“For thus says the High and Lofty One Who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, with him who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones’” (Is.57:15 NKJV).
“What is the greatest challenge facing the Evangelical Christian Church in the next ten years?” A young brother pastor friend asked me this great question, and it grabbed my attention throughout our suppertime together. Whereas we are not the first generation to face big challenges to Christian faithfulness, there are massive trends that are wreaking havoc upon the vitality of the Church and family in our day. Perhaps the most significant is the secularization of culture.
Secularization is, described by Al Mohler in The Gathering Storm, as a process that replaces the binding authority of the biblical worldview in society with another worldview belief system namely autonomous human reason.[i] This paradigm is easily understood with “3 Cs” as it is explained on The Briefing which is a “daily analysis of news and events through a Christian worldview.”[ii] In other words, the closer one travels in the United States towards a coast, city, or campus of a college or university, the more progressively liberal is the worldview writ large in the community. The stark contrast between “Red & Blue America” is a case in point example of this reality.
Confronting the challenge of a secularized culture requires a motherlode of wisdom, vision, and courage. Wisdom is needed to understand the times in which we live through the lens of a comprehensive biblical worldview. This begins with awe and reverence for the greatness of our God. Vision is needed to see beyond what is, to what ought to be by the grace of God. Needs observed are to be considered assignments given. Courage is needed to initiate decisive action for the glory of God and the good of multitudes even unto the ends of the earth. John Wayne, the famous actor of iconic films of the Old West, is reported to have said that “Courage is being scared out of your wits but saddling up anyway.” These virtues are central to faithfully engaging our stewardship responsibility of passing on truth to the next generation through family discipleship right at home despite the secularization of culture.
Back in the mid-point of the 20th century, the late A.W. Tozer was captivated by the same kind of question as I was that night. In classic Tozer style, his penetrating analysis of the church strikes to the heart of what is desperately needed today as we near the mid-point of the 21st century:
“What this country needs, what the Church needs, is the restoration of a vision of the Most High God. What we need more than we need anything else is a restoration of the vision of the Most High God. The honor of God has been lost to men. And the God of today’s Christianity is a weakling. He is a little, cheap, palsied ‘god’ that you can run and pal around with. He’s the ‘Man upstairs.’ He’s the fellow that will help you when you’re in difficulty and not bother you too much when you’re not.”
“We have a stuffed ‘god,’ now, in evangelical circles – a ‘god’ that can be appealed to by anybody at any time for any reason. The great God of the Bible is the God into whose presence you went with fear. You do not come dashing in wearing your tennis outfit and go into a huddle with God, and then rush out again.”
“Our God is a cheap, handmade God—a composite of various theological ideas and choruses and stories we heard evangelists tell. But we need the glory of God again. And the returning of the glory of God to the Church is the primary imperative; it is absolutely necessary.”
“I pray more for this than I pray for anything else. That the glory of God might be revealed again to this generation so the Presence of God will be so overwhelming, so humiliating, so humbling, so wonderful, so glorious that it will turn us wrong-side-out and all our thought-up jokes will go down the drain and all our self-confidence will disappear and we will stand or kneel or fall down in the Presence of this Holy God and cry, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.’”[iii]
Thanks be to God that the wisdom, vision, and courage that we need to face the challenges of our day are revealed in the pages of Holy Scripture. It is there that we find the tools that are needed to be fully equipped for Christian faithfulness in the face of a secularized culture. Such confidence begins with a heart that is broken in awestruck humility before the vertical reality of sovereign majesty. This is what Tozer championed in his day and the saints of old like Isaiah, the prophet, experienced long ago in another time and place.
He is the Holy One of Heaven
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple” (Is.6:1 NKJV).
Isaiah ben Amoz was an 8th century B.C. Hebrew prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah amidst their rebellion against the Holy One, God Himself. The heart of this man of God had been apprehended by the Lord during a national crisis the same year that King Uzziah died. As a result of doing something that he had no business doing, even as the king, the Lord struck Uzziah with leprosy which led to his death. It was a national crisis filled with uncertainty, nevertheless, God provided His man with exactly what his heart needed in the darkness of that day.
