Looking Forward and Keeping Watch – 2020
Text: 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6, 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12
Happy New Year everyone! When I was a kid growing up in the 70’s I never thought I’d see the year 2020… it just seemed so far off for me. If you had asked me back then what our world was going to be like, I probably would’ve told you it was going to be like Star Trek or something similar to that… But here we are – 2020… we don’t have teleporters… we can’t go warp speed, and as far as I know, androids don’t dream of electric sheep.
But I do think it’s important to look forward as we step into this new year, and I think it’s important to ask questions about where we’re going, what lies ahead, what do you and I want to achieve in the year 2020? What God would like to do with our church? And of course the big question… I ask it every year… is this going to be the year that the Lord returns? Now for some of those questions, we’re all going to have different answers and ideas about what we would like to do this year, and where we see ourselves as a Church, and what our church does… but as for that last question we have to look at Scripture. And of course the Bible says, “No man knows the day or the hour of the Lord’s return.” (That’s Matthew 24:36). So we can’t say for certain that this is the year that the Lord will return. But we can know that it is drawing near. And Jesus says that if we are alert and watchful, we won’t be caught off guard… in Matthew 24:42-44 He says, “Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
So what I want us to do this morning is zero in on something that points to the Lord’s return, and I think this is a sign that is saying it is close… it is soon… SO BE READY! And I’m not going to be preaching like I would normally… this is going to be more teaching, and more for your information, so that you can pray in an informed way, and make informed, well-reasoned, thought out decisions. And I might just go a little longer today than normal… just fair warning. With that in mind - Please take your Bibles and open them up to 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6 (READ)… now turn with me over to the next book, 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 (READ).
Now let me give you the background to these two passages… Paul is writing to believers in Thessalonica… and they had obviously contacted him in some way, either by a letter or by a message they sent, and they were concerned about the coming of the Lord, and our being gathered together to Him. In his first letter… 1 Thessalonians 5, Paul says kind of the same thing I just said to you – that the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, but if you’re watchful and alert… and because you are children of light and not in darkness, we shouldn’t be surprised as that day approaches… because we’re seeing the signs. But in the second letter, in 2nd Thessalonians… he goes into more specifics. Apparently someone had been telling the Christians in Thessalonica that the Day of the Lord was either right on the door step, or that they had somehow missed it, and that because they had not been raptured, they were about to face the coming wrath upon the world.
Now we don’t know who told them that, or where they got that idea, but Paul writes to them and explains to them how it’s going to go down. So look again at verses 1 & 2, Paul says, “Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our being gathered together to Him…” So that’s what he’s referring to – the Coming of Jesus, and us being gathered to Him… traditionally we’ve called that gathering the rapture of the Church. So… concerning that – don’t be “quickly shaken in your mind, or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter that seems to be from us to the effect that the Day of the Lord has come.” So Paul calls that time, when the Lord comes and we are gathered together to Him – THE DAY OF THE LORD. And then in verse 3 Paul says, “Don’t let anyone deceive you – IN ANY WAY.” And then he explains what we’re supposed to be watching for.
He says, “For THAT DAY will not come unless the rebellion comes first…” Now stop right there. That word “rebellion” is the Greek word “apostasia”. He’s talking about an apostasy from the truth of God’s Word, and an apostasy from Christ. It’s a turning away from the truth of God’s Word, and from following Jesus.
And I’ll just say, we’ve seen that happening for quite some time. Even in the days of the early Church, there were individuals who turned back from following Christ. Paul writes about a guy named Demas who was in love “with the present world” and who turned away from following the Lord, and 1 John 2:19 talks about some people who turned away from Christ and the Church as well. John says, “They went out from us, but they were NOT OF US; for if they had been of us, THEY WOULD HAVE CONTINUED WITH US. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” So… even back in the days of the early Church, there were individuals who departed from following Jesus… and make sure you understand what John is saying there… if they were OF US, they would’ve continued. So he’s not saying that real, true, Christians can be lost. He’s saying that it eventually becomes obvious that some people who appear to be following Jesus, aren’t actually Christians…So we see this turning away, but it tended to be individuals… here and there, spattered throughout history… but in the mid 1800’s we began to see apostasy on a wider scale. We also began to see a WHOLE LOT MORE false teaching and deception creep into the Church. And those things go together. In-fact Luke warns us in Acts 20:20, “From among your OWN SELVES will arise men speaking twisted things, TO DRAW AWAY the disciples after them.” False teaching leads to apostasy!
So just think about this for a second… almost all at once, during the mid-1800’s to the early 1900’s, we had Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russel, John Dewey, and whole bunch of other false teachers, secular-humanists, anti-Christian philosophers, and cult leaders just pop up on the scene of human history. And these false teachings and godless philosophies began to infiltrate into the Church. And they began to influence churches, and denominations, and leaders. So you see guys like Charles Finney, start implementing pragmatism… he was like the first evangelist to employ the seeker sensitive model into church… and some denominations started adopting this quickly. But at the same time, God raised up faithful leaders and pastors, and theologians to fight against this.
Charles Spurgeon the great Baptist preacher in England preached a series of sermons about it, and he published what he called “The Downgrade in the Churches”. Let me just read to you a quote from that, he said, “Instead of submission to God’s Word, higher criticism urges accommodation to human wisdom. It sets human thought above God’s revelation and constitutes man the supreme judge of what ought to be true.”
Spurgeon was speaking out against what was going on in the Baptist Church in England at the time… and what was going on was that the Baptist convention had adopted the theory of evolution and had begun saying, “We can use the theory of evolution, and the philosophies of higher criticism, as a way of interpreting and understanding Scripture.” And Spurgeon said, “NO! NO YOU CAN’T!” “IT’S CONTRARY TO THE WORD OF GOD!” So what happened is that in April of 1888 the Baptist Union of London met and voted to censure Charles Haddon Spurgeon – probably one of the greatest English speaking Pastors who ever lived. And the Baptist Church in England, as well as the Anglicans and several other denominations adopted false teachings and worldly philosophies. Today, England is a secular country, atheist far outnumber all Christians from every denomination combined, and Baptists, which used to have around 6 million members in England now only have 150,000 members.
