Unrelated to this post is the availability of a sermon I preached at the 50th anniversary of Bible Baptist Church, Grand Forks, ND, available at our website here.  It was on the theme of the conference, the zeal for God’s House.  Enjoy.

Douglas Wilson drinks.  He’s a drinker.  He imbibes. He’s into alcohol.  He’s a Christian.  He’ll let you know that Christians can drink alcohol.  Various brews.  Dark.  Light.  Stout.  Lager,  Amber.  The Bar.  The Pub.  Tip them back.  Nurse them.  Marijuana, however, no.  He says, no way.  No tokes. No drags. No puffs.  Grass is bad.  Uh-huh.

With a classic Wilsonesque title, “Two Birds With One Stoner,” he writes on June 11 about his beloved alcohol:

Now while Scripture warns us against the abuse of alcohol, that same Bible sets alcoholic gifts before us as legitimate gifts from God—aesthetic gifts, gifts for your thirst, sacramental gifts, and so on.

“Alcoholic gifts.”  You won’t find anything close to that in the Bible.  Alcohol isn’t called a gift.  The only reference to actual alcohol in the Bible, since there was no word for alcohol available for the biblical writers, is in Proverbs 23:31:

Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright.

“When it is red” and “moveth itself aright” are descriptions, since a word didn’t exist.  They mean “alcoholic.”  “Look not thou upon the wine when it is alcoholic.”  My favorite gift in his list is “and so on,” equal to the others in his list in veracity.  Wilson’s next line reads:

It is noteworthy that the only thing that pot does for you—get you buzzed—is the one use prohibited concerning alcohol.

I’m sure marijuana users could also speak of aesthetics at least, and so on.

I would argue that alcohol is as much or more a problem than pot.  Maybe pot smokers violently beat their wife and children.  I hadn’t heard.  I know alcohol users do in great numbers.  Murderous alcohol users, also the ones who drive their cars into innocent victims like heat seeking missiles.  And the statists redistribute their alcohol tax in exponentially greater amounts than the cannabis cash.

Belly up to the hypocrisy.

The just shall live by faith.  Faith comes from hearing the Word of God.  Without faith it is impossible to please God.  By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God.

We live in a faithless world, a world where the Bible isn’t enough.  When Jesus comes, will He find faith on the earth?  People would say they live in a world where the evidence is against God, where God has just made it more difficult to believe in Him.  The world says it is justified in unbelief by the lack of evidence.

The Bible says the knowledge exists.  It isn’t an intellectual problem, but a volitional one.  Men know God.  They suppress the truth.  They are scoffers, walking after their own lusts, denying the Lord Who bought them.

Scripture is sufficient.  Unless men believe scripture, they won’t believe.  It is a wicked and adulterous generation that wants more.

Because the Bible isn’t enough for a faithless generation, what do men embrace and pursue instead? The Apostle Paul gives two categories of so-called “evidence” that men elevate above and even with which they replace scripture.  A vast majority of churches seem to be embarrassed that scripture is all they have to buttress, sustain, and support their faith.  They want more or something else that they see as more credible than the Bible.  Those two categories seen everywhere still are “wisdom” and “signs.”  You see these two written by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1-3, introduced in 1 Corinthians 1:19-22:

19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. 20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21 For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. 22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom.

What is “wisdom” in the above verses?  A good synonym for today is “evidence.”  It is intellectual evidence that people want to “prove” Christianity.  The other one is in v. 22, “a sign,” which is a miracle.  There are two categories given by Paul that can be difficult to distinguish from the other. You could group the two into one big category, that being “extrascriptural evidence.”

I live in what a lot of people would agree is a very intellectual region of the world.  Our area is full of what some think are very smart people.  Maybe so.  This area really does show you how inadequate ‘being smart’ is.  Here we’ve got Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, and the Silicon Valley, the hi-tech capital of the world.  We have google, apple, yahoo, intel, oracle, facebook, twitter, symantec, intuit, salesforce, ebay, netflix, hewlett-packard, pixar, tesla, solarcity, paypal, and many others.  I talk to many “smart” people every week, who know how smart they are.

Smart people won’t believe, and they say they won’t, because they need more proof.  That is the “wisdom” Paul is talking about.  If you just give them “wisdom,” then they’ll believe.   This is the “wisdom of this world,” to distinguish it from biblical or godly wisdom.  The problem with this proof or wisdom is that they can never get enough of it, really because it isn’t a basis of faith, and the bar of evidence keeps rising higher.  This “wisdom of the world” is the currency of an unbeliever.  He justifies his unbelief with it.

