Mild Christianity - Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. You can have five Bibles. You can put one in every room in your house.

You could rub it for good luck as you walk by. But that won't make you right with God. You see, that's not the way it is. You can have books on every kind of Christian issue. You can have tapes just filling up your car, listening.

But that in of itself will not make a difference in your life. Because holiness is not transferable. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana. Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. Seven years ago, author named Chad Walsh wrote a book called Early Christians in the 21st Century. And he concluded his evaluation of 21st century Christians this way. Millions of Christians live in a sentimental haze, a vague piety with soft organ music and lovely light of stained glass windows. The religion is a pleasant thing, an emotional quiver, divorced from the intellect, divorced from the will and demanding little except lip service to a few harmless platitudes.

I suspect, he writes, that Satan has called off his attempt to convert people to agnosticism. After all, if a man travels far enough away from Christianity, he is always in danger of seeing it in its proper perspective and deciding that it might be true. It is much safer from Satan's point of view to vaccinate a man with a mild case of Christianity so as to protect him from the real disease.

That's my first question for you this morning. Have you been vaccinated with a mild case of Christianity? You see, I think we're always more satisfied with a far less commitment to God than God will accept from us. And so therefore, God always sends messengers to people to challenge him and to confront their attitude. The messenger he sends this day to us is Haggai.

Would you open your Bibles to Haggai chapter two? Haggai said he was a post-exilic prophet. All that meant was that after Israel had come back into the land, actually Judah, as they came back into the land after being for 70 years in captivity, they were to get about doing the Lord's business. Now you would have thought, considering they were delivered by God after 70 years, most of them born in captivity, you would have thought that they couldn't wait to get about God's business. But much like us, they began to waver on that idea. They got back into the land, but instead of building the temple, they took the paneling from the cedars of Lebanon and began to panel their houses. And 17 years went by and the Lord's temple will just lay fallow. And so the Lord sent Haggai and this prophet had four messages to the people of Israel.

These four messages occur from late August, September to December. And each of them he is trying to challenge them. In the first message, he challenged their apathy. And they had become apathetic to the spiritual things of God.

Such an easy thing to have happen, especially when you become preoccupied with your own life. Then last week, he dealt with discouragement. And they had become discouraged because they had that kind of discouragement that I would call comparative discouragement.

You know what it's like. It's when you compare what you have in life with what somebody else has. They compared this temple versus Solomon's temple. We compare other things. We compare someone else's job to our job. Someone else's marriage to our marriage. Someone else's house to our house. Someone else's clothes to our clothes.

Someone else's friends to our friends. And then we get discouraged. And so the warning here by Haggai is not to be discouraged through comparison. And now we come to the third and fourth message, which we'll handle together from verse 10 of chapter two to the end of this short book. He has one more warning for the people. And he is concerned about them. You see, as I read this little book, I'm trying to read between the lines.

And by now it's been three months. And as Haggai keeps looking at the people, he keeps thinking something's wrong. Yeah, they're going about building the temple, but there's just something wrong with these people. The vibrancy of their spiritual life is missing. And actually, what has happened, according to at least this message, is they've been vaccinated with a mild case of faith.

It's the same today. When you know Christians and look at them, something's wrong. If you have unhappy, joyless Christians, something's wrong. If you have Christians that are full of worry and anxiety, something's wrong. If you have Christians that are bitter and angry almost about everything, something's wrong. If you have unloving and selfish Christians, something's wrong. If you have greedy and unethical Christians, something's wrong. And if you have apathetic and indifferent Christians, something's wrong.

And what probably is wrong is they have been immunized against the real disease. And they have mild Christianity disorder. And there are many, and I almost hate to say if not most, in the Church of Jesus Christ who suffer from this.

By the way, it's very easy to get a mild case of Christianity. Notice in verse 10, On the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month, the second year of Darius, the word of the Lord came to Haggai the prophet, saying, Thus says the Lord of hosts, Ask now the priests for a rolling. And again, I love the humor of the Bible, but in my opinion, this is humorous. Everybody in Israel and Judah would kind of know what he's going to ask.