The LORD of hosts was not surprised, caught off guard, or unprepared for Uzziah’s death. When Isaiah saw the Lord, high and lifted up, He was sitting on a throne and not pacing the floor, wringing His hands, or scratching His head wondering what He was going to do next. Almighty God was large and in charge of the entire situation as the majesty of His royal presence filled the temple of the Most High.
Understanding the Ancient Hebrew Prophets
According to His sovereign majesty, Almighty GOD has ordained the ends and the means whereby He will carry out the eternal purpose of His will. His faithfulness to the promises of His Word unfolded in the Prophetic Program throughout the Mosaic Law and the Ancient Hebrew Prophets is sure and steadfast. As the channel of God’s blessing to reach the nations with knowledge of the true and living God, Israel was given the covenants of promises and therefore immense stewardship responsibility. Unfortunately, their idolatrous rebellion in whoring after pagan deities caused the Gentiles to blaspheme Yahweh instead of blessing the name of the Lord. Israel’s disobedience brought God’s mighty hand of judgement upon themselves in both the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms.
“Above it stood seraphim; each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one cried to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory’” (Is.6:2-3 NKJV).
The God of Angel Armies was yet reigning in majesty supreme, despite the death of Judah’s king and the consternation of His people including the prophet Isaiah. This all-glorious reality was manifest to God’s man when he beheld the angelic “burning ones” or seraphim whose six wings were entirely employed in their created purpose before the throne of God. They were active in honoring the LORD of hosts through their humility and worship of Him who is worthy of all praise.
By declaring God’s holiness to the third degree, we see this central attribute of the infinite perfections of God’s greatness and therefore His glory being lifted up in a very distinct way unlike His other attributes. The holiness of God includes His moral purity, separateness, and transcendence. All three of these were experienced by Isaiah on that day and overwhelmed his heart.
Faithful Christians must always remember and never forget that all of creation is a theater, as it were, showcasing the all-glorious majesty of the Eternal King and Sovereign Creator. The seraphim heralded this reality along with David whose heart beheld the wonder of the Creator when he cried out, “The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork” (Ps.19:1 NKJV). Bible scholars refer to this dynamic as general revelation. All mankind has knowledge of God through the testimony of the created world (Rom.1:20). Paul David Tripp speaks to this reality with a connection to family discipleship in AWE: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, & Do:
“The fact that the physical world points to God is no accident; it was His divine intention as He was forming the physical universe with His awesome power. So God has made His power, faithfulness, wisdom, goodness, love, and mercy visible to us every day through the lens of a the world that He created. Every glorious created thing points to a God of far greater glory. So, parents, it’s not unnatural to talk about God every day to your children; it’s positively unnatural not to. We live in the middle of an awesome, never-ending glory display, and it is our job—and should be our joy—to point our children to this glory again and again day after day.”[iv]
Having ministered throughout the United States and Southeast Asia, we must keep in mind that general revelation renders all mankind inexcusable before the Holy One of Heaven but is insufficient to bring them to salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. This is why evangelism and missions is not an optional accessory to the Christian life but a matter of dead serious urgency. The book of Romans reveals seven truths about people who have never heard of Jesus namely: 1. All Mankind Has Knowledge of God, 2. All Mankind Rejects Knowledge of God, 3. All Mankind is Guilty Before God, 4. All Mankind is Condemned Before God, 5. All Mankind Has a Way to Be Saved from God’s Wrath, 6. All Mankind Must Come to God Through Faith in Christ, and 7. All Mankind is the Mission Field of the Church. May God give us courage to bring the light of the gospel of His grace into the darkness of a world in urgent need for the glory of His Name.
“And the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out, and the house was filled with smoke. So I said: ‘Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts” (Is.6:4-5 NKJV).
