What Is Our Top Concern About Today's Church?

In this regular feature, Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call.  Here’s this week’s question:  “Dear Tom and Dave, I know you guys deal with a lot of issues and have for many years as I have read and followed your ministry, but I am curious to know what your number one concern is regarding what’s taking place in the church today.”

Tom:

Well, it’s addressed to both of us so I guess—your opinion Dave, I have an opinion.

Dave:

Go ahead.

Tom:

Well, I think the thing that concerns me most is, maybe what we were talking about in the first segment.  There doesn’t seem to be a heart for God’s Word ruling in the hearts of, maybe to my own heart to some degree, but I am really looking at, what we call evangelical leadership, ecumenism, certain things have developed and continue to develop where you say, well, what does God’s Word say about that? And it’s almost like, what are you talking about? What do you mean God’s Word?  Dave, we’ve mentioned before that many evangelicals believe in the inerrancy of God’s Word, of the authority of God’s Word, although, I think, those are having trouble today.  But, certainly the sufficiency of God’s Word, that’s where you draw a blank stare—what are you talking about?  All truth is God’s truth and so on.  So, I just see an undermining of the resource that God has given us, the scriptures.

Dave:

Yeah, the questioner is asking our greatest concern, I guess, for the church today.  You have to define church.  We have all kinds of churches out there and we have churches that have some very serious problems that have departed.  We have whole denominations, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for example, has departed totally from the Word of God, but we have others that haven’t departed quite so far.  And again, as you said, the problem is, are we going to go by the Bible?  We have evangelicals, for example, Tom, the situation in the Middle East right now.  We have a Christian president; I believe he really is a Christian.  I don’t know him personally, but this is what I get from other people.  He talks about a Palestinian state.  I think we did a newsletter on this, an article—I think I called it, “Defying the God of Israel,” because the Bible very clearly says that that land was given to the Jews by God forever.  Now, how can you claim to believe the Bible and yet talk about giving parts of this land over to a people to whom it doesn’t belong?  I mean, that’s just a very simple situation.  One place where we can see what the Bible very clearly says, hundreds of prophesies that God would preserve these people, bring them back into their land, the Messiah will rule over them there—this was given to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and yet, I would say, in defiance of that the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, the pressure we put on Israel and, of course, in defiance of that, the Israelis themselves, Israeli leadership doesn’t believe it.  They are willing to give up this land.  So again, it comes down to, do we believe the Bible?  Do we take everything that it says and are we going to accept this and then, live by it?  So I’m—  

Tom:

Dave, along that line, stepping down from the President and looking at evangelical leadership, you have large, incredibly large evangelical churches who are recognizing Islam as a tolerant faith, have had Muslim clerics share their pulpits. We have Robert Schuller in OrangeCounty.

Dave:

He had an imam in his pulpit, right.

Tom:

He also has that organization within the Crystal Cathedral Ministries which promote—what’s the name of the organization?

Dave:

The Joint Christian Muslim Institute for Peace.

Tom:

Now, we are all in favor of peace, but it has to do with a blindness toward the false religion of Islam.

Dave:

Tom, you would just look at it from a common sense standpoint, okay?  Let’s forget sacred books, forget Christianity or Islam or whatever it is.  We know that God exists; we know that we have broken his laws, every human being knows that.  I mean, I can count on that because the Bible says so, Romans 1, we all know from creation around us that God exists.  Romans 2, we know in our conscience—he has written his law in our conscience—we have broken his laws.  Now—religion, what does religion do?  It offers you some do-it-yourself kit, it offers you sacraments or rituals or some way to appease God.  Look, if you talked about appeasing a judge, it wouldn’t fly!  The penalty has to be paid.  They don’t face that, so you have all kinds of ways—turning over a new leaf, doing good works, somehow to buy points with God.  You couldn’t do that in a court of law.  That in itself, rules out most of, well, all of the religions in the world and very much of what claims to be Christianity.  So, we’ve got to get back to what the Bible says and common sense tells you that if we have broken God’s laws, which we know we have, the penalty has to be paid.  Now, either we’re going to pay that for eternity ourselves or someone paid it in our place and that’s Jesus Christ, he’s the only one who could do it and we have to get back to this message and not compromise it.

Tom:

Right.  And again, Dave, to answer this person’s question, we’ve seeing an incredible growth in accommodation of false religions, false beliefs, false practices, things that are contrary to God’s Word.

Dave:

It’s not because we are narrow-minded, dogmatic fundamentalists that we don’t like that, Tom.  It’s because the issue is, the eternal destiny of souls.