The following is an editorial from our Church's parish magazine.
The richness of our Christian heritage is second to none. We have the history of Christianity in Scotland, the wealth of Reformed theology, the triumph of Presbyterianism over its enemies in spiritual and physical battles of centuries long past. For more than fifteen hundred years Christianity has been at the heart of European civilisation. In these circumstances, it’s so easy to think that the church is just something that will always be around, something that’s just so much part of the British way of life, that it’s impossible to imagine the world without it. We take the presence of churches in every parish in the land for granted. And in saying this I don’t judge anyone else – I’m confessing my own thoughts. Our land is soaked in Christian history and influence. "How could it ever be otherwise?" I say to myself.
The trouble is that it’s not the case that the church will just always be around. It’s a very dangerous assumption to just think the Church will always be there. The truth is that living Christianity in our parish, in our city, or even in our country, is not a fortress with all the impenetrable defences of faith and truth to defend it for all time. No, the truth is that real Christianity hangs by a thread, and it must be carefully passed down from generation to generation, otherwise the thread can break and the church can die out. Think about it. The church only exists now because at some point in our lives we started going to it. Just as surely, it can only survive us if by the time we leave this life we have passed on the torch to those who are now young people, or children or even those not yet born, so they can come to know God through our Jesus Christ for themselves. Otherwise, at some point in the future, there will simply be no Christian presence in our land anymore.
Let’s be clear what I’m saying here and what I’m not saying. Of course in one sense the Church will always exist. In one sense it is a fortress of truth and faith that can never been destroyed. We have God’s Word for that. Jesus said in Matthew 16:18, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
But that promise doesn’t necessarily mean the church will always exist in our parish, in Glasgow or even in Scotland. And it certainly doesn’t mean that the church as we know it or anything remotely like it will continue to exist.
It’s nothing new. Look at the churches mentioned in the New Testament – the churches Christ himself addresses in Revelation chapters 2 and 3 for example. None of them survives today. Christ warned them to change their ways or else he said he would “come and remove your lampstand from its place” (Rev. 2:5). In other words, Christ threatened that he could take away the life of a church that departs from his way. We need only look around our church on a Sunday to see that there are far fewer people there than there were even a decade ago. In another decade, how many faces will there be? Can the decline go on forever?
It is really only by God’s grace that the church has survived, its living faith being passed on in an unbroken thread from the apostles down to the those new Christians who only came to faith somewhere in the world in the last few seconds. It’s only because those we look up to in our Christian heritage – the early church fathers, the Reformers, the Puritans, the Covenanters, the Victorian missionaries and many other faithful saints – believed the gospel and loved God so much that they were willing to do whatever it takes to confess the gospel, live the gospel and spread the gospel in their time, that there are any Christians in Scotland and many other countries around the world today.
If we are going to really be Protestants, and claim people like Knox, Rutherford, Boston, McCheyne or Livingstone as our Christian forefathers, we need to be confessing the gospel, living the gospel and spreading the gospel in our day and age. We need to be faithful to the truth, zealous for God’s glory and filled with compassion for those who are living and dying without Christ.
Can we make anyone become a Christian? No, we certainly cannot. God is in sovereign control of who is saved and who isn’t saved. Acts 13:48 says of the New Testament Church that only “as many as were ordained [by God] to eternal life believed.”
The Bible teaches us that by nature the whole human race is so bad that no one can be persuaded to become a Christian purely by human means, no matter how beautiful the preaching, no matter how slick the campaign, no matter how loving the fellowship: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God,” Paul wrote in Romans 3:10-11. The prophet Jeremiah said that man’s heart by nature is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” (Jeremiah 17:9)
It takes a divine act to give new birth to a dead sinner before a person can even have faith in Christ. This was why Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again.” (John 3:7). And why Paul said that saving faith was a gift from God, not something generated naturally within the heart of men and women (see Ephesians 2:8-9).
But at the same time, God commands us to preach the gospel to everyone, precisely because he can bring even spiritually dead, God-hating sinners to salvation by the power of his Word. He commands everyone who hears the gospel to come to him, to accept his offer of salvation in Jesus Christ, promising that everyone who believes in Christ shall be saved. The Lord gave the Word, but it is our duty to take that word out to the world around us, to let them hear it, for “faith comes from hearing...the word of Christ.” (Romans 10:17).
Will we do it? Will generations to come look back at us and say: “What great Christians those people at the turn of the millennium were! Look what God did for Scotland through them!”
Or by then will people in Scotland not even know what a Christian was?
