There's a right way, there's a wrong way. There's a right interpretation of a passage and every other interpretation is the wrong one. There's a right theology and anything that disagrees with it is a wrong theology.
There's a right way to understand God, Christ, the Holy Spirit and salvation and a wrong way. Picture this, you're piloting an airplane solo when you suffer a stroke. You don't lose consciousness, but the stroke puts pressure on your optic nerves and renders you completely blind at 15,000 feet.
You can't see your instruments and worse, you can't see the runway to make a landing. Well, that is exactly what happened to Jim O'Neill, a businessman from England, but there's a happy ending. He managed to land the plane safely thanks to the heroic intervention of another pilot who flew next to him, radioing precise spoken directions and guiding this blind pilot safely to the ground. Well, like that disabled pilot, many churches are in effect flying blind today, unable to distinguish truth from error. But that doesn't have to be the case.
In fact, there's help at your side. It's called discernment and today John MacArthur continues making a plea for discernment. That's the title of his current study and now here's today's lesson. Discernment is critical in the life of the church. Knowing sound doctrine is essential in the life of the church. Sound doctrine, Paul said to Timothy, is to be preached, it is to be guarded, it is to be kept as a treasure and passed on to the next generation. Now we said last time that there is a lack of discernment in the evangelical world today and I gave you the first reason. You remember what it was? Lack of doctrinal clarity and conviction...lack of doctrinal clarity and conviction. That's pretty obvious.
We just don't have that. I remember being on a talk show with a woman, it was a Christian talk show in a major city, a big station, and we were talking and it was obvious that she was a host of this Christian talk show. People called up with their questions about their spiritual life and it was more like Christian counseling than Bible questions. But anyway, she was the answer lady and she said to me in the middle of this discussion off the air, she said, you know, there's a word that a lot of people use, it's the word sanctification. What does that mean?
What does that mean? And so I explained to her a little bit about that and after another half an hour or so, we went off the air for a commercial and I said to her, I said, how did you become a Christian? Trying to figure out if she was, but I said, how did you become a Christian? She said, oh, it was really cool.
One day I got Jesus' phone number and we've been connected ever since. That's what she said. And I guess I had a startled look on my face. I was so stunned by that and she looked a little surprised and I said, what does that mean?
What do you mean you got Jesus' phone number and you've been connected ever since? She said, well, what do you mean what do I mean? That's about as far as she could go. She said, if somebody asked you why you were a Christian, what would you say? And I said, I'm glad you asked. So I explained to her the gospel.
And at the end of that, and I put this in the book, at the end of that she said to me, oh, come on, you don't have to go through all of that, do you, to become a Christian. This is the Christian answer lady on the radio. We have a serious problem when we don't know sound doctrine, when sound doctrine is offensive.
Let me give you a second reason. This is just kind of an assessment of why we have the problem we have. One is that the lack of doctrinal clarity and conviction is followed by a failure to be antithetical, get a little bit philosophical there for a minute, a failure to be antithetical. To put it another way, an unwillingness to disagree, to disagree. There has to be constant and healthy and serious debate about truth in the church. When you decide that debate is divisive, disagreement is intolerable because everybody's got a right to his own opinion, the church will die.
That's true. It's essential to be antithetical. It's essential to be willing to say that's wrong and that's right.
This is antithesis. We have now this sort of politically correct, kind of a smarmy, sentimental relativism that prevails in the church that doesn't want to disagree. Nobody's really right and nobody's really wrong.
Nothing is really true and nothing is really false. Whatever you feel is to be accepted because you by your own intuition have a right to come to whatever spiritual conclusions you want to come to. That's just deadly to the life of the church. Everything is subjective, biblical preaching is not relevant today because it's too definitive, it's too offensive, it's too sharp, it's too black and white, it's too absolute. But if you look at Scripture, it presents truth and error, God's way and everybody else's way.
There's a right way, there's a wrong way. There's a right interpretation of a passage and every other interpretation is the wrong one. There's a right theology and anything that disagrees with it is a wrong theology. There is a right way to understand God, Christ, the Holy Spirit and salvation and a wrong way. This is on every page of the Bible, from the beginning to the end of Scripture, this antithetical kind of thinking is everywhere, everywhere, teaching people to go through life with an understanding of thesis and antithesis.
Today all of a sudden this is just gone. Anybody's sort of able to do whatever they want. No longer are we trying to distinguish God's way from every other way. I remember one time when I was asked if I would become the head of a Christian school and of another Christian college or university and the people who were talking to me said, you know, here's our objective, we want to integrate the Scripture with the wisdom of the world. We're committed to syncretism and integration. I say, well, I think we have a profound difference then. What I want to do is distinguish the truth of God from the wisdom of the world. I'm into separation.