The unbeliever who requires “wisdom” is the person who needs more evidence of a young earth.  He presupposes naturalism.  Someone must come along to prove that wrong.  He needs the smoking gun, the proof of God that he requires.  God doesn’t give that “wisdom,” as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 1.  These people won’t believe even if you gave them the proof they say that they need.  He also explains that later.  Even if they could believe with that proof, God isn’t going to give it to them, because then the proof and the person who convinced them of that proof would receive the glory (read later in chapter 1).

An aspect of the wisdom category is acceptance of multiple positions on almost any and every doctrine and practice.  Churches allow for multiple positions except to a very limited number of essentials or fundamentals, and even those find multiple acceptable definitions.  Pastors use multiple Bibles.  They rely heavily on philosophy, tapping into popular intellectual leaders to turn their sermons into near lectures on par with a good professor at an Ivy League school.  Like Christians compete with the secular world with their own entertainers, they have their thinkers, who can give the world’s thinkers a good run for their money. The idea here is that scripture won’t sound smart enough, but you can make it sound smarter by associating it with intellectualism.  This will make it acceptable to intellectuals by trying to make the Bible sound smart.  ‘It obviously needs a lot of help in this way.’ Christian intellectualism abounds now as a lure to those who require wisdom.

Signs are the other category, and signs are some kind of special category of supernatural experience. Men in their experience want more than what scripture gives them.  They want God to talk to them directly.  They want a divine healing.  They want a miracle.  The Bible isn’t good enough.

Churches can’t do miracles.  They aren’t providing miracles, so what occurs is that the churches provide fake supernatural experiences, dumbing down the biblical definition of miracle to give people the supernatural experience they covet.  They also give men a feeling that they can interpret as a movement of the Holy Spirit.  They do that with music and the environment that they produce in the meetings of their churches.  Preaching style also can give people the impression that God is moving in some way.  All of these fall under signs.

If I were to get technical in separating the two categories Paul supplies in 1 Corinthians 1, I would call “wisdom,” intellectual proof, and call “signs,” emotional proof.  “Wisdom” does something to the mind.  In Paul’s day, this is what the Greeks required.  They weren’t looking for something that would titillate their feelings, but something that would convince them intellectually.  With “signs,” you could feel something, have a sensation that would tell you that God was working.  I understand that there is overlap between the two, some occurrences straddling the gap between wisdom and signs. Overall, however, wisdom and signs are extra-scriptural.  They are provided because the Bible just isn’t good enough.

The leaders of churches know men seek after wisdom and signs. They don’t want to lose people for various carnal reasons, so they supply them to the extent that they will work.  I have called the provision of these carnal weapons, cheating.  You’ve heard the phrase, “if you aren’t cheatin’, you aren’t winnin’?  If you want your church to succeed, you’ve got to cheat a little, fudge a little.  Sure, these are not supernatural acts.  These are extra-scriptural, but if you don’t want to lose a crowd or if you really want to get a crowd in this era, you’ve got to have a show or make it really, really smart for the smart crowd.  Men are tempted to do these, and they do to various extents.

The men who use wisdom are clever men.  I hear their strategies everywhere, including among unaffiliated Baptists, the churches with whom our church fellowships.  The Apostle Paul later writes in 2 Corinthians about what they are doing in 4:2:

But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.

We should just preach the Bible.  People don’t like that.  It doesn’t succeed.  Professing Christians get discouraged, so these clever men, these ingenious men develop strategies.  This is rampant.  These techniques are dishonest.  They are not straightforward.  God does not get the glory.  These men get the glory.  I see it all over.

Over not that much time, wisdom and signs scorch the earth.  The seed falls on ground ruined by wisdom and signs, and men won’t take the Bible any more.  They have been conditioned that it isn’t good enough.  The Bible is effective, but this is a type of blindness, to where men won’t receive scripture, because they have become desensitized to it by wisdom and signs.

I have criticized men using wisdom and signs.  They become angry.  Why?  It’s not because God is not being honored.  It’s because they are being questioned.  They don’t think they should be questioned.  This is fertile soil for deceit.  They promote wisdom and signs, and when they are questioned, they treat it like you are questioning God.  They are essentially saying that their strategies and techniques, not in the Bible, not derived from the Word of God, are on par with God.  You are as good as attacking God when you attack them.

A major reason the gospel isn’t being preached everywhere is because men have lost confidence in the gospel.  Church leaders know it is foolishness to the lost.  They don’t want to look foolish before the world at using such a loser work as preaching, so the lost don’t get the free offer of the gospel. Churches are too busy catering to wisdom and signs.

