My friends, Hallelujah means I will praise the Lord.
Let us praise the Lord together by hearing the word of God for
us this morning. And the disciples devoted
themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship,
to the breaking of the bread. And the prayers and awe came
upon every soul. And many wonders and signs were
being done through the apostles, and all who believed were
together, and they had all things in common.
And they were selling their possessions and belongings, and
distributing the proceeds to all as any had need.
And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking
bread in their homes, they received their food with glad
and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all
the people. And the Lord added to their
number day by day, those who were being saved.
This is the word of the Lord. The grass Withers, the flowers
fade, but the word of our Lord stands forever.
My friends, the word of our Lord stands forever.
Please be seated. So I want you to imagine that
you're just getting to know somebody, you're on the first
second date, something like that.
And you start feeling to yourself, hey, I really, you
know, want to be honest with this person.
I've got these feelings and I want to share with them and I
want to be really honest with this person.
So you go up to them at the end of the date, you kind of go up
to them and say, hey, I need to tell you this, that you are a
real bully and that there's nothing nice at all about you.
And I have to say, when I look at you, I just feel awful.
OK What's the end result of such a comment?
Yeah. The chances are you're going to
get slapped. Or I was thinking you just
wouldn't get another date. But something along those lines.
On the other hand, 300 years ago, that would have been a love
ballad to be. Thank you, Kelly.
That would have been a love ballad, to be a bully.
To be a bully would be to be a sweetheart or a darling.
And to say, hey, you're, you're my bully would be to say you're
my sweetheart, you're my loved one.
To be nice is to be silly. It's to be ignorant.
It's to be just short of stupid. And to say there's nothing nice
about you would be to say that you're a very serious person.
To say when I look at you I feel awful would mean when I look at
you, I feel the awe of God, the wonder of our Lord that he has
blessed me with. I feel awe full of awe,
etcetera, etcetera. So to say somebody that you're
my bully, that you, that there's nothing nice about you and that
when I look at you I feel awful, that would be a love ballad 300
years ago today. It's likely to get you slapped.
OK, if you're at all aware of these kind of things, if you do
any study of language at all, you're aware that the semantic
range, the, the, the, the definition of language, the
definition of different words shifts over time.
And that's not surprising. We can come up with lots of
those illustrations. Those are three that fit
together well for me, but you can come up with a whole fleet
of them. If you want to have fun someday,
search on the Internet. You'll come up with lots of
things that will make you laugh, that the words shift and change
so much. We are living right now in the
midst of a time period where a an incredibly significant word
for the church is shifting its meaning terribly.
If we're going to have a conversation about this word, I
need to almost reprogram you. I mean, literally reprogram you
because the way in which we're going to talk about a particular
word is not at all the way in which you're hearing it being
used. Now, as we have a self
description of the church here, this is kind of the an
articulation of the kind of church that I want to serve, the
kind of person that I want to be.
And so this not only reflects what Hebron is to some extent,
but it also reflects, I think, what we want it to be.
What does Hebron, What should Hebron be like?
Well, this is the phrase in which we've been using for the
past couple weeks. Hebron is a biblically based,
Christ centered community of disciples, A reformed,
classically evangelical church in the Presbyterian tradition,
worshipping, growing, and serving Christ in the eastern
suburbs of Pittsburgh. Hebron is a biblically based
Christ centered community, disciples, A Reformed and then
classically evangelical. Notice how we've got classically
evangelical in there, and I've included a kind of in
parentheses in part so that it stands out.
We're a classically evangelical church.
Now, I, we have to state it like this because over the past 40
years, and 1st off, just to wrap your minds around this a little
bit, in the English speaking Christian world, the world
evangelical is only about 80 years old.
It's only about 80 years old. And in the past 40 years, the
word has shifted and changed dramatically in popular usage to
the fact that it rarely means very little at all of what it
used to mean. And that's why when we talk
about being classically evangelical here at heaven, when
we call ourselves evangelical here at heaven, we need to
somehow distinguish ourselves from the contemporary use of the
term to its classical use, to its use back in the 80 years ago
or so. And so just like you could
probably trace the evolution of the word bully from sweetheart
to somebody that intimidates themselves with their physical
presence. So I think you can trace the
evolution of the word evangelical from its classical
meaning to its contemporary meaning.
