A failure of biblical proportions

“I know you inside and out, and find little to my liking. You’re not cold, you’re not hot – far better to be either cold or hot! You’re stale. You’re stagnant. You make me want to vomit. You brag, ‘I’m rich, I’ve got it made, I need nothing from anyone,’ oblivious that in fact you’re a pitiful, blind beggar, threadbare and homeless.”

– Jesus (Rev. 3:15-17)

No, these are not Jesus Christ’s words to the Muslims, the Buddhists, the atheists or the new-age designer-religion peddlers. They are Jesus Christ’s words to His church just prior to the end of the church age. Very likely, they are His words directed to the church you and I attend. They are his assessment that the church, which He loves and for whom He died, has lost its heart, mind, and soul even as it professes His words.

Jesus assigned a seemingly impossible task to the church following His death and resurrection: “Go now and make disciples of all nations.” Against all odds, the church very nearly succeeded. Out of the crumbled ruins of the Roman empire, mingled with the fragments of Greece, Western civilization rose on the back of the church. Central was the concept of an all-powerful God who demanded the allegiance of even the king, and who placed all men and women – the small and the great – on the same footing. In 1644, Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish philosopher, captured the essence when he turned the phrase “Rex Lex,” the King is Law, around. The new phrase, “Lex Rex,” Law is King, turned the world – and government – on its head.

Chief of the beneficiaries of Lex Rex was England, with its Common Law, and its struggling colony, America. The adolescent child separated from its parent during the War for Independence in 1776. Its fledgling founders drew on the best of Western thought – assembled brick by brick on the principles of Christianity – and drafted the new nation’s bedrock principles in a new Constitution that not only limited the powers of government, but charged it with protecting individual rights. To the world’s tired, poor and oppressed, America became the city on the hill whose light could not be hid. They arrived in droves.

With religious liberty in its homeland enshrined in the new Constitution and 10 subsequent amendments, the Christian church in America focused anew on Jesus’ departing words, “Go now and make disciples of all nations …” (Matthew 28:19). By the mid-1700s, the financial income and expenditures of Christian charities focused on world evangelism and relief rivaled the federal government’s income and expenditures.

But the church made a tactical error. Its leaders were blinded. From the smallest to the largest, churches focused on making disciples of other nations, while they neglected the nations growing in their own backyard. Christian churches, which founded the majority of private colleges in America – Princeton, Harvard and Yale among them – suddenly found themselves unwelcome on those campuses. Public officials, who once assumed themselves to be operating in a Christian framework, began to sense and reach out to other constituencies. And the church, absorbed in other lands, failed to notice the change.

In a study released Dec. 1, the Barna Research Group reported the results: Today only 4 percent of Americans have a biblical worldview. Inside churches, that figure rises to 9 percent.

Worldview … was defined as believing that absolute moral truths exist; that such truth is defined by the Bible; and firm belief in six specific religious views. Those views were that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life; God is the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe and He stills rules it today; salvation is a gift from God and cannot be earned; Satan is real; a Christian has a responsibility to share their faith in Christ with other people; and the Bible is accurate in all of its teachings.

– “A Biblical Worldview Has a Radical Effect on a Person’s Life”

Barna tested the effect of this worldview on common lifestyle choices:

People’s views on morally acceptable behavior are deeply impacted by their worldview. Upon comparing the perspectives of those who have a biblical worldview with those who do not, the former group were 31 times less likely to accept cohabitation (2 percent vs. 62 percent, respectively); 18 times less likely to endorse drunkenness (2 percent vs. 36 percent); 15 times less likely to condone gay sex (2 percent vs. 31 percent); 12 times less likely to accept profanity 3 percent vs. 37 percent); and 11 times less likely to describe adultery as morally acceptable (4 percent vs. 44 percent). In addition, less than one-half of one percent of those with a biblical worldview said voluntary exposure to pornography was morally acceptable (compared to 39 percent of other adults), and a similarly miniscule proportion endorsed abortion (compared to 46 percent of adults who lack a biblical worldview).

The political and cultural divide in America is religious. The Christian worldview provided unprecedented freedom, but entwined in the strands of that freedom was the moral restraint provided by biblical guidance on individual conduct. Self governance. Without personal moral restraint, laws are necessary to reduce damaging personal and public conduct. Bogged down with a growing patchwork of laws to enforce – each enacted at the urgings of varied special interests – government grows proportionally and soon abandons the very notion of individual rights in favor of balancing competing claims in a sea of moral relativism.

The conclusion is inescapable: The church has failed to protect the homeland. We will now live with the result until Jesus returns.