Don't You Wish God Would Kill Bad People? Reflections on Psalm 139

(The full text of Psalm 139 is given below at the end of this sermon.)

Three times in my life I have heard sermons on Psalm 139 that skipped verses 19-22. Preachers read through verse 18 and say, “Now let’s go down to verse 23.” The shunned verses are a paragraph where David talks about how much he hates bad people and wishes God would just kill them. He writes,

Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God! O men of blood, depart from me! They speak against you with malicious intent; your enemies take your name in vain. Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred; I count them my enemies.

I can see why preachers like to skip that.

I should say that I believe it is perfectly legitimate to preach from isolated parts of this psalm. It is a rich prayer-poem with several units worthy of focused contemplation. But if you are going to take the psalm as a whole and try to discern its meaning and pattern and application, then I think it is a big mistake to cut out verses 19-22. David’s rant about hating bad people and wishing God would kill them is, I believe, a tent pole that holds up the whole psalm. Ultimately it makes this prayer compelling, convicting, and righteously frightening in a personal way.

The first and last paragraphs of this psalm seem (at first glance) to be out of order. If I were David’s scribe I might have pointed that out to him. I would say, “Your Majesty, you may have goofed the arrangement there. Let me fix this for you.” I will explain what I mean. David begins verse 1 by saying to God, “You have searched me Lord, and you know me.” And then he goes on at length about how perfectly God knows him. God's knowledge has no conceivable gaps. Verses 2 and 3:

You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.

God’s knowledge never needs to be updated or refreshed, and never needs to respond to unforeseen circumstances. Verse 4: Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. God knows not only what you have said, but what you are going to say, and what you are going to think. You know my thoughts from afar. God knows your past and present and future.

In the past, David says to God, you created me. Verses 13-16: you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body;

God not only saw you, he made you - he fashioned you bit by bit. Before there was a “you,” before there was anything that could call itself a person, you existed in the mind of God. We could compare this to the way a house "exists" in the mind of an architect before any brick has been laid or a single line has been drawn on a blueprint.

So, God, you know my past. You know my present –whether I’m standing up or lying down, going out or coming in. As for my future (or that which is future to me), verse 16b: all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

God knows us from before we were conceived until after we’re dead. It is all in his book. Maybe we can get some feeling for this when we read a biography. Recently I read a book about Jonathan Edwards. In this moment I can open that book to page 33 when he’s 12 years old, or to page 239, when he’s a 37-year-old pastor, or to page 493 where he is the 54-year-old president of Princeton and about to die of smallpox. That is, I can open up the story of Jonathan Edwards to any point in his timeline of history because I stand outside the book of his life which I hold in my hands. In a roughly analagous way, God can do the same with us because he stands outside the book of universal reality. He is outside, above and beyond a universe (or multiverse) that is structured in space-time. And because he stands outside of it he can see it all at once.

And there is more to God than that. David emphasizes that God is not only omniscient (knowing everything); he is also omnipresent (existing everywhere). You cannot escape him, you cannot hide from him. Here David engages in a kind of thought-experiment where he tries to imagine getting outside the range of God’s perception. Verses 7-10:

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

In David’s day there were silly people who thought that God had a realm of jurisdiction beyond which he could not go. In 1 Kings 20, for example, servants of the king of Syria tell him why they just lost a battle to the Israelites. It was a matter of terrain - the Israelite god must be a god of the hills. So, if you just get off the hills and get on to the plains and valleys, then Yahweh wouldn’t be able to do anything – he would become superman on kryptonite. They were wrong of course. God has no boundaries. His jurisdiction is all reality.

And nothing can cloak us from him. David suggests that God has (as it were) x-ray vision that pierces through every cover – including the cover of darkness. Verses 11-12: If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.

Sometimes people speak of “searching for God.” And I grant that that can be a legitimate way to describe a spiritual quest. The Bible itself speaks of searching for God: Jeremiah 29:13: You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. Isaiah 55:6 Seek the Lord while he may found, call upon him while he is near. When St Paul addressed Greeks in Athens he said that God arranged human history in such a way that “people would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.” But then Paul is quick to add, “though he is not far from anyone of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:27-28)

Though we may speak of "looking for God" and trying to find him, the fact is God is always there. He is right next to you now. How do you feel about that? Are you comforted by that thought or terrified by it? Many people should be terrified. In C. S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography Surprised By Joy he writes: “Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God.’ To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for a cat.”

Honest people throughout history have regarded God’s nearness has a horrifying prospect from which they would run if they could. Poet Francis Thompson wrote,

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind;
and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Thompson was saying, “I did everything I could think of to hide from God. But he chased me down.” In one part of that poem he writes, “Fear wist not to evade as love wist to pursue.” “Wist” is an archaic word that means “know how.” So that line means, “My fear did not know how to evade God as well as his love knew how to find me.”

In sum, what we have in Psalm 139: 2-18 is a thorough, logical, poetically imaginative discourse on the knowledge and presence and sovereignty of God as applied to the individual. God is everywhere, and he knows everything. Nothing about his presence is bound by space, and nothing about his knowledge is restricted by time. He stands outside of time and space and matter because those are things he created. Therefore he knows all our days from beginning to end and all our thoughts before they have occurred to us. So, when David says in verse 1, You have searched me O Lord and you know me, the next 17 verses can be understood as an unfolding of that statement – all that it means and implies.

And that is what makes the very end of this psalm so puzzling. In his conclusion in verses 23 and 24 David writes, Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

This is where, if I were David’s scribe, I would come to his rescue and explain how he could make his psalm better. I would say, “Your Majesty, what you need to do is start with verses 23 and 24. Begin with a prayer that says ‘Search me O God...’. And then you rhetorically slap yourself on the forehead and say, ‘Wait a minute. What am I saying? Stupid me. God, you don’t need to search me. You have already done that! You have searched me, Lord, and you know me [Verse 1]. You know everything about me - my past, present, and future. You know my thoughts before I’ve thunk them. You know everything I’ve done, including the things I’ve tried to hide from you. You’re everywhere. You made me from scratch, and you’re perfectly informed.’ Etcetera. Then, Your Majesty, you conclude with the verse you actually started with: ‘You have searched me, O God, and you know me.’ Amen. The end.”

Is that better?

One thing I have managed to do in this reconstruction is cut out those troublesome verses about how much David hates bad people and wishes God would kill them. If you frame the psalm my way you can banish those nasty verses and plunk them down in another psalm where they belong.

But at this point I can imagine David looking at me and shaking his head slowly and saying, “I think you have missed what I’m trying to say.”

As David celebrates God’s wisdom and knowledge and omnipresence and timelessness in verses 2 to 18, there arises, I think, a troubling thought that won’t go away. There is a piece of the puzzle that does not fit, a background noise that rumbles louder and louder and must be addressed. It is this: with God’s perfect knowledge and complete control, his flawless vision and inescapable presence – why in the world are there still wicked people? Why are there these awful people running around wreaking havoc and creating misery? They ruin it for the rest of us! They even mock God in the process. Things would be great if it weren’t for them.

God, O God - you know everything, and you see everything, and you have power over everything – so, why do you let this wickedness go on? That I do not understand. These people are violent and destructive. They contaminate reality. I hate them, I really hate them. I know you see what they're doing - why don't you stop them? If only you would kill them! Could you please get rid of the wicked so that the rest of us could live in peace?

If that thought does not resonate with you at some level, I might have cause to wonder to what extent you have had to confront true evil, to witness its effects, to be victimized by it yourself or see how people’s lives – children’s lives! - have been brought to agony and grief through the malice, selfishness, greed, neglect, and rapaciousness of others.

And if you yourself have not been the target of such evil, all you have to do is open your eyes and read the news. Even if I limit myself to things I read in the past 24 hours, the news is bad enough. Last night I read about yet another megachurch pastor (is it all megachurch pastors??), Tavner Smith, who enriched himself to a lavish lifestyle by defrauding churchgoers and then (of course) committing adultery with a married church employee - destroying at least two marriages in the process and wrecking a church. Then I read a report on the crimes of Bill Cosby, who drugged and raped dozens of women for decades going back to the 1960s - all while maintaining a wholesome image as America’s Dad. And then I read about 2 very young cops in New York, just in their 20s, shot by a creep. One cop is dead, and the other barely clinging to life. And so on and so on.

A few days ago I heard from an old college friend. His son's life was in disarray because his wife had just left him to go pursue lesbian relationships. Somehow I have found myself to be a go-to guy for these stories of woe. Three very close friends of mine, colleagues in full-time ministry, left God and deserted their spouses in order to pursue same-sex relationships. So - did I have any words of wisdom to share with my friend? No, not really, I'm sad to say - just the brutal observation that some people are selfish and unfaithful and wicked. They defy God, they transform themselves into wrecking balls of pain in the lives of others, and they just don’t care. They feel no guilt, they seek the company of those who laud their cruelty, and they leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces as best we can and endure the misery and simply trust God.

