Spurgeon on the Amusement-Driven Church

As a young Christian I remember stumbling across this statement by Charles Spurgeon on how entertainment and amusement are not part of the tools of Christ’s mission for the Church in the world. The 21st Century church in America desperately needs to hear this. Spurgeon wrote:

An evil is in the professed camp of the Lord, so gross in its impudence, that the most shortsighted Christian can hardly fail to notice it. During the past few years this evil has developed at an alarming rate. It has worked like leaven until the whole lump ferments!

The devil has seldom done a more clever thing, than hinting to the Church that part of their mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them. From speaking out the gospel, the Church has gradually toned down her testimony, then winked at and excused the frivolities of the day. Then she tolerated them in her borders. Now she has adopted them under the plea of reaching the masses!

My first contention is that providing amusement for the people is nowhere spoken of in the Scriptures as a function of the Church. If it is a Christian work why did not Christ speak of it? “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, and provide amusement for those who do not relish the gospel.” No such words, however, are to be found.

Again, providing amusement is in direct antagonism to the teaching and life of Christ and all His apostles. What was the attitude of the apostolic Church to the world? “You are the salt of the world,” not the sugar candy; something the world will spit out, not swallow.  Continue at Nicholas T. Batzig

Sheep, Goats, and the Mission of the Church

Can't give you a sermon manuscript---I'm working on my own!---but here's how I think through the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25.

1.  I think your first impression is correct.  I think that when Jesus refers to "the least of these" in 45, that's the same group referenced in 40 when he says "the least of these my brothers."  There are two crucial things to consider here--the meaning of "the least" and the meaning of "brothers."  On "the least," elachistos, it's not quite true that it's not used of disciples anywhere else.  Jesus uses it in Matthew 5:19 to refer to those who will be called "least in the kingdom of heaven."  Paul uses it to refer to himself in 1 Corinthians 15:9 as "the least" of the apostles and in Ephesians 3:8 as "the least of all the saints."  Maybe even more to the point, other than those instances, I don't see any other places where the word is used of humans at all.  Maybe I'm missing something, but there certainly don't seem to be lots of places where elaxistos is used of non-disciples!

Besides that, elaxistos, "least," is just the superlative of mikros, "little."  And Jesus uses that quite a lot to refer to his followers.  Matthew 10:42, for example, says, "Whoever gives one of these little ones a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will be no means lose his reward."  You could look also at Matthew 18:6, 10, and 14.

Which brings up Matthew 18:5.  That's not talking about the needy, I don't think.  It may be talking about the child who's sitting on Jesus' lap; I think it's even more likely that it's talking about disciples who are like that child.  After all, Jesus has already made that metaphorical pivot in verse 4 from the child himself to those who must be like that child, and then in verse 6 he actually brings it home by talking about "one of these little ones who believe in me."  Keep Reading >>>

We Do Not Preach Ourselves

Two weeks ago, we looked at 2 Corinthians 4:3 and considered what it had to teach us concerning the nature of Gospel ministry. The conclusion to that post was that the purpose of Gospel ministry was not to amuse the goats, but to call the sheep. Last week, we moved onto verse 4 and discovered the world’s problem: they are blind to the glory of Christ. Therefore, the Church’s mission is to solve that problem. If we’re doing something that won’t solve that problem, we need to stop.

The question is, then, what solves that problem? How can the Church be instrumental in the opening of blind eyes? Well, Paul gets to that in verse 5. Just as we must know the purpose and the problem of Gospel ministry, we must also know the proclamation.

For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants for Jesus’ sake.

– 2 Corinthians 4:5 –

What does it mean to “not preach ourselves?” It means that we don’t put ourselves—the messengers—forward as the appeal to unbelievers in our ministry. We don’t make our methodology or our style the draw. We don’t appeal to that which is fleshly or worldly in the unbeliever in order to attract and compel their participation. Instead, we do everything we can to get ourselves out of the way so as to be merely incidental—merely the finger that points to the substance, to the content of the message: that Jesus Christ is Lord.

