Transcript

Well, once again, let’s go to the old part of the book, to Malachi chapter four. Malachi chapter four, while you’re turning there, thank you for praying about our pastor’s training institute as we kick off our fall term. I had a text from Brother Steve who is somewhere in the world. And we need to pray for him. It’s kind of some difficult places and some difficult travel he’s in, particularly in India. You know, there’s three climates in India, hot, hotter, and hottest. Been there two or three times, and it’s tough.

But nevertheless, he said, I want you to know that we have another brother who’s signing up for your class from Australia, and that puts us at 50 men in the class. Pretty humbled about that and praising the Lord about that at the same time. It doesn’t hurt any that we’re requiring those who want our support to take my class. So that helps a little bit, but it would have been a large class without that for sure.

Which leads me to an exhortation about next February’s True Church Conference. That’s kind of a homecoming of all the brothers and sisters, church leaders, pastor church leaders of the churches that have connected with us in some level of partnership. Sometimes as a new church plant, sometimes as a replant, like our church in Marion, Illinois is being replanted. Got down to 20 something people and excited about that taking back off again. And then some of them are just church revitalizations. They come to us and say, we’ve got to clean house, we’ve got to reestablish strong, thoroughly biblical purposes and practices in our church. Would you help us? Can we connect with you guys? So counting all that together, including the, the Baptist Fellowship that Barry King overseas in London, we are pushing about 150 churches and several hundred others who, in loose ways, not formally, connect to us.

What I’m doing for next year’s conference, I believe, will be the most consequential conference we’ve ever had. I’m not saying it’ll be the greatest attended. Last year’s numbers were up pretty good. We praise the Lord for that, but sometimes it might be good if the numbers are down. I’d rather have 12 or 15 brothers who mean business and are serious than hundreds and hundreds who are sort of playing games and what’s the next big thing and can you excite me or whatever. We’re not about that kind of, if that’s what you’re looking for, we’re not your folks. But anyway, it’s consequential because the title is A More Perfect Union.

We want to strive to lay out from the scriptures a more biblically sound way to determine who churches should connect with. What other churches based on scripture should we be fellowshipping with? Doesn’t mean we don’t love others or believe others are saved, but there’s got to be some basic doctrine and commitment to basic methodologies that are biblical so that we can work together and plant churches together.

We can’t partner with someone and go out here and plant a church somewhere, Australia, wherever it might be, and they come in with these kind of ideas, and we come in with another set of ideas of how the church ought to be structured, and then a third church comes in to help them, and they’ve got another set of ideas. That’s idiocy. That won’t work.

It’s hard enough to build a true church without three or four or five men you respect telling you three or four or five contradictory things. So you gotta have a partnership that has some clear parameters on both doctrine and structure and methods. And so we’re gonna lay that out. We’ve been sort of laying it out, but we’re gonna try to lay that out in sort of a concise form this year and see what God does. Could it be possible? I mean, honestly, I thought maybe we, in our Pastoral Training Institute, we’d have four, maybe seven guys, and four or seven solid guys is a great class. Put four, seven solid guys out on the field could cost us $100,000 a piece the first year. That’s $700,000.

So we need your offerings. I think, Tim, we got six boys graduating. That’s not the only ones we may be sending out. Some guys audit classes, because they’ve already got a degree, and they just need select courses. So that’s a lot, and so 50 is a whole lot. But could it be that by the time the Lord gets through with me and you get released from me, I’ll say it that way, you get released from me, that we have 1,000 churches?

Is that possible? I’m not shooting for that. I’m shooting to be faithful and let God multiply it as He sees fit. Can I get amen right there? But if I wanna say it for the 1,000th time, I am nothing if you’re not the real deal. If you as a Grace Life Church members are not modeling out to a decent level, thoroughly biblical Christianity, thoroughly biblical local church life, then I’m just another, assuming, sharp speaker organizer. We’ve got plenty of those.

We need somebody to see the real thing. And then say, yes, God’s word does work. So I think the most consequential true church conference we are ever going to have, or ever have had, I should say, a more perfect union. On what basis do we work together? And so gonna define that and sharpen that up.

Malachi chapter four, as we come to the conclusion of this book, I’ll read four, five, and six, that’s what we’ve gotten to in chapter four, but I’d only deal with chapter, well, verse rather, no, it jumps around a little bit. I’ll not finish it this morning, put it that way.

