The Sovereign Electing Grace of God!

The following is from Spurgeon's sermon,
The Widow of Sarepta. #817. 1 Kings 17:8, 9.

None of us have any right to God's mercy.

Election is an indisputable truth of Christianity,
and one full of the richest comfort to the child
of God- one which is intended to kindle in him
perpetual flames of adoring gratitude. It is a
truth which lays him low, and makes him feel
that there is nothing in him, and then raises
him up and bids him, like a seraph, adore
before the throne!

Distinguishing grace is a fact; prize this
truth and hold it firmly. Thank God that
you are made a partaker of his eternal love.

The sovereign electing grace of God
chooses us to repentance, to faith, and
afterwards to holiness of living, to Christian
service, to zeal, and to devotion.

Election should be to you savory meat such as
Isaac's soul loved; and as you feed upon it you
will become like the three holy children in Babylon,
both fatter and fairer and more lovely than those
who have not received this precious truth.

~Charles H. Spurgeon

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The Dominant American Religion: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

A Nation of Deists
The dominant American religion is a far cry from Christianity

By Gene Edward Veith

Sometimes recognizing a problem requires finding the right words to name it. Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton have coined a phrase that describes perfectly the dominant American religion: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Those authors are researchers with the National Study of Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and have written up their findings in a new book: Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press).

After interviewing over 3,000 teenagers, the social scientists summed up their beliefs:
(1) "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."
(2) "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."
(3) "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."
(4) "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."
(5) "Good people go to heaven when they die."

Even these secular researchers recognized that this creed is a far cry from Christianity, with no place for sin, judgment, salvation, or Christ. Instead, most teenagers believe in a combination of works righteousness, religion as psychological well-being, and a distant non-interfering god. Or, to use a technical term, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

Ironically, many of these young deists are active in their churches. "Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe," conclude Mr. Smith and Ms. Denton, "or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it."

Another possibility is that they have learned what their churches are teaching all too well. It is not just teenagers who are moralistic therapeutic deists. This describes the beliefs of many adults too, and even what is taught in many supposedly evangelical churches.

Mr. Smith and Ms. Denton recognize this. MTD has become the "dominant civil religion." And it is "colonizing" American Christianity. To the point, these secular scholars conclude, "a significant part of Christianity in the United States is actually tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition, but is rather substantially morphed into Christianity's misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism."

Consider how many Christian publications, sermons, and teachings are nothing but moralism. Sometimes morality is reduced to the simplistic MTD commandment "be nice," though often real morals are inculcated. But the common assumption is that being good is easy, just a matter of knowing what one should do and trying harder. The biblical truth that bad behavior is a manifestation of sin, a depravity that inheres in our fallen nature, is skimmed over. And so is the solution to sin: a life-changing faith in Jesus Christ.

Consider how many Christian publications, sermons, and teachings are primarily therapeutic. It is true that Christ can solve many of our problems. But much that passes for Christian teaching says nothing about Christ. Instead, it consists of pop psychology, self-help platitudes, and the power of positive thinking.

Consider how many Christian publications, sermons, and teachings talk about God in a generic way, but say nothing about the Father, who created and still sustains the world; the Son, who became Incarnate in this world to win our salvation; and the Holy Spirit, who works through the Word of God to bring us to faith.

Christianity is about grace, not moralism; changing lives, not making people feel better about themselves; the God made flesh, not an uninvolved deity. And that is better news than Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Copyright © 2008 WORLD Magazine
June 25, 2005, Vol. 20, No. 25
See World Magazine

Faith and Repentance are Inseparable

The repentance which is here commanded is the result of faith; it is born at the same time with faith—they are twins, and to say which is the elder-born passes my knowledge. It is a great mystery; faith is before repentance in some of its acts, and repentance before faith in another view of it; the fact being that they come into the soul together. Now, a repentance which makes me weep and abhor my past life because of the love of Christ which has pardoned it, is the right repentance. When I can say, "My sin is washed away by Jesus' blood," and then repent because I so sinned as to make it necessary that Christ should die—that dove-eyed repentance which looks at his bleeding wounds, and feels that her heart must bleed because she wounded Christ—that broken heart that breaks because Christ was nailed to the cross for it—that is the repentance which bringeth us salvation.

