How We Got Into This Religious Mess (Part 2)

(Continued from Part 1)

Here comes philosophy turned theology. The gathering up of verses. The preaching of verses and leaving out stuff they didn’t want you to hear. Dwight L. Moody gave us…invented out of a whole cloth and out of the influence of George Whitfield and Charles Finney, he invented a whole new theology. It’s as shallow as it can get. We Southern Baptists bought into it lock, stock, and barrel, and it’s in this room, and it dominates this room. It’s called Revival Theology. What it teaches…it only teaches two things. Every word in the New Testament says one of two things. 1. Get saved, or you go to hell. 2. You are saved; win the lost. Every parable Jesus ever spoke, every word he ever uttered, teaches two things. Get saved, save others. Get saved, save others. There is no mysticism; Luther took care of that. There is no depth; George Whitfield and Dwight L. Moody took care of that.

I go to conferences. I listen to people. I was in Budapest at the International Summit of Evangelism. They got all the bigwigs there. I remember one of the most famous men in America saying, ‘Paul and Barnabas went out to lead people to Jesus Christ, and they won them, and they suffered greatly, and this and that. We need the spirit of going out like that and winning people to the Lord. He told that whole story, and never once did the word church come out of his mouth. Because those men have such a low opinion of the church, I share that low opinion, but I’m not going to create a New Testament that has no church in it. Those men have given you a New Testament without the church of the living God in it, and the Bible classes you attend are, and the things you hear on television and the preachers you hear preaching on the radio have no church in their New Testament. They have revival theology. This is the curse of curses. Between having a verse that will let you do anything on earth… between a mentality that says when I’m 21 years old I get saved, and when I’m 22, I will found a non-profit religious organization to do something that is utterly churchless.

Now, I’m going to scoot back again. I want you to get a better look at this. There was a guy named John Darby. He was for the church. It didn’t matter that it was going to be a church Catholic in nature. Now, you need to understand who John Darby is because he is probably the greatest influence in this room. With the accumulation of all these people sitting in his head, John Darby was a Church of England priest, and he joined the brethren at a time when they were about where we are right now. Beautiful. House church. Boy, these people were for the church. They were out to restore her. John Darby came in. John Darby, you know, up here’s the pope and here’s these people, and down here and there’s the peasants, and he had it warped and woofing him. That man was an authoritarian. Nonetheless, he did preach about the church, and do you know what else he did? He preached that all the traditional churches were Babylon. He really gave the organized church down the country. And he amassed this great verse here, verse here, verse here; not since Thomas Aquinas has anybody ever put together such a scheme. He could, every time there was a problem, create a new world of teaching. Some guy named Schofield came along. He took all these teachings and put them in a Bible, but instead of the attacks that John Darby had made on the organized church, and he had the organized church as the—I don’t know if it was the beast or what it was, but it was at least Babylon—well, Schofield was in the institutional churches, so he switched it. He made the liberals the people in the Bible that God didn’t like, and preserved the traditional church. Dwight L. Moody came along and ignored the church part completely so he could have his great crusades and raise a lot of money for them. He just got down to the teachings of Schofield, which were the teachings of John Darby, and he put all that together in a churchless mode and presented it.

Now, here’s the sad part. The liberals did take over American seminaries. So, Dwight L. Moody founded the Moody Bible Institute, and when people took a look at that, Bible institutions were born all over America. Now, in seminary, you have to be a college graduate before you get into it. In a Bible school, you could be a high school graduate. It’s all the same curriculum. Right out of Aristotle. Dwight L. Moody’s Bible Institute would have sent out so many people. It’s a churchless institution. It’s lost; saved; save others. They crank that out, and they crank that out in those Bible schools all over America, and unfortunately, all of those Bible schools are now seminaries, and they’re turning out our preachers. And those preachers don’t know anything I just told you. They’re going out with a New Testament, and they’re banging on it, saying, Preach the word of God. They’re taking John Darby’s theological mind and using these verses together to prove anything. None of them work from a first-century model, and that’s where we are today.

I’m going to get; I’m going to peel high at this point. You got your little Bible class, and you’re into the word. Bull. You got your Bible class, and its churches. You send money. Or maybe you’re part of one of the interdenominational organizations. It’s churchless. Its whole emphasis is evangelism. I don’t want to take from that, but brothers and sisters, the New Testament gives you a deeper Lord than this. In the second session we have, for the first time ever in my life, I think at least in the United States, I’m going to talk to you about some of the more practical things about how to get to know the Lord a little better in a way I haven’t done before.

You have a shallow Christian faith. You have a mentality that has a New Testament without a church. What we are doing in seeking to return to first things, there ought to be 100,000 people in this room, not 100. We are enamored with the beauty and the gaud of interdenominational movements. Let me just cheat here a little bit. I sometimes think about writing a book titled Confessions of a Preacher by Minister X. These interdenominational movements attract young people. Their churches send them money. They’re going out and spending the summer preaching a gospel somewhere. Those kids experience church life. That’s wonderful, but nobody knows it. They love it. Then on Sunday morning, there sweeps through every week, about 8 o’clock in the morning, a terrible disease: headaches, fever, belly aches, dizziness, total exhaustion. They don’t want to go to church. Now, I have verified this again and again. These kids are having a wonderful time. They’re getting to know the Scripture. They think this is going to carry them through the rest of their life because it’s being told the Bible, the Bible, the Word of God. I’m not against that. It’s just that it’s not. Its verses are logically arranged to circumvent the church and present revival theology. There is no depth, there is no centrality of Christ, and there is no ecclesia. But those kids love the interdenominational movements, and I don’t blame them. Man, those things, they got bands, and they got those lights, you know, and they got puppets, and they’ve got fun, and they’ve got clowns, and… The Church of Jesus Christ has a Sunday morning sermon. Which one would you choose? Bring in the clouds…anytime.

Those of you who are not in the… You can’t go back to the church, and I’m asked where to go all the time. Most people seem to go to The Vineyard. John Darby revisited, behind the submission and authority. And a lot of people, I’d recommend this: just find yourself one blowing, glowing, beautiful interdenominational organization and go to their meetings. Get with those kids, but just know that those kids are run ragged and exhausted mentally and emotionally. After two or three years, you can’t find them in the kingdom of God. They have been milked dry. Tossed out while a new group comes in.

By the way, the evangelization of the world is an impossibility. You could evangelize and save every human being on this earth today, and in 10 or 15 years, you’d have that problem all over again. Salvation is wonderful, but it is not transforming. It saves us from sin, but it does not transform us. Do you understand what I’m saying here? There’s little transformational power in salvation. That’s the long haul, and we neglect that. It belongs to the church of Jesus Christ.

Now, brother, I would strongly recommend that you give up your Bible school mentality and the Bible class you’re so enamored with. If you’ve got a little group with elders and ministry to this little group, I just want you to know that you’re repeating the teachings of John Darby. Ain’t got nothing to do with the Bible. Ain’t got nothing to do with Jesus. It is a tradition.

One of the first things I ever learned when I got out of the seminary and started finding the real world out there: have you ever gone into a Bible class since the first night? Invariably, that Bible class will show you why you need to get into the Word of God, and boy, I tell you, it is electrifying. Read this. Word of God, my pastor never showed me this, never did this. Look at this. We’ve got to get in the Bible. Something mean gets inside of you. Almost immediately. Mean.