So here we have Malachi coming down to the end of his prophetic ministry in Israel. He’s pointed out very clearly there’s a elect chosen remnant, if you will, within greater Israel that are the true Israelites, that are the true God-fearers. You might say they’re the truly saved ones out of all of those who profess to be God’s people. So I think it’s probably right to assume all that he’s saying to the end of the book now mainly is spoken to that remnant. Now, I’m not saying it does not apply to the whole nation, but in a sense, the whole nation at large is just apostate, and the holy remnant, a righteous small group, is striving to be strong in the Lord. They’re getting together in meetings, the text tells us, and they’re speaking to one another, the text tells us, and the Lord gave attention to it. You remember all of that from our previous preaching.

So now we come to this very end before the revelation from God to the people on earth is going to go silent for 400 years. And then this wild guy, camel skin coat and eating locust and wild honey. Not the guy you’re gonna call to be your pastor. Most unlikely guy, John, starts crying in the wilderness, what the text says. And the light of God’s revelation is back on. But before, that’s 400 years from where Malachi’s writing now. Before that, here’s what Malachi says.

Malachi 4:4, “Remember the law of Moses, my servant, even the statutes and ordinances, which I commanded him and Horeb for all of Israel. Behold, I’m going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children. and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse”.

So, Revelation is about to be closed for 400 years, but before I close it, Malachi says, remember the law of Moses, and keep this in the back of your mind, Elijah’s coming. Elijah’s coming. He’s going to have an interesting ministry. Generally speaking, he’s going to be calling an apostate rebellious people back to God and to God’s promised Messiah, Savior. He’s going to turn the hearts of the children back to the father and turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children. and basically do these things so that you’ll not be under the curse. That’s just a brief overview of how Malachi is closing this thing down.

So, this phrase in verse 4, “remember the law of Moses”, is a phrase that comes out at least two other times. close to 20 times in all, but there’s two other ways to say it, I should say, from two other sections in the Old Testament, and I’m going to use one of them as our main point and as our title for this section, and that is, remember the “ancient paths”. Remember the ancient paths. That’s what he means when he says, remember the law of Moses.

Now, this exhortation is used numerous times in Deuteronomy. As a matter of fact, it’s used 13 times in the book of Deuteronomy. And it’s important for us to tell ourselves and remind ourselves that when God says in this context to remember, it means more than recall. It means more than to think about them. That’s certainly true. Recall them and think about it, but it’s more than that. It means to put action on them. Be obedient to these things. So, It’s not that Israel as a nation and more directly this righteous remnant within Israel was supposed to view the law in its rigid formalities as a way to find favor with God. But brothers and sisters, the law of God expresses the nature of God. And I think that’s what the prophet’s getting to. Remember the God who has shown you much of what he is or who he is by this morally, ethically, upright, holy commandments, the 10 commandments, his law that he has given you.

So knowing the law helps you know the true God of heaven, the true God of Israel. So he’s basically saying remember God. But not God as you think he ought to be, and not God as you feel he would be like, but God as who he really is. And his law helps us greatly in understanding who he really is. So the law expresses the very nature of the one true God, and from the law you can learn to reverence him, to treasure him from the heart as the Holy Spirit helps you to embrace these things.

Remember, Jesus said in Matthew 5:18, “not one jot or tittle of the law will pass away, but all will be fulfilled”. Now again, I think this includes the moral law, the Ten Commandments, and the ceremonial law, which was centered in the sacrificial system, other things, but centered in the sacrificial system.

Let me say it again. They were not to trust their ability to work the law or keep the law, but they were to look through the law and see the love of God and the truth of God is to see his holiness, to see his redemptive love for them. All of that’s depicted in the law. It’s not unlike our baptism in Lord’s Supper today. We don’t trust in them, but we see our Lord through them. And that’s what they’re meant for, as a remembrance. Romans 3:31 reminds us, “do we then nullify the law through faith? May it never be. On the contrary, we establish the law through faith”. In other words, when you come to faith in Jesus Christ, you get the merit and the righteousness of Christ with you on your behalf. He took your unrighteousness on the cross, then he imputes into you his righteousness. So once you become righteous as Christ, you become a law keeper in Christ. You become a fulfiller of the law of God in Christ. So the law wasn’t bad and the law wasn’t done away with in a real sense, it was just fulfilled in Jesus Christ. And you gotta make sure you’re in Christ.

