(By: Nick Kennicott)

I regularly get glossy mailers from the latest and greatest church plants in/around our community and instantly run to the computer to check out their website. The newest one has a “Sunday worship experience” and seeks to “be Jesus” to our community. In other words, it seems as though worship is about feeling good and getting excited. And I hate to break it to my new neighbors, but they will never be Jesus to anybody, nor should they want to. We are all lame, broken, fallen substitutes that fall far short of the true King of kings. I don’t want a substitute and I don’t want to offer one either. I want Jesus.

Here’s their teaser: “When you come to a Sunday experience at ____ you can expect a coffee waiting for you and friendly faces. Your kids have an exciting safe environment for them with fun in mind. They won’t be bored to death. Our worship is upbeat and passionate and will probably look more like a concert from a venue downtown.”

Lovely.

I think I’ll stick with biblical worship on the Lord’s Day and catch an actual concert at a venue downtown some other night.

I’m so grateful the Lord has given us clear instruction from the Bible regarding ecclesiology, worship, and the importance of the ordinary means of grace. I am humbled by God’s truth and have a great desire to pray all the more for the purity of Jesus’ bride.

(By: Nick Kennicott)

Whenever the church becomes increasingly man-centered, she begins the downhill slide, often without recovery, and always to her detriment. Once yielding the high ground of Calvinism, a self-absorbed church puts its full weight onto the slippery slope of Arminianism, resulting in a loss of its foundational stability. Tragically, however, the descent rarely stops there. Historically, man-centered doctrine has served only as a catalyst for an even greater fall.

Rappelling down the slippery slopes of Arminianism, one is soon to find the church sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into a murky quagmire of heretical ideas. Such a descent inevitably gives way to liberalism, the utter rejection of the absolute authority of Scripture. From liberalism – given enough time – the church always plunges yet lower into ecumenism, the deadly philosophy that embraces all religions as having some part of the truth. Continuing this downward spiral, the church plummets into universalism, the damning belief that all men eventually will be saved. Yet worse, universalism gives way to agnosticism, a degenerate view that one cannot even know whether there is a God. Finally, the church falls into the deepest abyss – the hellish flames of atheism, the belief that there is no God.

-Steven J. Lawson, Foundations of Grace: 1400 BC – AD 100