On February 2, I will start a Sunday morning sermon series entitled In Defense of God’s Order and the Gospel. I am an expositor in both heart and practice. For the past three years, I have been preaching through Matthew, and we are starting chapter 17. But I believe the current direction of the SBC presents a clear and present danger to God’s divine order and the purity of the gospel; therefore, as a shepherd charged by the Great Shepherd with protecting the flock, I must speak (Acts 20:28-30; 1 Tim 1:18-20).
The Conservative Resurgence was one of the great moves of God in the twentieth century. Everyone involved knew that God’s victory in restoring the primacy of his inerrant Word would require eternal vigilance to preserve that primacy. While an exceptional amount of fruit from the Resurgence is still in place in the SBC, even that cannot long withstand the current spread of spiritual corrosives. If left unchecked, the present course will surely lead us to a place of regularly extolling man’s wisdom over God’s, which is the same place we were before the Resurgence, and therein is the clear and present danger.
The poisoning and de-seeding of the fruits of the Resurgence come in several forms and from several venues. First, there have always been those who did not support the Resurgence and inerrancy of Scripture and even openly fought against it; they are involved and elated about our present course to pre-Resurgence days.
Second, some claim to be inerrantists, and I believe many of them are actual inerrantists, but they are, in my estimation, becoming too hospitable to ideas that are contrary to not only the inerrancy of God’s Word but the sufficiency of it as well. I further believe some who are espousing such cancerous ideas have the best of motives; many of them love God and the SBC. But they are unwittingly embracing ideas that cannot long co-exist with God’s Word occupying its proper place of being loftily ensconced as God’s inerrant, sufficient, and supreme unquestioned determiner of his order. Lastly, I believe social media grants those who have no love for the SBC or God’s Word to operate piratically in SBC life along with other adversaries of Biblical fidelity; making their numbers seem greater than they are.
Therefore, as in the Resurgence, I must speak to my church on the ideologies at hand so she will not be vulnerable to their seductiveness. Moreover, our church will even be able to counter the winsome words of the conscious or naive purveyors of these gauzily veiled heresies and corrosive accommodations. Without exposing these ideas for what they are, they will continue to advance, albeit slowly and almost stealthily to the unsuspecting, until they return us to the days where it was normal to replace God’s order with man’s order. The guiding light for many seems to be that wherever they believe God’s order is too restrictive or out of touch with modern society, it must be modernized.
The Resurgence was successful because of the grace of God. But a serious component of that victory was the involvement of dedicated and informed laypeople. Similarly, there must be a host of informed laypeople involved in our present distress if there is to be a victory in staying the onslaught of evils spreading and multiplying in the SBC, from social justice, women preachers and prophetesses, Me Too excessive right by might, trial by social media mobocracy, reducing biblical complementarianism to soft complementarianism (or one could say soft egalitarianism), to obscuring the unambiguous message and language regarding homosexuality and gender fluidity, Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and liberation theology.
The sermon series is available at sermonaudio.com.
Here is an excellent documentary on some of the issues as they have unfolded in the SBC. It is long but very informative. By What Standard, https://founders.org/cinedoc/