I can understand why David hated wicked people. I can also understand why he had trouble reconciling his understanding of God’s knowledge and presence with the galling fact of constant, devastating human wickedness. How can these things co-exist in our reality?

But that prompts a further thought, a thought which perhaps too few people are willing to entertain - a chilling and brutal thought which we hardly dare face and would gladly suppress.

What if I’m one of those wicked people?

Is that possible? What if my hatred of the wicked and desire for their death is legitimate and justifiable – but also true of me? What if I’m wicked and don’t know it? What if I myself have not felt that guilt which I know others ought to feel? Could it be that while I have been alert to other people’s depravity I have been ignorant of my own? What if – horror of horrors! - someone is praying the awful prayer of verses 19-22 about me?

This is not just a hypothetical for David. He actually experienced it when the prophet Nathan told him about a rich man who was evil incarnate – a man so monstrously wicked that he stole the sole prized possession of a poor man. David was outraged - rightly outraged - and said, “That man must die!” And Nathan floored him by responding, “You’re the man.”

I’ve had the idea of writing a short story someday from the perspective of the father of Uriah the Hittite – that is, the father of the man whom David murdered so he could steal away his wife whom he had impregnated. I imagine Uriah’s father mourning his son in bitter grief, and praying earnestly to some Hittite god (Tarhunt perhaps) to avenge his son’s death. The distraught father cries out, “My son, my son! My dear son Uriah! He was worthy and noble and honest and brave. And David – that depraved Hebrew despot! - raped his wife and had him slaughtered in cold blood. May the name of David perish from the earth! This cursed wretch has dared to write love poetry to his god Yaheh, and some even call him ‘a man after Yahweh’s own heart.’ May his poetry perish with him! May no one ever sing his songs again! O Tarhunt, Tarhunt, why do you allow this foul fiend of darkness, this damned Hebrew wretch, to go on living? He pollutes every square cubit of the ground on which he steps! I hate him with a perfect hatred. Tarhunt, please, please, if only you would slay him as he slew my son.”

Can you see how David’s prayer in verses 19-22 could be applied to him? Rightly applied to him?

Could it be applied to us?

In the Bible, the finger thrust in outraged accusation against wicked people is never allowed to be pointed in that same direction for long before it curls back on itself and dares to ask, “Am I guilty too? Could I be the object of the indignation that I feel?” And I’m afraid the answer is, “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes, much more than you would ever know.” A goodly proportion of our depravity consists in the fact that that it is hidden from our eyes. We blind ourselves to it. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). Well, a man cannot know it unless God enlightens him. For that reason it is good for us to pray for that enlightening. We pray for God to search our hearts because we are so bad at doing it ourselves.

When David concludes his Psalm by saying, Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting, he has the order right after all. God does not need to search us in order to inform himself of something he does not know. But we need him to inform us of what he knows, and reveal to us that to which we have been so blind. We need that in order to repent of the wickedness that till this day, to our discredit, has provoked no guilt within. We must seek forgiveness for those sins which never landed heavily on our conscience, and for which God might justifiably lump us together with the wicked and the damned.

I conclude by taking you back to the 1750s, to a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine a young individual chained and fastened to a wooden board in the darkness of the cargo hold, surrounded by stench and a few dead bodies, wondering if he will survive the trip - and also wondering, given what awaits him, if he even wants to survive. What curses might fill his prayers as he contemplates the captain of that ship? I can see him praying as David prayed: "If only you, God, would slay the wicked!" God, why don't you strike down that evil man?

Only God knows the full answer to that question. But I do think we have a piece of the answer. Rather than destroying the wicked as they deserve, God would rather search their hearts, and reveal to them the results of that search so that they might be moved to sorrow and repentance, and so that he might bestow upon them an extraordinary, unmerited grace that gives some hint as to the depth and breadth of his love. (If God can forgive such a wicked man, whom might he not forgive and restore?) That is in fact what happened to David, and it also happened to the evil slave-trader I just referred to. He was a man so wicked that he once boasted that there was no sin he had not committed. But God searched his heart and broke him, and filled him with remorse, and kept before his thoughts his many murders, and eventually turned him into a crusading abolitionist. God also gave to him, John Newton, a special measure of grace to pen the words we love to sing,

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see.

Let us pray.

Lord God, you know everything about us. But we don't know everything about ourselves, and truth be told we're afraid to look. Search us, O God, and know our hearts. Try us and know our anxious thoughts. See if there be any wicked way in us. And lead us in the way everlasting. Deliver us from the evil that we know about and from the evil to which we must be awakened so that we can repent of that too. Conform us to the image of your Son Jesus, for he is the way, and the truth, and the life, and we have no hope of pleasing you apart from him. Amen.

Psalm 139:

1 You have searched me, LORD, and you know me.2 You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.3 You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 4 Before a word is on my tongue you, LORD, know it completely. 5 You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. 7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” 12 even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. 17 How precious to me are your thoughts,[a] God! How vast is the sum of them! 18 Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand— when I awake, I am still with you. 19 If only you, God, would slay the wicked! Away from me, you who are bloodthirsty! 20 They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. 21 Do I not hate those who hate you, LORD, and abhor those who are in rebellion against you? 22 I have nothing but hatred for them; I count them my enemies. 23 Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. 24 See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Christmas Sermon 2021

Hebrews 2:10-18:

In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. 11 Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. 12 He says, “I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters; in the assembly I will sing your praises.” 13 And again, “I will put my trust in him.” And again he says, “Here am I, and the children God has given me.” 14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. 16 For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants. 17 For this reason he had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people. 18 Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

The sermon below was given at a Chinese Church and translated into Cantonese. When I prepare a sermon that will be translated into a language unfamiliar to me I write it out in short, simple sentences for the sake of the interpreter (whose job is very difficult!) and also for the sake of clarity. Cross-linguistic communication is so fraught with challenges and obstacles that it has always seemed best to me to keep such sermons as basic and streamlined as possible.

If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, then there are many different words in the Bible that apply to you.

One of those words is “sheep.”

Jesus called his followers his sheep.

Sheep are stupid.

All sheep are stupid.

A friend of mine worked with sheep in Montana.

He said to me, “Everything you have heard about sheep is true.”

“They’re stupid.”

I said, “How do you know that?”

He said, “A sheep will get its neck caught in a fence, and so you will go and pull it out.”

“And then it immediately will stick its neck in the fence in the same spot and get caught all over again.”

Sheep are stupid.

Maybe someone will say, “I am not stupid, like a sheep!”

“I am smart, like a goat.”

Perhaps you are right.

But Jesus said the sheep go to heaven and the goats go to hell.

So I would rather be a stupid sheep than a smart goat.

Sheep don’t have to be smart.

They only have to be wise enough to listen to their master’s voice.

Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”

“I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.”

“And no one will snatch them out of hand.”

Followers of Jesus Christ are sheep.

Here is another word that applies to followers of Jesus Christ:

Slave.

The Virgin Mary, and St Paul, and St James, and St Jude all called themselves slaves of God.

Jesus said that we should call ourselves “slaves.”

He said In Luke 17:10, “When you have done everything commanded of you, you should say, ‘We are unworthy slaves; we have only done our duty.’”

Maybe someone will say, “I am not an unworthy slave!”

Perhaps you are right.

Maybe you are not good enough to be an unworthy slave.

Jesus said when you have done everything commanded of you, you should say you are an unworthy slave.

I have not done everything commanded of me.

But I hope someday God makes me good enough to be an unworthy slave.

Here is another word the Bible uses to describe followers of Jesus.

Evil.

Jesus said, in Matthew 7:11: If you, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

You will notice in that sentence that Jesus called his followers evil.

Perhaps someone will say, “I am not evil.”

Yes you are.

You may know how to do some good things, like give good gifts to your children.

But you are still evil.

The Bible says that your righteousness is as filthy rags.

The Bible says that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The Bible says that there is no one righteous, no, not even one.

People who follow Jesus Christ are evil.

People who don’t follow Jesus Christ are evil.

Everyone is evil.

So to sum up: Followers of Jesus Christ are stupid sheep, unworthy slaves and evil people.

I know that sounds bad.

But thank God there are other words in the Bible that also describe followers of Jesus Christ.

One of those words is in our text in Hebrews chapter 2.

It is the word “brother” or “sister.”

That is, a brother or sister of Jesus Christ.

Verse 11 says Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.

In verse 12 he says “I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters.”

The Bible say that followers of Jesus Christ are his brothers and sisters.

But how can that be possible?

How can an evil person, a stupid sheep, an unworthy slave, be a brother of Jesus Christ?

I can think of two reasons why this should be impossible.

First, because Jesus is God and we are not.

The Bible says many times that Jesus is God.

In Hebrews 1:8, God the Father says to him, “Your throne, O God, is forever.”

John 1:1 says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Jesus is the Word; Jesus is God.

In John 8:58 Jesus said, “Before Abraham was born, I am.”

“I am” was the name for God.

So if Jesus is God, how could any human being be a brother or sister of God?

