OK. You are of Christ. Your Church is faithful. You do not tolerate the heretics (the way the PCUSA, the Methodists, and the Anglicans do by being a big tent). You do not have a heretic running the show, as Mundabor correctly says the Romans do. You are not weak on issues of public morality, as Hillsong is.
Your church is not dry. The worship is strong, the people want to be there. But I have bad news for you. Well not I, but Christ, for I have just described Sardis.
Sardis was alive and pretty. So is the thistle in the picture: but the thistle is a weed (and The Department of Conservation will not spray nor control: a farmer would be compelled to root it up).
“And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: ‘The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.
“‘I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy. The one who conquers will be clothed thus in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’
(Revelation 3:1-6 ESV)
You cannot sleepwalk to salvation. You are in the place you are to do good and to glorify God. You are not here for your own benefit. The Church is Sardis needed to move out of the theological ivory tower and remember what they were taoght. They needed to preach the gospel.
This is the sin I fear most, because I am employed by an academic institution, I attend a church where there are at least two PhD theologians in the pews most Sundays, and we can get very abstract very quickly. Our correction is our pastor: who is no academic (he scraped through his theology degree) and at times lets is compassion for others blur his teaching. But he bleeds for us and preaches the gospel.
For the gospel never grows old.
Let the SJW preach the current fashions. They will change. It is not our role to be an echo chamber to them: if that happens we are truly dead. Instead let us correct our lives and preach the gospel. If the SJW and Islamists tell us to shut up, let us preach longer and louder.
And I pray that my actions today bring glory to Christ and not shame, so that my name, and yours, will be confessed by Christ at the end of times.