You're into integration. That is a profound and substantial philosophical difference. I want to make sure in whatever education I'm involved in that people understand God's truth separate from any pollution by the thinking of man. And then that truth of God sits in judgment on all human wisdom.
Great difference in those two mentalities. If, as James 1.27 says, you're going to keep yourself unspotted from the world, if you're going to distinguish the wisdom that is from above from the wisdom that is from beneath, you have to maintain clear understanding of biblical truth. Discernment will only thrive when you understand that there is antithesis and thesis, there is black and white, there is true and false, there is right and wrong and you not only have a responsibility to proclaim the right, but to expose the wrong.
That's part of our responsibility as guardians of the truth. There's a third cause of the lack of discernment that I'll just bring before you. And I don't know exactly how to frame it, but the third cause is a preoccupation with image and influence as a key to evangelization. This is a big issue and I don't want to get too...I don't want to get too involved in this.
I could, but I'll try to resist it. The idea is that the church somehow is more effective in evangelism if it can create an environment that somehow embraces unbelievers. This is where all the user-friendly, seeker-friendly church movement comes from. But the idea is that effective evangelism is a product of influence, making people sort of feel good about the church, making people feel good about Christianity and Christians. And so obviously then you can't confront them with truth, you can't confront them boldly with truth, you can't confront their sin, you can't confront their error, you can't call them to repentance because that doesn't make them feel good, that offends them.
So the idea is let's get all the offenses out. Anything that we think is a negative influence, we redefine the church, reinvent the church, stripped of anything that anybody might feel is somehow offensive or...listen to this...even different. Hymns are different.
The world doesn't identify with those. Sermons, the world doesn't identify with those. That's why George Barna says the only hope for the church in the future is to get rid of preachers. Because people don't identify with preaching, people don't identify with old hymns, they don't identify with church music, they don't identify with pastoral prayers, they don't identify with the Lord's table and communion, they don't identify with baptism. That isn't something they're familiar with, that's not sort of user-friendly, so we just wipe it all out even though that's what the New Testament defines as the life of the church. And the illusion is that somehow we're going to be able to influence them into Christianity by cutting out everything that's offensive to them, reinventing the church so that the church is just another form of entertainment with a little psychology sort of stuck in there to boost their self-esteem, and then we sort of subtly sneak in a minimalist kind of gospel.
This is a myth. The idea that anybody gets saved because of somebody else's influence is really false. The only reason people get saved is because they hear and believe the gospel. I'm not saying you shouldn't live a life that demonstrates the power of Christ, you should.
I'm not saying that people don't see your life and glorify your Father who is in heaven because the Bible says they do. The real influence is the influence of a godly life, but that's not enough until they hear the truth. It's not the style of our music that gets people converted. It's not because of the entertainment level that they enjoy that gets them converted sooner or later. You've got to get down to confronting them with the message, and my judgment sooner is better than later.
So what are we waiting for? Let's just get them to hear the message. That's how they're going to be saved. Take out the preaching of sin, take out the preaching of hell, take out repentance, take out the cross, and then people will feel comfortable.
That's the new trend. Build an image of love, care, being nice, and if everybody's nice, they like us, they might like Jesus. That is tragically not the case. When Jesus came preaching, He came preaching repentance. They hated Him for it, they sought to kill Him, and eventually they executed Him. They did the same to all the apostles. They've been doing it to the faithful preachers throughout all of the history of the church. There's only three possible reactions to the gospel.
One would be indifference, the other would be faith, and the other would be hostility. You have to live with the reality of that. So the church has had this illusion somehow that we can wipe out everything that offends and somehow influence people to be saved in an inoffensive way.
Eventually you've got to get to the offense. You might as well start there because until they're offended about their own sins and their violation of the holiness of God, they aren't going to come penitently to the Savior. Well, there are a lot of other things we could say about that.
Let me give you just a fourth thing to think about if you're making a little list. Another reason we have a lack of discernment is because of a failure to properly interpret Scripture. This kind of follows along, a failure to properly interpret Scripture.
This is like running fingernails down the blackboard for me when I hear somebody speak who misinterprets Scripture. The meaning of the Scripture is the Scripture. The meaning of the Scripture is the Scripture. If you don't have the meaning, you don't have the Scripture. So if you misinterpret the Scripture, that's not the Scripture. Don't say God said and then misinterpret Scripture. If you're going to say God said, then you have to interpret it correctly. And yet today there's very little interest in careful, biblical interpretation. I was reading about a guy named Bill Hamon, H-a-m-o-n, and he is a minister, preacher, evangelist, Bible teacher, and he says this, he advises people to ignore reason, ignore logic, ignore common sense when attempting to bear witness with accuracy to the Scripture.