Just a few months ago, I gave analysis to an online podcast type video plan of salvation done by Kurt Skelly (pt. 1, pt. 2).   My purpose was to show the perversion of the gospel found among independent Baptists.  Men accept it, and they shouldn’t.  Here’s my paragraph from my analysis about what he said about Romans 6:23:

Romans 6:23 doesn’t tell how to “receive the gift of eternal life.”  Skelly though tells you that receiving the gift of eternal life is “trusting Jesus as your Savior,” that’s how you receive it. Romans 6:23 doesn’t say that, but it is what Skelly reads into the verse.  Since “receiving the gift of eternal life” is “trusting Jesus as your Savior,” then how do you “trust Jesus as your Savior?”  You “call upon the name of the Lord to be saved,” which means “praying a scripted prayer to trust Jesus as your Savior.”  This instruction follows from something that wasn’t in the verse in the first place.  The first step isn’t biblical and then none follow from the other.  If someone does any of what Skelly teaches, it’s because he trusts what Skelly is telling him is true.  He’s not starting with the Bible, but with Skelly.

My point for this post isn’t again to deal per se with Skelly’s presentation.  Many men use Romans 6:23 in a “Romans Road” of salvation, but they are likely not thinking about what Romans 6:23 means.  You will not get the right interpretation of Romans 6:23 by pulling it out of its context.

Romans 6:23 works in a plan of salvation.  It does.  Usually it is used for the second point in the plan, something about the “penalty for sin.”  The penalty for sin is “death,” and someone turns to Romans 6:23, which says, “the wages of sin is death.”  There we go.  It works.  The wages of sin is death. That is true.  Do we know what Romans 6:23 is saying though?  Most, I believe, couldn’t care less about that.  They like how it reads, so they can use it like they want.  It comes in very handy for them for what they want with it.

In Skelly’s presentation, he also parked on the “gift of God” aspect of Romans 6:23, to turn salvation into “asking for a gift.”  You ask for a gift and God gives it.  That is false.  That’s not salvation, but it is a common turn from Romans 6:23 that many in evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and independent Baptists take.  I get it too.  They want to simplify the plan to the extent that they get professions, that is, they get results.  People want to receive a gift.  The idea that it is a gift is very appealing to someone, so this offer brings more often a positive response.

The idea here is, isn’t God good?  He wants to give you a gift.  How could you refuse a gift from God?  And guess what?  The gift is eternal life.  Who wouldn’t want eternal life?  Come on!  Take the gift!  How can you refuse the best gift ever, eternal life, when God wants to give it to you?

I’m pretty sure that the statistics, the percentages, on prayers prayed go exponentially upward with this approach.  Who do you think wants to accept a gift?  About everyone.  If the gift is eternal life, who wouldn’t want to have that?  No one.  People use Romans 6:23 because it seems to sit there right on a proverbial platter for using it in that way.  Someone doesn’t have to receive his wages for sin, because instead he could just take this gift of eternal life.   This simplifies salvation and provides the lure for asking for the gift, which is praying the prayer.  The whole process of which I speak is very horrible.  Horrible is bad.  Very horrible is worse.  I can’t use enough “very” in front of horrible.

Is Romans 6:23 about salvation?  It isn’t in its context, unless you are including sanctification as an aspect of one’s justification, which is true.  Sanctification comes out of justification, and since that is true, Romans 6:23 could be about salvation, but in a technical sense it is not.  Romans 6:23 is speaking to already saved people.  They are already justified.  The audience of a Romans 6:23 is saved people and Romans 6:23 is helping those already saved people in a church at Rome in their sanctification.  The Apostle Paul wants the saved audience in Rome to understand how they are to live the Christian life.

The believers in the church at Rome had a problem in their sanctification that Paul dealt with in Romans 6.  Many through the centuries since Romans 6 was written have had a similar problem to the church at Rome.  Salvation was by grace, but they interpreted or used their grace in the wrong way.  They misunderstood grace as it applied to their own practical righteousness, its relationship to their Christian living.

Paul writes about the righteousness of God in Romans.  Righteousness comes by grace through faith, which is the gospel.  The righteousness that comes by grace through faith should also be lived for a Christian.  Salvation doesn’t stop for a Christian when he is justified. He keeps being saved by grace, which keeps producing righteousness.  However, he also needs to cooperate with the salvation through the gospel.  He has a responsibility to keep living by grace through faith the life of righteousness to which he has been saved.

I’m only going to go as far back as the previous few verses (vv. 20-23) in Romans 6 in order to understand verse 23 in its context:

20 For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from righteousness. 21 What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death. 22 But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. 23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The people to whom Paul is speaking “were the servants of sin” and “free from righteousness” (v. 20). They “are now ashamed” (v. 21) of that former state and practice.  When they were “the servants of sin,” what fruit did they have from that?  Their fruit, which was sin, led to its end, which was “death” (v. 21).  Now that they are in a different state since their justification, “being made free from sin, and become servants to God” (v. 22), they have their “fruit unto holiness” (v. 22).  That means they live a life after the nature of God, which is righteousness.  The end of the former fruit, sin, was death, and the end of their present fruit, righteousness, is “everlasting life” (aionios zoe, v. 22).

