Tag: Culture

The Battle for Truth

by Mike Avery, posted in All Articles, Culture, Theology

–October of 2000

The Battle for Truth

The Clinton Presidency has forced to the forefront of this election year the two very important issues of moral absolutes and religious faith.  I suppose this ought to be cause for celebration, but I, for one, am deeply troubled with how I see these issues being addressed.  Both candidates have spent a considerable amount of energy trying to convince the American public that they are decent, honest, God-fearing men who have the integrity and character it takes to be president.  But a closer look at what is being said and how it is being communicated deeply troubles me.

The vice president has told the American public that he is a committed husband and father, who is solidly anchored in the traditional moral values that are important to our nation.  To reinforce his own testimony, he has secured testimonials from a high-profile lesbian, a movie star, and Ted Kennedy.  Furthermore, he has told us that as president he would defend the moral values of the American family while in the same breath telling us that he would fight for a woman’s right to an abortion and oppose the overturn of Roe vs. Wade.  He says and does all of this with no apparent thought of contradiction.

The nomination of an Orthodox Jew has opened up the other issue of religious faith.  This nomination has allowed the media to openly talk about the “barrier of race and religion” finally being torn down.  They have also been able to discuss the validity and equality of all other religions with that of Christianity.  A prominent media figure asked a guest this question, “How could an Orthodox Jew be elected when the vast majority of Americans say they are Christian and in saying that they believe that Jesus is the only way to Heaven?”  His guest replied, “I am a Christian.  I believe that Jesus is the Son of God.  But, I do not believe He is only way to Heaven.  I believe He is simply a way to Heaven.”  He went on to proclaim that the Islamic faith and the Buddhist faith were all legitimate ways to get to Heaven and Christ was just one of many.  The program host thought his response was just outstanding and applauded the fact that America is finally growing up.

What the vice president, the media, and the educational elite see as intellectual enlightenment, I see as an encroaching darkness.  Why?  Because both perspectives undermine the absolute truth found in Scripture.

Our civilization, both morally and judicially, was built upon the absolutes embodied in the Judeo-Christian faith as revealed in Holy Scripture.  Decency, civility, morally and justice all rest upon these moral absolutes.  Our own constitution would be in shreds if these moral absolutes were pulled from underneath it.  The rejection of these values bring chaos, confusion, contradiction and emptiness.  When a society proclaims that there is no transcendent source of moral truth, it is left to construct its own belief system out of a moral vacuum.

The perfect example of this took place some years ago when Cal Thomas had just finished giving a lecture at the University of Michigan.  A student who heard the lecture strongly objected to his thesis that our nation needs to promote values rooted in fixed absolutes.  Thomas responded, “If you reject my value system, what do you recommend to replace it?”  The young lady couldn’t answer.  Thomas pressed further by asking, “What is your major?”   “I am a senior, and my major is ethics.”  “On what do you base your own ethics?” Thomas posed. “I don’t know.  I’m still trying to work that out.”

Here is a typical example of what our American educational system is producing.  This young lady has been given no moral foundation for right or wrong.  She has been stripped of a belief in the Bible and even taught an antagonism towards values founded on Scripture.  Her moral compass has been completely destroyed.  Consequently, she has no way of finding what real truth is.

It is out of this moral wasteland that the modern mind has developed post-modernism.  This is a view of life that rejects not only Christian truth, but any claim to absolute truth.  This means that all viewpoints, lifestyles and religious faiths are equally valid and acceptable. A post-modernist has no problem accepting two completely opposite points of view. Growing out of post-modernism is multi-culturalism.  Multi-culturalism opens the door to say that the faith of a Muslim is as valid as that of a Christian because both are anchored in their own perception of truth.  Since neither can know absolute truth, the one is as adequate as the other for salvation.

Most of my readers see the fallacy of all of this and may be wondering what the point is.  The upshot of it all is this.  There is an orchestrated endeavor to destroy belief in the absolute truths of God’s Word and in Jesus as the only way to be saved.  The educational system that has produced both of our presidential candidates has been at the very heart of systematically destroying the absolutes that we have embraced as a nation.

The success of this endeavor will not be to stamp out Christianity, but to gain enough room to claim a society so pluralistic that the message of toleration and inclusiveness will be preached by politicians, made into laws by Congress, upheld by the Supreme Court, and enforced by police until most of the vestiges of Christian values are gone and Christianity is just one of many views.  This, my friend, will lay the foundation for a new world order.

