I recently attended a Christian event. I was hoping to learn something there and to spend some time in worship. I came home early, disappointed and wondering why I had gone. Having reflected on what happened there, I know why I went. In the sovereignty of God, I went in order to see more plainly the current state of the church in Western Australia. It is a cause for prayer and tears. Without recounting every detail, I want to explain what the issues are. Although the singing and teaching I will discuss here is particular to that event, the general issues are in fact a problem in many churches.
I will begin with the “worship”. My criticism is not about the sincerity of the individuals leading the singing. I have no way to measure that nor do I actually doubt it. But Paul says, “It is fine to be zealous, provided the purpose is good” (Gal 4:18). However, zeal that is misplaced is not helpful. My issue is that ignorance of the gospel destroys the church. That is in fact the issue with the teaching as well, but more about that later.
I am struggling to remember the words of the songs that were sung. I do remember that the songs had very little by way of Christian content. The impression I received from the singing was that the purpose was to generate a feeling of excitement about God’s presence. There was a lot of noise and a lot of repetition. The final song seemed to be a declaration that the Spirit was moving in the place and miracles were taking place there. Declarations of “faith” are not faith in the biblical sense. Faith must be based on the word of God given to us and its centre is always Jesus. He is the object of our faith. The declarations in that event were based on what the people wanted to see, not on what God has said. I would sum up the 45 minutes of singing as hype.
Now why does it matter that the song leaders were trying to hype up the congregation? The real issue here is that the gospel does not require hype. It is in itself the most incredible thing that human beings could ever experience. When we genuinely understand the wonder of what God has done for us in Christ, then there is no need for hype. So when “worship” has to work at generating excitement, the implication is that the gospel is not grasped. I have experienced this problem before. Many Christians believe that for our worship to be acceptable to God, then we must generate this kind of excitement; we must generate an attitude because it is our attitude that determines what God thinks of our singing.
But this is Pelagian. Pelagius was a 5th century English monk, who believed that we can work hard and successfully overcome sin with the right attitude and the right influences. It was Augustine who refuted this idea with his doctrine of original sin. Humans cannot please God in their own abilities. We are sinners. What we need is more than hype. We need Jesus Christ, the one who lived and died in our place. Since Jesus has lived a life of perfect worship, always fully submitted to the will of the Father, our worship is acceptable to God in him. “You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Pet 2:5). Without Jesus, no amount of excitement or hype could ever make our worship acceptable to God. Because of Jesus, there is no need to hype up people in worship. If the church understood the gospel, then this way of trying to get people into worship would not exist. The implication is that the church does not know the truth of the gospel.
The worship was fleshly in that it relied on our human ability to generate a feeling. The presence of God is a gift that God gives to his people because of Christ. It cannot be generated by anything that we do. If we believe that God must be coaxed to appear in our midst, then we have not understood the God with whom we deal. If we believe that we can draw God out of heaven into our buildings then we have misunderstood our own powerlessness before him. He is a holy God, who does not enter into fellowship with fleshly, unholy people. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, however, promises to be present with his people (John 14:23) because he has chosen to make his people holy through the blood of Christ (Heb 13:12). Any fleshly attempt to produce the presence of God through our singing is yet another indication that we have not understood the grace of God. We imagine that our own efforts could make this happen.
Having had some singers attempt to produce some excitement about the presence of God in the church, the pastor then told everyone how wonderful they are. At that point, I realised that the church does not know that the blood of Jesus is enough to cover sin. Christians are the only people on the planet who can freely confess their sin because we are the only people on the planet who know that our sins are washed clean in the blood of Jesus (1 John 1:9). If we are unable to confess our sins or acknowledge them, even in church, this is a plain indication that the church does not understand forgiveness, grace or justification. The gospel has been so denuded of Christ that is no longer the gospel. If we must tell one another that we are OK, constantly trying to shore one another up with triumphalistic (overly victorious) declarations of our own making, this tells me that the church does not know her Saviour.