Holy smoke indeed! This house of God’s temple was engulfed by the all-glorious presence of the Holy One rendering Isaiah a dumpster fire mess. God’s man was overwhelmed to the point that he literally cursed himself because of the grim reality of the rebel darkness of his heart in the sight of a holy God. Sin is not merely something on us that we can flick off like flea but is much rather in us and of us. We are all spiritually dead sinners by nature and practice. Our destitute condition of depravity renders us incapable of rescuing ourselves from our greatest enemy, our own hearts (Jer.17:9).
As a result of beholding the King, the LORD of hosts, Isaiah’s eyes were not only opened to the condition of his heart but also to the spiritual state of his generation. Unclean lips ought to remind us of what the Lord Jesus Christ said about “those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matt.15:18-19 NKJV). Such double exposure of his heart along with the surrounding culture, humbled Isaiah so that he was now prepared to receive the remedy of God’s grace and be deployed into the harvest field of souls as a culture changer. “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (Jam.4:16 NKJV).
“Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a live coal which he had taken with the tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth with it, and said: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; Your iniquity is taken away, and your sin purged” (Is.6:6-7 NKJV).
Having broken Isaiah’s heart in awestruck humility before the vertical reality of His sovereign majesty, the LORD of hosts, delivered grace to the deepest need of His servant. Throughout every age and dispensation of redemptive history, salvation has always been by grace through faith according to the parameters of God’s revelation at that time. A biblical theology of salvation therefore affirms that the only way that anyone has ever been saved is through the blood of Christ shed on behalf of sinners (Gen.3:15; Rom.3:25). Ancient Hebrew prophets like Isaiah were given manifold truths regarding the prophesied seed of the woman and the coming of Messiah whose substitutionary atonement would fulfill God’s plan of redemption (Is.9:6-7; 52:13-53:12).
Understanding Redemptive History
In this present age of grace, God has entrusted to the Church, the revelation of the mystery of His grace in Christ Jesus. This means that He has given to His people today the stewardship responsibility of the fullness of the cross whereby the Lord is bringing the nations unto Himself in salvation apart from Israel and through the Body of Christ. Diverse ethnicities are being reconciled unto the Lord and to one another through the transforming power of the Person and finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ (Eph.2:11-18). All this is to the praise of God’s glory indeed![v]
“Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’” (Is.6:8 NKJV).
When I was a teenager, back in the 1990s, my greatest aspiration was to be in the starting lineup of whatever team that I was playing on at the time. Whether it was baseball, basketball, or soccer, no one ever wanted to ride the bench. Every guy my age wanted a chance to make it happen on game day especially when girls were watching. No self-respecting, red-blooded, American boy or young man would have his shoes untied, jersey untucked, or attention fixed on anything other than the big game. Never would you ever want the coach to catch you waving to Mom or blowing kisses to the ladies in the stands and not paying attention to what is happening in the game.
Having been through the absolutely most stunningly spectacular religious experience ever imaginable, this is how I picture Isaiah on that day. If the LORD of hosts, the triune Holy One of Heaven, is the coach, it is like He looks at who is sitting on the bench just waiting to get in the game and there He sees none other than Isaiah. This guy is sitting on the edge of his seat with his chest puffed out, chin up, and ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. As soon as the coach issued the call, there was no question whatsoever in his mind whether or not he was available, interested, or willing to go. BAM! Isaiah’s hand snaps up, and he cries out “Here am I! Send me” (Is.6:8b NKJV).
