A fantastic preacher named Smedly Yates preached
at our church last Sunday. Our regular pastor was at a conference, and as
Pastor Yates grew up at our church and has family here, he graciously came here
from Tempe, AZ, where he pastors a church, and spent the weekend—first preaching
to the men at a Saturday morning breakfast, then feeding us the Word on both
Sunday morning and evening.
And boy, were we fed.
He preached from 1 Corinithians 1 and 2…on the
foolishness and power of both the gospel message (morning sermon) and the
method of bare proclamation (evening). This post is borne out of that evening
message, and I’m going to quote liberally and shamelessly from my notes (I’ll
share links to both messages at the end of this post). This sermon was EXCELLENT.
One of the best things about it was that he put
his finger directly on one of the biggest problems with modern churches today,
besides false doctrine/watered-down, erroneous, eisegetical preaching (that
which uses the Bible to back up teaching rather than drawing out of the Bible
that which it is actually saying and teaching that). This problem could be
described in many ways: seeker-sensitive preaching, programs, and/or gimmicks;
worldly church growth methods; catering to the unsaved in order to get them to come
to church.
What’s wrong with this?
“You cannot package the gospel in a
method that undermines the gospel.”
Christianity has fallen into the trap of trying to
get people to come to Christ using human and natural means. This does not, and cannot,
actually work. Why? Because “a man persuaded and a man transformed and born again
by the power of the Holy Spirit are two very different things.” One is a work
of man’s effort: rhetoric, reasoning, emotional manipulation, persuasion,
logic. The other is entirely a work of God: the work of conviction, repentance,
and faith in the heart. We might reasonably evaluate these two methods by
asking, who, in each scenario, gets the credit?
Pastor Yates spoke of the two kinds of public
speakers that they were familiar with in the Greco-Roman culture of the Corinthians’
day. First, there was the rhetorician, the orator, the speaker-artist, whose job
it was to entertain his hearers and to persuade them to agree with their point
of view. These might be lawyers, politicians, entertainers, or activists. This
kind of speaker was what the people of this culture prized. They loved
eloquence. They judged a speaker’s skill by how well they “played” the audience
and were able to get the desired response from them. At the same time, these speakers
were dependent upon their audience’s favor for continued success. In order to
do this, they had to make sure they kept their finger on the “pulse” of the
audience, so to speak, in order to be able to establish credibility, lead their
emotions, and persuade them to agree. A very interesting note was that the Greek
definition of “faith” was “the yielding of the intellect to the persuasion of
another.” When an orator was successful, the audience was willing to place
their “faith” in his point of view. This kind of speaker is goal oriented;
the variable was the method, the goal was to get consistent, positive results.
There was, however, another kind of public speaker.
This was the herald. The herald had no goal in mind other than to clearly
proclaim the message of his master, whoever that might be. The herald’s job
didn’t depend on successfully getting people to respond positively to his
message. His job was to make sure that the message was faithfully communicated.
This kind of speaker is obedience oriented. The consistency was in both method
and message; the variable was found in the hearer’s response.
Guess which kind of speaker Paul was?
“When I
came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom,
proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among
you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified….my message and my preaching were
not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of
power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power
of God.”
1
Corinthians 2:1-2,4
We don’t need to impress
or please. Human strategies will never arrive at what God has planned. The
things we proclaim are of divine nature and has the power to change hearts. Paul
didn’t deliver these truths in the packaging of human wisdom…and neither should
we. We ought to learn to communicate the gospel CLEARLY, faithfully, and
simply, trusting God to do the work of heart transformation through its
message.
What has happed in modern
day churches is this: we have cajoled, petted, emotionally led, baited-and-switched,
manipulated, pressured, promised, reasoned, argued, and eventually persuaded
people to agree with the Christian message…intellectually, emotionally, and/or
guiltily. But many…MANY…of these have never experienced true heart change. They
don’t see themselves as guilty beggars before their holy God and Creator, with
nothing to offer and needing total transformation. They don’t see (and love)
Jesus as their Lord and Savior from their own sin, who gave us His own righteousness…they
see Him as a choice that makes sense to their natural, human intellect. They
aren’t filled with gratitude and humility, seeking to mortify their own sin and
live to please Him; they are filled with pride in how wise they are to have
made this choice, and how great it is that God has them in His camp, well
pleased with how much they do for Him. Many of these eventually “fall away from
the faith” and leave the church. Many within the church live in active disobedience
to God and live lives of defiant sinfulness, without qualm. These were and are
never truly saved.
Another area in which I
see this thinking is an alarming one, because it’s not as obvious. It’s in
homeschooling. As a homeschooling mom of 17 years, with 8 children, I’ve tried
and been privy to many different curriculums, conferences, and co-ops. And I’ve
found myself disturbed by the number of people who believe, teach, and have
organizations that promote the idea that a certain type of education or a
certain type of training will make our children more effective for Christ in
the world. I especially find this train of thinking in the push for classical
education, and so many Christian homeschoolers have jumped on that train,
convinced that it’s “biblical”. I don’t
know to what extent those who join in are aware or even buying into this kind
of thinking, but if their churches are run this way, who is going to discern
that this isn’t a good thing?
It’s one thing to train
our children to understand our world and how to think about it biblically, but
to believe that training them in rhetoric, debate, and logic will somehow make
them better witnesses for Christ is nonsense. We cannot “win” people to Christ
by human means of persuasion.
I have a whole lot more to
say about the topic of “Christian education”, but that will have to be for
another post. Onward.
So, what drives us? Are we
obedience driven or results driven? Are we more concerned about clearly giving
our Master’s message to people regardless of response, or getting people to
make decisions for Christ?
What is our method?
Obedience or pragmatism? Are we orators or heralds? Are we engaged in persuasion
or proclamation?
“…but God
has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has
chosen the weak things of the world to shame the strong…so that no man may
boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who
became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and
redemption, so that, just as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts, boast in the
Lord.’”
1
Corinthians 1:27, 29-31
Links:
Embracing the Foolishness, Part 1 https://vimeo.com/387303327
Embracing the Foolishness, Part 2 https://vimeo.com/387453108
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