The “worship” was followed by some teaching. The name of the teacher seems unimportant in the scheme of things. I have heard much of this false teaching before and will no doubt hear it again in another context. I cannot recount it all here because I got up and walked out of the meeting half way through the teaching and only came back towards the end. I was so horrified by what was being taught that it was difficult to listen to it. I will explore some of the main points that he made, but all of these teachings suffer from the same problem, they have wandered from the truth that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The nature of false teaching is that the lies are wrapped in small amounts of truth to make it more palatable. When the serpent came to Eve in the Garden of Eden, he asked, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Gen 3:1). Now this sounds sort of like what God actually said, and yet it is a huge distortion of what God said. Once Eve engaged in conversation with the father of lies (John 8:44), the serpent then flatly contradicted what God had said, telling Eve, “You will not certainly die” (Gen 3:4). So it is no surprise to me that much of what was said sounded close to what the Bible says. But close enough is not good enough in this case. The teaching was a distortion of the Bible and thus false.
One thing which made it easier to teach falsely was the fact that he often quoted the Bible but rarely provided a reference. Since many Christians are ignorant of the Bible, they have no way of looking at the context since the Bible passages were never actually viewed. I do not have this problem since I could find the passages (I am not as ignorant of the Bible). He also repeatedly told people not to take any notes on what he was saying. If nothing is recorded then there is no opportunity to consider it later and to think about whether it is scriptural or not.
He taught about what it means to be “in the Spirit”. According to this teaching, when John said, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” (John 1:10; see also 4:2), he was referring to a state of being that enabled him to see into the spiritual dimension. This spiritual dimension is always accessible to us. What we need to do is to shift our awareness. God does not come and go; he is always there. So we can step across into the spiritual realm at any time. The spiritual dimension is unhinged from the dimension of space and time.
Despite using several Bible passages to teach this idea it is very far from the truth. First of all, being “in the Spirit” involves the person of the Holy Spirit. The false teacher has reduced Holy Spirit, the divine person of the Trinity, to a “state of being” that we can enter into. I cannot go so far as to call this blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, since the context of that sin is something else, but it is a serious sin against the person of the Holy Spirit. Any teaching that takes away both the personhood and the divinity of the Holy Spirit is clearly false. The Holy Spirit is grieved when we do not honour him for the holy, divine person that he is. The false teaching is able to penetrate the minds of people because they are not focused on Christ but on experiencing things. If we understood that the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ (Rom 8:9; 1 Peter 1:11), then no one would ever fall for this false teaching.
He went on to teach that human beings are made in the image of God. John 4:24 tells us that “God is Spirit”. This means that we are primarily spiritual beings who are having a human experience. Then he read 1 Cor 2:9-16, which explains that the Spirit of God accesses the thoughts of God. The conclusion he drew is that as image bearers, we are designed to access spiritual things. In fact, accessing spiritual things is the default.
This false teaching defines our humanity without reference to Christ. To begin with we must understand that humans are not “spiritual beings having a human experience.” Genesis tells us that Adam was formed from the dust of the earth. “Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Gen 2:7). The first human had a body before he had a spirit. The body is not an optional extra for humans that we will cast off at some point. Humans are physical beings. If we consider Jesus, who is the one who defines our humanity, then this fact is even more certain. Jesus Christ was born, he grew, he ate and drank, and he died. All of these activities were done in a human body. But most importantly, Jesus rose again from the dead and he now lives eternally in that resurrected body. Bodies are not optional extras. Human beings are bodily creatures just as Jesus Christ now is. To downgrade the body is to downgrade the Lord Jesus Christ.
In addition, this teaching reduces spirituality to something which needs nothing from God. The claim is that we can access the spiritual realm “naturally” because we are image-bearers. All we have to do is change our perspective. In truth, this is totally the wrong way to look at things. The truth is that there is no neutral spiritual realm which we enter. It is not simply that the teaching about how to enter the spiritual realm is incorrect. The entire concept is misplaced. The goal of the Christian life is not to access the spiritual realm. The goal of the Christian life is to know God and to fellowship with him. “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Jesus has reconciled us to God (Rom 4:10) and restored us as sons of God (Gal 4:4-7). This is a relationship. In fact, because of Jesus, we are able to share in the relationship that Jesus has with God the Father.
None of this is “natural”. God paid a great price to bring about this salvation. He gave up his own Son for our sakes. There is no access to God without Christ. Jesus himself said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6.). It is only made possible by his shed blood. There is no way for sinners to naturally come into the presence of a holy God. To suggest that it is normal for humans to come before God without Christ is to deny the fact that we are sinners in rebellion against him. It is a lie that the devil has been perpetrating since the beginning of time. When Adam and Eve were innocent in the Garden of Eden, they were forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God warned them that on the day they ate of it they would surely die (Gen 2:17). The Hebrew here is very strong. It is not a vague threat, but “you will definitely, absolutely, surely die”. But the serpent said to Eve, “You will not certainly die” and then he assured her, “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:4-5). The lie is that humans can be like God without God. The idea that we can access the spiritual realms without God is simply a different version of the same lie.