Again, the repentance which makes us avoid present sin because of the love of God who died for us, this also is saving repentance. If I avoid sin to-day because I am afraid of being lost if I commit it, I have not the repentance of a child of God; but when I avoid it and seek to lead a holy life because Christ loved me and gave himself up for me, and because I am not my own, but am bought with a price, this is the work of the Spirit of God.

~Charles H. Spurgeon

(From Lane's Blog)

Plexiglass Preaching

There are plenty of gifted communicators in the modern evangelical movement, but today’s sermons tend to be short, shallow, topical homilies that massage people’s egos and focus on fairly insipid subjects like human relationships, "successful" living, emotional issues, and other practical but worldly—and not definitively biblical—themes. Like the ubiquitous plexiglass lecterns from which these messages are delivered, such preaching is lightweight and without substance, cheap and synthetic, leaving little more than an ephemeral impression on the minds of the hearers. ~Dr. John MacArthur

The Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God

The following excerpt is from the sermon "The Glorious Gospel of the Blessed God," preached Sunday morning, 30 June 1867, at Camden Road Chapel, London. In that sermon, Spurgeon carried on an imaginary dialogue with the "epistemological humility" of his day.



Someone demands, "How am I to know which is the gospel?"

You may know it by searching the Scriptures.

"But one sect says this, and another sect says the reverse."

What have you to do with the sects? Read the Book of God for yourself.

"But some men do read it and arrive at one opinion, and some maintain the opposite, and thus they contradict themselves, and yet are equally right."

Who told you that? That is impossible. Men cannot be equally right when they contradict each other. There is a truth and there is a falsehood; if yes be true, no is false. It may be true that good men have held different opinions, but are you responsible for what they may have held, or are you to gather that because they were good personally, therefore everything they believed was true? No, but this Book is plain enough; it is no nose of wax that everybody may shape to what form he likes. There is something taught here plainly and positively, and if a man will but give his mind to it, by God's grace he may find it out.

I do not believe that this Book is so dark and mysterious as some suppose, or, if it were, the Holy Spirit who wrote it still lives, and the Author always knows his own meaning: you have only to go to him in prayer, and he will tell you what it means. You will not become infallible, I trust you will not think yourself to be so, but you will learn doctrines which are infallibly true, and upon which you may put down your foot and say, "Now, I know this, and am not to be duped out of it."

It is a grand thing to have the truth burnt into you, as with a hot iron, so that there is no getting it out of you. The priest, when he took away the Testament from the boy, thought he had done the work; "But," said the boy, "sir, what will you do with the six-and twenty chapters which I learned by heart? You cannot take them away." Yet memory might fail, and, as the lad grew into an old man, he might forget the six-and-twenty chapters; but suppose they changed his heart and made him a new creature in Christ, there would be no getting that away, even though Satan himself should attempt the task.

Seek to carry out the sacred trust committed to you by believing it, and believing it all. Search the word to find out what the gospel is, and endeavor to receive it into your inmost heart, that it may be in your heart's core forever.

Next, as good stewards we must maintain the cause of truth against all comers.

"Never get into religious controversies," says one; that is to say, being interpreted, be a Christian soldier, but let your sword rust in its scabbard, and sneak into heaven like a coward.

Such advice I cannot endorse. If God has called you by the truth, maintain the truth, which has been the means of your salvation. We are not to be pugnacious, always contending for every crotchet of our own; but wherein we have learned the truth of the Holy Spirit, we are not tamely to see that standard torn down which our fathers upheld at peril of their blood.