But we're not going to do that process today.
What we're going to do is emphasize what it is that we
mean when we say that Hebron Church is a classically
evangelical church. And it's important that I, I, I
keep stressing this because if we're all triggered to
understand words a certain way, and if you understand
evangelical in the it's contemporary usage right now,
you're forever going to miss some crucial identification,
self identification of Hebron when Hebron says that it's
classically evangelical. Now the reality is just to catch
you up on some linguistic struggles of the church in
America, the church is struggling trying to come up
with another term. There's not a good term.
We recognize that evangelical no longer means what it meant even
40 years ago when we first used the terminology to describe
ourselves. It no longer means that any
longer. And so we're struggling to come
up with another term. I'm too old for that.
I just want to use the words that I know how to use.
And so until they come up with a better term, I'm sticking with
the fact that Hebron Church is an evangelical church.
But what I mean by that is a classically evangelical church.
So what I need to do is I need to spend the next 20 minutes
giving you 100 years of history. This is 100 years of quick
understanding of the way the word evangelical is used and
specifically what we mean by it. When we say that Heaven Church
is an evangelical church and strives to be an evangelical
church, what are we talking about contemporarily?
If you use the word evangelical, you're usually identifying some
kind of a socio political position on social issues and
political issues. You're identifying yourself in a
particular corner. That's the way in which the word
is used. Now it overwhelmingly has
political and social identification, social uses, and
to some extent it's might have a little bit of a religious
background to it, but overwhelmingly it's talking
about a social political stance of society as a whole.
Now all of this revolves around the fact that about 100 years
ago, 150 to 100 years ago, the church was struggling as it
always does, with that concept that we are called to live in
the world but not be of the world.
All the church throughout of the ages have always struggled with
that kind of an understanding. That's a great phrase that
summarizes the description of the Scriptures in terms of the
church, that the church and us as individuals need to live, be
in the world but not be of the world.
That means that we have to impact the world.
We are put in this world to be God's hands and feet.
We have an impact in the world and yet at the same time we're
not supposed to be shaped and molded by the world.
Instead, we are to be influencing the world, not
having the world influence us. Well, about 100 years ago, the
church found itself locked in two different camps.
In the one camp, there was a position where they said, look,
in order to influence society, in order to impact the the world
around us, in order to share God's love with them, we need to
minimize, we need to downplay the things that are
distinguished, the things that separate us from the world.
We need to instead embrace some of the concepts of the world.
We need to embrace the world's outlook on things, see things
the way the world does so that we can bring our distinctive
Christian influence to bear. So the goal was, hey, how can we
influence the world? And yet the great danger of this
position was that you would compromise some of the crucial
gospel truths, minimize the impact of the gospel message, in
order to try to be relevant to the culture as a whole.
So in order to impact the culture, which is a great
desire, the idea was to minimize some of the things that separate
us from the culture as a whole. That was 1 camp.
On the other side there was a camp that said no, what we need
to prioritize above all else is theological rigidity,
theological faithfulness. We need to be true to the
Scriptures. We need to be true to ourselves.
And so in order to do that, we have to object to and resist the
corrupting influence of the world as a whole.
So what we have to do is we have to anchor ourselves and we have
to become a distinct community and separate ourselves from the
rest of the world. If the world does that, then by
golly, we're not going to do that because we need to be
different. We need to be hold passionately
to the truths of the gospel message, even if that means that
we end up rejecting the world and becoming isolatory from the
world. Now, just like the danger of
this position over here is that it compromises the gospel, the
danger of the position over here is that they withdraw so far
from the world that they no longer have an influence on the
world. Think if you want to extremize
this, extremize this, can you do that?
OK, but everybody knows what I mean.
If you extremize it, you're looking at the Amish position,
OK, The the Amish community, everybody kind of knows the
Amish community, but they've so isolated themselves from the
world that they have very little impact on it.