Romans 6 explains why someone would not live in sin even though he has saving grace in his life. To sum it all up in v. 23, death is the payment or wages of sin.  The servant of sin has earned through his works, his evil deeds, the wages of sin, which is death.  He was paid what he deserved.  The servant of righteousness, the servant of “Jesus Christ our Lord,” who has Jesus as His Master, doesn’t earn eternal life.  He receives it by grace through faith, so it is a gift of God.  Death is a wage of sin and “eternal life” (aionios zoe, v. 23, identical to “everlasting life”) is a gift of God.  The former is earned and the latter is not.

Upon faith in Christ, God set a man free from his slavery to sin, the end of which is eternal life.  He doesn’t serve sin anymore, which is why he has eternal life.  Servants of sin die and servants of righteousness live.  If someone takes Romans 6:23 in its context, he can’t separate it from repentance, habitual righteousness, the fruit of holiness, and Jesus Christ our Lord.  Someone should know that if he is a servant of sin, he doesn’t have the gift of eternal life.  The end of the fruit of holiness is everlasting life.

Let’s say you know someone who is living in habitual sin.  You ask him if he is saved?  He says, “Yes, because I received the gift of eternal life.”  According to Romans 6:23, the gift of eternal life is a life of holiness.  He isn’t living a life of holiness.  He obviously doesn’t have the gift of eternal life, because that is slavery to righteousness that keeps on going right into eternity.  The life and the righteousness or mutually inclusive.

To pull the language “gift of God” out of Romans 6:23 and then say it teaches to pray to God and ask Him for the gift of eternal life misses or more likely twists or perverts the entire point of Romans 6:23.  The slavery to sin is the problem.  Slavery to sin is the habitual practice of sin.  A person practicing sin is earning the wages of sin, which is death.  Obviously, the person no longer a slave to sin, because of the gift of God, practices holiness, which end is eternal life.

Speaking of the Lord as one’s Shepherd, Psalm 23:2 says, “He leadeth me beside still waters.”  When we follow Jesus Christ through His Word in the Bible, He is leading us.  Then in Romans 8:14, the Apostle Paul writes, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”  He also writes in Galatians 5:18, “But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.”  The idea of being led by God, by Jesus, and by the Spirit is true.  Believers are led by God, by Jesus, and by the Spirit.

Last week I was sitting with another pastor and he told me the story of how he came to his church. Someone asked him to come to pastor where he was, and this man said he would pray about it. When the one asking called back later, this pastor said that he had silence from the Holy Spirit, that is, the Holy Spirit had not told him anything.  When the Holy Spirit did begin to talk to him, He told him to go someplace else.  I never asked him follow-up questions, but is this an experience we should expect, and if the Holy Spirit is talking to people, how is this occurring today?

From conversations I have had with other independent Baptists, it isn’t unusual that some, perhaps many, believe that the Holy Spirit talks to them directly and in a very specific way.  Very often, if you question one of them, he will react like a Charismatic does when challenged about his experience. On many various occasions, a young lady has said to me that a young man had informed her that the Holy Spirit had told him to marry her.  A young lady doesn’t agree, but how could she question God? He apparently told the young man to marry the girl.

Parallel to the “leading of the Spirit” is also “the Spirit teaching.”  1 John 2:27 says, “But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things,” and 1 Corinthians 2:13, “Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth.”  What I’ve heard here is that when someone looks at a passage in sermon preparation, he prays and the Holy Spirit “gives him a message” or “tells him what to say.”  A never before heard teaching very often emerges from this tack.  Ordinary means of word usage, grammar, and syntax give way to what the Holy Spirit reveals someone.

What is the basis for believing a voice in your head is the Holy Spirit talking to you, telling you something, or teaching you?  As you look at the above few passages, that’s not what they are saying. That goes beyond what they are saying.  We have a scriptural basis for not believing that is how God works.  That teaching from those verses contradicts other scripture, so that can’t be what they are saying.

The Holy Spirit is a Person, so He can speak, but He is not continuing to reveal a message directly to anyone since the completion of the canon of scripture (Jude 1:3, Heb 2:3-4).  The man in the office of the prophet and then the apostle was given direct revelation on par with scripture.  Scripture itself is that to which 1 Corinthians 2:13 refers.  That did occur at one time, but only before AD96 — not since then.  1 John 2:27 says that you can understand the Bible on your own and in a technical, doctrinal way, this has been called illumination.  Illumination does not function apart from the ordinary means of study. However, believers filled with the Holy Spirit are not closed off from comprehending what the Bible teaches.