We could never become God.

But God could become one of us.

We do not have the power to turn ourselves into God.

But he has the power to turn himself into a human being.

That is not impossible for God.

The Bible says nothing is impossible for God.

The joy of Christmas is that 2000 years ago God turned himself into a human being.

Verse 14 of our text says that since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity.

Verse 16 says he had to be made like them, fully human in every way.

And Philippians 2:6-7 says that though Jesus shared equality with God he was made in human likeness.

2,000 years ago God turned himself into a human being.

He did this so that he could call stupid sheep, unworthy slaves and evil people his brothers and sisters.

But there is more.

I said there were TWO reasons why it should be impossible that we could be brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.

The second reason is, he is good and we are not.

The Bible says he committed no sin.

But we commit sins every day.

He is full of glory.

And we are full of shame.

Shouldn’t he be ashamed to call us brothers and sisters?

But verse 11 says that he is not ashamed to call us brothers and sisters.

How is that possible?

It is possible because he not only took human flesh upon himself.

He also took human sin upon himself.

Isaiah 53 says he bore the sin of many.

It says that the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all.

In a stable in Bethlehem Jesus took on human flesh.

And on a cross in Jerusalem he took on human sin.

He did this because he loved us.

He did this so that he could call us brothers and sisters, and not be ashamed.

He did this so that we could all belong to one family – the family of God.

Trust in Jesus Christ.

And he will be your Savior, and your Shepherd, and your Brother.

Let us pray.

Lord God, I have sinned against you.

I am a stupid sheep, an unworthy slave, and an evil person.

But Jesus your Son became a human being for people like me.

And he died on the cross for people like me.

Please accept his perfect life on my behalf.

Please don’t let his sacrifice on the cross be for nothing.

But accept his death as payment for my sin.

Please accept me into your family so that Jesus can be my brother forever.

And never be ashamed of me.

Amen.

Evangelicalism in Crisis Part 5: The Fundamental Misdiagnosis of the Human Condition

I will begin with seven passages of Holy Scripture.

God is love. (1 John 4:8)

God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

In this is love – not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. (1 John 4:10)

We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. Whoever fears is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18)

The Word of God.

All Christians love these verses for what they tell us about God and what he has done through Jesus Christ. We love these verses for the assurance that they give.

If, however, you take these verses and a few others like them, ignore ten thousand others, refuse to consider the audience to whom they were written, and absolutize them as a message for all people for all times, then four things, among others, will follow. (1) You will contradict other passages of the Bible; (2) You will preach a false gospel that dishonors Christ; (3) You will give false assurances to the damned, and (4) You will find no obstacle whatsoever to the prospect of becoming a prominent voice in modern evangelicalism.

I will give you now a one-paragraph summary of the gospel as I frequently hear it in evangelical hotspots. That would include places like WMBI radio, Wheaton College, and I think the vast majority of megachurches.

"God loves you. He loves you unconditionally. Nothing you can do can make God love you more. Nothing you can do can make God love you less. It’s not about what you do. All other religions of the world tell you what to do. Christianity tells you what God has done. He has forgiven all your sins by putting them on Christ. God is not mad at you. Don’t be afraid of him. Perfect love casts out fear. Your biggest problem is that you don’t realize how much God loves you. You are always trying to do good things and not do bad things in an effort to earn God’s love and try to get him to like you. He already likes you. He loves you. And he invites you into a personal relationship with him."

Before getting into specifics, I would like to submit that paragraph to a smell test. This is for those of you who have actually read the Bible. Not “heard a sermon about the Bible” from a megachurch preacher or a professor of evangelism at Wheaton College. No, if you have read the Bible on your own, this one is for you. Does the paragraph I just related sound like any sermon, any sermon at all, implied or explicit, on the pages of Holy Scripture?

That is, would Noah have said to his contemporaries, “God is not mad at you – he loves you unconditionally”? Would Lot have said to his neighbors in Sodom, “Stop thinking you can earn God’s favor by doing all these good works – you just have to accept God’s free grace”? Did Jonah say to the Ninevites, “Fear not! I bring you good news. Nothing you can do could possibly make God love you more”? Is that the kind of thing that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel or any of the minor prophets said to their fellow Israelites when preaching to them?

Now switch over to the New Testament. Did John the Baptist say to his contemporaries, “All the other religions of the world tell you what to DO. Not me – I bring you the gospel, I’m telling you what God HAS DONE (or will do pretty soon, anyway.)”? Did Jesus preach like that in the Sermon on the Mount? Did Peter’s sermon have that flavor when he addressed the crowd on the day of Pentecost? Did he say, “God loves you, his love is unconditional, your biggest problem is that you don’t get how much he loves you, and he invites you into a personal relationship with him”? Is that what his sermon in Acts chapter 2 sounded like? Did Stephen speak that way in the sermon he gave in Acts 7 just before he was executed? I don’t think he would have been executed if only he had had the sense to speak like a modern evangelical. Does the book of Hebrews - the first 12 chapters of which sound like an extended sermon - have that relentlessly sunny, warm, encouraging, unthreatening flavor to it?

I’ll provide the answer to my all rhetorical questions. No, no, no, no, no, a thousand times no. Much of what passes for evangelistic preaching today miserably fails the Scriptural smell test. And people whose minds are bathed in Scripture get that right away. But such people are getting harder and harder to find. That was part of what I had to say last week.

What I hear presented as the gospel in countless evangelical forums today reminds me of fake movie trailers. I don’t know if you have seen any of those. They’re fascinating. They’ll take a horror movie like The Shining and splice together a few clips, put in some uplifting music and inspiring narration, and make it look like a feel-good family film. Or they’ll take a broad comedy like Back To The Future and make it look like a deep melodrama of forbidden love between Marty and Doc. Those can be very funny. The humor is crucially dependent upon the assumption that you have seen the movie and you know its tone, but the trailer deliberately takes you in a completely different direction despite the fact that it is showing accurate short clips.

What I would like to do now is take you through just four of the slogans and soundbites that have come to dominate evangelical preaching. I started with a lot more but for time’s sake had to whittle it down to four. I hope I picked the right ones.

1. “God’s not mad at you.”

I remember the first time I heard that from a pulpit. It was 1988. My immediate thought was, “How do you know that? How do you know that God is not mad at me, or at anyone else seated here?” Since that moment I have heard that phrase spoken to general audiences many times. There is even a daily speaker on WMBI, Steve Brown, who has made a career of saying it. If you go to his website “Key Life,” you will see that its subtitle is, “God’s not mad at you.”

But if you read the Bible, you will see that no less than 600 times it speaks of the wrath of God. And that wrath is not only upon the damned but sometimes upon his saintliest saints. Three times Moses says, “The Lord was angry with me.” (Deuteronomy 1:37; 3:26; and 4:21). If someone claimed, “God is never angry with me,” I would want to say, “Do you think you are better than Moses?”

Someone might respond, “Yeah but Moses is Old Testament. In the New Testament God stopped getting angry, because, you know, Jesus.” That is not correct. Colossians 3:5-6 says, “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.” Is coming. That is not past tense. Sin still provokes the wrath of God. In Revelation 14:10 worshipers of the beast “drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.”

Many people can quote John 3:16, which speaks of God’s love. Far, far fewer people can quote John 3:36, which speaks of his wrath. John 3:36 says, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” If you do not obey Jesus Christ, God’s wrath remains on you.

2. “Don’t be afraid.”

Something I have noted that evangelical preachers love to say is that the most often-repeated commandment in the Bible is “Fear not.” I don’t know if that is true. It may be. I haven’t counted all the commands of the Bible and sorted them into categories. Such an attempt strikes me as intrinsically impossible because of all the overlap. (For example, does a commandment against slander count as a command against deception or are those two different commands? You can go on with that forever.) But for the sake of argument, let us suppose that the Bible has a most common commandment, and that it is in fact, “Fear not!” I still would find that datum spectacularly uninteresting and uncompelling because I know that that command is always bound to a particular situation and even to a particular person.

For example, an angel said to shepherds in the field on the night of Jesus’ birth, “Fear not!” (Luke 2:10). But no angel said that to Herod the Great that night. Herod the Great was a butcherer of toddlers and other innocents. He would not have been told “Fear not!” but rather “Fear yes! This is a good time for you to start fearing.” Jesus said to his followers, “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Luke 12:32). But he certainly didn’t say that to Caiaphas, or Herod Antipas, or Pontius Pilate, or a host of other bad people. It seems clear to me that commandments like, “Don’t make idols, don’t be greedy, don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, love the Lord your God” apply across the board to everybody at all times. But you can never generalize “Fear not.” That command always depends crucially on whom you’re talking to and what the situation is.

Of particular concern to me is that many evangelical preachers are absolutizing the verse “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:10) and instructing us to apply it to God - don’t be afraid of God. But Jesus explicitly commands us to fear God. Luke 12:4-5: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has authority to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him.”

The Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). Romans 3:18 says about sinners, “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” That’s a bad thing. The penitent criminal on the cross next to Jesus rightly challenged his scornful counterpart with the question, “Don’t you fear God?” (Luke 23:40). Since Jesus commanded the fear of God, the refusal to fear him is disobedience to Jesus Christ.

Allow me to go outside the Bible for an illustration of the humble believer’s appropriate attitude and posture before God. This is from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, a passage cited by C. S. Lewis in his book The Problem of Pain. Mole and Rat are about to appear before the god Pan. Mole speaks: “‘Rat.’ He found breath to whisper, shaking, ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Afraid?’ murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid? Of Him? O, never, never. And yet – and yet – O Mole, I am afraid.’ Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship."

3. “All your sins have been forgiven.”

Easter Sunday morning, April 20, 2014. The church I was attending, Bethany Chapel in Wheaton, had a guest speaker, a professor noted for his intellect and for his zeal in evangelism. He alarmed me when he said in the course of the sermon, “I have yet to see an apologetic more powerful than these two: The God of the universe loves you, and he forgives you.” Now an apologetic is a defense of the faith whose purpose is to persuade unbelievers to believe. It seemed that this professor was saying that a powerfully persuasive point was to tell unbelievers that they were already forgiven. But he could not have meant that, right? It turns out that is exactly what he meant. Because he gave an example from his own life where he was trying to evangelize a young man, and he said to him, “It boils down to this: the God of the universe knows you. He knows all about you. And he loves you. And all the goofy stuff you’ve got clogged in you – he has forgiven every bit of it. He’s forgiven your every sin. And he welcomes you into a relationship with him.” Then he asked him, “Is there any reason why you wouldn’t want to trust him right now?”

Had I been that young man, knowing my penchant for precision and rigor and contentiousness, I would have said, “Yes, I have a very good reason for not trusting him now. I don’t have to. I’m already forgiven. You said so yourself. You didn’t say I had to confess my sins or turn from them or trust Christ or anything like that to be forgiven. You said he has forgiven my every sin. Well, good. Thank you for that great news. I think we’re done here.”

The speaker then proceeded to generalize his approach for all of us and said, “The world needs to know that they’re loved and forgiven.” No they don’t. It is not true. The world is not forgiven yet. That is a false gospel. The people of the world need to know that they now stand under condemnation. Jesus said in John 16:8 that the Holy Spirit would "convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.” Not “acceptance and love and forgiveness” - but sin and righteousness and judgment. And the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14:24-25 that if unbelievers or seekers came into our worship services he wanted them to be convicted of sin and brought under judgment by all so that they would fall down and worship God saying “God is really among you.”

But though people stand condemned for their sins by God and their own conscience, they can be forgiven if they confess, repent, and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible says “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (John 1:9). Note the condition if we confess. The Bible also says, “Whoever believes in him (Jesus) is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:18). That text does not say that unbelievers are forgiven already but rather that they are condemned already. That is the starting point for humanity. Not forgiven, but condemned. People need to be saved. They don’t start out saved. They need to be forgiven. They don’t start out pre-forgiven.

After Jesus’ resurrection he told his disciples that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached in his name to all the nations (Luke 24:47). Please hear those words. “Repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Again, Jesus did not say, “Tell them they are already forgiven,” but rather, “Tell them that upon repentance they will be forgiven.”

From what I have observed, the heresy that everyone is already forgiven has so overtaken my alma mater, Wheaton College, that I would not recommend that a young person seeking a Bible-based education go there. You can’t imagine how much it pains me to say that.

Of course, it’s not just Wheaton College. I mentioned earlier Steve Brown, who has a daily one-minute devotional on Christian radio. This past Friday, September 24, his devotional involved a story about a little boy who shot his grandma’s duck with a slingshot. (I guess it must have been on a farm.) When some days later he confessed to her she said. “I know. I was standing by the window. I saw the whole thing. I forgave you then.” Brown concludes by saying, “Run to Jesus. You’re already forgiven.”

“Run to Jesus” is very good. “You’re already forgiven” is a heresy that holds the Bible, including Jesus’ own words, in contempt. You are not already forgiven. Trust in Jesus Christ. Confess, repent, and you will be forgiven.

4. “God loves you unconditionally.”

For many years now, it seems to me that the majority of evangelical preachers have been saying that God’s love is unconditional. They keep using that word “unconditional.” I do not think it means what they think it means. With some preachers, the conviction is so powerful that they seem unable to speak of God’s love at all without specifying that it is unconditional.

About 10 years ago a related line of rhetoric caught on like wildfire in popular evangelicalism. It goes like this: “Nothing you can do can make God love you more. Nothing you can do can make God love you less.”

I actually heard that line from three different megachurch pastors over the course of just a few days. Here are the exact quotes.

J. D. Greear: “In Christ there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, nothing I have done that makes You love me less.”

Pete Briscoe: “There’s nothing I can do to make him love me more, there’s nothing I can do to make him love me less.”

Andy Stanley: “Do you what the root, the heart, the pull-back-the-layers is when it comes to following Jesus? This is uncomfortable, but it will change you. And it will change us. I think it will change the world. God could not love you more. And there is nothing you will do and nothing you could do that will cause him to love you less. And the corollary is this: Every person you’re ever eyeball-to-eyeball with God could not love more. And there is nothing they could do to cause God to love them less. Nothing.”

Perhaps this will sound shocking, but I suspect that these megachurch preachers do not read the Bible at all. I know for a fact that if they read it, they don’t pay attention when they do so. Because if they did pay attention they would not be regurgitating astoundingly unbiblical slogans and clichés that they have plagiarized from one another. I would like to think that somewhere along the line one of them would scrutinize the rhetoric and say “Wait a minute! The Bible doesn’t say that. It says the opposite!” But I’m afraid that such scrutiny is not happening in our megachurches.

And not just the megachurches. Many of our mid-sized and smaller ones too. About that time, a decade or so ago, I was in the process of joining a church. In a group meeting with the pastor one of the other prospective members said, “I’m so glad to find a church where they teach the true gospel, that nothing you can do can make God love you more, nothing you can do can make him love you less.” I almost spoke up, but the moment passed, and they went on to other things. But I thought, Well, she will soon find out otherwise. I’m sure they don’t teach that nonsense here.

Boy was I wrong. In a short period of time, the former pastor of the church said just that in a sermon. Then the current lead pastor of the church said it. Then an elder (who later became executive pastor) also preached that from the pulpit. Then a few years later, (after my wife and I had left because we couldn’t stand it any more), the church hired a new lead pastor, and I listened online to a few of his sermons and, yep, he said it too.

Can it get worse? Yes it can. My wife and I looked for a new church, and for a few weeks we attended a small start-up church plant. That pastor, bless his heart, had us stand together and recite in unison, as though it were the Lord’s Prayer or Apostles’ Creed, “Nothing I can do can make God love me more...” etc.

Such experiences make me sympathize with sincere, devout followers of Jesus Christ who love the Scriptures and who wind up saying, “I don’t know where to go to church anymore.”

Let me take you through some Scripture passages that overtly specify the conditionality of God’s love.

Psalm 5:5-6. King David says to God: “The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies. The LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”

David did not believe in a God who loved everybody unconditionally. David believed in a God who hated evildoers - who abhorred bloodthirsty, deceitful men.

Psalm 86:5: “You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call upon you.” Hear the words “to all who call upon you.” That is a condition. If God’s love were unconditional, the verse would need to say something like, “you abound in love to all who call upon you and equally to all who don’t call upon you, because you love everybody just the same and nothing they do can make you love them more or less.” That is SO ridiculous. To read unconditionality into that verse and many others like it renders all such verses senseless and absurd.

Psalm 103:11: “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.” There is a condition. And ultimately it is a very comforting one! Fear God, and he will love you to the heavens. (Refuse to fear God, and I’m afraid we can’t say that about you.)

Psalm 146:8: “The Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous.” I don’t know how that can get much clearer. God’s love is not unconditional. The Bible says, “The Lord loves the righteous.”

Proverbs 15:9: “The Lord detests the way of the wicked, but he loves those who pursue righteousness.” I must admit I like that verse a lot better than the one that says that the Lord loves the righteous. Because I would never say that I am righteous - except insofar as there is credited to me an alien righteousness that belongs to Christ. But perhaps I can say that I (sort of) pursue righteousness, and that I honestly hunger and thirst for it. And if that is true of me, then I have Jesus’ assurance that God blesses me (Matthew 5:6), and Solomon’s assurance that God loves me.

The verses I have cited are from the Old Testament. But the conditionality of God’s love is repeated many times in the New Testament as well. Here’s a few:

2 Corinthians 7:9: “God loves a cheerful giver.” That verse can only make sense if God loves a cheerful giver in some way or to some degree that he does not love a grumpy giver, a cheerful non-giver, or a grumpy non-giver. I have had many many pastors tell me that nothing I could do could make God love me more, and one of them even tried to get me to say that out loud. But the Bible says – awfully clearly, I think - “Give cheerfully, and God will love you more.” I mean it’s right there.