Are you in Christ? Now, I didn’t say, are you a nice person according to the world’s definition of nice. I didn’t say, are you liked by your neighbors? I’m not asking, are you a good wife or a good husband? I’m not asking, are you a good kid to your parents? I’m saying, are you in Christ? Do you know that you stand in him? Nothing you’ve done, nothing you can perform, no ritual or works you can put on to make you any better before holy God, are you in Christ?

Well, I think getting back to our text, Malachi is saying, “remember the law of Moses” so you remember the one true God and you will not backslide from him and go into idolatries in this 400 year period before God shows up in the person of John the Baptist and speaks again.

Well, just three quick thoughts here. I may have said this enough already, but the law today helps us. It teaches us the very nature of the holiness of God. Particularly, it speaks of his justice and his righteousness. It points us to the Savior. Galatians says it’s like a tutor. It’s like a personal tutor to guide you to Jesus because the law keeps showing you how you deserve wrath and judgment because you fail it often, and it is the standard for living godly lives. I think the key point for the Jews of this day and the righteous remnant within Israel of this day, Malachi’s day, would be again that everything’s gonna go silent for 400 years and they’re gonna have to make sure that they are diligent to remember the ancient paths. Don’t reinvent religion. Don’t go off on other things. Stay with the truth. Stay with the truth.

Proverbs 22:28 basically says the same thing in this way. “Do not move the ancient boundary which your fathers have set”. There’s a practical thing to that in that they inherited the land that God gave to Israel and each tribe had their own portion of land. But it means more than that. There’s a figure here that applies to us spiritually, and that is don’t move the boundaries on what is truth and what is non-truth. Don’t move the boundaries on what is right and what is not right, what is evil and what is not evil. God’s ordained them once and for all.

Here’s the thing, folks. God can’t change, so what’s right and wrong can’t change. God does not want to change himself, but God could not change himself because he’s perfectly God. If he changed himself, he’d no longer be God. And then he’s expressed to us the holiness and righteousness of his character, again, in his law, and we’re to hold to those things and remember those ancient paths. It’s a figure of speech, but it’s a good one.

Brothers and sisters, some things do not change. I don’t care what the culture does, what the culture says. I don’t care how they drift here and drift there. We are driftless. We don’t change on the things God’s made clear. Some things are variable. Some things must not change. Some things must not be forgotten. Remember the law of Moses. Remember the ancient paths, if you will, ancient boundaries. and some things must always be embraced. Another way to say it, Jeremiah 6:16. “Thus says the Lord, stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths where the good way is and walk in it and you will find rest for your souls. But they said, “we will not walk in it””.

We done been looking around Israel, and we’ve seen all of these nations around us, and they’re all Baal worshipers, and man, they have a blast. You ought to go to their worship services, and man, they’re just having fun. It’s all about drinking. It’s all about sexual impurity. It’s all about lust and carnality, and they still go through the motions of their ritual. So we can hang on to bringing some sacrifices and bringing some tithes, but we want our church to be like the Baal churches all around us. That’s what the ancient Israelites were doing. And they did it over and over and over and over. And God would clean them up and they’d drift back off. And God would clean them up and they’d drift back off. Malachi’s warning, don’t do that. Stay with the ancient paths.

I remember when I was first saved and I was called into the ministry, it’s really odd because when I began to visit Baptist churches, I visited all kinds of churches, I didn’t know where I was gonna be. I didn’t know if I was gonna be Methodist or Presbyterian or Church of Christ and I was just visiting churches. And somehow I visited Baptist churches and I felt like I heard the Bible and I couldn’t tell you why I needed to hear the Bible. I didn’t know anything about the inerrancies of Scripture, the authority of Scripture, the plenary verbally inspiration of Scripture, the sufficiency of Scripture. Couldn’t have discussed any of that with you but I was drawn to the preaching of Scripture. That’s the Holy Spirit. And I begin to visit those churches and God bless some godly, faithful saints of God in those very, very weak, mildly biblical churches. And immediately in my heart, there was this thing that said, can’t we do better than this? I remember sitting in a large church in my hometown right after my conversion and counting a few couples in there that had more or less swapped spouses in the last few years. Just sitting right there in church. And I thought, have they experienced what I’ve experienced?

None of us are perfect. By the way, we’re all sinners. Have you checked that lately? But we can be humble repenting sinners, not embracing glorifying “in sin” sinners. There’s a real difference. So I thought we could do better. So there was something in me that was stirring to go back to the ancient paths. I learned early on that doesn’t mean that we all have to start dressing like the Pride and Prejudice movies. Not talking about that. I used to say Little House on the Prairie, but none of y’all ever saw Little House on the Prairie. I’m not talking about some of those legalistic extremes, but I’m talking about core, clear, biblical doctrines that we’ve let slip away. Return, return to and hold to. Malachi writes, children of Israel, 400 years, you’re gonna hear nothing from God, but remember the law of Moses. Stay with the ancient paths. Remember those ancient paths.