To what should one attribute a voice in one’s head?   No one should assume that the voice given credit as the Holy Spirit speaking is in fact the Holy Spirit speaking.  We don’t have any basis for either knowing or not knowing whether the voice we hear is the Holy Spirit.  We do know that the “sword of the Spirit is the Word of God” (Eph 6:17).  We know that in verbal gifts, that it is the Holy Spirit when someone speaks as the oracles of God (1 Pet 4:10-11).  If it is what the passage from scripture says, then we know it is the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is not going to tell you who to marry.  He isn’t going to inform you of the brand of toilet paper you should buy.  He won’t tell you whether you should build a new auditorium or not.  He won’t counsel you on when to buy a new car.

The voices in your head are either your conscience or your talking to yourself.  If it is your conscience, the message will still be whatever is your highest perceived standard, which might be teaching you’ve heard in the past, whether scriptural or unscriptural.  The voice can tell you that you’re doing something wrong when you aren’t doing something wrong.  The conscience functions as a warning device that operates according to a regulation already plugged into your brain.  It won’t feed you something that isn’t already there.

If the voice is your talking to yourself, then it can be a lie.  It is especially lying if it is telling you that it is the Holy Spirit talking.  That is yourself believing something that isn’t true.  The voice might be telling you the truth, but it isn’t the truth that the Holy Spirit is saying this directly to you.  If you are controlled by the Holy Spirit, you are controlled by the Word of God, which is content that has already been written for two thousand years (Eph 5:18, Col 3:16).

When someone decides to build an auditorium, he wanted to build the auditorium.  It wasn’t the Holy Spirit telling him to build it.  He wants to build it, but he’s telling people that the Holy Spirit told him. The Holy Spirit will not tell you who to marry.  You marry who you want to marry.  Can you know if the marriage is scriptural?  If it is scriptural, then it is scriptural.  You have to look at scripture to see if something is scriptural.

Someone might ask, “What about the conviction of sin?”  Again, the Holy Spirit uses the Word of God to do that.  He does not skirt around scripture to convict anyone.  It all comes right from the Bible.   There is no basis for your knowing whether it is your conscience, you talking to yourself, or the Holy Spirit helping you remember and then apply scripture.  What matters in the end is if it was biblical.

What if someone wants to go to Thailand and he really shouldn’t go?  We have many different checks and balances against doing something that God doesn’t want us to do.  Pastoral leadership might have scriptural reasons for not going.  We don’t have the right to disobey church authority.  The rest of the church may know of character deficiencies.   Someone may not fulfill the qualifications.  Others may have good reason to say that it is an unwise decision, using biblical principles.  Perhaps someone else preaching the gospel lives just down the street in Thailand, to where we think we should go.  God isn’t telling anyone to go to Thailand today.

What about the Apostle Paul?  Didn’t God send him places?  Didn’t God send Jonah to Nineveh?  I’ve said this before, but God doesn’t function in an identical way through all history.  God is the same, but He does things differently depending on the era in which we live.  God spoke directly to prophets and apostles.  Now we base what we do on the completed Word of God.  God has told us that He is finished revealing new things, so when we say that we are getting something new like Paul did, then we are not trusting what Paul wrote.

Some of what people say the Holy Spirit told them is actually good.  What it is that “God told them to do” is actually the right thing to do.  They say God told them to pastor.  God already said that the desire to pastor is a good desire.  Someone might desire that, but God didn’t tell the person to do it.  We read the Bible and it talks about the necessity of pastors.  People can read that and desire it.  They know that there is a reward for faithful pastors.  They still might not be one, because other people have to see that they could be one, that they fulfill the qualifications.

This claim that God speaks to you directly is wrong and it is dangerous.  It adds or takes away from scripture and from the sufficiency of the Bible.  It is a lie, not necessarily on purpose, but we won’t really know what the motive is.  God either causes or allows everything, but that doesn’t mean that He approves of what we want to do, the thing that we are saying He told us to do.

If you need a new building, don’t pray that God will direct you to a new building.  Make a good decision based upon what God already said.  Getting a new building might just be what you want to do.  The feeling you get, that you are saying is Him, might just be your own feeling.

Many unscriptural ideas revolve around these revelations people say they get from God.  You can get a new building, for instance, but it might be a waste of money.  It might make things more convenient for people, but Christianity itself isn’t convenient.  If someone won’t come, because he needs his church to be more comfortable or a larger choice of seating, that’s not a good reason.  He should be dealt with for his disobedience or wrong attitude.

While talking to a man from a new-evangelical church, he testified that God gave them new property for a huge new auditorium right next to the highway.  He was convinced of it.  Shortly thereafter the city built a highway exit right by their property to make it more convenient than ever.  Was this God sending everyone a message about their legitimacy?  This man testified that it did.

It is my opinion that many professing Christians trust this mystical voice more than they do the Bible. They would rather consider what they think Jesus would do than what the Bible says He did do. They like the concept that God is telling them things.  They feel more important from that and, of course, more spiritual too.

