Robyn had to deal with me after church today. We had a visit from Presbyterian Support. Unfortunately I know too much about them. They compete for government funding, and the government agencies leverage the charities to extend their budget and meet their corporate role. The implication was that to serve each other we should be working as a social agency.

No.

We should do good works, yes, but the bureaucracy we now have in our social and health agencies is driven by the government, who live the narrative of this time and hate the gospel. They want us to be Unitarians: to be weeds not wheat.

Our primary duty, as men in the Church, is to provide for our families. Then those in need in the church. Then our local community. Then those in need who are not in the community and of the faith. In that order: we are not imperialists trying to bring our version of Unicorn Democraticism or British Isrealitism to the nations of the world.

We are here to preach Christ.

Matthew 13:24-34a

²⁴He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; ²⁵but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. ²⁶So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. ²⁷And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ ²⁸He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ ²⁹But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. ³⁰Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

³¹He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; ³²it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

³³He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

³⁴Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing.

Acts 17:22-31

²²Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. ²³For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. ²⁴The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, ²⁵nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. ²⁶From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him — though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’
²⁹Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. ³⁰While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Why does this matter? Why is there so much opposition against the church? Why do we need to care about those who come in to preach anything but the gospel? It is because the narrative needs the church silenced. And those who reform always have an error within that will lead to failure unless the spirit of God corrects us. For the Free Church, it was academic freedom that was the virus.

However what is happening is that the Church of Scotland has been in free-fall over the past few decades – its membership has fallen from 1.4 million to well under 400,000 and continues to fall by 20,000 per year. I believe that the key reason for that decline is because of something that the Free Church introduced into the Scottish church, which has become a deadly virus for the whole Church in Scotland.

In the twenty years following the Disruption the Free Church built thousands of churches, manses and schools – and three theological colleges (if you ever visit Edinburgh it is hard to miss the beautiful New College building on the Mound where the Church of Scotland General Assembly is now held). But the church became proud and arrogant and in seeking ‘new learning’ managed to bring in the ‘Higher Criticism’ teaching about the Bible from Germany. This had the effect over many decades of undermining confidence in the Bible as the Word of God, and as a result, when the Tsunami of cultural and anti-Christian change hit Scotland in the 1960’s, in effect the churches largely folded like a house of cards, or became inward looking. In either sense both died. When the church just goes along with the contemporary zeitgeist it will wither and die. When it retreats into a pietistic and legalist shell it will also die. But what the Disruption teaches us is that when the people of God are prepared to make a stand for the Word of God, to radically challenge the culture, and to live boldly for Christ, it can really turn the world upside down.

There will always be those who will subvert the church for the sake of their agenda. It may be climate change, it may be social justice. It will not be the gospel. And there we need, as pewsitters to act. We need to confront those who are in error. We need to pray for their souls, and, as Brother Mundabor notes, we need to not support those in error.

We may not be able to remove the weeds from our midst, but we should attempt not to fertilise them.