Holding on to the gospel is an antidote to today’s spiritual disaster
by Julian Mann, TCW:
Here’s an imaginary scenario – the story of a local church over a hundred-year period.
At the start of this time, the church is made up of real born-again Christians, people who have genuinely believed God’s saving good news, his gospel of eternal salvation from sin and death through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And the evidence that they are real born-again Christians is that they are godly people. They’re not perfect but they are leading God-pleasing lives which marks them out from the non-Christian world around them.
But as this generation grows old and dies off, a new generation takes over the church. Amongst these people, Christian morality is assumed and generally practised, but this generation loses touch with the spiritual heart of the God-pleasing life, which is thankfulness for the grace of God in salvation. This second generation become Pharisees – they are outwardly moral, upright, respectable people – but because they have lost touch with the grace of God they have become arrogant. They look down their noses at the non-Christians around them and make little attempt to reach them with the good news of God’s saving love in the Lord Jesus.
Then a third generation takes over the church and this generation reacts against the Pharisaism of the previous one, which earned the church a bad reputation in the community for being snooty and holier-than-thou. This new generation begins to think that the way to improve the image of the church in the community around them is to ditch traditional Christian beliefs and morals and to try to be trendy. As a reaction against the Pharisaism of the previous generation, this generation becomes revisionist, theologically liberal and as a result of embracing revisionism the church becomes no different from the non-Christian world around them.
So over that hundred-year period, you have a church that has gone from real Christianity to revisionism via Pharisaism.
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