PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE:  Christian Rip Van Winkles? Ushers get ready with crash helmets and signal flares?

By:  Ron Woodrum

If you visit the town of Irvington, New York, not far from Tarrytown, the location of Sunnyside, the home of Washington, Irving, you will come across a bronze statue of Rip Van Winkle.  Rip (Rest In Peace?) Van Winkle is a fictional character from the short story written in 1819 by Washington Irving.  It is a story of a Dutch American villager in colonial America, who in 1769 tries to escape the nagging of his wife by going on day trips to the Catskill mountains, to hunt, to fish, to just dally.  But on one such excursion He and his dog encounter some ornately dressed men, in antiquated Dutch clothing, playing nine-pins, (bowling) and drinking rum from a keg.  To make a short story even shorter-he joins them, both in nine pins, and rum-drinking…and soon falls asleep.  When he awakens-he cannot find his dog…his beard is a foot long, down onto his chest; his musket is rotting and rusty; his clothes are ragged and moldy.  He hurries back to his village to find it completely changed!  He recognizes no one.  He arrives just after an election and is shocked to find that the American Revolution has taken place, the colonists are no longer subjects of King George III.  He enters the tavern to see a picture of George Washington, the new American President.  He discovers that he has been asleep for twenty years!  His wife is dead.  His home in disarray.  He meets his own son Rip Van Winkle jr., and his daughter who is grown and married.  The story revolves around his shock and transition to the changes while he was asleep!  A true American Legend.  But in some ways history has repeated itself.  As a Pastor since 1971, sometimes I feel like I have been asleep while the world transformed into a post-Christian world, strangely, suddenly, and subtly into a world we no longer recognize, nor are quite sure how to communicate and reach any longer.  In a sense, we have been so busy in our own little Christian environments, that it is as if we have fallen into a trance, while the world changed right before our eyes, and as the Holy Spirit awakens us we realize that we have a whole new challenge before us, that we have to find new answers to, because old methods and strategies are not, and will not ever work again!

In his thought provoking book, The Great Evangelical Recession, John S. Dickerson unpacks a much-needed wake-up call for the American Church.  Not only does he validate the coming reality of decreased giving and increased cultural hostility to the church, but he gives and accurate assessment of the actual number of evangelicals in the United States today. (This shocked me!).  Based on four different studies, each with unique and verifiable research approaches, Dickerson reports that the number of evangelical Christians is actually between 7 and 9 percent of the US population.  I thought the numbers were closer to 40 per cent.  Meanwhile a recent Barna study finds “the percentage of Americans who qualify as ‘post-Christian’ rose by 7 percentage points, from 37 percent in 2013 to 44 percent in 2015.  Across the United States, cities, in every state, are becoming more post-Christian in their world views”.    Here is a summary of what is happening-“An increasing number of people are religiously unaffiliated, there is a steady drop in Church attendance, Supreme Court decisions, on things like same-sex marriage, and other issues are going the opposite direction to the evangelical position, we have lost our voice, there is a growing tension over religious freedoms that all point to a larger secularizing trend sweeping across the nation”.

It has even affected our own denomination.  Southern Baptists, the largest evangelical denomination in the world, recently unveiled troubling news in our annual reports.  Though we have added more Churches, we have lost over 200,000 members in recent years, the largest decline since 1881.  Membership dropped 1.5%; weekly worship declined 2.75%; Baptisms fell eight of the last ten years; Even David Platt, the president of the International Mission Board announced the cutting of 600 missionaries to balance the budget, to make up for a $21 million-dollar deficit in 2015.  Thom S. Rainer, President of Life Way, the Southern Baptist’s publishing arm, responded “It breaks my heart that the trend of our denomination is mostly one of decline.  Programs and meetings are not going to revive our people-only prayer and repentance will lead our people to revival!”  I agree whole heartedly.  We need to re-evaluate our approach to ministry to our post-Christian world. But…programs and strategies alone will not suffice.  We perhaps need some new paths energized by some old power!  I don’t always agree with some of the new evangelical theology that is being scattered today, but some of it speaks to our need.  Os Guiness has written:  “Let there be no wavering in our answer.  Such is the truth and power of the Gospel that the Church can be revived, reformed, and restored to be a renewing power in the world again.  There is no question that the good new of Jesus Christ has effected powerful and personal and cultural change in the past.  There is no question too that it is still doing so in many parts of the world today.  By God’s grace it will do so again even here in the heart of the advanced modern world where the Christian Church is presently in sorry disarray”.  Someone has said, “The real problem is not the pervasiveness of the darkness, but the failure of the light.  Light always dispels darkness!” The glorious resurrection light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ can be radiate enough to cut through the darkness of even our post-Christian darkness!