From listening to many pastors through the years, I know they don’t know how to prepare a sermon. They don’t know how to study the Bible.  They are flawed in many different ways, but they still keep preaching unscriptural ideas, because they think they got them from the Holy Spirit.  A lot of false worship is justified because of how it makes them feel, a feeling they attribute to the Holy Spirit. What I’m contending is that this doctrine of continued direct revelations from the Spirit has led to many false beliefs and either damaging or destructive practices in churches.

Before I get to the point of this post, I need to say what it isn’t about.  It isn’t about the fulfillment of the cultural mandate, to subdue and have dominion.  God created.   Made in God’s image, man is creative in a way designed by God, albeit different than Him.   Man does innovate.  Scripture doesn’t forbid invention.  It encourages it.   The industrial revolution emerged from a biblical point of view. George Washington Carver was right to find exponential uses for the peanut.

Furthermore, I grant that even in ministry we use paper and bindings and typewriters.  The words are written between staffs of musical notation for singing.   These are all circumstances for obedience to the Bible, not actual teachings of the Bible.  In addition, people will write new tunes used for praise to God, so that’s not what I’m writing about.  You should not use these as arguments to justify all forms of novelty, to drive through that void your Mack truck of innovation.  This isn’t even hard to understand; yet these are utilized to blur the lines, so people feel justified in doing what they want to do, and then blame it on God.

Innovation has become such the norm in churches, that when you point it out to people, they act like you are criticizing scripture.  Many get very defensive, as if you are attacking one of their convictions.  As you read here, I ask you to pack away your defensiveness and open your mind to what I’m writing.  The inability even to admit you might be wrong here might be a bigger problem than the problem I’m addressing.  You can still grow, reader.

Scripture Is Complete

The plan for doing the work of God is complete in scripture.   The explanation for the Lord’s work was finished with the culmination of the twenty-seventh book of the New Testament in circa AD96. We know everything we need to know and can know to do God’s work.

This essay in part dovetails with my recent writing about continuationism.  Men credit a new method as revelation from God.  They reach a barrier blocking evangelistic success and the apparent solution arrives through innovation ascribed to divine illumination.  They couldn’t find a way through until the idea “came from God.”  Whole manuals unveil page after page of secrets.

Direct Approach

To use a football analogy, the plan in the New Testament is run after run by the fullback right up the middle.  What is being offered instead is a gadget play to win the game in one play, perhaps a literal “Hail Mary.”  A run by the fullback isn’t fooling anybody.  Everybody knows what is happening.  Now no one expects it to win, because it’s too obvious.  It looks like a loser.  The thought is that a new scheme is needed that use a kind of sleight of hand, a little craftiness to score a lot points and ensure victory.  Credit goes to the coordinator.

The Apostle Paul took a beating because he kept just running the ball up the middle — ground and pound.  There was no doubt he had the ball every time, so every would-be tackler could take his shot at him.  Despite the opposition, he didn’t change his strategy.  He suffered for it and was following in the example of Jesus in doing it.

God wants His churches to like what He said.  He wants them to believe what He said.  He wants them to believe that His plan is working, even when it doesn’t look like it is working.  That is really believing in it.

Almost inherent to evangelicals and fundamentalists for many decades now has been regular, almost non-stop, new concoctions for numerical success.  From my perspective, this tendency hasn’t escaped unaffiliated Baptists either.  I would say that I understand the lure of innovation for God’s work, except we are now to the point where we also have seen transpire, repeated over several generations — nothing new under the sun.  But that shouldn’t even matter.  We have a biblical basis for rejecting it.

Preaching

What is the work of God?  It is preaching, what Paul calls the “foolishness of preaching.”  Every believer is supposed to preach the gospel.  The audience is every creature.  There are ways that people can ruin the preaching, but there isn’t anything to add to the method.  Preaching is the means by which God is glorified.

What I hear and read is that preaching doesn’t work.  The lost hear preaching and they don’t like it. When preaching doesn’t work, people then get discouraged.  They quit.  Because they quit, they aren’t preaching anymore.  The work of God isn’t getting done.  Not doing anything can’t be right.   This convoluted reasoning represents the wrong thinking.

Actually what is said, however, is that preaching is fine.  It’s good.  Keep doing that.  Of course. However, if you want to succeed, you can’t do just that.  It’s not enough.  Sure, it’s good to continue to be faithful with the preaching.  Your just going to need to bring some gadgets to your game plan.  You won’t win if you don’t.

