Our Diet Is For Babies, Pt. 1

Series:  What is wrong with church?

A.W. Tozer puts his finger on one of the main issues that is wrong with the church:

“There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the principles of the doctrine of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangely unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breast a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.”

Have you ever heard the phrase:  “preaching to the choir?”  It means, “preaching to the converted.”  The idea is that it is pointless to try to make believers out of people who already believe, or to try to convince people who are already convinced! It is indeed a waste of time and energy.  The secular phrase would be, “kicking at an open door.”  There is simply no point in trying to convert Christians – they are already converted!

How does a person become converted? By responding in a positive way to the gospel. He or she opens their heart and says, “YES” to Jesus. Although our punishment is death and hell for our sins, the gospel is the good news that Jesus paid for our sins on the cross and all we need to do is to receive the gift of His amazing grace.  We simply repent of our sins and receive Jesus into our lives as our Lord and Savior.  He then forgives us of our sins and grants us eternal life as a gift.  How good is that?  The gospel is the absolute foundation of our Christian faith. It is a message we give to unbelievers in order to convince them of their need of a Savior.   Everyone who has been a Christian for sometime should know this.

So what would happen if we went to a church full of mature Christians who have been saved for 5, 10, 15 or more years and discovered that the pastor was preaching this same foundational gospel message to them week-in and week-out?  Surely we would say, “Hey this preacher is preaching to the choir.  He is wasting his time and energy, and on top of that, he is wasting our time as well. Why is he spending so much time trying to convince me that I need to be saved when I am saved?”

It is been my own personal experience, right from the time I entered Bible college, that pastors are preaching to the choir. Some pastors believe that if the message of Jesus and Him crucified is not preached on Sunday mornings then it is not a valid message or a biblical sermon.

And so this is what happens on Sundays.  Christians go to a church to hear a message they already know and accept, from a pastor who already knows they know it, and knows they accept it.  And what is even more strange is that if these Christians become disgruntled over hearing information that they already know and accept, then something terribly is wrong with them!

Thus church has turned into an exercise of perfecting the art of preaching to the choir.

End of Part 1