It's a pretty obvious thing. But he says, let's ask the priests. Because he wants the people to understand that the way they feel is not consistent with God's revelation.

He asked this question. If a man carries holy meat in the fold of his garment and he touches bread with his fold, cooked food, wine, oil or any other food. Will it become holy?

The priest probably think my chances, but no. See, in Leviticus, Chapter six, when the priest transferred what was sacrificed, he could take what was sacrificed and he could take the meat. He could put it in a fold of his garment.

He could fold it up and hold it in his hand. His garment was considered holy. Now, the reason that his garment was considered holy is that he was touching. It was touching the sacrifice. The question was, if you just took the garment and began to touch things with it, would that make them holy? And the answer, of course, is no. It won't.

You see the application. You can't become spiritual by touching spiritual things. You don't become a victorious Christian by hanging out with just other victorious Christians and you get it by osmosis.

That doesn't work. Holiness is not transferable that way. When I was at Dallas Theological Seminary, I actually in the beginning was probably naive enough to think that once I was there, I was going to really be holy. I mean, I was going to a holy place and I figured the professors are all holy men and then all the students are like holy guys. I mean, they're giving their holy life for a holy God to the holy church.

And then I met him and it wasn't that way. Some of the most incredible believers I have ever met in my life at that institution. But there are others who are not. There were faculty members who walked close to God and there were faculty members who did not. There were students who walked close to God and students who were spiritual frauds. Because you don't get holiness. By just touching someone else who is holy, you only become holy. By touching the sacrifice.

For us, the sacrifice is Jesus Christ. You see, it's only in your contact with Jesus Christ that will make a difference in your life and change it. Now you could say, no, I have Christian friends. My parents are committed Christians. That won't help you at all. I go to a Bible church.

They teach the Bible there. That won't help. You can have five Bibles. You can put one in every room in your house.

You could rub it for good luck as you walk by. But that won't make you right with God. You see, that's not the way it is. You could have books on every kind of Christian issue.

You could have tapes just filling up your car, listening. But that in of itself will not make a difference in your life. Because holiness is not transferable. It only comes about when you touch the sacrifice.

There's a second point he makes in the next verse. Then Haggai. If one who is unclean from a corpse touches any of these, will the latter become unclean? The priest answered and said, it will become unclean. Now what he's referring to is if I were a priest and I went and I touched a corpse, that would make me unclean. But then if I walk down and I touch Brad, now he's unclean. Now if he starts touching every one of you, you're all unclean.

That works. Kind of just the opposite. Application of that.

Sin is much more transferable than holiness. We kind of know that, don't we? We have all kinds of idioms and proverbs. One bad apple does what?

Yeah. And by the way, it'll work that way. Get a bad apple. Get a basket of good apples. Get a really rotten one. Stick it right in the middle and cover it up.

See what happens. I mean, that's the way it goes. The scripture says a little leaven does what?

Leavens the whole lump. Remember Israel? Remember back in Joshua with Achan? Hit something in his tent, made it unclean, said everything will be okay. No, it wasn't. Did God just judge Achan? No, he didn't. He judged them all.

Sin has a tendency to be really transferable. And by the way, we know that. Parents of teenagers, you know that more than anybody. You call it the peer group. Don't you have just terror about the peer group? The peer group.

I always love this when I talk to parents whose kids are always in trouble. This is what they say. He or she is in with the wrong crowd. Yeah, they're in with the wrong crowd.

But understand this. If I talk to their parents, that's right, their kids are in with the wrong crowd. That's your kid that's in the wrong crowd. I have yet to talk to a parent that said, my kid is the wrong crowd. He's the captain of the wrong crowds.

He makes everyone around him wrong. No one says that. That's not the way it works. But there's truth to it. Sin has a way of being transferable.

It's like in a natural law, as a second law of thermodynamics, everything is coming down, everything is degrading, everything falls apart in a fallen universe, in a fallen creation. It takes a century to grow an oak tree. You can take it down in five minutes. It takes a lifetime to build a reputation of integrity. And you can lose it all in one afternoon. That's a fact of life.

