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Call to Worship
Reading of Psalm
Prayer
Kids Play day this Tuesday.
Anyone want to make snacks?
Tonights Church meeting is at 6:30 with everyone meeting here.
Deacons meeting tonight after Church.
Introduction
Well as you very well know, this is the first Lord’s Day of October and this is a day that I have been anticipating now for several months.
We will be setting to the side our study of Paul’s letter to the Galatians to study the five core articles of the Reformation.
5 Core doctrinal beliefs that the early reformers declared that we must believe in order to be within the realm of Biblical Orthodoxy.
Now for many of you this statement might not make much sense.
Why are these 5 elements what the great reformers said was needed in order to accept true Biblical Christianity?
Well I think that as we walk through this month, the teachings that we will encounter should make this very clear to us as time progresses.
So as we begin today, I’d like to open up our study of the first and most influential of the solas with a reading that comes from .
Let us read God’s holy Word and go to Him in prayer.
Read and Pray.
On January 4th 2017, David Haskell who is a Professor of religion and culture at the university of Wilfred Laurier wrote an article for the Washington Post.
The headline for this article was as follows: “Liberal churches are dying.
But conservative churches are thriving.”
The headline on this article is surely enough to grab the attention of anyone who comes across it.
For the liberal who sees this they would be angered that something like this even made it into the paper.
And for the conservative they would be wondering what the real reasoning behind this article would be.
Haskell begins his article by stating that according to research, mainline protestant Churches are shrinking by around 1 million people every year.
Yet Haskell isn’t noticing anything new.
There was a time 100 years ago when every Church across this great land would be filled to the brim with people who fellowship at the local body.
From the high end banker to the town drunk who stumbled into the back doors of the Church hungover, the local Churches thrived and flourished in our American culture.
But as time progressed, something happened that transformed the thinking and the culture.
Something happened that led those people to search for answers outside of the local Church.
And when they looked for those answers outside of the local Church, they found answers that lined up with what they wanted to hear.
The hearts of those very same people who 20-30 years before had filled the local churches, now looked unto something else as their authority.
The thoughts in their minds about where the ultimate source of moral authority came from began to drift away from the Bible.
Instead of the Word of God providing answers to these people, they now had the world around them to give them the answers.
The problem is that the world around them operated and functioned on the basis of individual thought.
What was right for you was right for you and what was right for me was right for me.
Never mind the fact that our two views may contradict each other.
Let each of them do what is right in their own minds.
I think theres some thoughts on that in Scripture...
With this same idea of individual autonomy where each person now becomes their own little god if you will, came alongside it people in the Church who believed the same thing.
Men such as John Shelby Spong who is a Bishop in the Episcopal Church would write books such as “Why Christianity Must Die or Change.”
And this influence became prominent over the local Church’s.
In a time where conservative scholars were battling to win the souls of the unbelievers with the truth of the Gospel.
Men like Spong came along offering up a different Jesus.
A Jesus who still somewhat looks like the Jesus from the New Testament.
A Jesus who still might have died upon the Cross of Calvary.
Yet this new Jesus, He’s alright with your sin.
In fact, what the “Old” Christians believed to be sin, we won’t even call sin anymore.
Instead we will call it something along the lines of misunderstood lifestyles.
We’ll take what God has clearly forbade in the text of Holy Scripture and we will now teach the truth.
The truth that those horrible and wretched conservatives knew this whole time.
But in order to push you down and oppress you, they decided to stick with “ancient and outdated” views.
Yet these men and women, people such as Spong and countless many others who teach a different view of Christianity, these are the people that would swear that they are right.
This thought that said basically this:
That in order to minister to the hearts of those living in the 21st century, we must transform the text of Scripture so that it conforms to the thinking of the modern world.
And for a long time, this thought and these people had their hands in every arena you could imagine.
It wasn’t just the rise of individual liberal theologians and pastors that brought on this issue.
It was also the indoctrination of those who were being educated in the Seminaries as well.
Ralph Elliot who was a professor in 1961 at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, the school that I attend:
Published a work criticizing the creation account in Genesis and declared that chapters 1-11 of Genesis were merely mythical.
But as Dr. Jason Allen pointed out in a reflection article concerning this event, Elliot’s work was not the largest part or even the pinnacle of the incident, but instead was merely the last straw so to speak.
*Ralph Elliot*
Elliot’s work was the final piece of kindling that made the pile ready for the fire.
Liberal theology for countless many years had run rampant throughout the Southern Baptist Seminaries.
Elliot’s work merely revealed it to those in the pews of the local Churches.
Something drastic had happened in many of the local Churches.
Something that was unprecedented and outright rebellious against God.
Yet I don’t have to tell very many of you about this.
Many of you lived through this.
I mean that was the entire reason that this Church was started.
To get away from the “system” Church and get back to the roots of Orthodox Christianity.
And that’s not a bad thing at all.
This period of time that we’ve been talking about this morning was horrendous for the local Church.
It was bad for the Church then and it’s bad for the Church now!
But can I tell you something, the effects and the impacts of liberal theology is coming to light in profound ways in our modern culture.
A Church in California who once stood on sound principles of the faith is now there as an empty building.
What was once a thriving body of believers reaching over 2500 in attendance and membership has now vanished.
What caused the closure one might ask?
At the end of the day it’s all very simple, they removed themselves from being under the authority of the Scriptures.
The mega-churches who closed down did so because somewhere along the line, they abandoned the only source that they had for truth.
The dying liberal Churches are seeing the very same issue.
They are rejecting the authority of the Scriptures, and because of this they are losing ground and dying off every day.
So what does this have to do with the Protestant Reformation and our text for the day?
I would argue that they are directly connected to one another.
In the periods leading up to the Reformation, the Church was dying in much the same way.
The people of God were being starved of the truth.
They were being fed a lie and told that it was the truth.
They could hear
They were being told that they must work hard to make themselves right before God.
In the period of the reformation the Church was starving for truth at the hands of those who were entrusted to teach.
In our generation today, you have the same thing.
A body of men sent off to the local Seminary to be equipped and yet they come back rejecting the authority of the Word.
Rejecting the Word and pouring those same thoughts and ideas into the hearts and the minds of their congregations.
But in the period of the reformation, men were bold enough to stand firm and stand up against the tyrannies that would enslave the people.
See we credit 1517 and Luther’s 95 Thesis as being the starting point of the reformation.
And while there’s some truth to that, the reformation actually begun a few years later with Ulrich Zwingli.
Zwingli on January 1 1519, set aside his Catholic lectionary and began to read and to teach from the Bible in a verse by verse, book by book format.
This idea that Zwingli as the Pastor of the church had the authority to set aside the catholic lectionary that was assigned to him and just teach the Bible was profound.
You see, Zwingli, Luther, Calvin and many other reformers had gotten to this place and this mindset that Scripture is enough!
And not only is it enough, it is the sole authority in the Church.
It’s the sole authority in the lives of Christ’ followers.
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