Jude 21: “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” What??? Keep yourselves in the love of God??? If God’s love were unconditional, it would be impossible not to keep yourself in the love of God. Jude does not tell us there how to keep ourselves in the love of God. But that's ok because Jesus already told us how in John 15:10: “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love.” Again, the condition is just siren-blaringly explicit.

Two more, quickly, before I summarize and wrap up this point.

John 14:21: [Jesus said] “He who loves me will be loved by my Father.”

John 16:27: [Jesus speaking to his disciples] “The Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.”

That last verse is interesting because elsewhere we learn that we love because he first loved us. So which is it? Do we love God because he first loved us, or does God love us because we have loved Jesus? The answer is both. In physics, light is both a particle and a wave, and we just have to learn to affirm both, deny neither, and live with the paradox. Likewise, the Bible says both that we love because God loves us and God loves us because we love Jesus. It just plain says both, so we have to accept that and deny neither proposition.

In the meantime, the Bible affirms the conditionality of God’s love so often, so relentlessly, and so explicitly that only someone who isn’t reading it could possibly say, “God’s love is unconditional - nothing we could do could make him love us more or less.” That demonstrates jaw-dropping ignorance of the Bible, and I shake my head in disbelief over the number of times I have heard it from evangelical brothers and sisters over the past 10 years.

I began this series four weeks ago by saying that evangelicalism is in crisis and in desperate need of reformation both in its practice and its preaching. In the opening message I outlined just a small portion of the scandals that have swept through evangelicalism like a category 5 hurricane. In the next two messages I focused on just two of the vices that have plagued our community of faith, pride and greed. That list could have been a lot longer - I capped it at two. Last week I talked about the lack of focus on the Bible, biblical illiteracy, and a failure to cite Scripture that characterizes our most influential churches and institutions. And today I have tried to show how that ignorance of the Bible in pew and pulpit has spawned a skewed, truncated, twisted version of the gospel that I don’t think our forerunners in evangelicalism would have tolerated, and that goes a long way toward explaining why so many of our leaders have behaved so badly. Why not? They know that God loves them unconditionally. They have drilled that into our heads and they have drilled it into their own heads.

What we have today is what I am calling a fundamental misdiagnosis of the human condition. All people are being addressed now as though they are saved saints who are in no peril, who need not fear, who will be loved unconditionally, and who primarily need hope and encouragement on a Sunday morning so they can leave the house of God feeling refreshed.

To this end, believers and unbelievers alike are fed a steady diet of, “You’re accepted, you’re loved, you’re forgiven, your problem is trying too hard to be good in an effort to get God to love you when he already loves you to the max and couldn’t love you anymore. It’s not about what you do, it’s about what God has done” and so forth.

But the Bible more typically describes the natural human condition as lost and needing to be found, condemned and needing to be saved, sinful and needing to be remade in the image of Holy Jesus. The good news of the gospel is that you do not have to remain condemned, unforgiven, under the shadow of God’s wrath that in your most honest moments you know you deserve. There is a pardon available, there is a welcome that God offers into his fearful presence, and a love from God that grows – it does NOT stagnate, it GROWS to the extent that your obedience creates room for it. That is available for you because Jesus, God’s Son, died for you – you wretch, you sinner, you rebel against the good will of God. Bow the knee to him, he who died for sinners and rose from the dead, beg his forgiveness and renewal, and you will have it forever. And some day you will see the face of God.

Evangelicalism in Crisis Part 4: The Simple Neglect of Scripture

Last week my wife and I watched the movie Walk the Line about Johnny Cash. He had an older brother, Jack, who as a boy was very devout and was planning to be a preacher until he died in a tragic accident. There is a scene early in that film where Jack is reading the Bible and little Johnny asks him about it, and Jack says, “If I’m going to be a preacher one day I got to know the Bible front to back. I mean you can’t help nobody if you ain’t telling the right story.”

Those are compelling words of wisdom from some perceptive screenwriter’s take on Johnny Cash’s fondly remembered brother. “If I’m going to be a preacher one day I got to know the Bible front to back. You can’t help nobody if you ain’t telling the right story.”

The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Hebrews 4:12.

All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17.

Your Word have I hid in my heart, that I might not sin against you. Psalm 119:11.

To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no light of dawn. Isaiah 8:20.

These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, because they received the Word with eagerness and searched the Scriptures daily to see if these things were true. Acts 17:11.

And one more:

Meanwhile a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was a learned man, with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. Acts 18:24.

Older versions of the Bible say that Apollos was “mighty in the Scriptures.” That reflects a literal rendering of the Greek dynatos from which we get our word dynamite. I like the old phrase “mighty in the Scriptures.” While it is perfectly accurate to translate the Greek as “thorough knowledge of the Scriptures”, it seems to me that “mighty in the Scriptures” packs a better punch.

A hallmark of the evangelical tradition of Christian faith is that its leading lights and influential voices have always been individuals mighty in the Scriptures and eager to produce others mighty in the Scriptures. When the Bible was first translated into English by morning lights of the Reformation John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, both men emphasized that they wanted to get Scripture into the hearts and minds of even common peasants. John Wycliffe (1320s-1384) said, “I will cause that every ploughboy in the fields shall be able to read it.” His successor William Tyndale (1494-1536) took up that same rhetoric, and wrote to some priests who opposed him, “If God spares my life, I will take care that a ploughboy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.” It is as though Wycliffe and Tyndale could see 500 years into the future and hear ploughboy Jack Cash saying, “If I’m going to be preacher one day I got to know the Bible front to back. You can’t help nobody if you ain’t telling the right story.”

But even if Wycliffe and Tyndale could not see ahead 500 years, they could certainly look back 1500 years and see what the Apostle Paul wrote to his young protégé Timothy: “From your childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” (2 Timothy 3:15).

My parents, thank God, were mighty in the Scriptures. When they were teenagers in the 1930s they were blessed to sit under the teaching of a man who had soaked his brain in the Bible since childhood. Harry Ironside of Moody Church had read through the entire Bible by the age of 10, and then once a year thereafter for the remainder of his life. It showed. His messages were full of Scripture.

Preachers like Harry Ironside remind us of something Charles Spurgeon said about John Bunyan. John Bunyan is best known for writing The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) which for centuries was the world’s number 1 bestseller outside of the Bible. In addition to The Pilgrim’s Progress Bunyan wrote many sermons. Spurgeon had this to say about Bunyan:

“Read anything of his, and you will see that it is almost like the reading the Bible itself. He had read it till his very soul was saturated with Scripture; and...he cannot give us his Pilgrim’s Progress...without continually making us feel and say, ‘Why, this man is a living Bible!’ Prick him anywhere—his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the Word of God.”

Spurgeon may have been too modest to say that about himself, but I’ll say it for him. I have read a number of his sermons. If you cut Spurgeon he would bleed Bible verses. Whatever you eat eventually finds its way into your bloodstream. So you can only bleed Bible verses (metaphorically speaking) if you eat a lot of Bible. Prominent evangelical preachers of yesteryear – John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon and Harry Ironside etc. feasted on the Word of God. They would be able to say with the prophet Jeremiah, “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts.” (Jeremiah 15:16).

How is the evangelical tradition doing today with regard to knowledge of, and focus upon, Holy Scripture?

What I want to say about that might be best supported by exhaustive, quantitative analysis of evangelical sermons and books and songs. To prove my point I suppose I would need an armload of statistics rigorously researched and fairly presented. But I don’t have that, and I don’t know how to get it. What I do have are anecdotes, vignettes, personal observations and highly subjective impressions. That is what I am going to share with you.

One thing I have seen in evangelical preaching in recent years is an absolute explosion of simple factual mistakes. I am not talking here about interpretation or bad theology or viewpoints that I oppose. I mean just simple, in-your-face, easily discoverable errors that result from carelessness and brutal unfamiliarity with the Bible.

Before I give examples, I should clarify that everybody makes mistakes - especially when speaking off the cuff. I get that. The Bible is a big book, and I don’t know anybody who has memorized all of it. The best expositors have occasional slip-ups. I once heard James Montgomery Boice, who knew the Bible as well as any contemporary, refer to Philemon (the man, not the book) when he clearly meant Onesimus, Philemon’s servant. Oops. One time I saw online a video of D. A. Carson answering a question and he was unable to call to mind the name of the individual whom the Apostle Paul left sick at Miletus. Carson had to appeal to the audience to the supply the name, and of course I’m shouting at the computer screen “Trophimus!” Somebody say ‘Trophimus’!” Well, that happens, and we extend grace to one another because of the frailties and limits of the human brain. I myself once hastily prepared a handout for a Sunday School lesson, printed it up, and somehow did not notice that I had reversed the fates of the Egyptian cupbearer and baker in Genesis chapter 40. I still cringe at that.

