... the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch (Acts 11:26)
Some time ago I rode along a modern highway in an up-to-date automobile on a lovely Sunday afternoon. If I could have forgotten newspaper headlines and radio news reports long enough, I might have imagined that I was in that ideal world of peace and plenty which is the poet's dream. But as I rode along I noticed highway signs that read, "Evacuation Route," meaning of course, "In case of atomic attack, this is the way to get out of town." I was rudely awakened to the irony of a world full of scientific wonders, threatening to blow itself to bits with its own gadgets.
I cannot understand how any intelligent human being can swell up with pride in an hour like this. Any thinking man should be red-faced with embarrassment. Scientifically we are in the graduate school; morally and spiritually we are in kindergarten. Civilization is like an ape playing with matches in a room full of dynamite. We talk of "one world," but it is a "wan world," and what some think are the birth pangs of a new era are but the dying gasps of the age.
When Isaiah wrote, "Watchman, what of the night?" (21:11) he had in mind a sentinel on an ancient city watchtower looking for an enemy with crude weapons of primitive warfare. Today we have lonely outposts in Alaska or Greenland where men watch a radar screen, anticipating the possibility of that awful moment when a fanatic may press a button and bury millions of Americans in a furnace of molten steel.
These ramparts we watch are endangered from without and within. So is the bulwark of Christianity. Our greatest enemy is not without but within. The temple of truth will not be damaged half so much by woodpeckers on the outside as by termites on the inside. Any religious group that boasts room for all shades of doctrine is like a man saying, "We have room in our house for termites—all are welcome." If he makes room for termites, he will soon have no house at all.
If the church would only be the church—if Christians would only he Christians—nothing could halt our onward march. We are like the early Christians "behind closed doors for fear." We are smitten with an inferiority complex.
The answer is not in church unification. We need not huddle together in self defense; we need to scatter in all directions preaching the Word. We have the answer to our problems and to everybody else's problems. We were here first. The early church faced a pagan civilization, but they did not meet it with panel discussions on Caesar and slavery. Paul did not join a symposium of pagan philosophers to discuss the problems of the times. Whittaker Chambers said, "Communism is no stronger than the failure of other faiths," All of our adversaries are no stronger than the failure of the church to rise to its duty.
How many times have I heard, upon arriving at a church for a meeting, "This will be a poor week for a revival. On Monday night the circus is coming to town; on Tuesday the Sons and Daughters of "I Will Arise" are having a convention; on Thursday night the Garden Club will meet to discuss African violets; the ball game is on Friday night. And there is always television." When was there ever a good week for a revival? Must the church take a back seat in favor of every sideshow that blows into town? Must we take the leftovers? Why shouldn't the other crowd do the worrying? Why shouldn't the church of Jesus Christ—with the answer to all the world's problems—make such an impact that the world, the flesh, and the devil would huddle in consternation, saying, 'This will be a poor week for us—there's a revival in town!"
We Christians do not have confidence because there is something wrong with us in both creed and conduct—in what we believe, and in the way we live. We are told that modernism and liberalism are dead, but we are haunted more by their ghosts than we were hurt by their earlier presence. Too many animated question marks are standing in pulpits again, and there are too few living exclamation points. A new theological breeze has begun to blow and a new virus is in the air. The language is different, the personalities are different; the attack is on a new front but the issue is about the same. In the old days the battle was fought in the open, but now it is not fashionable to take a stand against anything. It is a day of diplomats instead of prophets. Defenders of the faith are a weaker breed and are more easily disarmed by the smiling tolerance of the new school of peaceful coexistence. What was black and white has become gray.
In such spiritual fogs and doctrinal twilights, let a minister speak out against heresy and he is declared un-Christian. It has become quite the thing to lambast the fundamentalists, but we are declared lacking in Christian love if we express even a suspicion about wolves in sheep's clothing.
The trumpet is muted and nobody will prepare for battle under such uncertain bugle-blowing. The impression has been created that we preachers cannot speak with authority unless we are Ph.D.'s schooled in existentialism and Bultman. It is hoped that plain grass-roots preachers will not be disturbed by all this avalanche of verbosity. Let Bible believers go right on enjoying the meat of the Word, leaving the bones to the theologians. Some of us are not disturbed about theories of inspiration. We do not believe that the Bible is God's Word only as it applies to you in one verse and to me in another. It is absolute or it is obsolete. It is wired up from heaven and when we make proper contact we get a shock. But if we stay in contact we get a charge! Too many poor souls make only enough contact to get a shock.
The plight of the churches shows up not only in creed but in conduct. The sermon on Sunday is denied by the way most church members live all week. We believe in separation of church and state, but we wish that Christians would become equally concerned about separation of the church and the world. The greatest scandal of Christianity is the low grade of Christian living. There are more professing Christians than ever, but the quality does not keep up with the quantity; we are not improving the sort while we increase the size. We are many but not much. The average church member shows no evidence of having been born again. He is not remotely interested in the deeper Christian life. He is not concerned about forsaking the world, crucifying the flesh, and resisting the devil.