We’ve seen the same thing happen in the US. The Methodist Church began in the 1700’s and they reached nearly 12 million members, they began ordaining women, began allowing homosexual marriage, and homosexual pastors, and now they’ve dwindled down to a little over 6 million members, and their own statistics show that by 2030, if things don’t change, they will be down to less than 1 million.
The Episcopalian church; which began in the late 1700’s reached a peak of nearly 4 million members, but it started ordaining homosexuals, and became more liberal and now it’s down to 1.5 million members, but out of that 1.5 million only about 400,000 faithfully attend church services. And throughout all of this, the leadership SBC has fought for the truth of Scripture, we’ve stood strong on the inspiration of Scripture, and said we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture… the leadership of the denomination has stood strong for a long time, but individual churches didn’t do so well… we’ve said it, but we haven’t practiced it. Churches have been giving in to Pragmatism for some time… again, ever since Charles Finney at least. And the result of that is the “Seeker Sensitive model”. Instead of relying on SCRIPTURE to work in people’s lives, and trusting that God’s Word will not return unto Him void, but will accomplish what He intends; we’ve made our worship services more worldly, saying we needed to do that in order to attract the worldly minded… we’ve added all sorts of programs and worldly philosophies, and grown more and more pragmatic. And when you add a little leaven, it begins to leaven the whole lump. Little by little we’ve seen worldly, godless, demonic teachings and philosophies begin to creep in to the point where in the last 15 years or so, we’ve seen our SB seminaries and state universities like OBU and Baylor bring in openly homosexual professors who affirm that lifestyle. We’ve seen them bring feminist professors who support abortion. We’ve seen them bring in Socialist and Marxist professors who are teaching a revamped form of the social gospel, and Black Liberation Theology, and we’ve seen them bring in professors who deny the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. These are the institutions that are training the future pastors of our denomination… and they’re funded by our cooperative program dollars.
In the past 15 years or so we’ve seen our Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission – which in case you don’t know, that’s the SBC’s organization that petitions the US government for things that are important to us, like trying to end abortion, and for making sure we have religious freedom, and the right to worship the Lord without government interference… but in the last 15 years we’ve seen them working hard to subvert our nation’s immigration laws… and not to help Christian refugees, but to help Muslims from the Middle East and Northern Africa, come to America and gain amnesty. The President of that commission, Russel Moore even went to so far as to suggest that if you support President Trump’s border wall, you might not even be a Christian. We’ve seen Russel Moore take a position on a George Soros funded organization that is actively trying to destroy our nations sovereignty, borders, and culture. We’ve seen the ERLC use our CP dollars to build a mosque in New Jersey in 2016. That’s right an Islamic mosque, where people gather to worship a false god… And in 2018 – our SBC ERLC came out and said that animal rights are equal to the rights of the unborn.
In the past 15 years or so, we’ve seen LifeWay publish more and more books that promote false teaching, heresy, New Age Mysticism, and Word of Faith theology. We’ve seen them ignore literally thousands of requests from pastors asking them to stop selling those blatantly false teachings.
In the past 5 years we’ve seen several Southern Baptist Conferences that brought in homosexuals to teach on family matters, Socialist philosophers and strategists to teach on reparations and the redistribution of wealth, and other things.
And in 2018 the SBC elected J.D. Greear as the President of the SBC… since that time, he’s said that the Muslims and Christians worship the same God, he’s denied the Bible’s teaching on gender roles, he’s affirmed homosexuality, he’s pushed for opening the role of pastor up to women, and has openly attacked several pastors who have spoken out against him.
But last year at the annual convention, the SBC finally put all their cards on the table. Last year at the annual convention, the SBC voted to approve Resolution #9, which says that we will now use Critical Theory and Intersectionality as a means of interpreting Scripture. I mean… it’s almost a repeat of what happened in the mid 1800’s in London.
Now if you don’t know what Critical Theory is, let me just give you a brief overview… CT originates from Marxism… but instead of looking at economic disparities, it instead looks at class, race, and groups. And basically CT says that there are two groups, the oppressed and the oppressors. And what you see playing out in Hollywood, and the news, and politics, and the educational institutions is the result of CT… If you’re white, heterosexual, male, Christian, middle or upper class, and educated, then you belong to the oppressor group. And that means you have privilege, and you’re an inherent racist, and you oppress other groups, like women, homosexuals, blacks, Hispanics, the poor, immigrants, transgendered, feminists… you name it, you oppress them. You victimize them. You’re evil. That’s what CT says. It’s godless, humanistic, Marxist philosophy. And it’s a turning away from the truth of Scripture, and the inerrancy of Scripture, and from the sufficiency of Scripture. History tells us what happens when a denomination does that…
So what does all this mean for you and me?
It means that at the annual convention this year, June of 2020 in Orlando Florida, if things don’t turn around, we’ve got some serious decisions to make as a congregation. I will tell you, it already looks bad. The SBC has already announced who is going to head up the pastor’s convention at the Annual Convention. It’s a pastor from Orland named David Uth, David Uth affirms homosexuality.
Now let me go back and read to you our text from 2nd Thessalonians, and we’ll close.
“Let NO ONE deceive you in ANY WAY. For that day will not come, unless the REBELLION (apostasy) comes first,”
LOOK UP CHURCH! The return of the Lord could be closer than we imagined.
Even so, Come Lord Jesus!
CLOSING