How are you going to accurately interpret the Bible without your mind, without your reason? In fact, he says the Spirit will help you interpret Scripture by giving you strong sensations in your upper abdominal area. When you get a message of no in your upper abdominal area, or be careful, or something's not right, it will manifest itself in a nervous, jumpy, uneasy feeling. And there is that Holy Spirit witness that there's a deep, unintelligible message that something's wrong. On the other hand, he says, when God's Spirit is bearing witness with our spirit that the interpretation is correct, then our upper abdominal area reacts with an unexplainable peace and joy and a warm feeling. Well here's a quote, in other words, ignore your mind, forget your beliefs, disregard your theology and common sense and wait for the sensation in your upper abdominal area.
Say that's wacky, of course it's wacky. This kind of subjectivism is frightening...frightening. Paul says in 2 Timothy, he preached the Word and then he says, continue in the things you've learned from me, the things you've learned from me, give to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. You know those passages. As a person who teaches the Word of God, my passion is to make sure that I'm consistent with the men of the past.
In other words, when I want to know whether I'm right, I don't wait for some upper abdominal feeling. If I want to know whether I'm right, I'll go back and read somebody in the past who had illumination, who had a God-blessed great ministry. I may go all the way back to the Reformers. I may go back and read John Calvin. I may go back and read the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards or John Owen. If I have any question about whether I'm right in the interpretation of Scripture, inevitably I go backwards. I don't look for a contemporary writer. I don't go to the bookstore and say, you know, do you have any new books, you know, on contemporary Christian psychology or some popular Christian book? I certainly don't look for fiction. If I want to test my interpretation of Scripture, invariably I go backwards to those in the past who are the noble, proven interpreters of Scripture whose books are still in print because they have stood the test of time and the scrutiny of scholarship. And I go back to make sure that I'm not inventing something.
I just want to take the baton from somebody. I want to interpret the Word of God the way it's always been interpreted and I want to be faithful to those in the past who were led by the Spirit of God who understand the Word of God. In fact, I'm far more drawn to past literature than I am to present literature. You could put all of the books from the last five years in my office on one shelf and all the rest of the, say, four or five thousand books there are from the past because there is a continuity of the work of the Spirit of God and the preservation of the truth and I want to remain in that continuity. One of the things that frightens me greatly about contemporary preaching, it frightens me greatly is this idea that you cut off from the past completely.
Writers today want to invent their own style. They want to give their own message, do their own insights. They have very little, if any, interest in the past. They don't read the great theologians and the great commentators of the past.
They don't expose themselves to that. It is a level of egotism that frankly is frightening to me. To all of a sudden pop onto the scene and say, forget the past, forget the theology of the past, forget the great writers of the past, this is my cool insight. That is frightening egotism, scary. You go into a...hear these people preach, just give you all their own little insights. That's scary. I want to be in the great tradition of those who pass the truth on down from generation to generation to generation, so pardon me if I include in my little book Jonathan Edwards.
But I'm very glad to stand exactly where Jonathan Edwards stood and proclaim the same truth that concerned him in his day. You have in contemporary evangelicalism today a stylizing of preaching, a stylizing that has literally cut off the church from its heritage. And they wipe out the hymns. We don't want any hymns in here.
Nobody likes hymns. Listen, there's a reason that hymns last and I'll tell you what it is. They were written by men who knew theology and the bad hymns disappear over the centuries. The hymns that convey the profound realities of theology hammered out through the centuries, those hymns last. And those hymns are a phenomenal legacy to the church because they convey that theology. But the contemporary idea is, whack off the past, whack it off, we're an island and we'll reinvent the church, we'll reinvent teaching, we'll reinvent Bible interpretation. We don't need the past, we don't need its hymnology, we don't need its theology, we don't need its commentaries, interpretations, that's frightening. And what you have is inept and inadequate and non-historic interpretation of Scripture if in fact you have any interpretation of Scripture at all. We have one job as preachers and that is to tell people what God meant by what He said. That's it.
My whole life is about one book and only one book and that's it. What does God mean in this book? That's it. That's ministry.
Nothing more and nothing less. To declare the whole counsel of God, that's my responsibility. So when you think about the whole issue of discernment, you have to realize that discernment cannot survive in an environment where doctrine doesn't matter. Discernment cannot survive in an environment where people refuse to be polemical, where they refuse to debate or argue or test things or disagree or say something's wrong. Discernment cannot survive in an environment where everybody's concerned about somehow wiping out all that offends and discernment cannot survive in an environment where there is virtually no interest in maintaining the great truth that has been passed down from generation to generation through a careful, thoughtful, scholarly, faithful interpretation of Scripture. The future of the church is going to depend upon discerning leadership.
