 ESV)

He is urging them to be concerned about holding fast to their confession of faith because their very salvation depends on it. He then goes on to warn them “How shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?” The Puritan John Owen, commenting on this verse warns that:

“Diligent attention to the word of the Gospel is vitally necessary to persevere in the profession of it. There are many different times and seasons, ways, and means in which men are in danger of losing the word that they have heard if they are not diligent in keeping it. The word that is heard is not lost without the great sin and the inevitable ruin of the souls of men.” [2]

One of the main reasons for this alarming drift is that there is the idea in many mainstream churches that doctrine isn’t very important and all that matters is your spiritual experiences and encounters in your walk with the Lord. So sound doctrine is often regarded in more charismatic circles as something that conservative Christians are more concerned about. Many charismatic Christians would appear to believe that doctrine isn’t just irrelevant but unhelpful and divisive, and so they jettison doctrine completely. Over the years, the lack of biblical expository preaching, use of historic creeds and confessions, and biblical hymns has led to a removal of theological “guide rails” which are there to keep the church fully orthodox. This rejection of doctrine for the most part can be traced back to the 1970s, when there was a considerable backlash to what had become a rather “dry” and dead religion in the UK Church. So the historic creeds and confessions, expository preaching, and biblical hymns were replaced with topical and prophetic preaching (often filled with stories and anecdotes) and modern songs that lacked the doctrinal depth of the old hymns. But in doing so, the guide rails to faith and biblical orthodoxy were removed, and as a consequence the charismatic church has typically become a breeding ground for false teaching.

One example of this is a particular phrase that I have often heard whilst ministering in charismatic church circles: "Christian discipleship isn’t so much about doctrine and what we believe but who we follow”, and many people in the modern charismatic church context would hold to a similar sentiment. But the problem with that kind of statement is that it divorces the Lord Jesus Christ - the One who is the Word, from His written word and the covenant relationship with God lived out in obedience. Jesus says in His Great Commission to His disciples:

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…” (Matt 28:19-20 ESV)

The French theologian Francis Turretin argues that:

“It was necessary for a written word to be given to the Church that the canon of true religious faith might be constant and unmoved; that it might easily be preserved pure and entire against the weakness of memory, the depravity of men and the shortness of life; that it might be more certainty defended from the frauds and corruptions of Satan; that it might more conveniently not only be sent to the absent and widely separated, but also be transmitted to posterity.” [3]

There is this rather naive and dangerous idea in the charismatic church world that Christian discipleship and following Jesus mainly consists of having an encounter with God, with the outworking of this being a behavioural improvement, standing up against social injustice, or perhaps even performing signs and wonders. And yet there is often no real mention of growing in spiritual maturity and our knowledge of God, bearing the Fruits of the Spirit in our lives, and being devoted to prayer, worship, and studying the Scriptures. This view is not just immature and misinformed but it completely goes against what the Bible teaches us. The whole canon of Scripture provides us with the means to learn about God and come to know Him on a much deeper and personal level, as the Holy Spirit ministers to us, revealing truths and revelations to us from God’s Word. Having already established the importance of the written Word of God, Turretin goes on to make a very important point concerning the Holy Spirit:

“The Holy Spirit by whom believers should be God-taught does not render the Scripture less necessary. He is not given to us in order to introduce new revelations, but to impress the written word on our hearts; so that here the Word must never be separated from the Spirit. The former works objectively, the latter efficiently; the former strikes the ears from without, and the latter opens the heart within. The Spirit is the teacher, Scripture is the doctrine which He teaches us.” [4]

In this quote Turretin is also referring to God speaking through His prophet Isaiah:

“‘And as for me, this is my covenant with them,’ says The LORD: ‘My Spirit that is upon you, and my words that I have put in your mouth, shall not depart out of your mouth, or out of the mouth of your offspring, or out of the mouth of your children’s offspring,’ says the LORD, ‘from this time forth and forevermore.’” (Isaiah 59:21 ESV)

So if the main way that we come to God fully is through His written Word then the sobering truth is that so many Christians do not know God as they should because they are relying on a shallow, experience-driven faith. But the truth is that without being devoted to the Word of God we cannot know Him. In describing the connection between the Lord Jesus and the Scriptures the Dutch-American theologian Geerhardus Vos, writing in the early Twentieth Century, argued that:

“The genuine believer takes the whole of Scripture as a living organism produced by the Holy Spirit to present Christ to him. On every page of Scripture, he finds traits and traces of the Mediator. He regards each declaration of God in this light. One should purpose to grasp this close connection vividly — that we recognise and know nothing of Christ other than through and from Scripture.” [5]

So as we devote ourselves to reading and living God’s Word we come to a better understanding of His law, His character, what pleases Him and what angers Him, the incarnation and birth, earthly ministry, atoning death on the Cross, resurrection, and ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. We also read about the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and the growth of the early church, the teaching, and doctrine in the letters to the early church, and the apostle John’s vision of the end times in Revelation. Through diligent biblical study, we come to understand that the whole of Scripture is about Christ and God’s plan of salvation for His people through Him, and God speaks to us today through His Word as we see how these promises in Scripture also apply to us, they are the assurance and benefits of the Gospel for the believer.

Footnotes:

[1] John Bunyan “Pilgrims Progress” (Banner of Truth, 2017) p127-131

[2] John Owen “Hebrews Vol.2” (Banner of Truth, 2018) p464 (my own paraphrase)

[3] Francis Turretin “Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol.1” (Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992) p58

[4] Francis Turretin “Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol.1” (Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992) p58

[5] Geerhardus Vos “Reformed Dogmatics” (Lexham Press 2012-2016) p727

Protestant & Reformed?

On Saturday 6th May the United Kingdom witnessed a momentous and historic occasion as King Charles III was crowned King with large crowds in attendance outside of Westminster Abbey. Watching the event live on the BBC were in excess of eighteen million people. During the ceremony, the Archbishop of Canterbury called upon King Charles to make the following oath:

“Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?”

This call to “uphold the Protestant and Reformed religion by law established” was a reminder that the Church of England was once a Reformed and Protestant church, and this was also reinforced by the liturgy throughout the coronation, and in particular Cranmer’s communion prayer:

“All glory be to thee, almighty God, our heavenly Father, who, of thy tender mercy,
 didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the cross for our redemption;
 who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world; and did institute,
and in his holy gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of that his precious death, until his coming again.”

The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also read beautifully from Colossians 1:9-17:

“For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God; Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness; Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins: Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”

The great tragedy is that the established church has turned its back on God and His Word. In February of this year, the House of Bishops’ proposals to bless same-sex relationships were voted in at the General Synod, a clear sign of apostasy and a rejection of God’s Word and the Gospel itself. Without calling people to repent of their sin and believe in the Gospel of Christ crucified, there can be no true repentance that leads to life, or the forgiveness of sins and eternal life.

Sadly, the Church of England is neither Protestant or Reformed, and is now little more than apostate. And yet these ancient words of biblical truth cried out to us at the coronation of King Charles III akin to that of the prophet Jeremiah:

“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.” (Jeremiah 6:16)

Let us pray for God’s mercy and grace for our new monarch, the established church and the nation, that we would indeed repent and find the old paths and walk in them.