To diagnose the two paragraphs above and the real problem, preaching does work, even if we don’t see the immediate results we want.  The people who stop are faithless.  They haven’t been taught the proper motivation for work for God.  They gave up because they didn’t love keeping God’s commandments.  They weren’t loving God.  They need to get biblical motivation, so they won’t quit. They need to be buoyed in their faith.  They should be encouraged and then encourage one another. Men should pray their love will abound.  Faithful men should provide good examples of not quitting. They shouldn’t make excuses for their people, like I hear from church leaders today.

Preaching Is Sufficient

There is a reason we just preach.  Preaching doesn’t make sense as a method.  When victory comes from preaching, you will know that God did it, because from a human standpoint, it is a failure of a method.  When someone believes preaching, he really will like just the message.  He will be receiving the message without anything to help it along.  Nothing can help it along, but it will be obvious that it was the message that did the work.  God is glorified.  When innovation occurs, man gets the glory.  There are other problems too, especially over a length of time, but that is a good enough reason, and one that Paul writes in depth in 1 Corinthians 1-3.

If marketing and promotion really are vital, churches should be sending their children to state universities to major in marketing or to the seminars by people who are the best at it.   In fact, that’s already what’s happened.  Certain pastors conferences have then spread that information all over, books have been written, and often a pastoral degree spends major time on it.  Rather than major on what the Bible says, the emphasis shifts to what will work, at least in the short term.

One threshold of true conversion is affection for the gospel message.  When men eliminate that checkpoint as necessary, something else takes prominence.  You don’t fool people into the narrow road. People really do need to be impressed with Jesus to be saved.  When that emphasis is shifted, the nature of conversion itself changes.  Someone might make a decision, but it isn’t saving.   More than anything, however, again God is deprived of the glory He deserves.

Go Versus Invite

Moreover, scripture says go and preach to everyone.  Instead, churches very often employ an invitation philosophy, not to be confused with merely inviting someone to church.  I’m talking about invitation as a strategy.  Attempts to lure unbelievers very often change the nature of the assembly.   I’ve never seen a focus on recruiting the unsaved to a meeting not modify what the church does to adapt to visitors.  A common change is with the music.  This is where the idea of “evangelistic music” (and then gospel music) started, the thought that you used music to affect your visitors.  If your unsaved visitors came, and they couldn’t relate to the music, you needed to refashion  it so that they could relate.

In first considering how many come, preaching to everyone becomes secondary with the acceptance of an invitation philosophy.   Usually those churches never get the gospel to everyone.  They might get an invitation-to-church to everyone or some kind of direct mail, but not preaching of the gospel to all of them.  It’s not their goal anymore, because of this innovation of invitation.  When God wants the gospel offered to everyone, it doesn’t happen.  His will just isn’t foremost.  It doesn’t work as well as the new idea.  People like the new idea, because it does work, and they like doing things that work. They aren’t living by faith and they’re not pleasing God, but they’re happy.  What they want is different than what God wants, and they’re fine with that.

Final Considerations

When innovations work, those who use them often designate the outcome as a work of God.  They say God did it, validating the innovation like a counterfeit sign.  If something works, and it is characterized as a work of God, the person using it appears to have some greater spiritual capability. For instance, the appearance of increased activity means the church “is alive,” while the churches not seeing this type of movement “are dead.”

The desire among men for the “living stuff” to happen, which is all the success that comes from innovation, spreads the innovation.  Innovative men want to tell others about their success.  You usually don’t have to ask them.  They figured out something no one has, and they want to talk about it.

I have had innovative men visit our church and they notice our lack of innovation, as if we’re missing something, that we’re clueless.  “There is so much more that you could do,” that “could be a real help to you.”  These innovations that could be a real help have usually been around for quite a few years in different forms, like the same cologne in a different bottle.  The innovations aren’t too hard to enact — they’re wrong to do.  If they are not a replacement for the right thing to do, they are at least adding a thing that will take away the glory from God.  We are told not to do that.  Because of this, our church doesn’t want to do these innovations.  I don’t want the influence upon our church from those who do them.  I don’t want our people thinking they’re missing anything.  They’re not.

If I visit the church of the innovators, I notice the innovation, but I also notice the obedience to God that innovation has replaced.  Almost always in some way the Bible isn’t being practiced.  Innovation is practiced.  However, some of the Bible is not.  Today it’s very odd to bring up disobedience to the Bible and more normal to bring up missing innovation, as if missing innovation is what is especially missing in churches.

The churches who innovate often don’t suffer for it.  Other churches and pastors say nothing.  No fellowship is lost.  If someone does say something, he’s the bad person.  It reminds me of what occurs when you point out the errors of Charismaticism.  The problem isn’t their lie, but your “lack of love.” As a result, innovation spreads.

I still want you to read Monday’s post.