Programs and pretense will never cut through this ever-increasing darkness.  C.H. Spurgeon still speaks relevantly on this issue-“Some have tried to imitate unction by unnatural tones and whines; by running up the whites of their eyes and lifting their hands in an almost ridiculous manner…Bah!  The whole thing smells of the green-room and the stage.  The getting up of fervor in hearers by simulation of it in the preaching is loathsome deceit to be scorned by honest men…Unction is a thing which you cannot manufacture, and its counterfeits are worse than the worthless; yet it is in itself priceless and beyond measure needful if you would edify believers and bring sinners to Jesus.  To the secret pleader with God this secret is committed; upon him rest the dew of the Lord, about him is the perfume which makes the heart glad.   We shall never see much change for the better in our Church until the prayer meeting occupies a higher place in the esteem of Christians”.  There lies the answer to our effective ministry.  Martyn Lloyd Jones talks about how revival cannot be organized.  But it comes in answer to repentance and prayer of God’s people.  The he says, “Believe me friends, when the next revival comes, it will come as a surprise to everybody, especially to those who have been trying to organize it.  No revival the Church has ever known has ever been an official movement”.  A.W. Tozer adds, “How much will revival cost?  Absolutely everything and absolutely nothing-that is how much it will cost.  It will cost not one dime, and it will cost everything we have!”  Charles Bridges said, “Prayer is one half of our ministry. and it gives the other half all its power and success”.  Someone has said, “Never attempt more ministry than you can undergird with constant and consistent, and fervent prayer”.  Never forget that the forward progress to victory only occurs as our own hands of ministry are held up in weary days by prayer support warriors!  It is time to wake up, see a new scary post-Christian world.  Fall to our knees seeking God’s face.  Receive His unction.  Go forth in new paths, supported by old time power, and dispel the darkness with His glorious light!  Revive us still!  Amen!  When that happens-we will all be overwhelmed by His glorious presence in revival.  Annie Dilliard points out the foolishness of Christians going through the motions of spirituality and vitality.  She writes, “On the whole I do not find Christians…sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The Churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies’ hats and velvet hats to church; we should be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should fasten us to our pews!”  THAT KIND OF POWER—DISPLAYED FROM THE REAL LORD—WILL WAKE UP A SLEEPING CHURCH OF RIP VAN WINKLES—AN MAKE VAST IN-ROADS INTO A POST-CHRISTIAN WORLD.  I GUARANTEE IT!

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Alexander my Shepherd too?”

By:  Ron Woodrum

     One of the most interesting prophecy passages in all of the Bible is found in Isaiah, written 150 years before Cyrus was born, relates to Cyrus the Great, King of Persia.  In Isaiah 45:1 God says, “I summon you by name and bestow on you a title of honor, though you do not acknowledge me!”  Also showing His sovereignty over all nations, God says of Cyrus, “He is my shepherd and will accomplish all I please”.  Not only is that true of Cyrus, King of Persia, but it was also true of Alexander the Great.  According to Josephus, in 332 BC Alexander the Great defeated the cities of Tyre and Gaza in his march toward Egypt.  During this campaign he turned toward Jerusalem.  He demanded supplies and men from the Jews, who were under rule of the Persian King Darius.  The Jews refused, saying they were pledged to honor Darius.  Alexander began a move to besiege the City of Jerusalem.  The High Priest Jadda asked the people to pray for mercy.  God told the Priest how to approach Alexander.  He and his order of priests went out to meet Alexander.  Alexander did the unexpected.  He went to meet the Priests.  According to Josephus, Alexander told the Priests that “he had seen these priests, in these very garments, in a dream when I was at Dios in Macedonia.  They told me to go forward without delay and I would be successful in my domination over the Persians.  Since I have never seen these kinds of Priests in these garments I believe their divine conduct”. Alexander accompanied the priests to the Temple, made a sacrifice to God of the Hebrews, and then was shown in the Book of Daniel, written several centuries earlier, that he would conquer the Persians.  Alexander was impressed with the prophecy and treated the Jews with favor as he marched on toward Egypt.