Now, apostasy, idolatries are always the new way. That was true in ancient Israel. That’s how, oh, there’s a new way now. We’re hearing about these new idolatries of the nations around us. Oh, it looks so fun. I’m drawn to that. Well, sure, your flesh is drawn to all kind of wicked things, but the problem is wicked things and sinful things will hurt you, ultimately destroy you, and far more important than that, they dishonor the God whom you pledge to know, love, and serve. Apostasy and idolatry, that’s the new way, that’s the modern way. And in biblical terminology, the old paths, the old way was referring to the godly, God-centered, God-honoring way. So the point is, there are truths that have been established, doctrines that have been established. Practices for the people of God that have been established that do not change. And we want to stay on those ancient paths.

You know what I found as a pastor? You never run out of work. About the time you think, well, I think the body of Christ has come to a good biblical balance on that. Somebody, I write a book with some silly, ridiculous thing, and you find out they’ve never done anything really in a local church, they just wrote a book. And then some of your church members will go chasing this idea over here. And it’s mildly biblical at best, it causes divisions, and they’re making a mountain out of a molehill. It’s become an idol, because there’s not enough scripture to back it up. And you get them reeled back in, and you take a breath and think, well, we got that kind of balance back out. And then all of a sudden, a group of reads, somebody else wrote a book. May not be doing.., their church may not look like much, but they wrote a book, they’re good writers, and now we gotta do it all these things this way, and you get them reeled back in a little bit, and usually not all of the books, things in the books, I should say, are wrong, but the major thesis of the book is wrongheaded and off track.

Here’s what I’m saying, it just never ends. And by the way, your old carnal, restless heart does the same thing. You’ll get chasing something over here a little bit and God will convict you and you think, man, I can’t get over there and you’ll move over here, then you’ll go too far over to this side a little bit. And can I confess to you as a pastor? Pastors do that too. Maybe with good intentions, but you begin to lead your church out of some shallowness or error over here and you get too far over here and you get in this ditch. You climb up out of that one, try to get over here, then you go over there.

But here’s what happens. If you can keep a pastor long enough and God will keep sanctifying him, pretty soon you’re not going from a ditch on the right side to a ditch on the left side. You’re catching yourselves a lot quicker when you get off the center lane. You don’t have to get in the ruts. Can I get amen there? I’ve told you many times, you better be repenting of sin in the early stages of the thought life, not in the shoe leather life.

Remember the ancient paths, Malachi says. Remember the law of Moses is the way he terms it. Now, literally driving to church this morning, I’ve got these nine points. Literally driving to church. I love meditating on the text because stuff comes out. You guys who are planning to preach, make sure you give yourself meditation. If you go out there and you only preach accurate academic expositions, I’m gonna come and shut your church down. I can’t really do that and I wouldn’t do that, but what I mean is that’s not, you are to get from your academic exposition the applications your church needs. Amen?

Last thing we need is a bunch of Pharisees who’ve learned the accuracy of exposition. That’s essential, that’s foundational. Dr. Seale does as good a job as anybody, he’s also gonna tell you, you better get with God and see what God wants to give you for your church from that exposition.

I’m chasing some rabbits, but boy, these are good rabbits.

So we’re gonna look at conclusions for practical application at this time that I call slipping off the ancient paths. Nine things, now you might say six, you might say 15, I’m sure I missed some. But nine things.

Number one, a way we see churches slipping off the ancient past is denying the inerrancy of Scripture.  The Bible is no longer fully authoritative, and we see it over and over and over again in church history. It was only a few hundred years after Christ’s ascension and the Roman system began to develop. And in their system, they fell off. They didn’t just go into a ditch. They jumped out of that ditch and jumped off a cliff. They went way over here to this thing of extra biblical revelation. Now the church, specifically the Pope, speaks for God with Scripture. That’s denying the authority of Scripture, the inerrancy of Scripture. It’s saying there’s something else that equals Scripture.

