The Three Big Ones

What are the biggest idols are plaguing the church today? Check out  Tim Keller on The Three Biggest Idols in Western Churches Today by David Qaoud 

Tim Keller sat down with Jefferson Bethke way back when to discuss the idols that are most prominent in western churches. You can watch the full video here, or you can just read below to gather Tim’s thoughts.

In Keller’s eyes, here are the three biggest idols in western churches today, followed up with secondary points that Keller includes:

1) Experience. 

Instead of looking to the Word of God to be their norm and their guide, people tend to look to their own experience, feelings, intuitions, and impressions to be their guide.7
This is part of American individualism.

Emotion and expression are very good, but when you make it more important than the Word of God, or put it higher than the Word of God, it becomes an idol.

2) Doctrine.

This might surprise some people that I say this.

But I do think some people make an idol out of doctrine.

There are some sectors of the church that say if you have your doctrine straight, and if you have your doctrine right, then you’re pleasing to God.

If you have your doctrine right, they say, then you are part of the solution, not the problem: you’re not heretical like everyone else.

There is a pride and a smugness about having good doctrine that, to me, almost puts it into the place of the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

3) Consumerism. 

Instead of looking to the church to give themselves into community, people look to the church to get the services they want.9

They have emotional, vocational, and relational needs and they go to a church because it is a good place to network.2

People see the church as a mall, rather than a family that they give themselves to.3
Consumerism becomes the idol — that is, my felt needs become an idol; they are more important than being apart of a community.

From Keller’s point of view, these idols are the ones that are most prominent. But this is not the consensus — not every church struggles with the same idol in the same way. Keller adds, “These idols don’t exist equally across the whole church. Certain sectors of the church struggle more than others, but these idols are all there, and they hurt us quite a bit.”

Idols can’t just be removed; they must be replaced. As Keller points out so well in his outstanding book, Counterfeit Gods, if we don’t replace an idol with the gospel, another idol will grow. And by God’s grace, if we’d all just recognize, remove, and replace these idols, our churches would be much better off.

Multilingual Jesus

Did you know that we serve A Multilingual Jesus ?  By this phrase, blogger Jim Wright means that Jesus speaks to both those of us who favor and lean toward an objective truth relationship with God (like me) and those who favor and lean toward  a subjective experience based relationship with the Lord (like my wife).

God speaks to some subjectively, and to others objectively, and each often forgets that Jesus is multilingual. Regardless, His subjective love is rooted in objective truth, and He never limits Himself to either/or.

When we become so focused on one, to the exclusion of the other, we are not really relating to a complete Jesus. Rather, we often are seeking self affirmation – a Jesus who simply relates to us on our own terms and within the confines of our own comfort zones....

More from my old friend Jim Wright at the link. (By old I mean I've known you a long time, Jim. I know you are young at heart!)

I Still Refuse to Choose!

Below are some words of mine from an old post from 2008.- Can We Avoid a Charismatic Civil War? I noticed someone had viewed it yesterday, and went back to look myself.  You know, I.still believe this - and think it is worth repeating.

Some choices should not be made.  Sometimes, when asked (or tempted) to choose between two alternatives, the proper thing to do is to say yes to both!

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As I have said earlier, some choices should not be made.

• Some choose good theology and doctrine, some choose personal experience; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose the Spirit, some choose truth; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose individual spirituality, some choose community; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose knowledge about God, some choose knowledge of God; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose orthodoxy, some choose orthopraxy; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose commitment to a church family, some choose openness to all believers; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose ministry models open to all believers, some choose gifted and trained leadership; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose catholicity, some choose evangelicalism; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose charismatic gifts, some choose fruit in changed character; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose loving God, some choose obeying God; I refuse to choose.
• Some choose ministry within the church, some choose ministry to the world outside; I refuse to choose.

I refuse to make choices where God did not intend me to choose. I refuse to say yes to one and no to the other, when God says yes to both. I refuse to separate things God put together. I refuse to divide things God wants held in tension. What God has put together, let not man put asunder!

A Present Place of Subjective Execution

"The gospel isn't simply a set of truths that non-Christians must believe in order to become saved,  It's a reality that Christians must daily embrace in order to experience being saved. The gospel not only saves us from the penalty of sin (justification), but it also saves us from the power of sin (sanctification) day by day.  Or, as I once heard John Piper say, 'The cross is not only a past place of objective substitution; it is a present place of subjective execution.'  Our daily sin requires God's daily grace - the grace that comes to us through the finished work of Jesus Christ."

- Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace, page 154

Life and Doctrine - No Separation

This article by Time Keller is over a week old, but I just got around to reading it and it is GOOD!  I'm referring to "There’s No Escaping Doctrine, but Handle it With Care" at The Gospel Coalition Blog:

Keller is commenting on a sermon by David Martyn Lloyd-Jones in the book Walking with God: Studies in 1 John (Crossway, 1993). The message deals with the tension between emphasizing doctrine over life experience or vice versa.

On the Danger of promoting experience over doctrine, Keller says:

"So when you say, “I don’t care about doctrine, it’s how you live that matters,” you are ironically promoting the doctrine of justification by works. You are proposing that what God really wants is a good life. The response can be similar when someone claims that it doesn’t matter which religion you belong to, because all religions are alike and no one should be held to a particular doctrine of God. Yet that assumes that God is not holy, and that he does not hold people responsible for how they live. In other words, to say, “No one should be held to a particular view of God” is to assume and promote a particular view of God. To say, “Doctrine about God doesn’t matter” is itself a statement of doctrine about God — and therefore it does matter! So Lloyd-Jones concludes: “It is no use your saying, ‘We are not interested in doctrine; we are concerned about life’; if your doctrine is wrong, your life will be wrong” (p. 23; italics added).

On the danger of promoting doctrine over experience, he says:

However, whenever Lloyd-Jones takes up the importance of doctrine, he always points out that there is a danger on the other extreme. He speaks of some Christians and says, “There is nothing they delight in more than arguing about theology” and they do this in “a party spirit” (p. 24). One of the signs of this group is that they are either dry and theoretical in their preaching, or they can be caustic and angry. They have “lost their tempers, forgetting that by so doing they were denying the very doctrine which they claimed to believe” (p. 24). In short, ministers who go to this extreme destroy the effectiveness of their preaching. What is the cause of this? Lloyd-Jones answers that they have made accurate doctrine an end in itself, instead of a means to honor God and grow in Christ-likeness. “Doctrine must never be considered in and of itself. Scripture must never be divorced from life” (p. 25).

That is some good and wise commentary.

Update:  There is a Tim Keller Wiki resource page!