Alexander was blessed by God permitting him to conquer the known world.  It was through this conquest that God used the Hellenistic culture to prepare the world for the coming of the Greatest King of All-His Son Jesus Christ.  Alexander the Great conquered the known world, making it a unity of sorts.  He took Hellenistic Greek civilization, culture, education, philosophy, and a universal language to the entire world.  The Greek philosophy had prepared the world for highest thoughts about God. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Alexander’s own personal teacher, rejected ancient philosophy and began to introduce God, the Unmoved Mover, the Cause of all that exists, and the Creator of a Heavenly Perfect World to parallel the incomplete ever-changing physical world.  The Greek language became the most beautiful, expressive, and precise language through which to preach the Good News of the Gospel.  Alexander conquered the world by the time he was 33.  He extended his empire East far into India.  Finally, his soldiers threatened mutiny if he was to press on Eastward.  On his return back to Macedonia, he intended to build an Eastern capital at Babylon.  While in Nebuchadnezzar II palace he became ill.  He had been warned by the Chaldeans not to enter the city.  Bel, the Babylonian deity had prophesied that if he did it would be fatal.  Another eerie omen happened before Alexander came to Babylon.  He had asked Calanus, a Hindu wise man to accompany him back to Macedonia.  Calanus was 73, and in poor health.  He told Alexander he would rather die than to live disabled.  He was going to commit suicide, and then told Alexander, with his last words-“We shall meet again in Babylon”.  It was only after Alexander became deathly ill in Babylon that Calanus’ words were understood.  Alexander would never recover from this illness.  Historians are not sure whether he contracted malaria; died from alcohol poisoning; or was poisoned with arsenic by one of his generals.  But whatever the cause, it was June 10-11 323 B.C., nearly 2,500 years ago that Alexander the Great died.  His body was embalmed by Egyptians embalmers who arrived on June 16th from Egypt.  His body was interred eventually in Memphis Egypt.  Later he was taken to Alexandria Egypt and put in a tomb there.  Caesar Augustus would later visit his tomb, and place flowers on it and a golden diadem on Alexander’s head.  Though the tomb is no longer known, the last know visit is mentioned by George Sandys in 1611.  According to one legend the tomb lies beneath an early Christian Church in Alexandria, Egypt.

Another legend that still stands today is that Alexander the Great made his generals promise to him to fulfill three wishes at his funeral.  Here are the three wishes:

“My first wish is to have my physician bring my coffin home alone.  After gasping for air, he continued…my second wish is to scatter the gold, silver, and precious stones from my treasure house along the path to my tomb…my final request is to put my hands outside my coffin.”  When asked for an explanation of these requests–he responded, “I want my people to understand three lessons, (sounds like his teacher Aristotle), seeing my physician accompany my coffin tells the people that the physician cannot cure terminal illnesses.  Physicians are powerless in the face of death.  The casting away of silver and gold is to let people know not to squander their lives for treasure they cannot take with them.  The third lesson is to show that I came into the world with empty hands, and leave the same way!”  There is no way of establishing the historicity of this legend.  But seems very wise counsel from one of the world’s most educated kings!  Another legend, which is accepted by most historians, is what Alexander responded when asked, “who he bequeathed his kingdom to?”  He is reported to have said, “Tois Kratastois”-  “To he who is the strongest!”  That is the title of today’s message.