So the world about 100 years ago was caught in those in those two
positions. At the end of World War 4/2, a
bunch of church leaders arose that said, look, we need to find
a way to take what is right about this.
The goal here of having an influence in society, of
impacting the society, of bringing the gospel message, of
seeing the Kingdom of God worked out in our daily lives.
We need to be able to bring the impact, the importance of this
position to the world while warning ourselves consistency
consistently of the dangers that are present here of compromising
the gospel. But we also need to grab hold of
what is true over here, the truths of the gospel message,
and not compromising in the faithfulness of what is being
taught here. And yet being warned against the
idea of being separated, of pull the way of be, of refusing to
influence the society and the culture as a whole.
These church leaders came together and they literally
created a movement in the 40s and 50s that was called the
Evangelical movement. The evangelical movement
centered around 5 different principles.
Now if you look today, what's the evangelical movement
according to all the media and our society as a whole, what's
the core value of the of the evangelical movement?
You come up with some kind of a political understanding or a
view of the current administration, political
administration or something like that that had nothing to do with
this. 5 core gospel messages 5 core central themes in which the
evangelical movement said in light of this need that we have
to live in the world but not of the world.
In light of our desire to impact the world with the gospel
message and yet not compromise the gospel message in order to
hold true, hold forth the truths of the gospel message, and yet
not be isolatory in our impact. In order to do these things,
they Goss. The evangelical movement held
five main themes. Now, as we got through these
things, think about the way in which the word is used today.
Do are these five things the things that society says?
Oh, yeah. When we're talking about
evangelicals, this is what we're talking about.
I insist that you almost never hear these five things.
And yet that's what it means for us to be evangelical,
classically evangelical, and what we need to be evangelical
because it arises straight out of the Scriptures.
Now, as I talk walk through these five things, I want you to
have in mind the Scripture that I read or the Scripture that Dan
read. The two Scriptures work together
so well to highlight these five different things.
First, we understand the absolute authority of Scripture,
OK, about 100 years ago, as is throughout the history of the
church, there has always been a push away from the authority of
Scripture. When we talk about the authority
of Scripture, we talk about the absolute responsibility of the
Christian, of the believer to submit themselves under the
authority of Scripture. And yet about 100 years ago we
had the rise, this was the triumph of of the Enlightenment
period. We had the rise of naturalism
that was happening. The philosophies that happened
around those times and the rise of the romantic movement and
those kind of things all gave rise to the idea that what can
you really trust in this world? How do you know anything is
true? You know something is true
because you experience it or because you reason it out in
your head. Reason has a brought us into the
majesty of the scientific age in which we're operating under now.
Our experiences is that which makes us authentic.
And so how is it that we identify what is true in this
world? We identify what is true in this
world is that it makes sense to me.
And if I have some kind of experience with it, how do I
know that this is true or that is true?
This religious position is true to that religious?
Well, have I experienced it? Do I have any?
How does it make me feel? How do I engage with it?
Or how much sense does it make? In my mind?
The evangelical movement said, no, our ultimate authority is
Scripture. It's not my experience that
makes me evaluate the Scripture. It's the Scripture that
evaluates my experience. Now we have terrible Bible study
habits. When we say what does the
passage mean to me, OK, what does this passage mean to me?
What that means is, hey, given your own insight and
understanding, how is it that you understand the scriptures?
And instead what we need to do always is how does the
scriptures influence and impact and judge my own thinking, my
own understanding. The Scriptures are our ultimate
authority, not what we think of them, not what we experience,
but rather the Scriptures and the Scriptures alone.
So a common authority. So what the evangelical movement
came up with with his like look in light of the wonderful things
that the scientific world has come up with the the realities
of experiencing of this life. All of those things are true.
And yet all of those things need to be laid against that standard
that that definitive standard that we have in the Scriptures
and the Scriptures alone. So evangelical Christians are
those who are committed to ensuring that we judge our lives
by the Scriptures, not the other way around.
The authority of Scripture first.
Secondly, the absolute centrality of the of the cross.
