Grace Thoughts

Guest (Male): Hello friends, welcome to Grace Thoughts, the radio ministry of Grace Connection Church with Pastor Tim Kelley. Grace Thoughts has been dedicated to preaching a clear gospel of grace for over 20 years. Here is Pastor Kelley.

Tim Kelley: The last message I started talking, this is our intensive care series. I thought it was fitting because we have a projector on intensive care. It's really been a series about the condition of the church in America, specifically in America, and what we can do to fix the issues the church is facing.

In the first message, we talked about the size of the church. In some estimates, people say the Christian church is 50 to 70 percent of our nation, but in reality, it's about 7 to 8 percent of our nation. It's much smaller than people and the political pundits even like to say. So we don't have quite the clout that we thought we've had for the last 30 or 40 years.

The last week we talked about "Hated." How the church is basically hated. Of course, in the countries that don't embrace Christianity at all, it's persecuted. But in America now, if you remember the statistic last week, 22 percent of our college professors have negative feelings about Muslims. Fifty-three percent of the same professors have negative feelings about Christians.

So you can see the hatred, or maybe that's too strong of a word, the displeasure, the repulsion, the rejection of our Christian presence in America is well-documented and it's not going anywhere. It's been propagating itself for quite a while now.

In the last message, I talked about two big cherry laurel trees in my yard. My house was built in the 1950s in the subdivision over by Tyrone Mall. What they did back then is they used the same basic bushes in every yard. I had to rip all mine out and put new stuff in. But if you were going back, you'd find a little red flower bush that was there and lots of cherry laurel trees everywhere.

Well, my tree, as I noticed about five or six years ago, I was mowing my award-winning lawn and I noticed there were some ants crawling around my tree. So I looked and I poked in there, and there were a lot of ants crawling on my cherry laurel tree. So I went and got some Raid and I sprayed it in there, thinking I'd kill all the ants. Thousands of ants came out. They didn't like that Raid stuff and thousands of ants came out of that tree.

I said, "Wow, that tree is infested with these ants." So I called a tree guy because that tree was a big tree and it was sort of close to my house. I was afraid someday we'd get a tropical storm or, worse, a hurricane come through and I'd need a new roof. So I had the guy come in and he said, "This tree is eaten throughout and you've got to take it down."

He said, "I don't think it could withstand a 40 or 50 mile-an-hour wind." And he showed me when he cut it where it was just eaten throughout. He checked the tree next to it and that tree was just as compromised. Anyway, they both had to go.

The essence I told that story last week was the principle of the winds of the world, the current of the world could blow that tree over. When you looked at the tree, you wouldn't think anything was wrong with it. The tree, being the church, by sight looked like a normal tree, had green leaves, it was high. But in close inspection, it was corroded and eaten up and could no longer withstand a normal storm or a tropical storm that would've blown that tree over.

That was the principle because we're in that storm called the United States of America if you're a Christian today. But I want to go back to my cherry laurel trees because there was another principle attached to them. Before any storm could come and blow that tree over, the tree had to be internally compromised.

The tree itself had to lose its strength. If the tree had never lost its strength, no storm could have ever blown it over. It would have been okay. It would have been secure. But because he had these big old ants in there for a long, long time and ate away the strength of the tree and corroded, if I can use that term, the strength of the tree.

I want to use that principle today because I want to present to us that somewhere in the last 20 years, we have become more marginalized as the church in America. That's what I'm talking about, not international, but especially national. As we've become more marginalized, as the world has become more amoral, as the world has become more atheistic, you can point the fingers at a lot of different things and we've been doing that a little bit. We understand that the problem started in the house of God. It didn't start out here. It didn't start in the world. The decay started, I believe, in the house of God.

The world, my friends, is not our enemy. It's our mission field. The world is not our problem. We are our own worst enemies, the church. And again, I'm not talking about Grace Connection Church, I'm just talking about the church in the last 20 or 30 years nationally in America.

Now, I'm going to reiterate something. I'll actually show this on a screen for you next week. I call it the cone of decay. If I had a big old cone up there, and this is going to represent 50 to 70 years, and the top cone is our senior citizens today. They have this tremendous moral emphasis and moral code and moral dogma to them and they hold down the fort. They're in churches, they're tithing their income. These are our seniors, these are our 65 and up, 70 and up folks up there.

They really, that generation has kept the church afloat for a long time. Then the generation right under that would be me. We somewhat, we're not as powerful as they are in our Christian witness, but this cone sort of goes down like this and this is our generation right here. From the beginning of my generation to the end of that generation is about 30 years.

I'm not in the seniors' generation yet, but I'm not too far away from it either. I'm a decade or 15 years away from it. In 30 years, if I remain somewhat healthy, I'm going to be checking out. I'm going to be saying goodbye and you're going to come to my memorial service and say, "He was a good man," if you don't go first.