You notice that? Weeds are easier to grow than flowers. Can you just imagine that? What you want to do this year is just go out and just take all your landscape and just put weeds in there. And then in the summer, when it really gets hot, watch the flowers come in and take over.

See, that's funny because it doesn't happen that way, does it? You put those flowers in there, you better be committed to them. You better take care of them. You better nurture them. You better feed them.

And you better get the weeds out. Because that's the way life is, and that's what Haggai is trying to say. Notice the ramifications. He says, then, verse 14, then Haggai answered and said, so is this people, and so is this nation before me. And so is every work of their hands, and what they offer there is unclean. That's from God's perspective. God says, I don't care if you're sons of Abraham. I don't care if you've been delivered from Babylon. I don't care if you're working on the temple of God. Everything you do and everything you offer me, from my point of view, is unclean.

Why? Because you only have a mild case of believism. Your heart is far from me. You're thinking more about your own home than you are about me.

It's exactly the kinds of things that you see today. You see, if you're a Christian who is unhappy and joyless, if you're a Christian who's full of worry and anxiety, anger and bitter, unloving and selfish, greedy, unethical, apathetic and indifferent, and you think that every time you show up on a Sunday and you offer up to God your worship, that he goes, I am so impressed you came. He's not. Unless your heart is right. He says, please don't be vaccinated with a mild case of Christianity. It is not something God will accept. It is not something God will wink at and let go by.

If you belong to God like Israel belongs to God, he will deal with you. That's the side effects that he goes on and describes. Notice verse 15. He says, but now do consider from this day onward before one stone was placed on another in the temple of the Lord. At a time when one came to a grain heap of 20 measures, he says there would be only 10. And when one came to the wine vat to draw 50 measures, there would be only 20. I smote you and every work of your hands with a blasting wind, mildew and hell, and yet you did not come back to me.

What are the side effects? How do you know you've been vaccinated with a mild case of Christianity? Look at this. You have low spiritual resources.

You'll know it. You have low spiritual resources. Israel was a nation, and in order for that nation to overcome the difficult times, times of war, times of drought, what they did is they took their excesses and they put it in the barns or they put it in the vats. And so when the hard times came, they would go into the resources.

They would tap into the resources. And we say it in the principle, they saved for the rainy day. And so did spiritually in your own life. You see, do you have low spiritual resources when the drought comes, when the storms come up, the storms of life, when the difficulties come, when the thunder rumbles and the lightning strikes?

How do you do? You see, instead of having 50 measures, do you have only 20? Instead of having 20, do you only have only 10? And what you find is you just panic in the situation because there's no deep spiritual resource within you to grab onto this. If that's the case in your life, there's a good chance you've been vaccinated with a mild case of Christianity. And it's a sad thing to see because a part of it is, is that drought and storms hit all of us. That makes us so sad as a pastor because I know what's going to happen eventually in your life.

It's going to hit. And if that barn is empty, it's empty. And all those resources you should be able to cling to and grab are gone. And that's why God said, I want you to come back.

And you did not. Notice verse 17 says something a little different. You have low spiritual resources in verse 16 and 17. He says, you never seem to make much spiritual progress.

I smote you in every work of your hands, blasting wind, mildew and hail, and yet you did not come back. For some of us, we never seem to make any spiritual progress. Where we were last year is where we are this year. Where we were five years ago is where we are now. Where we were 10 years ago, we're still there. It seems as though instead of moving on, we're not moving. We're just sort of sitting still.

Do you feel like that? Notice I'm not talking about what you do either. I'm not talking about how often you're in church, whether you lead Bibles. I'm not talking about any of that kind of stuff. What I'm talking about is when push comes to shove and it does hit the fan, where are you?

What's going on in your life? Do you tap into the Lord right then? Does it have meaning and purpose, or do you find yourself spiritually bankrupt because you don't have anything to offer?

