Watch yourself

The temptations faced by high-profile Christian evangelists are enormous. Those who have not made themselves sufficiently accountable have at times brought the church into disrepute. No doubt even those who lived in the past must have gone through the mill of temptation.

I admire Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the foremost evangelistic Baptist preacher of the 19th century, for his clear and courageous stand against moral compromise. As an exercise, I have taken one of his meditations on the subject and turned it into the English of today. While his original words are easy enough to understand, people express themselves in a completely different way nowadays!

Spurgeon's text for the passage which follows is Psalm 5:8. In the King James Version with which Spurgeon would have been familiar, this goes, "Lead me, O Lord, in Thy righteousness because of mine enemies."

Here is my rendering of what he has to say about it:

The hostility of the world against the people of Christ is bitter indeed. People will forgive a thousand faults in unbelievers, but they will exaggerate the slightest moral lapse by Christians. Instead of fretting about this, let us turn it to advantage. Since so many are watching for us to slip up, let the knowledge of this spur us to behave extra carefully in the presence of God. If we live without watching our conduct, the eagle-eyed world will soon spot it. With its hundred tongues, it will spread the story in all directions, exaggerated and embellished by those who enjoy putting others down. They will shout triumphantly, "Aha! Just as we always thought! Look how these Christians behave! They are hypocrites, every last one of them." Great damage will be done to the cause of Christ in this way, and great insult heaped on His name. The cross of Christ is already offensive to the world without our help; let us not do anything to make it more so. To the Jews it is "an obstacle to trip over": let us take care not to put any more obstacles where there are enough already. "To the Greeks it is foolishness": let us not add foolery of our own. This would simply give more of an edge to the scorn which the worldly-wise heap on the gospel. How watchful we should be about ourselves! How unbendable we should make our consciences! Our enemies will misrepresent even the best of our deeds. If they cannot condemn our actions, they will question our motives instead. Faced with that, how circumspect we need to be! When pilgrims travel through Vanity Fair in John Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress", they are marked people. Not only are we under surveillance, but there are more spies than we could ever imagine. This espionage is everywhere, both at home and when we are out and about. If we fall into the hands of our enemies, we would be more likely to receive generous treatment from a wolf, or mercy from a malicious demon, than from them. The last thing they will show is patience with our weaknesses. After all, they spice their insipid unbelief in God with scandals against His people. Lord, lead us every moment, for fear our enemies will trip us up!

Man, Movement, Machine, Monument

Preacher and writer Dr Vance Havner once said that most religious movements begin with a man, then the movement becomes a machine, and finally it turns into a monument.

It’s sadly a very true statement. Thinking of my own background in the Methodist denomination, John Wesley in the 18th century was a whirlwind of a man, a great organiser who set in train the mighty movement known as Methodism. Marshalled into Conference, districts, circuits, preaching places, classes, bands, its following soared. There was even talk of the country being on the verge of going Methodist.

Then the pioneer movement somehow became solidified into one of the big denominations of the 19th century. It gave birth to a multitude of organisations and programmes. Everything meshed together and ticked over like a well-oiled mechanism. It had become a machine.

As the 20th century wore on, the sense grew that Methodism could no longer meet the needs and fire the imaginations of the people. Its movers and shakers began to hark back to the past. Places where Wesley did this or that were turned into stops on a heritage trail. A musical – “Ride! Ride!” – was written to celebrate the memory of the great man’s prodigious evangelistic travels. The machine was slowly but surely turning into a monument.

I moved into independency in 1998 and am hopeful that Evangelical independency remains a dynamic movement. Churches co-operating, but each standing free under God – that has ongoing appeal to me as a good way of doing and being church. But the same danger lurks.

It may be hard to identify the point where movement turns into machine and then monument. Yet it should be clear to those with discernment. When a church’s programme simply perpetuates itself year after year without question, or fond memories of the glorious past loom larger than hopes for the future, watch out.

A church may need to take a critical magnifying glass to much of what it has become, which is a painful process. Yet if the ideal of the movement is recovered, if Jesus Christ becomes real for people again, if people are once again helped and blessed, it is worth while.

John the Revelation-writer had to warn even the great church at Ephesus, “Yet I hold this against you: you have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place” (Revelation 2:4-5 NIV).