Later in the meeting (by that time I had come back after I walked out for a while), there was a time of using “sanctified imagination” to come before the throne of grace. Now although the idea of “sanctified imagination” sounds very Christian, it is in fact another substitute for Jesus. Although the Bible does exhort us to come boldly before the throne of grace (Heb 4:16) this is done on the basis of the shed blood of Christ, who has opened up heaven for us (Heb 4:14). We have no right to come before God without Jesus Christ. God is holy and lives in unapproachable light (1 Tim 6:16). If we imagine (and yes see the connection) that we can come to the Father without Christ we are fooling ourselves. Our God is a consuming fire (Heb 12:29). Any experience of God that someone has as a result of using the “sanctified imagination”, instead of Jesus, as the vehicle of approach to God will be nothing but a demonic counterfeit. Whatever you hear or see will not be from God. Anything you “receive” will not be true grace and mercy. There is no substitute for Jesus that could ever be acceptable to God.
The final issue is that the entire teaching was lacking in relational categories. God does not want us to be “spiritual beings” accessing “spiritual realms” and seeking after dreams and visions and amazing prophetic words. He does not want humans to be making “declarations” or “changing the atmosphere”. His primary goal for humanity is “I will be your God and you will be my people” (Exod 6:7; Jer 7:23; 11:4; 30:32; Ezek 36:38). The longing of God the Father is to have relationship with his human creatures. This is not a connection of spirit being to spirit being. This is a relationship between creature and Creator. He is a loving Father who has gone to great lengths to redeem people from sin and to reconcile them to himself so that we might know him. God did not send his Son into the world so that we might enter spiritual realms. He sent his Son into the world so that we might have intimate fellowship with him. The difference between these two things is huge. One is a non-personal experience and the other is a relationship with a loving God. Choose the latter.
The whole experience has left me thinking that the reason that Australia is in its present lost state is that the church does not know the gospel. The fundamental problem with every aspect of this meeting was the fact that Jesus has become irrelevant to the musicians, the pastor and the speakers. Once Jesus is swept aside and people are told that they can access “spiritual” things without any reference to Christ, then what is proclaimed, taught and acted out is no longer Christianity, but paganism. Much of the church does not know the gospel. This means that there are many sincere people in churches across this country who believe that they are saved but are in fact going to hell. There are many Christians who are deceived into believing that they must work hard to access the presence of God, because they do not know that the blood of Jesus has opened the way to God. There are many people who can never admit their own sins, because they have no knowledge that their sins are forgiven because of the cross. The church is in a sad state of ignorance. If the church does not know the gospel, there is no hope for Australia.
What is God saying to the church with regard to these practices of hype and false teaching? God gives us the desires of our hearts (Ps 37:4). For those who desire to know God through Jesus Christ, this promise is something glorious and will lead people into greater intimacy with God. But for those who desire sin God gives them over to that sin (Rom 1:18-32). If the church desires excitement at the cost of truth, then that is what we will receive. Yet those who pursue these kinds of experiences “have lost connection with the head” (Col 2:19), that is, Christ Jesus. The solution to this problem is to surrender to the lordship of Christ and he will change our hearts.
In the coming days the church will be increasingly divided into two groups: people who are happy with the hype and lies, and people who long for Jesus and something deeper. The latter will hunger for the word of God and search the Scriptures. The former will continue to draw people into false experience. But God is going to work only through those who desire him rather than the excitement and experiences. There is always a remnant that will seek God in truth. Just as God told Elijah, “Yet I reserve seven thousand in Israel—all whose knees have not bowed down to Baal and whose mouths have not kissed him” (1 Kings 19:18), so God has reserved for himself a remnant in the church. The remnant is uninterested in superficial nonsense and hungers for the truth. On the other hand, many will come to Jesus on the last day and he will say, “I never knew you” (Matt 7:23). Those who seek after religious experiences instead of coming to God through Jesus Christ will be shocked and terrified on that day.
Wake up church and repent. Turn back to Jesus now. Put Jesus back at the centre where he belongs. When Christ is exalted the church will be able to mature and to again offer hope to the lost. Without Christ at the centre, the church is in serious danger of being lost.