But I have in mind mistakes that I consider to be less pardonable than that. Google the name Ed Litton, current head of the Southern Baptist Convention, and you will come across quite a few side-by-side videos of him plagiarizing his sermons. The plagiarism is extreme – often word for word, paragraph for paragraph, even repeating parenthetical asides and puns and telling other people’s stories as though they happened to him. Ed Litton is a liar with zero integrity and the fact that he has a job in the ministry is an indictment of his church and his elders, and the fact that he still leads the Southern Baptist denomination is a sign that our nation’s largest evangelical denomination is an ungodly disgrace and laughingstock.

But that’s beside the point. My topic of the moment is factual errors. One of the sermons that Litton plagiarized was from his predecessor as head of the Southern Baptists, J. D. Greear. In a sermon Greear related the iconic story of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18 and said that that man’s servant owed him just one denarius and couldn’t pay it back. Greear emphasized how little one denarius was. But it wasn’t one denarius. It was a hundred denarii (Matthew 18:28). This is not an obscure text. It’s in a Gospel, and it has been preached on and treasured by Christians constantly for generations. I’ll bet you that 12-year-old Jack Cash could have told you it was a hundred denarii, not one. But when Litton plagiarized that sermon, he didn’t even notice the mistake – he repeated it, nearly word for word. It makes you wonder if he had read it at all. He certainly didn’t review it or study it. In sharp contrast to the noble Berean laymen of Acts 17 who searched the Scriptures daily to see if what the Apostle Paul said was true, we have an ignoble clergyman who can’t be bothered to crack open the Bible that he’s preaching from. And the largest evangelical group in America puts him at their head and leaves him there even after his biblical illiteracy and dishonesty have been thoroughly exposed.

Not long ago I saw a list of the largest churches in America. Number 2 on that list, just after Joel Osteen’s House of Mammon in Houston Texas, is an evangelical church, North Point Community Church near Atlanta, Georgia. Andy Stanley is the pastor. When he was speaking of the disciples’ discouragement following Jesus’ crucifixion, Stanley said, “There were no Jesus followers after the crucifixion. And there was no one on planet earth that believed Jesus was the Son of God when they saw him die.” That is an exact quote.

For any of you who have been a Christian for a few years, and have read through the Bible once or twice, and have been to church, what do you think of the statement, “There was no one on planet earth that believed Jesus was the Son of God when they saw him die”? I think at one time it would not have been hard to find a 12-year-old Sunday School student who would say, “Wait a minute, wasn’t there a centurion who saw Jesus die and said this was the Son of God?” Yes, there was. Mark 15:39: “And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, ‘Surely this man was the Son of God!’” (You can see a parallel verse in Matthew 27:54 and Luke 23:47). It amazes me that one of the best-known preachers at one of the biggest churches in the world can so easily spew out to his congregation the opposite of what the Bible says.

There was a church I was connected to some 10 years ago. When I saw that they got a new pastor a few years ago I decided to listen online to some of his messages and was immediately stunned because his sermons had a steady, constant drizzle of factual errors. For example he said that the Philip who spoke with the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 was the disciple Philip who spoke to Jesus in John 14. “Same guy!” he said. No it wasn’t. It’s a different Philip. The Philip who baptized the Ethiopian is the deacon Philip whom we first meet in Acts 6. This preacher also said that his favorite Bible story was the one where Gideon had to reduce his army of thousands to just 300 men by picking out just the left-handed men. No. His favorite Bible story said nothing about left-handedness. The army was reduced (at the end) according to the manner in which they drank water (Judges 7:4-7). He said that the 10 sons of Haman who were hanged in Esther chapter 9 all had a particle attached to their names which meant “self” which indicated that they, like their cursed father, were selfish and self-directed rather than God-directed. That is just idiotic. There is a particle connected to each name, but all it does is indicate the word is a direct object.

The pastor said in a Facebook post that he knew Greek and Hebrew, but in a sermon he said he liked Greek better because Hebrew had weird things like the fact that it had no word for "cow" or "goat", but substituted phrases like (here he improvised) “that animal over there that stands on four legs and chews grass.” Actually the word in Hebrew for bull is par; cow is para; male goat is tayish and female goat is ez. It is pretty straightforward.

Do I sound like I’m being picky on this poor guy? Well the mistakes get non-trivial pretty quickly. He said repeatedly in his sermons that in the Great Commission that Jesus gave to his disciples (Matthew 28:18-20), there is only one imperative in the Greek, and it is the word “Go”. It’s plural, he said, “Y’all go!”, and everything else - making disciples, baptizing them and teaching them – all fall under the main category of “going”. This understanding informs a church policy that he has called “Go to grow”. That is, don’t wait until you are a mature believer grounded in the Word before you go on a mission trip. No - just go, get out there, and you’ll grow along the way. I regard that as a recipe for missional disaster.

Anyone who has had one semester of Greek or who has paid attention to a minimally competent sermon on the Great Commission will know that the one imperative in it is the phrase “make disciples,” – not “go” or “baptize” or “teach”; those are all subsidiary participles. They’re dependent on the main verb which is “make disciples.” (One word in the Greek: “Disciple!” as a verb)

This pastor has described himself online as “a global teacher, speaker and consultant on leadership, culture and mission.” Something he said that I actually believe to be accurate is that his church had made it onto a list of the fastest-growing churches in America. And for me to know that such a church is led by a biblical illiterate brings to mind words famously sung by Jack Cash’s musically gifted younger brother: “I hang my head and cry.”

Now there are two ways for a preacher to avoid making factual mistakes about Scripture – a good way and a bad way. The good way is to read the text, do your homework, and produce results that your humble, prayerful research has yielded. The bad way is one that I’m hearing with increasing frequency, which is, don’t mention the Bible at all. Or refer to it as little as you can.

That is the great scandal in much of what passes for evangelical preaching today. The Bible, in many places, is barely heard.

Again, my evidence is anecdotal, personal, and highly subjective. Here is some of it. You can hardly imagine how many times when I am driving in my car alone and listening to a sermon on WMBI, I find myself yelling at the preacher on the radio, “WHAT IS YOUR TEXT???” That's when I’ve been listening 5, 10, 15 minutes and haven’t heard a Bible verse.

Recently I was listening online to Reformed theologian James White give a critique of one of Andy Stanley’s messages in the form of an open video letter to Stanley. At one point, in complete exasperation, White says to Stanley, “Could you give us a Bible verse once in a while?” And that hits the nail of my complaint against much of evangelical preaching on the head. Could you give us a Bible verse once in a while? In preparation for next week’s message I forced myself to start to listen to one of Stanley’s abominations. 14 minutes into the sermon, and he still hasn’t read his text of Scripture.

Some years ago a friend gave me a written copy of a sermon from a popular associate minister at his church, a teacher who went on to have a prominent ministry elsewhere. I was asked for my response. I was horrified by this message, which was a full-throated exaltation of Sandemanism (also known as easy believism or cheap grace). But that’s not the point I want to make about it. Among the things that leaped off the page at me was the fact that apart from his principle text (one of Jesus’ short parables), the entire sermon referenced no Bible verses at all until the very last page when there was a passing reference to one verse.

Even if you are honestly in no position to evaluate the worthiness of a sermon, let this thought at least suggest itself to you: In a sermon, a preacher should quote more Bible passages than Satan did when trying to tempt Jesus. (For the record, Satan quoted Psalm 91:11-12 when tempting Jesus in Matthew 4:6). If a preacher can’t reference more than one Bible verse in a 30-minute sermon, you know that something is wrong. Really really wrong.

Just as something is really wrong when a man who is tasked with leading a church seems incapable of bringing Scripture to bear on questions and matters of importance and crises that come before him.

Forty years ago when I was a freshman at Wheaton College, my roommate, Doug Schmidt, told me that he happened to be present at an informal gathering where some student asked a question of college president Hudson Armerding. I don’t know what the question was. But Doug told me that in the course of Armerding’s answer he brought up Scripture after Scripture after Scripture. It just flowed out of him. I wish I could have been there to partake of that delight.

On May 26 of this year, congregants at Willow Creek gathered and passed on to pastors Shawn Williams and Dave Dummit some questions they had written down. One question was, “Why is Bill Hybel’s name rarely mentioned?” You can see online a video of their response. It’s 8 minutes and 47 seconds long. Commentators jumped all over their response because of their failure to acknowledge the victims that Hybels left in his destructive wake.

Maybe you can already guess my other objection to their response. Neither man referenced anything in the Bible. It would be good if the malnourished, Scripture-starved sheep of Willow Creek bleated out the James White question: “Could you give us a Bible verse once in a while?”

I took upon myself the liberty of providing a Bible-based answer for Willow Creekans to the provocative question, “Why is Bill Hybel’s name rarely mentioned?” Here it is. (The pastors of Willow Creek are free to use this if they find it. I even give them permission in advance to plagiarize it without attribution. Take it!)