And they have been all over the world. Matter of fact, I saw a video just recently of a Catholic ceremony over, I’m sure, in the third world somewhere. Well, they had made this statue, this ceramic or metal little statue of a saint, a patron saint of long ago. And the statue had a hole in the back of its head. And they got the literal skull of some deceased person, they say was a saint. And for this ceremony, they would put that literal old, it’s black now, black dead skull in the hole in the back of that idol they had made, that statue they’d made. And somehow, they call it a relic, somehow through the relic of that skull, you can be touched by God or get closer to God or get blessed by God, get healed by God.

And sometimes they’ll have a little cloth with a piece of blood of a patron saint or maybe a piece of bone, they say is the apostle Paul’s bone. And it’s nothing but foolish, blasphemous, silly superstitions. That’s all it is. Why? Where did that come from? They got away from the absolute authority of scripture. They came off of the ancient past. Malachi told these Jews, don’t just stay with the things your priests or prophets think are wise. You stay with the law of Moses. The doctrines given to you once for all that do not change. That is the scripture. That was the scripture to them.

Number two. the scriptural authority, but without sufficiency. This is something we see a lot in our evangelical camp, and we all struggle with it to some degree, but some people have camped here, and that is the Bible’s authoritative, and we’re going to preach it like it’s authoritative, but in our lives, and particularly in our church life, we don’t really believe it’s sufficient. We believe we have to go off and chase and develop and describe from and prescribe from the world what will be effective in the church because we don’t believe the word of God is sufficient.

Now, to the media crew, can you put up the wheel right now? Is that possible? Wheel. You thought only that guy on Star Wars could do stuff like that.

When I begin to be your pastor, and we’re pushing four decades ago when this began to develop in my heart and mind, these are the structures that I think you’re going to find commanded or at least thoroughly exemplified in the biblical text. Here’s my premise. If the Bible is sufficient, then we ought to find all we need to be doing as a church in the Bible.

Preaching the Word is the center, which is congregational worship. Every member ministering through small groups. And of course, there are dozens, if not hundreds of ministries under each of those folks. Local church-centered missions or personalized strategic world missions. Then taking the church home. You come and you learn at church, and then dads or heads of households go home and purpose through the week to talk about the sermon, to talk about the small group lesson, and take it home with you, take it out to the workplace, Brother Chad. Be Christians in the world. All that is part of this home life discipleship.

So what am I saying here? So I thought, you know what, God, if you’ll help me, let’s build a thoroughly biblical structure with thoroughly biblical functioning ministries out of those structures. And then God, if you don’t bless it, we’re sunk. But I’m going to sink on the truth.

And then we’re now totally now 45 years in this thing. and we’ve got hundreds of other pastors who are saying, can you help us know how this works? And it’s not fancy, and it’s not complicated, and it’s not deep, and it’s not anything, it’s just simple Bible. You know what the key is? Doing it, because you believe the scriptures are sufficient. But that’s one of the things that comes down the pike, that where guys get off the ancient past, “Oh yeah, the Bible’s authoritative, But in the way I structure and function as a church, I’m really functioning like I don’t think it’s sufficient. It doesn’t have guidelines and precepts and commands for all that we do in the church”. Most of what we do in the church is kind of up to us. You’re drifting off the ancient path.

Number three, churches are drifting off the ancient paths when congregational worship is about what the worship team can bring to me in the way I feel and the way I’m blessed. They’ll begin to say, you know, boy, if it’s a good worshiping church, man, when I go in there, that bunch gets up there, and they’ve got a Steinway piano. Can you believe that? They’re all going to hell, they got a Steinway piano. And they’ve got this orchestra, and they’ve got this guy named Tom, he does incredible music. They’ve got an incredible sound, and man, it does something, it stirs me. I’m encouraged, I’m strengthened, I’m blessed, and that’s not bad, but that’s not necessarily worship. It’s not what the worship team can bring to you, it’s what we together bring before God. So we may have to shut all this down. If we get to where we’re being more consumer-driven, I want the product you’re putting out, if I’m gonna keep coming, gotta have the right product. Kind of like going to a concert, you pay for it and you wanna get the product you paid for. No, we’re just as much worship if the persecution comes and we’re meeting in a cattle barn somewhere and somebody grabbed an old electronic keyboard and Miss Pam’s playing it, but Tom stands up and we sing the great hymns of the faith, that’s worship.

Is this wrong? No. God clearly in the Old Testament text ordained choirs and orchestras and chief musicians and they had to be excellent by the way. and we’re gonna strive to be excellent, but today’s idea in most churches is this consumerism that is selfish – Give me a blessing from all this music, and that’s good worship. That is not.