So we have this, but after us, this cone goes like this. Fewer and fewer people have a Christian worldview. It goes like this: senior generation, my generation, then the generation coming up after me goes whoosh, just like that. And as it goes down into what we'll call the millennial age, the 20s and the teens, it tapers right down to a point in this coming generation like my little 10-year-old's age.

Now, that means if this cone up here, the seniors, yeah you guys still have work to do, and us, don't somehow influence this down here, then we have 30 years. Thirty years and the Christian church as we know it in America will have an absolute different face. Church buildings like this will be vacated wholesale. There won't be enough people to keep them open. There won't be enough resources to keep them open.

There'll still be churches, there'll still be big churches, there'll still be full-time ministry going on, but not as much. In fact, nowhere near as much. And the Christian church now, you think it's marginalized now, wait for 30 years from now. We're going to be a speck on the American landscape if things don't change.

The book of Ephesians, the first three chapters, I love the book of Ephesians. It sort of puts the whole Christian life in a perspective here. The first three chapters have some of the best theology in all the Bible. It talks about who we are in Christ: all spiritual blessings, seated together with Christ in heavenly places, 2:6; forgiven, 1:7; saved by grace, 2:8; preordained to good works, 2:10. It just goes on: God who is rich in mercy, 2:5; and it just goes on, this dispensation of grace, 3:2.

It's just this beautiful picture of what the cross did for you and I. And then in chapter four, he sort of takes this theology that he teaches us in chapters one, two, and three and says, "Now I want to show you what it looks like in real life." This is what this theology, it's not just a pretty picture on the wall, this is what it looks like in real life. And I'm going to pick that up here in Ephesians chapter four, if you have your Bibles open. If not, you just have to listen very carefully. I'll read slow.

"Therefore, I," a little faster than that maybe? All right. "Therefore, I," Paul's talking, "a prisoner," and let me just stop for a moment. "Therefore" always looks back. Remember that "wherefore," "therefore," always looks back. So what's it looking back to? Chapters one, two, and three. In essence, he's saying in light of what I've already taught you.

"Therefore, I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of your calling for you have been called by God. Always be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other." This does not include your spouse. Oh, that's not in there, I'm sorry. It just says "be patient with each other, making allowance for each other's faults because of your love."

Did Paul just say I had a fault? He did. He just said I have a fault. Wow. So it says, "making allowance for each other's faults because of your love. Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the spirit, binding yourselves together with peace." He's talking to the church here.

"For there is one body and one spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope in the future." So this is Paul's message to the church at Ephesus. He goes, "Listen, I'm a prisoner of the Lord, I want you to be humble and gentle with each other, patient with each other, allow each other to be human," if I can paraphrase it that way.

Just knowing that you're sitting next to other human beings that have weaknesses and faults and fears and insecurities and losses in their life. No one's perfect. "Make every effort to keep yourselves united in the spirit, binding yourselves together with peace." So the first thing that we need to, I believe the evangelical church, that 7 to 8 percent, these are the things I think that are important. There's other things I don't think are that important.

I'm going to talk more about the non-important things, but here's some things I think we've got to agree on, what one person called essential doctrines. These are doctrines that unite us, don't divide us. These are the things we all agree on. We might not all agree when the rapture of the church is coming, but we can all agree on these things.

We can all agree that the Bible is the word of God, worthy to be trusted. We can all agree with that. If you're Pentecostal, you're going to agree with that. If you're a Baptist, you're going to agree with that. If you're Methodist, you're going to agree with that. If you're Lutheran, you can agree with that.

These are things that make us evangelical. We believe in the Trinity: the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. We believe in the depravity of man because Christ told us that. We believe in the substitutionary atonement, a theological term for Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. That's all that means.

We believe in Christ's complete humanity. He's very God and very man. The theologians like to call that the hypostatic union. What's that mean? Go ask a theologian. And we believe in the complete deity and the sufficiency and the exclusivity of Christ's work. We believe that we all have a need for a personal relationship with Christ. We believe in the inspiration of scripture. Those are the things that unite us. Those are the things that keep us together.

Now, non-essential doctrines, I'm not going to go through all of them, there's too many. And I'm not saying they're not important, but I'll say this, some very good Bible-believing people disagree on them. I have a library full of commentaries, thousands of books. And I read them and it's funny how this guy who is brilliant disagrees with this guy who's brilliant.

So what do I do? I just find the thing that makes most sense to me and that's what I believe. Am I going to die on a hill on that? No. Baptism of the Holy Spirit, gifts of the spirit, non-essential doctrines. Nothing that should divide us.