This is an age in which truth must be maintained zealously, vehemently, continually. Playing fast and loose as many do, believing this to-day and that to-morrow, is the sure mark of children of wrath; but having received the truth, to hold fast the very form of it, as Paul bids Timothy to do, is one of the duties of heirs of heaven. Stand fast for truth, and may God give the victory to the faithful.

We must believe the gospel and maintain it, for it is committed to our trust.

~Charles Haddon Spurgeon

(Originally posted by Phil Johnson on Pyromaniacs)

Pastors, is Your Preaching Wimpy?

Quoting James White . . .

"When Paul spoke to the Ephesian elders in his final meeting with them, he said these words: "Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all men. For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God." (Acts 20:26-27) The true preacher of the Word seeks to have this as his ambition as well. God is not honored when men think so little of Him and so highly of themselves that they edit the content of the proclamation for the fear of the face of men and so that they may be considered "successful" in some worldly sense. It is a fearful thing to be unfaithful to the task of preaching "the whole counsel of God." Keeping this in mind, I would like to point out the fact that there are religious hypocrites in the church. There were even in the days of Paul, as he names some by name. But today one looks for the true believer as the oddity in evangelical churches filled with unregenerate men and women who have been fooled into thinking you can shake a man's hand, say some magical words that are not joined with any kind of repentance or understanding of the gospel itself, and you have your "ticket punched" and you are on your way to heaven.

"The result is that any time you would dare to preach the soul-searching passages of Scripture that expose sin and hypocrisy and false faith you will hear the howl of the religious hypocrite from front row to back. Which is why you can observe major "ministries" today that are completely focused upon avoiding any form of offense of the natural man, just so long as they are there on Sunday morning and drop a little something in the plate to help you pay for your massive sports arena.

"But even the best church will have false professors in its midst, men and women who, for various reasons, may well play the religion game quite well for an amazingly long time. Some do it for family reasons, some just because they were raised that way, some for acceptance--but in any case, they attend services, may even be involved in ministry, but their hearts are unchanged, their faith in word only. ...

"So the question I have to ask of many who stand behind pulpits today is this: is your preaching so wimpy it would never trouble a religious hypocrite, and never result in such a person fleeing its proclamation so as to run to man's religions for refuge?

"Do you pull back on those elements of God's truth that are the most offensive to the natural man because you do not wish to see that disdainful look, that annoyed shaking of the head? Do you really distrust the ministry of the Spirit to make the Word of Christ to come alive in the hearts and minds of Christ's sheep, so that you do not need to worry about those who find offense at His truth? Or have you embraced the spirit of the age which places man's fragile emotions upon the seat of prominence, and have bought into the idea that to be "loving" means to never give offense to anyone (well, except for God--it is fine to offend Him by thinking yourself so wise you can edit out what shouldn't be in the gospel in our day)?

"Would your teaching and proclamation allow a religious hypocrite to remain safely and comfortably ensconced in the congregation for years on end, never offended, never convicted? Finally, if such a hypocrite does leave and make a show of embracing heresy just to spite you, do you sting with embarrassment, or rejoice that God's Word continues to work in the hearts of men and women, some to His glory in their salvation, and some to His glory in their damnation? Think about it."


(From: Alpha and Omega Ministries Blog)

Lose Your Life for True Gain - Randy Alcorn

Nominal Christianity is Not Christianity At All (John Stott)

The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict half-built towers, the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. For thousands of people still ignore Christ's warning and undertake to follow Him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of Christendom today, so-called nominal Christianity. In countries where Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a descent but thin veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become somewhat involved, enough to be respectable, but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great soft cushion; it protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life while changing its place and shape to their convenience. No wonder the cynics speak of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escape-ism. ~John Stott

Should We Ignore The Fact That The Vast Majority Of "Seeker Churches" Operate Like Cults?

Now I Know Why They Don't Preach Repentance and Faith

“The man whose little sermon is ‘repent’ sets himself against his age, and will for the time being be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There is but one end for such a man—‘off with his head!’ You had better not try to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven.” ~Joseph Parker