Worship is when you have walked with God this week, when you felt it and when you didn’t feel it, when you were excited about it and when it was drudgery, but you know it’s right, because you know it’s biblical, and you love Christ, and you wanna get back with other people on Sunday to help each other, and do it again next week. But you know what, if you’re living through the week like you’re not much of a Christian, then you don’t have anything much to come in here and sing about. And you’ll be looking for a concert. You’ll be looking for a product to be delivered to you and call it worship.

Y’all getting this? You’re slipping off the ancient paths when you deny the inerrancy of scripture, when you hold to the authority of scripture but without the sufficiency of scripture. When congregational worship is about what the worship team can bring to you in the way of do you feel better and are you blessed.

Number four, you’re slipping off the ancient paths when salvation is by grace through faith plus human effort. Again, we go back to the Roman Catholic system, not my Roman Catholic friends. I’ve got good friends who are Roman Catholics, and I love them. I think they’re in a church that’s got a lot of error, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think some of them know the Lord. But the system itself is designed from the beginning to claim that they hold the salvation similar to we do. I know some of their statements are really clear, but I learned something in the airport in Honduras many years ago sitting by a Catholic priest. They have enough written in the manuals of their history and their edicts and their councils that they can agree with you on anything, anything at any moment. But basically what they’ve done is add works to grace, which means it’s no longer grace.

Brothers and sisters, listen to me. Baptists are about as bad When a Baptist pastor or evangelist with good intentions tells you, if you want to be saved, come to the front. I know what he means, but he’s being careless, if not reckless. Jesus is not at the front. Matter of fact, he’s everywhere. You repent and believe, amen? Why can’t we just leave it with what the text tells us?

Peter did not go out on the day of Pentecost and say, okay, we’re gonna have invitation. Judas is gonna lead the music. Of course, he’s gone, but if they had a music guy, it’d been Judas. I’m teasing music guys a little bit. And I want all y’all to walk down here if you wanna be saved. No, listen, the Spirit of God so changed their hearts, you couldn’t keep them to walking to somebody, some Apostle somewhere. Matter of fact, they were so changed, they wouldn’t walk back to their homeland. They stayed in Jerusalem. That’s the power of God regenerating the soul, not the manipulation of Peter to get them to jump through a couple of hoop jumps and call them all converted.

If I have to coach you and manipulate you to come to a certain place in the building that you can get saved, I know better than a Roman Catholic. As far as my theology, that’s basically what they’re teaching. If you do this, if you go through that motion, I don’t want you to go anywhere. I want you to be left with Jesus and be shipwrecked on God and stranded on omnipotence. Just you and Jesus.

You are slipping off the ancient paths. When you’re teaching in any way, form, or shape, salvation’s by grace through faith, plus some human activity, some human effort, some human work. Walk to the front, repeat a prayer, raise your hand. That’s not all bad, but it’s not nearly close to being enough evidence that you know Christ. And I would beg pastors, if you’re gonna use any of those things, please tell your people every time, but now that thing you did does not save you. Only Christ can save you.

You know, it’s like when Jesus was talking to Nicodemus, a brilliant intellectual of his day. And Nicodemus wanted to know what all this was about. And Jesus said, well, you must be born again. You must be born from above. You must be born of the Spirit. And Nicodemus says, I don’t understand how that works. And Jesus didn’t tell him how it works because he could never understand how it works because Jesus was talking about the spiritual new birth of the heart. And nobody can make that work in a performance, a work, a ritual, walking here, walking there, raising this, raising, you can’t do it that way.

I’ll be honest. I think God saved me from the beginning to be something of a reformer. I’m not the only one. There’s a lot of guys better than me at it, perhaps, but I think he did. And I think that’s why I was saved in my car. I couldn’t have walked anywhere. I’d wrecked. I couldn’t raise my hand. Well, I think I did raise my hand, but it was praising God for what I sensed that night in my car that he had forgiven me and made me his child. I wasn’t even in a church, but I found Christ.

So we’ve got to be careful. From the Roman Catholic system through the evangelical and Baptist systems, not to add any human work to salvation by grace through faith.

All right, number five, and I’m gonna have to hurry. You’re slipping off the ancient past when you believe one thing. hoop-jump of so-called orthodoxy justifies a truckload of compromise.

Sometimes churches put on elaborate things, spend a lot of money and do a lot of stuff that’s nowhere in the Bible as necessary to do. And then you have the phrase, well, it’s worth it if one soul got saved. Well, listen, if God’s not going to save souls through the gospel, he’s certainly not gonna save them through a carnival.

