What's the Difference?
05/12/2002 - Cultural Christianity
This morning we conclude our series called What's the Difference? with a look at what I've called cultural Christianity. It's been a great series that's helped us all get better acquainted with the belief systems that exist in our world. Over the past two months we've examined major world religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, Judaism and Islam. We've explored New Age thinking and investigated a few of the high profile cults in our country including Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science. And we tried to do it fairly with a great degree respect and civility. We didn't bash anybody or belittle anyone, but instead we compared each one to the teachings of the Bible. And today we want to finish the series by exploring the difference between cultural Christianity and biblical Christianity.
It seems to me that there's a real misunderstanding as to what a true Christ follower looks like. And that shouldn't surprise us because we all know how easy it is to misunderstand things. This week I came across some statements that kids had made about the Bible that reflect a little bit of misunderstanding.
In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, God got tired of creating the world, so he took the Sabbath off.
Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree.
Noah's wife was called Joan of Ark.
Lot's wife was a pillar of salt by day, and a ball of fire by night.
Samson slew the Philistines with the axe of the Apostles.
Moses died before he ever reached Canada.
Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol.
The greatest miracle in the Bible is when Joshua told his son to stand still and he obeyed.
Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.
The epistles were the wives of the apostles.
A Christian should have only one spouse. This is called monotony.
It's easy to misunderstand things! So what does it mean to be Christian? What does it really mean to be a follower of Jesus?
George Barna is a researcher who spends a lot of time and a great deal of money investigating current trends in America. He's a Christian man and so much of his research has to do with religion. And according to his research 86% of all Americans call themselves Christians! 86%! That's almost 9 out of 10! Are nine out of every ten people you know Christians? That statistic shocked me until he explained what people meant by the word "Christian." "Christian," at least in America, has come to mean almost anything.
What people meant by "Christian" was that their religious beliefs included a little bit of Jesus, a little bit of astrology, a little bit of fortune-telling, a little bit of New Age thinking, a little bit of secularism, and a little bit of good old fashioned horse sense.
It's what I call salad bar Christianity. You know what it's like to eat from a salad bar. You pick up your plate and you start with lettuce and then you add some cheese and cucumbers and cherry tomatoes and croutons and dressing. You pick and choose whatever you like. Which is the way lots of people practice their Christian faith. The bed of lettuce is like the teachings of Jesus. But then they add to Jesus whatever they like, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, whatever appeals to them, whatever suits their taste. Which has prompted one sociologist to say that Americans practice "religion a la carte." Salad bars are a great place to eat, but they're not the best way to follow Jesus.
Because so many Americans claim to be "Christians," Barna and other researchers, have had to narrow their terminology to "born-again Christians." "Born again" is a term that Jesus used which Barna defines as people who have made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that's important to them today. About 41% of all Americans claim to be "born-again Christians," that less than half of the 86% or about 4 out of 10.
But even among "born-again Christians" there's a lot of confusion over the truth. Two-thirds of born-again Christians say they don't believe in absolute truth. Which means they believe that what's true for you may not necessarily be true for me. So we can write our own rules. Which makes it hard to embrace Jesus' absolute claim in John 14:6 where he says, I am the Way. I am the Truth. I am the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me. That kind of black and white statement doesn't leave much room for salad bar Christianity. We either live by teachings of Jesus or we don't.
In addition to struggling with that statement almost half of born-again Christians surveyed said they don't believe in Satan or in the Holy Spirit or that Jesus Christ was really perfect, he sinned like everyone else. That's frightening. America's favorite Bible verse is a verse that's not even found in the Bible. But it's the life verse of millions of Americans. Do you know what it is? "God helps those who help themselves." That's not in the Bible, that's a quote by Benjamin Franklin.
Every single month about 100 million adults and 30 million children attend Christian churches across America. Unfortunately according to Barna, "most of them are involved in religious ritual and have little connection with Christ." One-half of the church lacks people who have had a life-transforming encounter with Jesus Christ.