Now, if you've ever had conversations with somebody
about the sacrificial system in the Old Testament, the slaughter
of the animals, the spreading around to the blood, the
sprinkling of blood all over everything, the consistent ways
in which the animal sacrifice would have dominated people's
lives. You might not be surprised to
get a turned up nose, a little sense like man, aren't you glad
we're no longer at that time period?
Aren't you glad we're where we no longer believe in a God that
is so wrathful that would insist that we kill things, animals of
all things and spread their blood all over the place, that
we no longer believe in those wrathful God that takes that,
that is unable just to love us for Pete's sake, what's the core
as message of the gospel that God loves us.
So God just loves us. We can do away with these
barbaric practices. This horrible understanding
coupled want with the idea. Can you imagine the child abuse
God the father kills his son, sacrifices him for somebody
else. The horror of this makes zero
sense if you hold to such an idea that no wonder you can't
connect with your neighbors and and those around you because
they look at you and think that's a barbaric understanding.
And yet evangelical Christians hold passionately to the truths
of the gospel. We preach Jesus Christ and him
crucified. We are not preaching Jesus
Christ the great teacher. We're not preaching Jesus Christ
the great example. We are preaching Jesus Christ
and him crucified, his death on the cross for our sin.
And yes, that is because God is a God of wrath, and He turns
that wrath against sin, and He intends to turn that wrath
against sin, and He will never subject Himself to anything
other than that wrath upon sin and the great love of God.
Where is the love of God in the midst of this horrid sacrificial
system that would lead to Jesus himself dying upon a cross for
you? The love of God is exactly the
reason why He dies on the cross. His love for you.
His love for me. Evangelical Christians are those
who proudly hold on to the realities of the atonement of
Jesus Christ upon the cross. We don't shy away from it.
We recognize that that is indeed the central concept of the
gospel message. And while the world might think
it's barbaric, while the world might not understand
substitutionary sacrifice, might not understand somebody
voluntarily taking their their, their death on my behalf, that's
exactly what the Scriptures teach and proclaim.
And it's what the evangelical movement has always held forward
is a key in a model. Now let me ask yourself, just
like we should have done when we talked about the Scriptures,
when you hear the word evangelical tossed around today,
do they have in mind the core central theme of the authority
of Scripture? Do they have in mind the core
central theme of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross and
centrality of proclaiming the cross?
Because that's what evangelical means 1st and 2nd.
Thirdly, evangelicalism recognizes the necessity of a
conversion experience and a relationship with Jesus Christ.
Now we all know what it's like to come through, and we've all
had these experiences and you've heard it from me from the
pulpit, you've heard it for years out of this pulpit.
The warning that you're not saved by coming to church.
Churchianity is this shorthand for those who think that the
idea of being saved is the idea of coming to Jesus Christ.
Sorry, coming to church and being part of being part of a
church body. And yet it is the evangelical
world that has brought forward that notion that no, no,
according to the Scriptures, you must be born again.
You must be born again now for those of a certain age.
In the past 20 years or so, the emphasis upon being born again
has been so minimized because it was so mocked in our society as
a whole. But for if you're older than
that, you might remember a time where we stressed a lot, hey,
you must be born again. That's how Christians would
invite each other, would welcome each other, would introduce each
other. Hey, are you born again?
When were you born again? We talked like that because of
the recognition that at the core, what we have is Christian,
that human beings are broken at the core.
We've been singing about that. We've been teaching about that.
The Christians, the sorry, the human beings are broken at their
very core. And what we need is not to love
we and one another as, as you know, we we don't need just to
shift our mindset. We need to be born again.
That the difference between following the ways of this world
and following the ways of Jesus Christ is not a fundamental
shift of thought. It's not a a minor tweak.
It is a transformation that takes place in all that we have.
And so we must be born again. And being born again means
entering into a brand new relationship with Jesus Christ.
It's fashionable to think that the whole world, every human
being, is a child of God. But the Scriptures proclaim that
those who've been born again are children of God.
Those who are in a relationship with Jesus are children of God.
It's a responsibility we have to work in to our understanding of
our lives, that we are being made new by Christ.
We're made new by Christ so that we might have a relationship
with Jesus Christ. Look, the teachings of the
Sermon on the Mount are beautiful.