I was watching this internet pastor. I watched some of these guys, because they are incredibly talented. And not that I wanna be like them in talent, but I don’t know if you noticed, but I like to analyze things, just study on it. And this guy said he preaches some fairly solid stuff. I can just hear some of you now, well, Brother Jeff, I went to so-and-so’s church, and no, he preached the word, he did a good job. And I wanna say, check your brain in for a while, we need to look at it a little bit before you go back out there, because you’re not seeing the forest for the trees in this guy’s ministry.

This guy claims 30,000 people in his church. on lots of different campuses. And just the other day, he was saying just, boy, the Holy Ghost was on us and great things were happening. I know this is not new for most of you, but they started doing the at the movies thing. You walk in the church, there’s popcorn machines. Then you go inside and you watch movie clips. Then the pastor comments on the movie clip as to what maybe is biblical and what’s not. He may do a good job of that. Boy, what the Apostle Paul could have done if he had a movie projector. Poor old Apostle Paul, he didn’t have any of that stuff. He had to depend on the Word of God and the Holy Spirit.

And that pastor said we had, it was right at, I don’t remember the exact number, but right at 4,000 people baptized at the end of the At the Movies series. Baptized into what, I wondered. that he doesn’t have a clue in a million years the real condition of those folks’ souls. If you would take your children to something like that and trust the precious eternal souls of your children to that kind of shenanigan, carnality, carnival experience, I’m gonna tell you what that is. You have done departed the ancient paths.

Probably be good for Baptists to go back to being the outscourings of the communities like we were 300 years ago. Just very poor folks were Baptists and Methodists too for that matter. Couldn’t afford anything, didn’t have anything, but they had God. And they knew it when somebody else got God and got salvation. Everybody okay? Am I okay? All right. Hadn’t done anything like this in a long time.

The hoop jump of Orthodoxy is what I mean by that. If we can just get them to repeat a prayer, we can tell everybody they’re saved, and by the way, we did that for a few decades, a little exaggeration, two decades maybe, maybe a little, one and a half decades maybe, and we kept having to discipline about 90% of those people that did those things, walking to the front, raising their hand, filling out a card. Dismissing them for church discipline, I’m talking about for willful, open, habitual sin. But when we got all that fixed and got back to a biblical understanding of conversion where we care about souls too much to rush you through the motions and call you saved, I would say today we’re 95, if not 98% of the people we baptize are faithful two years later. The old paths, the ancient paths.

Well, we gotta hurry up. Number six, biblical morals no longer apply to this generation. And one of the clearest ways you’re gonna see this today, one of the clearest examples of professing Christianity with ungodly, unbiblical morality is the Jesus of country music. I don’t know who this Jesus is they’re talking about, but you can’t talk about this Jesus, how he’s changed your life and go out every night in the dress of a harlot and sing for people about harlotries. Just can’t. Not the Jesus of Scripture.

You’ve gone off the ancient paths. When you say he saved me, he’s forgiven me, he’s my everything, but as a purposeful pattern of my life, I’m gonna promote the immoralities that contradict his holy character. Now folks, we all struggle, we all fail. But we ought to not pursue a profession where we actively premeditatedly promote what is antithetical to the character and the word of our God.

Much more I could say there, probably applies to the Jesus of modern athletics. Am I thankful for what I believe has been something of an awakening when young people, athletes, et cetera, et cetera, I’m thankful, but it’s a thousand miles wide and a thimble deep. And I believe some are generally say, let’s just pray to God they get in a sound church.

Number seven, that gender roles and the roles of the family are no longer necessary. There’s just a new normal now. I know there’s a TV show some time ago called Modern Family. There’s no such thing as a modern family. There’s only biblical families. It was God’s idea. Leave it alone. Quit perverting with it. Quit messing with God’s idea. You can’t perfect perfection.

They’re normalizing, in the name of Christianity often, perverse family roles. God still intends for men and husbands to be the head of the household. He still intends for wives to honor and submit to their husbands, be good keepers of the home, good moms. He still intends for children to honor and respect and obey and submit to their parents. And by the way, he still made boys to be boys and girls to be girls, period.

Can you get more idiotic, psychotic, blasphemous, perverse than taking little children into hospitals because they think that week that they might be a girl in a boy’s body or vice versa, giving them hormone therapy and butchering their bodies and their genitals to line up with this week’s emphasis on I might be a boy in a girl’s body, a girl in a boy’s whatever. Unbelievable. Some of this creeps into the church at various levels. Well, I should say the professing church.

