Guard your steps when you go to the House of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong (Ecclesiastes 5:1).

Reaping From The Church Growth Movement

How heartbreaking it is for our Lord, while this apostasy continues to spread, as He surveys the current scene of what is attempting to pass itself off as His Church here in America. The terrible harvest of the Church Growth Movement is now becoming quite evident within the evangelical camp itself in our supposed “postmodern” nation. For example we have the people-pleasing pragmatism spread through the Purpose Driven Church of Rick Warren on the one hand.

Then on a similar seeker-sensitive parallel track to perdition one sees its younger sister the semi-pelagian Emergent Church with men like Brian McLaren and his disciple Rob Bell. As Todd Wilken of Issues Etc. recently quipped the emerging church is as if the CGM and liberalism had a baby. But this severely misguided lowering of the actual standards of New Testament Christianity has had the decidedly unwanted ecumenical effect of creating yet another religion entirely—a postevangelicalism. This “faith-based” man-centered work has a Purpose Driven and essentially cross-less Christianity-lite for the older set and the reemergence of cross-denying pagan mysticism for the younger set in the emerging church.

In My Utmost For His Highest, Oswald Chambers brings out what is so tragically missing in today’s compromised evangelical community currently ingesting this spiritual cyanide in our narcissistic nation:

To mistake conscious freedom from sin for deliverance from sin by the Atonement is a great error. No man knows what sin is until he is born again. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced on Calvary. It takes the last reach of the Atonement of our Lord, that is, the impartation of His absolute perfection to make a man know what sin is. The love of God at work in me makes me hate with the hatred of the Holy Ghost all that is not in keeping with God’s holiness.

Self-Centered Sentimentalism Passing As Christianity

This now brings us back to our text — Guard your steps when you go to the House of God. Go near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong. The many unregenerate “churched” people, which have been created by this sappy centered of the self sentimentalism disguised as the Christian faith have never been told of the absolute holiness and righteousness of the actual LORD God Almighty of the Bible.

The tragic truth is, because these people by and large have not been born again—even if they were to be told about it—would have no way to adhere to His infinite standards of moral perfection anyway because the Bible says with crystalline clarity — they that are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8:8, KJV). One simply cannot follow God in the way of Jesus in his natural degenerate and totally depraved state. It is impossible.

And herein lies the huge flaw of this whole sinner sensitive approach to the faith taught by Jesus Christ of Nazareth. In order for someone to even be regenerated by God the Holy Spirit—which is what we mean by the phrase born again—the Lord must do a work inside them first. And this is not done by our clever man-pleasing methods to “attract” them. No; it is accomplished by preaching the Word of God to them in the power of His Holy Spirit, and if the Lord so desires He will draw them to Himself and you will see them totally surrender their lives to Christ as their Lord and Savior (e.g. see—John 3:3-7; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Romans 1:16; 1 Peter 1:23).

This isn’t just some kind of Biblical jargon, or Christian-speak, this is a literal reality that must take place before someone can even enter the Kingdom of God. For it is written — I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:50). This is why the self-centered Purpose Driven Life and the counterfeit understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven taught in the Emergent Church so often prevents someone from finding the Christ of the Bible. It simply ends up as the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.

Preach The Word Whether It Is Convenient Or Inconvenient

But I tell you the Truth when I say that the only witness for Christ which will be honored by the Father in Heaven and empowered by God the Holy Spirit upon His earth is the fearless preaching of the actual message of Jesus of Nazareth:

And He was saying to them all: If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it” (Luke 9:23-24, NASB).

And unfortunately the sad fact is that this seeker sensitive ecumenical postevangelicalism with its emerging church is really just a reimagined dominion/kingdom now theology with a repainted version of the Pelagian social gospel of mankind’s self-reformation, with a tip of the hat to the “grace” of God. Sadly, in the end, this lukewarm Christianity-lite purveyed within the Purpose Driven Life and the Emergent Church only ends up creating a comfort zone with the world.

But the wise man will remember that the Bible says — Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him (1 John 2:15, KJV). What is so reprehensible to the LORD God Almighty of Biblical revelation is that His Body of Christ has largely allowed ourselves to become so desensitized to sin that more and more of us bristle under true Gospel teaching based on the Word of God. And you must come to understand that A.W. Tozer was telling the truth when he said the real Christian must make sure that all peoples of every race and culture know that:

our living Lord is unspeakably pure. He is sinless, spotless, immaculate, stainless. In His person is an absolute fullness of purity that our words can never express. This fact alone changes our entire human and moral situation and outlook. We can always be sure of the most important of all positives: God is God and God is right. He is in control. Because He is God He will never change! I repeat: God is right—always.

after so long a time; as it is said, To day if ye will hear His Voice, harden not your hearts.