We do not mention Bill Hybels here – except as a byword, and as a warning – because he was a false brother. Jesus said that the pure in heart will see God (Matthew 5:8), but Bill, by anyone’s standards, has been impure in heart for decades. If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9), but Bill has refused to confess even when faithfully confronted. Instead he has stuck to his lies and slandered those who spoke the truth. Followers of Jesus Christ cannot do that, because no one who is born of God continues to sin (1 John 3:9). Sexually immoral people (like Bill) will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; Galatians 5:19-21; Ephesians 5:5). Revelation 21:8 says concerning sexually immoral people, liars, and other evildoers that “their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur.” As your pastors who will one day give an account to God concerning the watch that we have kept over you (Hebrews 13:17), we solemnly warn you that without holiness you will not see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14). So, for the love of God and the sake of your souls, stay away from Bill Hybels and people like him. Bad company corrupts good morals (1 Corinthians 15:33.) Until he repents or openly acknowledges that he is an unbeliever, you can’t even eat at the same table with him (1 Corinthians 5:11). We don’t want any of you to go to hell. Along with our God, we want all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). We don’t want any of you to arrive with false confidence before the throne of Christ only to hear him say, “I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness” (Matthew 7:23). If you are now in the condition that Bill Hybels proved himself to be in, repent, for kingdom of God is near (Matthew 4:17). It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31).

Those of us who belong to the evangelical tradition already know, we should already know, that we must keep our eyes on the pages of Holy Scripture. Read it, listen to it, learn it, and absorb it into your soul that it might do its work of warning you, comforting you, taking you apart and putting you back together in the image of Jesus Christ. And as that Word does its work in us, so also it is to come out of us in our words and our speech so that by holy viral spread it might accomplish the same work in others. God said, “My word that goes out from my mouth will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11).

The Bible is full of stories of the Bible itself, written to that point, being used to accomplish God’s good work. I think of Nehemiah 8, where Ezra read the book of the law to the returning exiles. The people paid close attention, and other Levites helped to explain the meaning.

Or Luke 24, where Jesus himself, right after his resurrection, conducted a Bible study with two disciples while on the way to Emmaus. Luke 24:27 says, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”

Or Acts chapter 2, the first public Christian sermon preached after the resurrection is a message by Peter where he expounds upon three Old Testament texts and relates them to Jesus: Joel 2:28-32; Psalm 16:8-11; Psalm 110:1

Or Acts chapter 8, one of the first gentile conversions takes place where two heads are bowed over a scroll of Isaiah and deacon Philip tells the Ethiopian what the text means and Whom it is about.

I think that in light of the ignorance and casual neglect of Scripture that has multiplied in our day and plagued our churches, it is appropriate to close with Paul’s words to young Timothy in 2 Timothy 4:1-3:

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and encourage with every form of patient instruction. For the time will come when men will not tolerate sound doctrine, but with itching ears they will gather around themselves teachers to suit their own desires.

Let us pray.

God, by your mercy, awaken and revive your church by means of your Word. May we who preach it be faithful to it, earnest about it, and handle it with reverence, care and awe. And may your people listen and verify with solemn diligence and love. In the name of Jesus your Son, to whom all Scriptures point, amen.

Evangelicalism in Crisis Part 3: Those Who Want To Be Rich

Greed is bad.

The Bible says that a million times. The 10th commandment has within it a condemnation of greed when it says “You shall not covet.”

Jesus said, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 5:19-21).

The apostle Paul wrote,

"[I]f we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs" (1 Timothy 6:8-10).

Greed is so bad that it will keep you from Jesus Christ. And that is bad because you cannot be saved apart from him. The Bible says, in Acts 4:12, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to humanity whereby we must be saved.”

Greed will keep you from coming to Christ in the first place, or it will turn you away from Christ at the very moment you are about to give your life to him, or it will cause you to wander away from Christ having once professed faith in him, or it will blind you to the horrible truth that you’re just a damned fool.

Here are four Scripture passages that speak to those four conditions that I just mentioned.

(1) Greed will keep you from Christ. The Bible says in Luke 16:14 that the Pharisees loved money. When Jesus said that you cannot serve both God and money, the Pharisees scoffed at him. They were never favorably inclined toward Jesus. They did not like him from the get-go. No man who loves money is favorably inclined toward Jesus. Such a man may have a soft spot in his heart for religion, and he may even love a Jesus of his own imagining. But he cannot love the Jesus who actually exists and who is faithfully presented on the pages of Holy Scripture. Pharisees love money. Pharisees hate Jesus.

(2) Greed will turn you away from Christ at the very moment you are about to give your life to him. That is what happened to the rich young man whose story is told in Matthew 19, Mark 10, and Luke 18. That man was no Pharisee. He did not hate Jesus or scoff at him. In fact, he trusted Jesus to tell him how to inherit eternal life. For some reason Jesus raised the bar very high for him. In his conversation with the man Jesus said, “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” (Mark 10:21).

The man did not do that because he was rich and he wanted to keep his things. The Bible says he walked away sad. He was ready to become a Christian, and probably would have done so, but greed got in his way.

Before I go on to number 3, I think I should speak to the matter of whether all of us should sell everything we have and give to the poor. My short answer is “No.” I agree with countless Bible teachers who have pointed out that Jesus only said this to one man. Jesus met lots of other rich people and did not make the same demand of them. Even Zacchaeus only pledged to give half of his stuff to the poor, and Jesus did not say, “Where’s the other half?” (Luke 19:8-10).

I think it is best to note that in this case, Jesus was laying his finger directly upon that man’s besetting sin. That man’s sin was greed, and it had to go. We may see rough parallels in Jesus’ conversations with Nicodemus in John 3 and the woman at the well in John 4. The sin of the woman at the well was not greed. It was promiscuity. Jesus said to her (and only to her), “Go call your husband.” That dagger of a sentence exposed her loose lifestyle. But a chapter earlier Jesus had not said to Nicodemus, “Go call your wife.” If Jesus had said that, I suppose Nicodemus would have shrugged his shoulders and said, “Ok, I’ll go call my wife.” That was not an area of embarrassment for him. He would not have needed to respond with an evasive deception like “I don’t have a wife.” It seems that Nicodemus’s besetting sin was neither greed nor promiscuity but rather the greatest, most fundamental sin of all: pride. So Jesus said to him, the great teacher of Israel (I paraphrase), “You have to start all over again like a newborn baby. You can’t even see the kingdom of God until you do.”

Jesus had the annoying habit of calling people to repentance in the area where they most needed it and where they were perhaps least willing to give it.

(3) Greed will cause you to wander from Christ even though you once professed faith in him. The apostle Paul said that himself in the passage I quoted earlier from 1 Timothy 6:10 where he says, “Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.” Jesus had earlier warned that the lure of riches would eventually draw some followers away from him. In the parable of the seed and the sower, the weeds that choke out a promising plant are identified as “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things” (Mark 4:19). Someone who probably fit in that category was Demas. I don’t think we can be 100 percent sure, because we don’t have all the details, but 2 Timothy 4:10 suggests this kind of falling away when it says, “Demas, because he loved this present world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica.” It sounds like Demas preferred riches to the rigors of serving Christ.

(4) Greed can blind you to the horrible truth that you’re just a damned fool. In Luke 12, Jesus tells the story of a man who has done very well for himself financially. He has done so well that it looks like he can take an early retirement and spend the rest of his days just enjoying life. He makes plans to build bigger storage facilities for all his stuff, and then says to himself, “You have plenty laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink, and be merry.”

For many people, that sounds like the American dream. Work only as long as you need to and then spend the rest of your days enjoying your stuff. But Jesus concludes that story by saying, “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” And then Jesus says, “This is how it will be for everyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:16-21)

That story hits too close to home for me. Earlier this week I was talking to my wife about the prospect of retirement. I am 58, and anticipating the day - perhaps 8 and a half years from now - when I can retire from my labor job in a chemical plant. And I think it is no sin to yearn for rest. But it is a sin to be self-indulgent - to think only in terms of one’s things and how one might best enjoy them at leisure, and to give no thought to how our resources might best be used for the glory of God and the benefit of people. The truth is, I may not have 8 and half years. Or I may have a lot more than that. But on whatever day God says to me, “Paul, this night your life will be demanded from you,” I don’t want him to preface that announcement with the words, “You fool.”

In order not to be fools, we must not be greedy. We must give with wise generosity, for the Bible says, “God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7). We must not be self-indulgent, because Jesus sternly warned people not to store up things for themselves. And we must not even want to be rich, because the apostle Paul said those who want to be rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. And Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich person to get into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24). No devout soul who takes those words seriously would ever want to be rich. What sane individual would want to make it harder to get into heaven? What rational person would want to fall into temptation and a trap that could drown him in destruction and perdition?

Now, what I have just shared with you is, in my mind, a very straightforward, pedestrian, old-hat Christian presentation on the subject of greed and its danger to the soul. I do not think that I have tried to provoke you with any extreme language or hyperbole. My goal here has been to set forth very simply, in measured tones, what the Bible says about greed.