I tell you, it's sad. You can look at some of the biggest Christian organizations in the world and they are led by people who have influence and power but have no real ability to rightly divide Scripture. And they are the power brokers in evangelicalism that define evangelicalism in its broadest definitions. So we have to get back to preaching the Word, to rightly dividing. Turn to 2 Timothy for just a minute, one other verse and I'll quit. But in 2 Timothy chapter 2, be diligent, verse 15, present yourselves, prove to God as a workman, a craftsman who doesn't need to be ashamed. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be ashamed of my ministry.
I don't want to be ashamed of my life. So if I'm going to present my ministry to God to be approved so that I'm not ashamed of it, I have to handle accurately the Word of truth. I mean, how clear is that? It's got to be handled accurately.
That's where it starts. You interpret it accurately, you proclaim it boldly. You proclaim it on a positive level, exhorting. You proclaim it on a negative level, confronting and refuting error. And you stay away, verse 16, you stay away from this worldly, empty talk that leads to further ungodliness, this kind of talk that spreads like gangrene.
Gangrene is not a good thing, it destroys. Just like Hymenaeus and Philetus with their gangrenous chatter about nothing, men who went astray from the truth upset the faith of people. Failing to interpret Scripture accurately and carefully and precisely, being preoccupied with worldly influence and image, failing to be antithetical, black and white, about issues of truth, disdaining clarity and conviction in doctrine leads to a serious onslaught on discernment. Just one other thing to mention, the final point in the little points I want to give you is a failure to discipline in the church, a failure to discipline in the church.
This is deadly to the church. This is deadly to discernment because what it says, if I know there's sin in the church and I don't do what Matthew 18 says and I don't do discipline in the church, then what I'm saying is, well I know what the Bible says, I interpret it rightly, but it just doesn't matter in your life. That is, if somebody rises up in the church and teaches falsely and I don't deal with them, or somebody lives in sin and iniquity and I don't deal with them and the church doesn't deal with them, what we're saying is the truth doesn't matter. It's the truth, but it doesn't matter. And that is typical of churches today.
There's no church discipline. So even if they do tell the truth, they will not apply the truth. churches tolerate sinning Christians, they therefore lower the value of the truth because if the truth doesn't have to be lived, then what's the point of it?
As a result, they dull the edge of the sword of the Spirit. You don't ever want to seek a place where non-believers and sinners feel comfortable, where Christians are never confronted with their sin, where error is never dealt with, because what that does is diminish the truth. God's truth is for application.
It's for application to those in error and those in sin. That's just not happening in churches today. They will not apply the truth. This is the issue of discipline, confrontation. And it's another reason why there's no discernment in the church because nobody, even if they come to the truth, is willing, it seems, to apply the truth.
Well, enough about that. Next time, I want to talk to you about how to become a discerning Christian. Father, we thank You for the call to discernment. We thank You that You have raised us up in a sense sort of counterculture in the evangelical world as well as the world outside. And we pray, O God, that we would be faithful to the truth, to live it and proclaim it and apply it in our own lives and in the lives of those around us as we serve You in Christ's name.
Amen. That's John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, continuing to make a plea for discernment. That's the title of his current series here on Grace to You. Now friend, something John mentioned in his lesson today is worth repeating. One way you can tell that a church lacks discernment is when it doesn't confront sin in its own members.
And of course, to point out sin in others, you first have to deal with your own sin. And to help you with that, John has written a helpful booklet called Hacking Agag to Pieces. This booklet will equip you to deal with temptation and the day-to-day struggle with sin, helping you discern between right and wrong like perhaps never before. We'll send you a copy free of charge. All you have to do is ask for the title, Hacking Agag to Pieces, when you contact us today. Call us at 800-55-GRACE, Monday through Friday, 730 to 4 o'clock Pacific Time, or just go to our website, gty.org. John's booklet, Hacking Agag to Pieces, will show you how to live in the spirit, the dangers of partial obedience, and how to tear sin out at its roots.
Again, for your free copy of Hacking Agag to Pieces, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. That's our website, gty.org, and be sure to take advantage of the thousands of free resources you'll find there, including the multiple daily devotionals from John. Those are great supplements for your daily time in God's Word. And don't forget, at our website you can download all 3,600 of John's sermons. You can listen to the MP3s, you can read the transcripts, all for free. Look for those Bible study tools and much more at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thanks for making this broadcast part of your day, and be here again tomorrow when John helps you avoid deadly spiritual errors by making a plea for discernment. Just another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace to You.