1 Corinthians 2:1-5 really sheds light on what it means for Paul that he not be preaching himself. He says... Keep Reading >>>

Amusing the Goats or Calling the Sheep?

Mike Riccardi oversees the membership process at Grace Community Church in Los Angeles. I dont know him personally at all but I loved all he had to say in this article below. 

I believe it will be especially encouraging to Pastors in revealing our most important task in Christian ministry. I recommend it highly:

“And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.” – 2 Corinthians 4:3

 

In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes primarily to defend his own apostleship against certain men whom he later dubbed false apostles (2 Cor 11:13). These men were teaching that Paul was not a true apostle, and were advancing many attacks against both his character and his ministry, to the point that the Corinthians began to doubt Paul, and thus doubt the gospel he preached.

For example, these false apostles accused him of being under God’s judgment because of his constant sufferings. The thought was that if Paul was really sent from Christ he wouldn’t have such opposition and turmoil, but rather that God would bless him. And so in 2 Cor 1:3-11 Paul defends himself by saying that his sufferings for the Gospel are actually a mark of God’s favor. Far from discrediting him as an apostle, sufferings are a badge of his authenticity as a minister of Christ. They also accused him of vacillating, and “purposing according to the flesh” (2 Cor 1:17) because he had changed his plans about coming to Corinth. And so in 2Cor 1:15-22 he defends himself by saying his word to the Corinthians is not yes and no, but yes, just as all God’s promises are yes in Christ. Another accusation was that he was uncredentialed—a sort of Johnny-come-lately apostle, not part of the original twelve. And so in 2 Cor 3:2 he asks the Corinthians, “Do we need letters of commendation to you? You are our letter of commendation. The fact that you now know Christ because of the Gospel we preached to you is evidence of our authenticity.”     Keep Reading...

Goat Membership for More Buck

Kevin DeYoung wrote the following letter to a colleague who was thinking of establishing two sets of memberships in his church, one for believers and another for unbelievers.

While Scripture tells us that external membership to the church is validated by public profession of faith in Christ, pressure to rake up the numbers has prompted many to accept as bona fide members those who do not even make the slightest hint that they have been acted upon by the Spirit through a faith that expresses itself in confession (Rom. 10:9), thereby deconstructing beyond recognition what it means to be a part of God's covenant people.This letter is really addressed to many who are contemplating the leap to liberalism, in an attempt to dissuade them from the path of unfaithfulness to their calling: Keep Reading...

Two Cents, and Not a Penny More, on Love Wins.

I have  mixed feelings about putting this post up, mostly because I don't think very much else needs to be said about Rob Bell's book Love Wins.  If you haven't seen Martin Bashir's interview with him on MSNBC, you need to.  It tells you everything you need to know about the book and Bell's approach to these issues:  He clearly has about six highly-crafted and exquisitely ambiguous things to say, and is doggedly determined to avoid---at all cost---giving straight answers to any questions about what he really believes.  Bashir calls him out on it, and it's a service to the church and the world that he does.

Several friends have already done a great job of reviewing the entire book.  Both Tim Challies's and Kevin DeYoung's reviews are helpful pieces of work.  So this isn't going to be a full review.  That said, I do think it might be useful to point out a couple of details that I haven't seen talked about much, and that Bell simply got flat wrong.  You know the old quip about lawyers?  "Always confident, sometimes right."  That's an almost perfect description of Bell in Love Wins; he writes with amazing confidence about certain facts (word meanings, Jewish backgrounds, historical issues), and yet if you just pick up a dictionary or google a quote, you realize that what he's saying is simply wrong.  Pointing these things out isn't just a matter of "picking on" Bell, either.  It's a matter of doing our best to make sure little errors don't become part of our atmosphere.  Otherwise,  before we know it we'll have people in our churches saying, as if everybody knows it already, that Luther was a universalist and that the Bible doesn't have a concept of "forever."  So in the interest of preventing that, here are just a handful of the things that Bell gets flat wrong in his book. Keep Reading>>>

Bible Illiteracy, Unbelief, and Goats in the Sheep Pen

Feeding Sheep or Amusing Goats (C.H. Spurgeon)

HT: Symphony of Scripture