We are, indeed, in a battle for truth.  Your voice and your vote can still make a difference.  If I were you, I would use them both.

Guardians and Gardeners

by Mike Avery, posted in All Articles, Church, Culture

–October of 1999

Guardians and Gardeners

To prepare my mind for a sermon I was to preach on Freshman Sunday, I decided to walk with the Apostle Paul on his last earthly journey.  I joined Paul as he gave his farewell to the Ephesian elders and started for Jerusalem.  I left him in chains at Rome.  As I traveled with him, I listened very closely to what would be his final words.  Emotion filled his exhortations to faithfulness as well as his warnings against false teachers and moral perversity.  Yet one theme kept surfacing.  Paul again and again reminded young Timothy of his responsibility to “guard” that which had been committed to him.  Paul left Timothy and me with a clear understanding that we have been entrusted with a guardianship—guardianship which demands that we must be willing to lay down our life for the truths of the gospel and spiritual reality.  However, as I read closer, I saw that Paul meant more than just standing like a sentry over scriptural revelation and doctrinal truth.  He meant more than just being a watchdog agency over orthodoxy.  To Paul our “guardianship” would also include a “gardenership.”

Dr. Theodore Kalsbeek, a prominent Cincinnati minister, helped me to see this in a story he recently told of a Russian czar who came upon a sentry standing at attention in a secluded portion of his palace garden.  Seeing no particular reason for having a sentry stationed at that particular place in the garden, he asked the sentry what he was guarding.  The young man replied, “I don’t know, sir.  I was ordered to my post by the Captain of the Guard.”  When the czar asked the Captain of the Guard, he could give no other reason than the simple fact that the regulations called for it.  The czar went to the archives and searched for the origin of the command.  He discovered that many years earlier Catherine the Great had planted a rose bush at that place in the garden and ordered a sentry to be posted beside it to protect it from being trampled.  The rose bush has been dead for over 100 years but the regulation to guard it remained.

This colorful story out of Russian history makes a forceful point for the church today.  Like Catherine’s rose bush, the church could die despite the presence of a sentry.  It is certainly true that the church needs guardians.  It is equally true that the church must have gardeners.  Watching is not enough.  There must be workers that nurture and build the church.  It is also equally true that the church needs guardians who know clearly what they are watching over.

Finding this balance has been difficult for the church.  Historically, every time the church has made the preservation of orthodoxy its focus, it has become scrutinizing, loveless, divisive, intolerant and legalistic.  In its effort to defend and purify itself it has usually only succeeded in destroying itself.

On the other hand, when the church has neglected its role as guardian for the sake of outreach, it has often become accommodating, compromising, worldly, and shallow—characteristics which have been the breeding ground for all forms of heresy.

John R.W. Stott, commenting on this problem, said, “It is easy to be faithful if you don’t care about being contemporary.  It is also easy to be contemporary if you don’t care about being faithful.”  The church must find the balance.  It must be both a guardian and a gardener.

Clear Beliefs

by Mike Avery, posted in All Articles, Christian Living, Culture, Education, Theology

–September of 1998

Clear Beliefs

One political analyst characterized former President George Bush as “a good man who just couldn’t decide what he believed.” This inability to articulate strongly a set of beliefs enabled the media to paint him as a “wimp” and ultimately took him down to political defeat. It is too bad that the church didn’t learn a valuable lesson from this former president. No one wants to listen to the windy babble of a man who isn’t sure what he believes, while on the other hand people are strongly attracted to the man who can state his opinions and beliefs in clear logical terms. Unfortunately the church is often plagued by leaders who pride themselves on their ability “to almost say something.” Too many leaders seek to cultivate an ambassadorial style of communication that never ruffles anyone’s feathers. Traditionally, the holiness preacher was a man who stood for and stood against some things. You didn’t see him “bellying up” to the bar of consensus and compromise to drink his fill. Convictions were not set aside for the sake of convenience. There were places he refused to go and things he refused to do. He was known and admired for his stand on the issues. Nowadays, however, it has become almost in vogue to consent to a host of general rules and biblical principles with our mouth, only to ignore them with our lives. This duplicity is not only accepted but defended as a way to operate and keep peace.