We will not be ready for the challenge of this hour until there is genuine repentance and conversion in our churches, in both creed and conduct. Even earnest and well-meaning Christians tend to divorce doctrine and practice. Some put all the emphasis on orthodoxy, with very little day-by-day living to match. Others major in experience, with little basis in Biblical teaching. One is body without spirit, and the other is spirit without body. Christianity is neither a corpse nor a ghost.
While we are concerned about communism and other "isms"—and we ought to be—why are we so indifferent to an imitation Christianity that so many men speak well of? Not liberalism alone, but dead orthodoxy also, false 'isms" and sects, worldly "churchianity," a form of godliness without power, the miscellaneous mixture of modern Laodiceanism, imposing, popular, prosperous, having need of nothing, lukewarm at a comfortable seventy-two degrees—all of this our Lord will spew from His mouth.
We are not going to meet the challenge of this age by holding conferences about it. When doctors have consultations it does not always mean that the condition of the patient is desperate. It may mean that the doctors are desperate. Both patients and doctors are desperate these days, but it will take more than a huddle of ways-and-means committees to meet the situation.
We must be more than critics of the world situation. Denunciation of evil has been neglected these days, but it is not enough to expose the unfruitful works of darkness; we must turn the light of a positive Christian testimony upon them. Noah condemned his godless generation, not by lambasting their degeneracy, but by his faith which led him to build an ark to the saving of his household. Too many prophets have warned of coming floods while they failed to get their own families to safety.
On the other hand, we certainly shall not help this age by being conformists to it. Getting chummy with Sodom and Gomorrah in order to win them—on the argument that the end justifies the means—will not work. Lot tried that, and lost both his family and his reputation. We are not to be conformed, nor merely nonconformed, but transformed!
The only way to minister effectively to this generation is to be Christians in it. I do not mean run-of-the-mill church members, but Christians in all the glorious implications of that word. Years ago I saw on a church bulletin board this arresting question: why not just be Christians? I have never forgotten it. It sums up the whole issue. To raise such a question does not discount loyalty to a local church or denomination. The greater loyalty does not exclude the lesser, but rather includes it. One is a better citizen of America if he is first a good citizen in his own town and faithful in his own home. A dog that follows everybody is of no good to anybody. I am not interested in that view of the invisible church which makes a man invisible on Sunday morning in a local church! Charles H. Spurgeon stated it well: "I am not ashamed to be called Calvinist and I do not hesitate to take the name Baptist, but if you ask what my creed is, I say it is Jesus Christ."
A worried airplane passenger asked a calm fellow traveler, "Are you a Christian Scientist?" "No," was the reply, "just a Christian." One never needs to be a Christian plus. It is never Christ and, and it is never a Christian and. One is Christian or anti-Christian. You do not have to add anything to a Christian, for everything that goes with it is included in that good word.
We Christians do not need unanimity or unification. The only place where you will ever get the saints together is where they are already together, in Jesus Christ. We need more unity of the spirit. There is a common understanding when we are in Him. One does not tune twenty pianos by harmonizing each with the other; they are tuned to a tuning fork, and when each is in tune with the standard pitch, they are in tune with each other. Trying to tune divergent Christian groups to each other is a hopeless business. Only when they are in tune with Christ are they in tune with each other.
The early church faced a pagan civilization with many problems not unlike our own. Those Christians did not sit around discussing current issues in the Roman Empire. They simply dared to be Christians, and they upset the world. The New Testament is not filled with discussions of problems outside the church. Paul and Peter and James and John were occupied with maintaining the purity and power of the church. As long as it had purity and power it took care of itself under God, and empires gave way before it. Today we seek position and popularity and prosperity and that strange thing called "prestige." All of these things avail nothing because we have lost our purity in creed and in conduct, in belief and in practice—and because we have lost our purity, we have lost our power.
Somehow the impression has been created that we need to rethink the inspiration of the Scriptures and revamp all our theology and work out a new code of Christian conduct in line with the times and acceptable to the nuclear age. Actually, this nuclear age is not essentially different from any other age, except for the increase of its gadgets and gimmicks. This is a generation of poor lost sinners and the need of the hour is a fresh crop of New Testament Christians who believe the Bible, trust Christ as Saviour and obey Him as Lord, are filled with the Spirit, and out to make the gospel known.
A lot of time and brains and printers' ink are being wasted these days on the supposition that we must devise some grand new scheme of faith and practice to keep step with missiles and summit conferences and ecumenical get-togethers. Throughout church history God has passed up pompous ecclesiastical assemblages and elaborate programs of experts and has set the world on fire with a handful of all-out Christians who scorn the values of this world and live by rigid discipline, willing to be called "the scum of the earth" and to be made a spectacle to this world for the scandal of the cross.
Why not just be Christians?