The Stuttering, Stammering Elder

A culture of political correctness

There can be no reasonable denial that those of us who live in America live in arguably the most politically correct society on earth. One example is the young man who was not allowed to fill out his profile on Xbox as being from Fort Gay, WV. Yes, it is a real place. I am from Chapmanville WV. But according to Microsoft, the name is offensive. In Sydney Australia there was a dust up over the Santa Clause laugh, “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and offend women. The Maine Human Rights Act banned ANY gender division in public schools because it offended a 12 year old boy who wanted to be a girl. In 2008, a Carmel, Indiana, school bus driver, Betty Campbell, overheard little Rachel Zimmer saying that she couldn’t vote for presidential candidate Barak Obama because of his positions on abortion and gay marriage. That led to unsubstantiated allegations that she said that other students would go to Hell, which Zimmer strongly denies. When Campbell heard the allegations (again, unsubstantiated) she stopped the bus and delivered a politically correct sermon on tolerance to her captive audience, who probably just wanted to go home and play Xbox before their moms and dads came home.  The security camera caught it all on tape, including Campbell’s conversations with another student. She probed this student for racist allegations, threatening to “eat Zimmer alive” and calling her “a stupid little bigot”. It gets worse. After dropping Zimmer at home, Campbell completed her route and then RETURNED to the Zimmer home, ordering Zimmer and her sister back into the EMPTY school bus (without parental knowledge or consent) for more browbeating. She again lectured Zimmer about her opinions on gay marriage and reduced the girl to tears. After seeing the tape, Zimmer’s parents went ballistic, saying: “That’s not someone looking out for someone. That’s someone out to get somebody.” Carmel Clay Schools refused to fire or even discipline Campbell, stating that she was working within “the scope of her employment.” The family has since filed a civil lawsuit.

The new way to hate is to speak things that are offensive

As it turns out, the most common way to hate people, even in evangelical churches in our hyper-politically correct culture is to tell them the truth. In other words, professing Christians are accusing other professing Christians that they are guilty of hate just for believing and quoting the Bible. For example, oppose gay sex, and even to many professing Christians, you are a hater and a bigot. Embrace male leadership in the church and oppose female leadership and you are a misogynist. The same is true if you dare affirm the biblical teaching of wives submitting to their husbands. If you dare to identify heresy for what it is, the heretic is likely to call you a hater. Political correctness empowers autonomy by rejecting the idea that we should ever be called to give an account for our behavior or our beliefs. The way to love people is simply to accept them for who and what they are. Anything less than that, and you are a hater. Now, I want you to think about how such thinking might impact the Christian doctrine of repentance. Not so funny is it! What bugs me the most about this is how some of leaders are unwittingly influenced by this behavior. It is indeed the product of the fear and intimidation of man. I will say more about that in a moment.

What is an elder

The elder is an overseer of the church. The elder is charged with the care and spiritual well-being of his community. His interest is solely focused on the spiritual health of his people. This interest is driven by his greater concern to please God by faithfully executing his calling. 1 Peter 5:2 commands the elders to lead, guide, care for, and assist the flock of God among you. Then he adds, exercising oversight, or, in other words, taking responsibility for the flock. Moreover, Peter says that elder is to take do these things according to God, or to the will of God. In other words, the care and oversight is to be carried out with a single eye to the will of God for that flock. God’s concern, God’s will, God’s word, God’s directive must be the single driving consideration for the elder.

What is truth

Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. Jesus also said that God’s word is truth. God’s word is our only source of spiritual nutrition. If we are to be healthy, we must desire the sincere milk and eventually, meat of the Word of God. The Word of God sanctifies the believer. The Word of God frees the believer. The Word of God brings true knowledge so that the believer is transformed more and more into one who honors and glorifies God with every part of his life. The elder is to dispense the Word of God so that our souls might be rich, nurtured, strong, vibrant. This raises the question why would an elder have trouble being direct and honest when it comes to basic doctrines of the church and of his local community? The Word of God is a light unto our path, a lamp for our feet. It provides the Christian with precise what we need in order to be the light God has called us to be. Why do some pastors/elders feel like they have to walk on eggshells when it comes to certain biblical truths? For example, why would an elder stammer in his attempt to defend particular redemption, or total depravity, or predestination? Why would he stammer when he is asked a question about submission and male leadership? Part of the reason can be blamed on the fact that we are influenced, to one degree or another, by our culture. Part of the process of being transformed into the image of Christ means that we become less and less like the culture, less and less influenced by cultural thinking. Christian dogma needs no apologies. Christian dogma is not embarrassing. Christian dogma, is however, offensive. It is inherently offensive. It is naturally offensive. It is necessarily offensive to any unregenerate mind. Scripture is, by its very nature, offensive to an unregenerate mind because of what it is by its very nature. So, Mr. Elder, please stop stammering around issues that you know the world finds offensive. Show us that you have some backbone. Demonstrate for us that you are not influenced by the culture. Thunder God’s truth without reservation, without trepidation, and without apology.

Why this matters

The reason this matters is because God matters. The reason this matters is because Christian truth matters. God has purposely chosen the passionate, convicted preaching of the gospel without apology, to save the lost. The Word of Lord needs no softening. God’s truth needs no chaser. God’s medicine works its miracle of regeneration just as it is. We need men who are more concerned with what God thinks than with what men think. We need men who are not afraid if certain types of people leave his church, or reject his leadership. We need men who follow God and His truth without reservation and who rally the rest of us to do the same. “I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock;

and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them. “Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.”