The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount guide and lead us.
You have that wonderful expression there that we're not
to do that. We're to do to others what we
would want them to do to us. The Golden Rule, all of those
kind of things. But following those things or
seeking to target those things in our lives, making those our
goals, is not what evangelical Christianity is about.
Evangelical Christianity is about recognizing that our whole
lives need to be remade, remade in the image of Jesus Christ
himself and drawn into a relationship with him.
The authority of Scripture, the centrality of the cross, the
necessity of conversion and relationship with Jesus Christ.
And 4th. The idea of a spread of a
gospel, the idea that the gospel spreads not just in our own
society, but across the entire world.
There's this global picture. And so the global Christian,
Christian, global Christian movement, man, that's not right
either. The spread of the gospel around
the world really got a shot in the arm in this 40's, the 50's,
the 60s, as people poured into the global missions and into
surrounding missions, sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And out of this, you had the development of all these
wonderful evangelical institutions, Intervarsity,
Christian Fellowship, Coalition for Christian Outreach, Campus
Crusade for Christ, these ministry organizations, World
Vision, Compassion International, all these
different institutions and organizations, so many of which
we know that we're all built around the idea of taking the
gospel into people's lives. Yes, we have to show that
gospel. Yes, we have to live faithfully.
But the evangelical world recognizes that it's not just
enough for us to live as Christ. We need to talk about Christ.
We need to share Christ. We need to challenge people to
come to know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, that when
we are called, when the disciples are called to go into
all the world, that that means us, that we are called to go
into all the world and to carry the gospel message of Jesus
Christ. And yes, that means that
sometimes we offend people. That means we say to people, and
we're not being evangelical. This is the connection, by the
way, between the word evangelical and evangelism.
If you write those two words out, you'll see that they look
almost the same. The only difference is the
emphasis. Where you put the emphasis is
the difference between those two terms.
And one describes a global movement, the evangelical
movement, that takes very seriously the individual
responsibilities that we have for evangelism.
Evangelism is not something that a rare few of us get to do.
It is a responsibility of every evangelical Christian.
Every believer has that responsibility, the authority of
the Scriptures, the centrality of the cross of Jesus Christ,
the necessity of a personal conversion and relationship with
Jesus Christ, the spreading of the gospel throughout the world,
and then the active cultural engagement and active concern
for a social impact. One of the great fears was that
we, that the evangelical movement would develop the way
that this, the group originally that we were talking about over
here, that they would isolate themselves from the rest of the
world and reading the Scriptures.
That was determined that that was an impossibility for the
Christian. The Christian who is going to
take the Scripture seriously, who is going to abide by the
authority of Scripture is going to also recognize that we have
the responsibility to care and love for those around us.
That we have a responsibility to work for change, to work for the
Kingdom of God to come in its glory.
That the homelessness that happens in this world is an
assault against our Lord, that poverty, that racism is an
assault against our Lord. And every Christian has a
responsibility not to pull into our own little hole over here
and say over here we're going to protect ourselves from the
world, but actually look and realize that the world has
manifest these dangers, these disastrous things, and we as a
church have a responsibility for it.
Now this used to be go on to the phrase of the searching for
social justice. And I understand that nowaday,
just like the term evangelical means something basically
political with right wing leanings.
So the term social justice means something political with left
lean leanings. That's not what evangelical is
about. Evangelical is a recognition
that the poor that are in our neighborhood, that the needy
that are there, that the oppressed are our responsibility
given to us by God himself so that we can communicate the love
and the care of the Lord. That's why institutions like
Compassion International or World Vision or Food for the
Hungry or and they and the list goes on and on.
Hundreds of others were created in the 40s and 50s and can still
exist today so that we can be God's hands caring for the
people around us, not withdrawing, withdrawing from
it. And yes, that means that we care
for them on an individual basis. For most Christians, that's easy
to think of. We've got somebody poor in our
neighborhood. We got somebody who pressed in
our neighborhood. We got somebody that is
downtrodden. It's our responsibility as
individuals to care for them, yes.