You see, that's a side effect of being vaccinated with mild Christianity disorder. In verse 19, he says, Is the seed still in the barn? Even including the vine, the fig tree, the pomegranate and the olive tree, it has not borne fruit. To understand this, you have to understand the culture and the month. This is the month of Chizlu. This is the month of what they call the early rain. This is the month that you wait for, that when it rains in Israel, you now plant the seeds so that you can have a harvest in the summer, in late summer. He says to them, Where's your seed?

Is it still in the barn? You see, one of the side effects is not only do you have low spiritual resources, you never seem to make spiritual progress, but God is withholding blessing. He's withholding the rain.

You see, that's an amazing and sobering thought, isn't it? But he does. Now, he does it for a purpose. Notice, he says, It has not borne fruit because, he said before, you have not yet come back to me. But God withholds the rain. He's withholding rain in your life. Is your life sort of two steps forward, three steps back? It's kind of the way it's going. If it is and you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you really have to examine yourself.

Do I have this mild case? And am I reaping what I've sown? Because you cannot sow apathy and indifference with God Almighty and reap blessing.

It will not happen. And he's consistent about that in the Old and the New Testament. The good thing is there's a cure to it. And it's here in these passages.

And in order to be cured, it simply takes a backward look and a forward hope. That's what God says. In other words, I have to look back to what I have sown and forward to what God can do. That's what I need to do.

And that's what he's asked him to do. Notice verse 15. But now do consider. Verse 18. Do consider. The end of verse 18.

Consider. Now, I'm not a prophet nor the son of one, but my thought here is if God says it three times, I don't think he stutters. I think it's important. It's sort of like Jesus saying, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. I think he knew who had ears and most of people did. But what he meant was this is something to emphasize. And when he says here, consider, consider, consider. It's exactly what he said in Chapter one, verse five. Consider your ways. Verse seven, consider your ways. What he wants you to do is say, Assess your life.

Assess it. Look back on your life. When the worst times came, were you a spiritual fortress? Or were you a sandcastle? You see, what happened in those darkest times?

Were you able to rely on and tap into the resources of God or were you not? You see, that's what he's saying. And if you have, this is built into the whole biblical doctrine of repentance. Consider your ways as this saying, Assess your life. Change your mind.

Flip directions. That's what he's saying. A Sunday school teacher asked a class of fourth graders, what does repentance mean? A little boy put up his hand and said, repentance means being sorry for your sins.

And a little girl who always liked to correct him in class raised her hand and said, it's being sorry enough to quit. Neither one of them are exactly theologically online, but she makes a really good point. What it requires is a change in the human being. Hold your place here and go with me to First John chapter one and sort of get a New Testament view of the same idea that Haggai is speaking of. First John chapter one, right at the end of the Bible. John says in verse five, and this is the message that we, the apostles, have heard from him. That is Jesus Christ. And we announce to you, God is light and in him is no darkness at all.

What does that mean? It means exactly what we were singing all morning. And we sing holy, holy, holy is the Lord. God is light.

In him is no darkness at all. Holy is not a word that should scare us. In fact, it's not really a holy word.

It's not being it's not about some kind of deep, mystical, religious thing. Holy simply means set apart. Holy means set apart. God is set apart from everything. Is there anything like God?

No. He is, as some say, holy other. That's what it means. God is holy. When we say holy, holy, holy, what we're singing is there is none like you.

There are no other gods like you. You are set apart. When he tells us that Israel is to be a holy nation, it means it's to be set apart by God to be his people. There's a holy temple. That temple is set apart to worship God. We are a holy people. We are being set apart by God. And so when God says in Leviticus and in Peter, Be ye holy, for I am holy. He means live and act differently.

Be set apart. That's what Christianity is all about. At that Web site, you will find not only today's broadcast, but also many of our previous audio programs as well. At Fellowship in the Word, we are thankful for those who financially support our ministry and make this broadcast possible. We ask all of our listeners to prayerfully consider how you might help this radio ministry continue its broadcast on this radio station by supporting us monthly or with just a one time gift. Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word, 4600 Clearview Parkway, Metairie, Louisiana 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our Web site, fbcnola.org.

That's fbcnola.org. At our Web site, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our Web site is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word.