It matters because what God has to say about us, to us, and through us ALWAYS MATTERS. And it matters more than all the opinions on this earth matter. It matters more than what these God-hating, arrogant, materialistic, narcissistic Americans think. Thunder away, Pastor!

The American Way

There is no question that America, as a nation, has changed and is undergoing rapid change at a pace that is nothing short of remarkable. The amount of time it took for the aggressive gay movement in partnership with the media to sway American opinion on the subject of gay marriage is astonishing. In addition, when we compare opinions about Christianity and the Bible for example from say 20 or even 10 years ago, the shift is dramatic. The shift is no less true for American Christianity than it is for American culture. The nation has lost her way because she has deliberately abandoned her roots. The same holds for American Christianity.

American Christianity has displaced Scripture with autonomous human reason, science, and purportedly a more enlightened mindset than the authors of Scripture. For instance, gay relationships were allegedly unknown to the biblical authors and even to Jesus. If they had known of that possibility, it is said, they would have written differently about that subject. The same is true for the creation account, the resurrection, and divinity of Christ, and an assortment of other basic Christian doctrines. Today, not only do we feel the inherent right to reinterpret Scripture in light of modern thought, but we also subject the very nature of the Word of God to our own imperfect, fallible, and sinful judgment.

One of the single greatest contributors to this rise in a weak Christianity is due to the abandonment of excommunication and shunning in the Christian community. The American notion of radical human liberty, and an unbridled autonomy, namely, that everyone can be whatever they want to be, even a Christian has led to unsurpassed arrogance among young uninformed or misinformed, and inexperience pastors, leaders, authors, and bloggers in matters concerning Christian dogma. When we add to this the fact that most professing Christians have bought into the postmodern nonsense of the outright rejection of objective truth and the thorough rejection of authority and tradition, the results are nothing short of dismal.

Christians are sinners too, all of us. And we need to remind ourselves and to be continually reminded that we have an inherent proclivity to redefine God, Christ, and everything Christianity teaches so that it fits neatly into our own sinful ideal. The triune God is self-defining, Christian Scripture is self-authenticating, and the only person that could define it, Jesus Christ, has already defined Christianity.

Christians are now in a position to have to begin to make some very hard decisions. Will we continue in the Christian life and prove the genuineness of our Christianity or will we demonstrate that our faith was nothing more than the product of finite human reason. Christians would have an easier time with some of these issues if we had been doing what we should have been doing all along.

In Matthew 18:15-18, Jesus Christ Himself laid down the imperative rule for dealing with unrepentant professors to the Christian faith. The process would include confrontation in private all the way to public confrontation by the local assembly. If the individual refused to repent of the sin, they would be cut off from fellowship in that community. When we witness Christians living a lifestyle that is unworthy of the gospel, we must act in love, but we must act and we must act swiftly as if the reputation of Christ means something to us.

In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul instructs the Corinthian Church to remove a couple that had become entangled in a serious sexual scandal. It seems that a young man had decided to marry his former stepmother. Rather than react with revulsion, the Corinthian Christians rejoiced in their supposedly liberty. Paul found the situation morally repulsive. He referred to this man as leaven, an impurity in the community that must be purged. Paul then issued the order that Christians are NOT to fellowship with supposed Christians who are living in immorality. In other words, they were to cut them off. Christians do not have the luxury or option of ignoring the lifestyles of professing Christians in the name of being non-judgmental.

Paul informed the Thessalonians that they were not to eat with those who were busybodies and who refused to work with their own hands. He also instructed the Thessalonians not to associate with people who refused to obey the words of his letter. The Christians at Thessalonica were not given the option to do otherwise.

John informs his audience that those bringing false teachings to the church were to be shunned as well. They were not only to refuse to have fellowship with such people, but Christians were told not to receive them into their homes. In addition, they were not even allowed to extend a greeting to such people. These people are enemies of the faith, despisers of the cross of Christ and enemies of God to the core.

To the church at Thyatira, Jesus issued a stern rebuke, not because she was necessarily immoral, but because she tolerated immorality. The modern American way is not a way of tolerance for differing opinions although that sounds nice. Rather, it is the way of the coward. Christians are not willing to confront sin and sinners and hypocrites and skeptics any longer because we are cowards. We are concerned that we will be ostracized or that we might not be able to answer a challenge. We are either cowards or we are prideful. We care way too much about what men think of us and no where near enough about what God thinks of us. We don’t want to say we believe something because the Bible teaches it and that, because we agree silently that we should have more reason for believing something than that. After all, who believes something simply because the bible teaches it? How silly! How gullible! How incredibly naïve and embarrassing! This is the mindset of most modern Christians even though most would surely deny it.

We must put a stop to this nonsense. We must learn to lovingly, but firmly proclaim God’s truth to everyone we can. We must be willing to excommunicate the young couple that thinks they can live together outside of marriage and still be true Christians. We must continue to stand for God’s design for marriage and reject the nonsense of the homosexual movement. We must take God at His word and follow the way of Christ. It is surely true that the American way is not exactly the godly way at this point. The truth of the gospel does not depend on how many people accept it. Christian theism is a despised religion and will continue to be the most despised religion. God loves the world, but if we read that passage closely, we also realize that the world that God loves also stands in clear condemnation for its acts of wickedness and ungodliness. If that were not the case, grace would not be so very amazing after all.