In fairness to the pulpit, it must also be said that this is a serious problem in the home as well. Parents seem to lack the courage and commitment to communicate forcefully, yet lovingly, to their own children a belief system that will not be compromised under any circumstance.

I’m not suggesting that holiness people need simply to adopt “tough” agendas so as to appear spiritual. That direction is as deceitful as it is deadly. I am saying, however, that if we truly have a belief system grounded in the Word of God it will affect the way we live and lead. Biblical principles form convictions in our lives, and those convictions will become the moral fiber of what we are. What we are and what we believe will ultimately guide and gauge all of our actions. If it doesn’t, then something is critically wrong with our Christian experience. I believe we will have to take stands on issues where the Bible draws a line. The Bible gives us moral laws, standards for ethical behavior, as well as numerous directing principles to guide our daily lives. We cannot give intellectual assent to them and move on with our lives. True holiness demands that we allow the Word of God to impact the totality of our living.

When a culture or civilization goes as far astray as ours, it becomes easy to overlook some things as “not very significant” under the circumstances. However, those insignificant issues can be, and at times are, a first line of defense and, once lost, give way to an onslaught of all other sorts of evil. Attorney David Gibbs observed that… “any church body or denomination always makes changes in lifestyle issues prior to making changes in its theological tenets.” In other words, if we change the way we live, we will necessarily change what we believe. This is a treacherous path to trod. Instead of allowing the ancient faith to stand in judgment on us, we turn and judge the ancient faith. I believe we need to take a firm stand on the desecration of the Lord’s Day, on sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and abortion, on social sins like using drugs, drinking alcohol, smoking and gambling. We need to warn against immodesty and worldly attire. We need to sound the alarm against the immoral values that are being piped into our homes through the arts and entertainment world. We need to speak up and courageously proclaim that Christians don’t lie, cheat, steal and defraud their neighbor. This is not a time to soft-soap our words. It is not a quiet day in Zion we need, but rather it is an earthquake followed by a thunderstorm from men who will boldly and courageously proclaim “thus saith the Lord.”

I mean to imply that everybody is capitulating. Some time ago Presbyterian leader Dr. D. James Kennedy, thundered to his large congregation, “Some of you are going to leave here and violate the Lord’s Day by eating out in a restaurant.” Jim Cymbala of Brooklyn Tabernacle fame, advises live-in couples to separate and stay that way until they get married if they really want to follow the Lord and be genuine Christians. If these men will be courageous, shouldn’t we as holiness people be clearly voicing and insisting upon a high standard of moral and biblical behavior for our people?

My heart was refreshed when I heard the story of a young man who is enrolling in our college this fall. He was the manager of a large merchandising store in the Southeast. His position commanded a large five digit salary. However, after his conversion he refused to work on Sunday and accepted the consequences of being fired from the position. I also recently learned of an elderly lady in a distant state who lived most of her declining years in near poverty conditions. After her death they found a stack of checks from the state which were to help subsidize her income and make her living more comfortable. However, those checks had not been cashed because that money came from the state lottery, and she felt that the state lottery was wrong. Here is a woman who would rather live in poverty than spend one dime of money that came from the lottery.

How can we, in good conscience, call men and women to revival when we refuse to insist upon reform in both the pulpit and the pew? I believe the biblical portrait for revival always includes and demands both repentance and reform prior to any outpouring of God’s Spirit.

What a man believes is important. You will ultimately live out what you truly believe. As men and women of God within the holiness tradition, we need to start living out what we say we believe.

From the River to the Rhine

by Mike Avery, posted in All Articles, Christian Living, Church, Culture, Ministry

–October of 1996

From the River to the Rhine

I grew up in the country. My boyhood days were making memories on a lazy little farm in the Deep South. I was awakened in the morning by the sound or a crowing rooster or a bawling calf. I spent hours walking barefoot behind my father’s plow as he turned up the soft cool earth, readying it for the spring garden. I have played the day away in the gurgling, pristine waters of a forest stream, while birds darted about and squirrels chattered angrily at the sight of an intruder. The grand finale to such a storybook day was when family gathered around the front porch for the evening, each taking his place on a rocking chair on the porch swing.  The cool night breeze would bear the music of a distant whippoorwill, the crickets chirped wildly, while the flickering light of fireflies provided us with our own dazzling fireworks display.  Conversation would gradually begin to be interrupted by yawns, and Mother would give the order that sent us scampering away to bed.