All this has led author Leonard Sweet to conclude, "Christianity is still the religion of choice for Americans. We have the largest number of professing Christians per capita of any nation in the world. Yet we are living in a world where biblical standards no longer matter and the deck is stacked against Christians …. Christianity in America is chock-full of 'religious' men and women with little faith in Christ. They are 'Christian agnostics,' if you will (Soultsunami, p.50, 56)."
So what have we added from the salad bar to the words of Jesus to create cultural Christianity? Well already in this series we've seen how some who call themselves Christians have added other leaders besides Jesus and other books besides the Bible to their faith. The Mormons have added Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. The Jehovah's Witnesses have added Charles Taze Russell and their own translation of the Bible called The New World Translation. Followers of Christian Science have added Mary Baker Eddy and her book Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures. They all make room for Jesus, but he's not the Jesus of the New Testament. He's not the unique Son of God, the second person of the eternal Trinity. Instead he's a god like you and I are gods. Or he's the Son of God in the same sense that you and I are all the sons and daughters of God. But he's not 100% God and 100% man like the Bible teaches. Those are the condiments of the cults, the things their leaders have added to the salad to suit their own taste buds.
Others have added rituals and rites to the teachings of Jesus. There's nothing wrong with rituals and rites, unless they've lost their meaning or they're practiced to somehow gain favor with God or to show others how religious we are. Some have reduced following Jesus to the ritual of attending church. They think if they go to church once a week or on Christmas and Easter then they're a Christian. I like the way some one put it when they said, "Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in the garage makes you a car."
Others think they're Christians because they were baptized when they were infants or grew up in a church going home or because they're a member of certain denomination or just because they're not Jewish. Jesus had some very strong words for religious people who had no relationship with God. People who were just going through the motions, doing the drill, trying to look good in front of others. There was a name for those kinds of people in Jesus' day. They were called Pharisees. They were religious leaders who were leading others astray and Jesus saved his most caustic comments for them.
In Matthew 23:27-28 he says, How terrible it will be for you teachers of the religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs--beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity. You try to look like upright people outwardly, but inside your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.
These are strong words that we all need to hear. They go right after our hearts, right after our motives. Jesus wants our hearts not our religious behavior. He wants us to love him with all our heart and our soul and our mind and our strength. Jesus died to give us an abundant life to live, not a drill to follow. He wants all of us. He wants us to get on the adventure of following him, to be part of the bigger story of what he's doing in the world, to live our lives for the things that really matter. He wants our hearts not our rites and our rituals.
Still others have added the American Dream to the teachings of Jesus and created what's been called the prosperity gospel or the health and wealth gospel. It's the gospel you'll find most often when you're surfing the channels on television. It's the idea that once we trust Jesus Christ as our Savior God wants to bless us spiritually, physically and financially. God wants us to be healthy and wealthy. And if we're not healthy and if we're not wealthy then there's a problem. Something's wrong. And the problem is us. And what's wrong is that we don't have enough faith. But if we send money to this ministry or to that organization, seed money, then our faith can begin to grow. That's a false gospel made in America. It doesn't fly very well in Haiti where Christians live in abject poverty or in much of the world where Christians are being beaten, tortured and killed for their faith. Jesus has never promised health and wealth to his followers. Often God blesses us physically and financially, but if he doesn't that's not an indictment of our faith.
During the late 1970's and throughout much of the 1980's Jim Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, enjoyed enormous success and fame propagating the health and wealth gospel. They preached in front of glaring television cameras that God wanted everyone to be rich and prosperous and thousands of people around the country bought in to their "you can have it all" philosophy. In fact, their followers donated millions of dollars to build the lavish PTL Empire headquartered at Heritage USA in South Carolina.
Then in 1987, the empire collapsed, like a house of cards it came down. Two years later, Jim Bakker was sentenced to forty-five years in prison, but was released after five on good behavior. And for the next two years, divorced and alone, he spent most of his time in seclusion on a farm in the woods of North Carolina writing a book called I Was Wrong.