But we've got a society as a whole.
We've got a whole world here that is desperate for the love
and the care and the nurture of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And so we have institutional change that has to happen.
We have to have people that impact.
This is every level of our society, including our political
instruments, including the political society in which we
operate in. The evangelical world doesn't
shrink away from those things. The evangelical world recognizes
that because of God's calling, that's part of our
responsibility. Not letting go of the authority
of Scripture, not letting go of the priority of the cross, not
letting go of our need for personal conversion.
We nevertheless have a responsibility to reach out to
the poorest in our world, to be Christ's hands and feet as we
touch the society that is around us.
We are citizens of heaven. We are citizens of heaven, but
there's no picture in the Scriptures that we then withdraw
from the world and act like we're just citizens of the
heaven now without any care for the world around us.
This is our Father's world, and we have every responsibility to
touch individuals, but every aspect of society with the
gospel of Jesus Christ. Now I'm not competent to do
that. I'm not competent to touch it.
I don't know the political solutions to the problems.
I don't know how to tackle racism in this world.
I don't know how to tackle systemic poverty that's in this
world. But I know that the church has a
responsibility to do it. The church is God's leading hand
in touching these things. And so we need to raise up
people. We need to encourage people who
are going to abide under the authority of Scripture, who are
never going to leave the centrality of the cross of Jesus
Christ. That are going to understand the
necessity of being born again. Who are going to seek to spread
the gospel. That are going to go into
politics, that are going to go into music industry, that are
going to go into the entertainment world, that are
going to go into every aspect of this world and carry the gospel
presence. Because that's what it means to
be evangelical. Now, unfortunately, that's no
longer what the word means. So that's what it means to be
classically, Evan, classically evangelical.
That's what I mean. And I'm simply too old to change
my language. So when I say evangelical, when
I say I desperately want Hebron Church to be an evangelical
church, I desperately want you to be an evangelical believer.
I desperately want me to be an evangelical preacher.
What I'm saying is I desperately want Hebron Church to fall under
the authority, self consciously, under the authority of
Scripture. I want you as a believer to self
consciously place yourself under the authority of Scripture and I
need to fight that selfish, sinful tendency that rises up in
my heart every single day and place myself under the authority
of Scripture. I want Hebron Church to embrace
the centrality of the cross of Jesus Christ.
Yes, His teachings are beautiful and marvelous and they're in the
Scriptures for a reason. But it is His death upon the
cross and His resurrection that is the core of Hebron Church.
And I need it to be the core of your life.
And I needed to be the core of my life.
I need Hebron Church to self consciously recognize that we,
that the people you're sitting here with, the Christians in
this room, have indeed been born again, that we are turned into a
brand new person through the gospel message of Jesus Christ.
I need you to be passionate about that with your children
and with your neighbors and with your friends and to be
passionate about that with me. I need each of us here to have a
desire of spreading the gospel. And Hebron Church has to spread
the gospel and I have to spread the gospel.
And every one of us collectively as a body must be an institution
that seeks the good of the society around us to pray for
those who are with us, to seek to minister to those who are in
need, desperately in need. I need you to be that way as a
person. I need to be that way as a
person, for we are a church that is called by Jesus Christ to be
classically an evangelical church.
Let's pray together. Gracious God in heaven, we do
ask for your blessing upon us as we seek what it means to be
faithful as evangelical believers, classically
evangelical believers. Lord, our desire is to model
ourselves upon the Word of God. The word that we read so clearly
today in Acts that portrays a church community that is
faithful to the teachings of the apostles.
The Scripture that centers upon the cross of Jesus Christ.
The breaking of the body for ourselves, the spread of the
gospel throughout this world so that more and more people come
to know the necessity of being born again into a relationship
with Jesus Christ and the impact upon this world so that no one
would feel the lack of blessing that you pour out through your
Son Jesus Christ. Lord, take us more and more into
your presence. Through Christ we pray, praying
the way that he taught us to pray, saying, Our Father who art
in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come, Thy will be
done on earth as it is in heaven.
We give us this day Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not in temptation, but
deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and
the power and the glory forever. Amen.