And this leads me to a disturbing question to contemplate. For those of you who have some familiarity with mainstream evangelical preaching today – how often have you heard a condemnation of greed or a warning about greed along the lines of what I have just shared?

I have not heard it at all in recent years. Zero. And for what it’s worth, I do listen to sermons quite a bit. That’s what I do. Nearly every day I listen to at least parts of several contemporary evangelical sermons. There are gazillions of them online, and they’re also on Christian radio, and I listen to those when I’m driving. In today’s evangelical world, exhortations about and warnings against greed are nonexistent.

While condemnations of greed are absent, exhortations to give are plentiful. (Those two are not the same, of course.) I hear exhortations to give every day. In fact, there are preachers on evangelical Christian radio who, at end of every sermon, give a little presentation where they ask for money. Some don’t even wait for the end of the sermon. Some of them now have a commercial break in the middle of the sermon where they promote their ministry, hawk sales of their book, and ask you to give generously. Or, they offer you something free to get you on their mailing list. Such mailing lists, you should know, are lucrative cash cows for those who know how to exploit them.

I have a word of counsel for my fellow evangelicals. Don’t give money to millionaires. That’s stupid. And when I say that, I don’t even have in mind those obvious, outrageous frauds who masquerade as Christians. You know the type: Joel Osteen, T. D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Steven Furtick of Elevation Church, Brian Houston of Hillsong. Those people live cartoonishly lavish lifestyles, and their intoxication with greed is open, unapologized for, and actively promoted. Brian Houston, to pick one example, actually wrote a book with the title You Need More Money. On YouTube you can find a clip of him saying, “There is no one person in this building who doesn’t need more money. And if you say, ‘Well I don’t need more money,’ then I would say, ‘You have a very poor outlook on life.’” That is straight from the mouth of antichrist.

Frauds like the Hillsong founder Brian Houston - who clearly believed that St. Paul had a poor outlook on life for being content and not wanting more money - are beyond the fringe of the category of evangelical that I have in mind this morning. Greedy villains like Brian Houston and Joel Osteen will not be invited any time soon to speak at Moody’s Founders’ Week, or address the student body at Wheaton College, or serve as chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary, or join Keith and Kristyn Getty on the stage of a “Sing!” concert. Anyone who has a minimal familiarity with the Bible and a minimal familiarity with the teachings and lifestyles of Osteen, Joyce Meyer, Brian Houston, etc., will see very quickly that those people have nothing to do with Jesus Christ.

Again, my concern strikes much closer to home. Because I am speaking as an evangelical Christian to other evangelical Christians.

So here is an example of the kind of thing that concerns me. In 2010, I heard, a few months apart, a couple sermons by two well-known mainstream evangelical preachers. These were not TV charlatans but serious, influential expositors of the Word. Both sermons disturbed me, and I wrote essays at the time that referenced them. One preacher gave as a sermon illustration an incident where he said he really wanted to see a Monday night football game in person at Lambeau Field. Tickets were impossible to get at face value, so he instructed his son to go online and bid whatever exorbitant sum was necessary to get 12 tickets. He paid the ungodly price to get those tickets, and then a wealthy parishioner gave him 6 more, and the preacher concluded those were the tickets God wanted him to have. What you have there are thousands upon thousands of dollars, all derived ultimately from the sacrificial tithes of God’s people, to see a stupid football game. Of course there were a lot more shenanigans where that came from. Some years earlier that pastor had bought a house for 2 million dollars. He also had a serious gambling problem and he was known for giving away Harley Davidson motorcycles and automobiles to buddies like Ed Stetzer.

The other sermon I heard that year was by a younger preacher who boasted of having 40 pairs of shoes, and said his wife had more than that. He spoke contemptuously of modestly-priced wine and said he would only drink the premium stuff. Again, there was more, but I’ll stop there. You get the idea. He said these things without any remorse, repentance or shame - just as matters of fact.

The first preacher was the since-utterly-disgraced James MacDonald and the second preacher was the since-utterly-disgraced Mark Driscoll. Eleven years later we all know how evil these men are now that their jaw-dropping depravity in multiple areas has been unveiled for the world to see. All their former elders have at long last found the courage to denounce them. And that’s good. But my question is, “How did these men of such transparent, demonic greed flourish for so long in a community of people that supposedly value the Bible, and read it, and love the Lord Jesus Christ?” That is incomprehensible to me. How did MacDonald keep his radio show on WMBI? How did he get invited to speak to Bible students at Moody and to seminary students at Trinity? How did that fiend Mark Driscoll manage to plant his name, face and influence on every nook and cranny of the evangelical world? Part of the answer is that evangelicals of influence stopped caring about, identifying, denouncing, and repenting of greed. Gargantuan self-gorging greed is just out there all the time in plain sight, and we as a community have winked at it and let it slouch on by.

And we’re still doing that. It is part of the ongoing crisis in evangelicalism today. For example: David Jeremiah is still on evangelical Christian radio. Some years ago his chief financial officer, George Hale, resigned in protest and disgust over the unethical, deceptive practices Jeremiah was using to artificially inflate numbers on his book sales. Jeremiah doesn’t even write his own books – he employs ghostwriters. But with his celebrated name on the covers of these books, he was able to get a 3 million dollar check from Faith Words, a Nashville-based publisher, and soon after that, in January of 2010, he bought a 2 million dollar condominium in a resort community on Coronado Island.

Of course that’s wrong, of course that is indicative of blatant, self-indulgent, godless greed. But how can the megachurch evangelical preachers of our day condemn such a vice when so many of them are awash in it themselves?

Thank God there are exceptions to the rule of greed that has so poisoned our evangelical culture. I’ll mention two that I know about, though I’m sure there are others.

John Piper could be very rich and live very lavishly if he wanted to. He need only say the word. The royalties on his books would have him set for life. But for years Piper has kept his relatively modest house in a troubled neighborhood in Minneapolis where the syringes of drug addicts litter his doorstep. It is as though there is a golden apple before his eyes, and yet for the love of Christ and fear of God he refuses to lay hold of it. He values as something far greater his treasure in heaven, and refuses to forfeit that for the sake of earthly comfort. When his elders wanted to raise his salary beyond what he knew he needed, he refused. They tried to pressure him with the argument that it would throw off the salary structure of the whole staff, because of course they would have to be paid less than the senior pastor, and that wouldn’t be enough for them. Piper was mystified by that argument and said, “Where is it written that the senior pastor has to be the highest paid? Why should that be case? Just pay them what you need to pay them. If it’s more than what I get, who cares?”

I’m so thankful to God that there are some people who get it.

Someone of a previous generation who got it was C. S. Lewis. The converted atheist and greatest mind of his generation actually had trouble comprehending some things that other people seem to manage without difficulty. Algebra was beyond him. He was never able to learn how to drive a car. And he had no knack for understanding money management. In fact, his first publisher ripped him off royally and Lewis had no clue. Lewis didn’t really understand money, he just knew that as a Christian he had to be generous with the money that came his way.

I have to stick in a parenthetical note here. When I said that he was the greatest mind of his generation, it will seem that I immediately contradicted myself by referring to areas where he was, shall we say, special. Lest that remain as the dominant impression, please let me encourage you to read just the first six chapters of his book Miracles. Serious engagement with that book alone will have you staring open-jawed at the page and wondering why you never realized till that moment that you were an utter simpleton.

But I digress. When the money came rolling in from Lewis’s bestselling books, he just gave it away to widows and orphans and other needy people. He actually gave way too much of it, because he didn’t know he still had to pay taxes on it as income. Once he got back on track financially from having given his way into tax debt, he established a charitable fund with the help of a lawyer friend, Owen Barfield, and for the remainder of his days he never saw most of the royalties from his books because two-thirds of it went directly to charity.

And no, he did not buy a two million dollar condo in a resort community. In fact, the house he lived in near Oxford didn’t even have central heat. It was cold in the winter. He felt he had to warn an incoming American guest, Walter Hooper, that the accommodations he could offer would probably be a lot less comfortable than what an American would be used to.

Among the many gems that Lewis left behind is this statement concerning how much we, as Christians, should give. It is so encouraging to know that he not only wrote this, but he lived by it. He wrote:

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”

Amen. Let us pray.

Our Father in heaven, give us this day our daily bread. Wait a minute. Scratch that, God. You already gave me my daily bread. And tomorrow’s bread too, and the day after that. They’re in my refrigerator and freezer and cupboards at home. So let me start again. Thank you God for the overabounding material blessings that I, a rich spoiled brat, take for granted as an entitlement and mostly don’t even notice. Deliver me from the greed that rules my culture and renders me senseless to the ways in which, perhaps, my own heart has been taken captive to it. Thank you for the example of saints like Paul who conquered greed and enjoyed contentment in the confines of a prison cell. Teach me to live with that generosity of spirit so that when the moment comes for you to say that my life is demanded of me, you will not call me the fool that I am by nature, but the child and servant that I have become by grace. In Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.