Number eight, biblical modesty is no longer necessary. You got a dress on six, eight inches above your knee, now hear me. Let me say this first. and maybe I’m comparing us with others, but I think overall, we do a pretty good job around here. Overall, there is a, I think, a general modesty, even our young ladies, and I know that, and it’s just the truth, sometimes ladies and girls, they just don’t think about it, and that’s just the truth, they just aren’t thinking that way. But we need to be careful about the way we dress, especially in the church house. Modesty still matters. Too much flesh is too much flesh. We’re called to holiness.

But again, I would be unwise and unbalanced as a pastor if I didn’t say a lot of you moms and dads seem to be doing a good job and I thank God for you. Biblical modesty still matters. You’re off the ancient paths when you think, well, times have changed. Doesn’t matter how times have changed. God has not changed.

Number nine, Dr. Seale, here we go again for us. Preaching is just to inform the mind, not change the heart and behavior. That you’re doing a good job preaching if you’re giving people understanding of the truth. of the doctrine, the truth, I should say, of the text, that is the truth, which is sound doctrine. No, no, no. Preaching is not finished until you take the truth, inform the mind, and press it on the heart and behavior, which is what I’m doing, giving you these nine things. Pressing it, pressing it. Teaching is not preaching, though all preaching contains solid teaching.

And this is what makes preachers unpopular. If I just come in to you, and I could do this very easily, just exegete the text, give you the facts and figures, the history, et cetera, et cetera, and you go home thinking, man, that inspired my thinking. Well, so what? Has it changed your life? What did you repent of this week to be more like Jesus? How did your heart move this week to treasure and joy in him more than last week?

I’ll close with this, but talking about all of this stuff that’s going on in church life today that is a lot more like Ziegfeld’s Follies or Madison Avenue or carnivals or entertainment. Here’s the thing. Are you listening to me this morning? You don’t, and I mean that generically, not you, you, maybe you, you, but maybe you, you, I’m not sure, but not you generically. You don’t believe the Holy Spirit will build the church through the preaching of the word. That’s the problem. If you believed it, you wouldn’t do other things to detract from the work of the Holy Spirit. You don’t believe it. Pastors don’t believe it. They don’t believe it. The next thing, the next new thing, the next entertainment, the next exciting thing, get a crowd. Because they don’t believe the Holy Spirit’s gonna use the preaching of the word. You might be shocked. You might just camp there and put your stakes down on that truth and just say, okay, God, here we go. If you don’t draw me into this, I’m sunk. I’ve prayed that a million times.

In principle, we need to be more like Charlie Huff. Charlie Huff is the new head coach of the University of Memphis Tigers. They went out to, I think it was Las Vegas, and beat them over there on their turf. And here’s what Charlie Huff said after the game. We don’t play music at practice. So if you want music, you’re not gonna play for me. We don’t do ice cream trucks at the end of practice. We don’t do fun things. But you know what is fun? That locker room right now, that’s fun. In other words, they were rejoicing over their win. I thought, but we need more preachers like that. You know what’s fun? As your senior pastor now for what, right at 40 years and pastoral leadership for 45, you know what’s fun? It’s to walk by small groups and hear people studying the word and rejoicing in Christ. That’s fun. No matter what kind of show we might put on in here, that doesn’t replace that. Matter of fact, it might get in the way of that.

You know what’s fun? Past week or two, Pam actually told me this. I’m so grateful, so grateful that people were coming to her weeping over the joy after sitting under the preaching of the word. and I didn’t preach to you nonsense or sentimental stories about somebody’s dog dying. It was the things of God that stirred your hearts. That is fun. That is fun.

So what some of you people need to do this morning, along with your pastors, repent of the temptation you’re struggling with to leave the ancient paths and find other stuff. I’m gonna tell you something. Are you listening to me? What I’m giving you will matter on your deathbed. That other will not.

You will not lay on your deathbed and say, wasn’t my pastor clever to show that movie and feed us popcorn on Sunday morning? No, you’re going to say, he preached to me Christ and I know him and I’ve got assurance and I’ve got hope because he is with me.

Keep your popcorn, keep your shenanigans, keep your carnival, give me this book. Give me the Holy Spirit and give me Jesus. That’s what we need in our church. Malachi writes, it’s going to be 400 years before God speaks again. Whatever you do, remember the law, the law of Moses. Don’t stray from the ancient paths.