Few outsiders ever invaded our private world.  Anyone driving by on the main thoroughfare in front of our place was most often someone we knew.  Any car turning up our lane caused an immediate rush to the front door or window by inquisitive kids to see who our rare visitors might be.  I grew up in a quiet tranquil world.

I now live in the heart of a bustling metropolis.  The sounds of traffic and commerce fill the air.  People dash about with jobs to perform and deadlines to meet.  Recently while driving off our hilltop campus into the heart of downtown, my heart began to long for the tranquil quietness of my boyhood days, I cried inwardly, “Lord, look at all these people!”  My Heavenly Father quickly responded, “No, you are the one that needs to look.  I see them.”  With the aid of divine illumination, I suddenly began to see more clearly.  I saw the multiplied thousands of people in the inner-city with no one to care for their spiritual needs.  Here are people of every race and class, scurrying about like sheep with no shepherd—abandoned, it seemed, by those who could offer hope and help.

Mission strategists tell us that the inner cities of America have now become one of the largest mission fields of the world.  Yet strangely, the Church—and particularly those within the holiness tradition—has largely abandoned the inner-city.  It has surrendered the high ground of spiritual warfare to poverty, drugs, prostitution and vice of all sorts.  Even the horn and cymbals of the Salvationist street preacher have been traded for a soup ladle and a used clothing store.  Oh, the large mainline churches still stand tall and proud on prominent downtown streets; but they have no ministry to the hopeless or message of holiness for desperate sinners.

The Wesleyan message of saving grace and heart purity saved England in her darkest hour from revolution and turned around one of society’s and civilization’s most festering sores.  Yet the holiness church here in America has not chosen this road of revival and reform for the inner-city, but it has chosen rather to flee the cities and entrench itself in comfortable suburbia.  It now lines the outer beltways of our major metropolises and enjoys a selective evangelism that is more palatable and profitable.  This ecclesiastical escapism has helped to breed the user-friendly church, with plenty of self-help classes but very little agony and anxiety for the lost.

Jesus, however, authenticated his ministry and membership by preaching the gospel to the poor.  He rebuked the righteous by reminding them that he did not come to call them to repentance, but the sinner.  He articulated his mission statement well when he said, “I have come to seek and to save that which is lost.”  This Bible contains over four hundred passages relating to the poor, sixty-four of which command us as believers to help the vulnerable.  Yet holiness people rationalize their own inactivity with a “pessimistic theology” that believes we can’t fix society’s ills.

I’m well aware that the words I write will stir up strong feelings and immediate debate.  The first rebuttal will be that “white flight” and population shifts have forced the church to relocate in the proximity of those who want to identify with the church ministry emphasis.  Another argument is that because of socio-economic reasons, as well as other cultural factors, the blending of the two groups of people is just not possible or even practical.

I fully grasp the significance of each argument and will not take the time in this article to rebut them.  However, what frustrates me is that these groups will parade missionaries from every land and isle to their churches, hear their presentations, cry over the distant lost, and empty their pockets to make sure that sinners ten thousand miles away get the gospel message.  Yet they have no burden and make no plans and feel no responsibility to send a missionary or establish a ministry to and for the most desperately lost people in the world—the people in the inner-city.

This duplicity has even gripped until the Bible college movement until they, too, boast of rural campuses in comfortable suburbia, with plenty of hiking trails, swimming pools, and white-water rafting.  All, of course, within a considerable distance of any poor miserable sinner!  No wonder many graduates ask the potential church congregation about parsonage amenities, salary packages and retirement programs before they ever explore the possibility of reaching the lost.

Did I say that all have abandoned the inner-city?  The Catholics and the cults are still there.  There are also many little store-front ministries, mostly sponsored by the Pentecostals or the Calvinists.  These little hole-in-the-wall churches offer hope and light to those lost in darkness, and to some extent hold back the powers of evil in the inner-city.  Several of those missions here in Cincinnati have been fully operated and staffed by GBS students.  It was my own years spent working in an inner-city mission that created a passion and a drive for evangelizing the lost that has marked my ministry for the last twenty years.

One such mission stands at the north end of Main Street, in a section called “Over the Rhine.”  GBS Alumni will know it as “Main Street Mission.”  Our students have preached from its pulpit, held Good News Clubs for the neighborhood children, preached on its street corners, and passed out gospel tracts all the way down the southern end of Main Street, where it deadends into the riverfront.