In the book Bakker writes, "The words 'I was wrong' do not come easily to me. For most of my life I believed that my understanding of God and how he wants us to live was not only correct but worth exporting to the world. One reason I've risked putting my heart into print is to tell you that my previous philosophy of life, out of which my attitude and actions flowed, was fundamentally flawed. God does not promise that we will all be rich and prosperous, as I once preached."
"When I studied the Bible in prison, it became clear to me that not one man or woman--not even the prophets of God--led a life without pain... I was wrong! Wrong in my lifestyle, certainly, but even more fundamentally, wrong in my understanding of the Bible's true message. Not only was I wrong, but I was teaching the very opposite of what Jesus had said." I give him a lot of credit for making that public apology. It's certainly not easy to say, "I was wrong." But for many of his followers it was still too little, too late.
So if those are some of the tossed salads of cultural Christianity, the words of Jesus plus something else, what does biblical Christianity look like? Well, at the great risk of over simplifying it let me do it anyway and sum it up in one word, "love."
It starts with God's unconditional love for us. Perhaps the verse that captures it best is John 3:16, For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Did you notice throughout this series, week after week, every one of the religions and cults that we profiled was about their attempt to reach God whoever they define him to be? Which is what religion is about. It's about our attempt to connect with God. In fact, one of the things this study has made crystal clear is that men and women all over the world, all throughout the ages, have a factory-installed desire to connect with God. But in religion the arrow is pointing up. We're trying to reach him or her or it or whatever. But in the Christian faith, the arrow is pointing down. It's God trying to reach us. We have a God who loves us and wants to be known and wants to have a relationship with us and has gone to great cost to provide one. He sent us his only Son Jesus Christ, who at great risk, visited this planet, lived a flawless life and was pinned to a cross as punishment for our sin, died and rose again and says all who believe in me have eternal life.
Biblical Christianity starts with believing that God loves us and sent his Son to rescue us from a wasted life lived without him. It's about God's love for us and our love for God.
One day Jesus was cornered and asked what is the greatest commandment that God ever gave? What's the best thing human beings can do? You know what he said? He said in Matthew 22:37-39, Love the Lord your God with all you heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
Biblical Christianity is about God loving us and it's about us loving God. And that's where church fits in. Do you know why we come together each week as a church? We come to gather to learn to love God more. Do you know why we devote so much of our time to worship each Sunday? Because God loves to hear his people worship him. And those who love God, love to give him that kind of worship. It's one way that we communicate to him how much we love him.
Do you know why we teach the Bible each week? Not to make us smarter sinners, but to make us better lovers of God and of each other. The apostle Paul, who next to Jesus was perhaps the best teacher who ever lived, wrote in 1 Timothy 1:5, The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.
Biblical Christianity is about God loving us and us loving God and us loving each other. That commandment, Jesus said, "to love your neighbor," is a close second. He put it like this the night before he died in John 13:34-35, A new command I give you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
One reason we feel so strongly about community at Valley View is because of these words of Jesus. Next to loving God he wants us to love our spouses, our families, our friends, and even our enemies he says in other places. He wants his followers to see relationships as the ball game and to invest their time in one another. That's a lot different than performing some rite or ritual or showing for a church meeting once a week. Following Jesus means responding to the love of God, believing in him as Savior, loving God back and loving each other.
And if you feel inadequate for that, handicapped by your upbringing or your temperament, the mistakes you've made or the hurts you've had in life, join the club. There's not a one of us that is up to the task. There's not a one of us who doesn't have a long way to go to becoming better lovers. But thank God we have help. And help's name is the Holy Spirit that God puts into the life of each person who trusts in Jesus.
The apostle Paul writes in 2 Timothy 1:7, For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.
He puts it this way in Galatians 5:22-23, But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
We have help and his name is the Holy Spirit. That's biblical Christianity. That's the life that Jesus died to give us, a life of love for God and for each other empowered by the Holy Spirit. Let's make that our holy passion and magnificent obsession.