Right now, a fashionable position for evangelicals and fundamentalists is to resist, albeit in a benign way, transgenderism. In the so-called culture war, conservatives have chosen a strategic campaign of kooky bathroom laws. They tried to take it into the election, and we heard the representation as predatory older men dressed up like ladies, visiting little, little girls in their bathrooms.  It really was a dishonest position.  If conservatives went honest, they would at least have tried to deal with the biology of it, as if we could determine someone’s gender through biology.  Very few tried that tact. Instead, they attempted to put some kind of deniability to their opposition of trangenderism, while at the same time implying their opposition.  You had to read between the lines, maybe the lines at the bathroom stalls, to discover the apparent dislike of something.

Could conservatives oppose transgenderism on theological grounds?  The religious right, among which are the evangelicals and fundamentalists, has capitulated on gender distinction.  They are even surrendering on male and female roles, let alone what the two look like.  Evangelicals and fundamentalists stopped battling conformity in dress long ago.  As a result, they are left with lame suggestions in the nature of mind reading.  Yes, I’m saying, I told you so.  It doesn’t make me feel better.

Evangelicals and fundamentals ceased saying there was distinct male and female dress.  It’s too late now to pull that one out of the mothballs.  They were the ones arguing against distinction.  They were the ones mocking those who kept arguing for gender designed distinctions.  Evangelicals and fundamentalists are now getting what they bargained for.

The church stopped fighting the world on designed gender distinction in dress because the world didn’t like it.  The church embraced conformity.  Their women became more and more like men.  You can’t tell me that we are not now seeing the men in our churches becoming more and more like women.  Church men look and act more effeminate than ever.

Churches wanted to keep people.  They wanted to get bigger.  One major factor that really distinguished the church from the world was gender distinctions.  Churches forsook the distinction for church growth.  Mainly women wouldn’t be happy if they couldn’t wear pants.  Of course, it’s not just pants now, but how tight they are.  These are defended by churches.  Churches inform that’s all welcome.

Even traditionally gender distinct places like a West Coast Baptist down in Lancaster, California no longer hold to gender distinction.  I haven’t read an announcement saying that’s over, but you see it in pictures.  It seems to be a mere preference now for that crowd.  They have even bigger problems than that, but these types have given up on that too.

When the churches will not keep these biblical teachings, it’s no wonder the world turns into the sewer.  Churches are to provide the example of righteousness.  Churches are to be the salt and the light.  Judgment must begin in the house of God.  A church can hardly declare a religious conviction in North Carolina, because churches haven’t shown they even believe what they are against with their nutty bathroom laws.

Churches led the way in changing biblical teaching.  Every single church at one time practiced designer gender distinction.  Every church.  The point of Deuteronomy 22:5 was the difference between the garments.  Churches started taking the inane position, “They both wore robes.”  In other words, they made like the passage was talking about conformity, when it was talking about distinction.  They did this so that they wouldn’t lose people.  This paralleled with a weak gospel. Likely you had unconverted people they were trying to keep, and they were attempting to hold them with unbiblical teaching — that’s how you keep unbelievers in your church.

Someone isn’t in his right mind if he reads Deuteronomy 22:5 and thinks conformity.  The passage says nothing about robes.  It says nothing about people dressing the same.  Women are not to put on the male item.  There was at least a male item.  Women were not to wear it.  Women were not to wear what distinguishes women from men.  In Corinth, a head covering distinguished women from men. Even if women were equal to men spiritually in the church they were to keep the distinction intended to distinguish women from men.  This was an issue of authority, which it is.

Women dress the same as men to usurp the male role.  Now it’s just normal.  It doesn’t even occur to most women any more, because that ship sailed long ago.  Scripture teaches that women usurp the male role by wearing the male item or garment.  It’s easy to see that it matters.  Now that we’re to this transgender nonsense, churches don’t know what to do.  There isn’t anything they can do.  They’ve already capitulated on this issue.

The only real solution is for churches to admit they were wrong, to revert back to the original biblical and historical position, to teach it to their people.  I’m calling for that.  I don’t expect it though.  If churches taught what believers have believed and taught for all of Christian history until just the last several decades, they would hemorrhage their numbers.  They would shrink down to very tiny groups.  This would result in salary cuts and bi-vocational pastors.   The latter is what is most unacceptable.  Instead of attempting to end transgenderism, it’s easier to pose with short-lived and laughable transgender bathroom scenarios.

The honest thing for evangelicals and fundamentalists would be to celebrate their transgenderism. They wanted it.  They’ve got enough people in their churches to meet budget and pay for buildings. They can keep their people because they gave up on this long ago.  If an evangelical church has someone who looks like Ellen come to their service, it won’t disrupt anything.  Even if someone doesn’t like it, he has to keep that to himself.  It’s accepted — get over it.

Let’s just admit it.  Churches love transgenderism.  They lap it up. They adopted it long ago.  Now they will live with it.