Recently, I read a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He asked how it was possible for the Church to sit back and let Hitler seize absolute power. His firm answer, “It was the teaching of cheap grace.”
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Others in our day have had similar sentiments about how the Church stands in times of the dark trials of our day. So often we feel helpless as we see our world imploding and the collateral damage that is being felt all the way down to the elementary classroom.
This became evident as I watched news coverage showing the arrogance of students protesting the war in the Middle East. One student said, “We will not leave the campus until our demands are met.” Students are protesting on behalf of the Palestinian people in Gaza, demanding the school join them in their cause, and divest all funds in any company that does business with Israel. America lost its soul when it began to unravel the Judeo-Christian values that built America. They lost their identity as one nation under God, and gave away the values of God and country.
Today, the freedom to speak freely has been lost. The worse legislation ever passed was the Hate Speech Legislation, because that started our loss of being free to speak. As Christians, we believe in God’s moral laws, but teaching them in public or online, can be considered hate speech. In Canada, where the hate speech laws govern what Churches can say about moral sexual sins, pastors are in danger of going to prison for speaking against people who are gay or transgender.
This is why I titled this article ‘Afraid of the World,’ because the Church is slowly being corralled and fenced in by cultural norms.
In Ezekiel 34 and 44, the prophet placed the blame of a wayward society on the shepherds in the land. They really didn’t have a heart for God and they used their positions to serve their own needs and wants. They lowered the standards of God to the point that allowed for priests to minister to the Lord but they were not right with Him. The shepherds/priests did not surrender to God, but made a mockery of the priesthood, and as a result, Hosea 4 describes the condition of the land, “There is no faithfulness, no kindness, no knowledge of God in the land.” Every time I read Hosea 4 it reminds me of America. Hosea goes on to say, “My complaint you priests is with you.” Why? The people are being destroyed because they do not know God. The prophet went as far as to say that the priests refused to know God, which is an act of willful rebellion against the One they say they represent.
The departure of leaders who know God, will only result in people not knowing God either. I listen to many sermons on Sunday and thank God for the faithful pastors who stick to preaching the Word, but for every pastor who preaches the truth, there are two who do not.
Just 37% of Christian pastors have a Biblical worldview, with the predominant worldview among pastors (62%) being syncretism, a hybrid mixture of disparate worldview elements blended into a customized philosophy of life. ~American Worldview Inventory 2022
So, these statistics state that 2/3 of Churches in America are not hearing the truth, but they are hearing a combination of Scripture, politics, social justice, and pastoral bias. The Scriptures do not rule the hearts of 2/3 of our pastors! I have always wondered why the Christian community could never come together to eradicate an evil practice like abortion. Meanwhile the gay community (a statistical range of 1.2 to 6.8 percent of the adult population identifying as LGBTQ) can organize and garner the support of corporations, pass government legislation, and even influence the curriculum in education. The willful blindness of the Church is astounding to me. (63% of Americans claim to be religious … ten times larger than the gay community.)
Are we afraid of the world? I have no other evidence that leads me to believe differently, because the Church is losing ground in influencing Americans to come to Christ and serve God, and often we don’t want to talk about it. The 63% of Americans who say they are religious was 75% just a decade ago.
Are we afraid to stand for Christ? One word that I am surprised that is not used much these days in the modern Church, is the word surrender. It may be used when one is coming to Christ, but rarely used as a definition of discipleship. Surrender isn’t just a concept … it is an act of the will. We determine that we will surrender all to obey God and live for Him. Do we want that kind of Christianity? We may weigh in the balance on answering that question, but it is what the Bible teaches. Christianity without surrender becomes the broad gate Jesus talked about that leads to destruction.
It is a hard saying, but we cannot escape the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”
Challenging the Culture with Truth … Larry Kutzler
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