Understanding the Challenge of a Secularized Culture
Whether it was back in the 8th century B.C. amid a national crisis in the Southern Kingdom of Judah or today nearing the midpoint of the 21st century amid a secularized culture in rebellion against God, the Lord is still calling people to Himself. God’s people have a stewardship responsibility to engage culture with the truth of who He is and what He has done. This reality begins on the grass roots level right at home through family discipleship. Once again, Tripp speaks to this very issue:
“Think about it. This is the job of parents, for example. You are called by God to inspire worshipful awe in your children. You are to exercise your authority in such a way that it gives your children eyes to see the awesome presence, power, authority, & grace of God. When our children are blown away by the glory of God, they will be predisposed to reach out for His grace & submit to His will.”[vi]
Intentionally passing on the faith to the next generation despite the challenges of a secularized culture really is the greatest challenge facing the Evangelical Christian Church in the next ten years.
Lori and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary by enjoying supper out together, going away overnight, and hitting a host of thrift stores that that we’d never been to before. While she was combing through the racks of clothes in search of great deals for our kids, I was hunting for treasure on the bookshelves. Eureka! According to God’s providence, I happened upon a missionary biography called “Venturing with God in Congo” by Darrell Champlin. At the beginning of this volume, the author shared this incredible story about his upbringing out west in the 1930s and 40s:
“Folks are astonished when I relate the amazing fact that forty thousand of my generation were called to the mission fields of the world at the average age of ten! Yes, I said, ten. My brother Russell, twenty-two months younger than I, was ten when called. I was twelve and can’t imagine how it took me so long. When you understand the circumstances of our time, it seems quite natural that we should have been called while young. In those days the heart’s desire of godly mothers and fathers was to have the God of Heaven call their sons and daughters to the mission field. That was the crown of the Christian home! Our churches prayed and labored for the same crown: the glory of having young men and women called and sent forth from their own church. No higher honor was imaginable.”
“You need to know also that there was no junior church in those days. We sat with Mom and Dad in the grown-up services under adult preaching immediately out of the nursery—and we behaved, or else. The result was a group of young boys and girls who at the age of ten had spiritual vocabularies capable of understanding and applying anything they heard from some of the greatest preachers of the day. We were like little Samuels sitting in the temple just waiting to hear the voice of the Spirit of God saying, ‘I want you for the mission field.’ Listening Sunday after Sunday to the expository preaching of God’s Word, our pastor taught us how to study the Bible for ourselves. Eventually, once the pastor announced his text and exposited his first point, we were already waiting for him at his second and then sitting with anticipation at the verses which would form his conclusion.”
“In our youth department we eagerly launched into the study of the book of Romans. Inflamed with the glory of the Gospel, the excitement was so great that we had to have an ‘activity.’ The result was our spontaneous departure from the church to the street corner where we could catch one of the city buses headed to downtown Salt Lake and hold a street meeting preaching the Gospel to lost Mormons. Is it any wonder God called forty thousand such young people as missionaries? A solid foundation on the Word of God produced an abundance of fruit.”[vii]
Regardless of our season of life, a dead serious urgency should be at the forefront of our hearts and minds as we intentionally pass on the faith to the next generation. This really is the greatest challenge facing the Evangelical Christian Church in the next ten years. May God give us the wisdom, vision, and courage to do so beginning with a passion for the sovereign majesty of His holiness.
Personal Reflection: What would you consider the greatest challenges facing the Church in the next ten years?
Family Discussion: Who are some of the people that God has used to shape your life? What books and other resources have brought you to where you are at today?
[i] R. Albert Mohler, Jr., The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church. (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2020), xiii-xiv.
[ii] See “The Briefing” at wwe.AlbertMohler.com.
[iii] A.W. Tozer (Edited by James L. Snyder), Tozer: Fellowship of the Burning Heart. (Alchua, FL: Bridge-Logos, 2006), 28-31.
[iv] Paul David Tripp, AWE: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, & Do. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 163, 165.
[v] See W. Edward Bedore, Unlocking the Scriptures: The Key to Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth (West Bend, WI, Berean Bible Institute, 2018) for more information on the dispensational framework of God’s Word.
[vi] Paul David Tripp, AWE: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, & Do. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 46.
[vii] Darrell Champlin, Venturing with God in Congo. (Rhinelander, WI: Conjurske Publication, 2017), 2-3.