Our present pastor, Tom McKnight, works so faithfully with his people for the conversion of souls in his inner-city parish.  Tom is often heard from the pulpit saying, as he challenges his people, “we must reach them from the river to the Rhine.”  Of course, Tom is referring to the southern end of Main Street on the riverfront to the northern end of Main Street in the area of Over the Rhine.  The words and burden of this man have challenged my heart again and again.  Tom is right.  We must reach them.  We must take our cities back for the glory of God and the good of our civilization.

In the first part of this century when the Bible college movement, God called out the Cowmans and sent them to the Orient.  He called out the Smelzenbachs and sent them to Africa, as well as various others around the globe.  But these two couples from the holiness movement made an impact on the world that will never be forgotten.  I’m praying that in the closing part of this century God will once again find a couple like the Cowmans and call them—call them to the inner cities of our own country!  I want God’s Bible School and College to be on the front line, leading the way and giving the support that is necessary to see our inner cities reached.  Tom is right.  From the river to the Rhine, we must reach them!

The Values War

by Mike Avery, posted in All Articles, Culture, Education

—September of 1995

The Values War

Cal Thomas had just finished giving a lecture at the University of Michigan when a student strongly objected to his thesis that our nation needs to promote values rooted in fixed absolutes.  Thomas responded, “If you reject my value system, what do you recommend to replace it?”  The young lady couldn’t answer.  Thomas pressed further by asking, “What is your major?”  “I am a senior, and my major is ethics.”  “On what do you base your own ethics?” Thomas posed.  “I don’t know, and I’m still trying to work that out.”

Here is a typical American student who has spent sixteen years in public education at the cost of $100,000 only to be left unable to think.  She had been given no moral foundation for right or wrong.  She had been stripped of a belief in the Bible and even taught an antagonism toward values founded on Scripture.  Her moral compass had been completely destroyed.  Consequently, she had no way of finding true north in a moral sense.

This young person, like thousands of others, was left to operate in an ethical and moral wasteland as a result of her training in America’s educational institutions.  The educational elite of these schools have deliberately eroded traditional education rooted in 2,000 years of Western civilization and undergirded by Judeo-Christian ethics.  They have spent the last forty years on a determined campaign to secularize our society through its young people.  They have established and politicized curricula centered in multiculturalism and held up by subjective standards void of moral absolutes.  A common core of knowledge has been replaced by a smorgasbord of relativism.  These graduates are then thrust into America’s marketplace and expected to do what is right.  However, the daily news echoes shocks and horror, bombings, fraud, incest, murder, and “wickedness in high places.”

Should we really be shocked by an Oklahoma bombing?  Should we shake our head in disbelief when mothers drown their children, and when fraud and deceit are daily occurrences in public life?  When incest, adultery and divorce come home to haunt us?  What else should we expect when we strip the moral values out of our educational system?  C.S. Lewis expressed it this way, “We laugh at honor and then are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”  Has the “dumbing down” of America affected even us to the point that we honestly believe we can place our youth under the influence of today’s public educators and have them still committed to the values and traditions that we hold dear?

The most serious war being fought today is the war of values.  The church and our nation cannot afford to lose.  Our survival as a country as well as Western civilization hangs on the outcome.  The end result will determine whether it is a revival of religion we seek or whether we must start over and evangelize a heathen country.  I am praying for and promoting revival.  I believe God is beckoning to us through His Word for such a revival.  I believe God is beckoning to us through His Word for such a revival.  However, ears that are morally deaf cannot hear the message of revival but must be evangelized by the Gospel.

The Bible college is now on the front line of this struggle.  The role that we play will have an important part in the outcome.  Unfortunately, many have capitulated and are serving up the same secularistic menu that has left thousands of others void of moral nourishment.  We must embrace with renewed conviction our belief that education based on biblical truth is the only true education, and that this education must assist us in acquiring virtuous habits and ridding ourselves of nonvirtuous ones.  We must take from the center stage the question, “How shall I make a living?” and place there the question, “How shall I live?”  Our success in graduating a core of students who embrace the moral truths of God’s Word and whose lives possess a discipline and self-restraint will determine the future of our precious church and country.  The outcome of today’s values war will determine whether we pray for God to send us revival or pray for God to send us missionaries.