Chapter 3: Church-O-Rama or Corporate Worship? By Monte E. Wilson

Evangelical worship is becoming an oxymoron. Our songs are either belted out in the same mindless intensity with which we sing our football team's fight song, or we are crooning romantic ditties that would be more at home in an old 1930s B movie. Irreverence has become so rampant in our worship services that one would not be shocked to hear of deacons walking up and down the aisles yelling, "Popcorn, peanuts, sacraments!" (67)

Although the apostolic and primitive church emphasized worship as an act of obedience, we see it solely as an experience. Why? Because "church is for me. Sunday worship is to be centered on my needs and desires. Never mind what the Father desires or commands. I am at the center. My needs are paramount. Meet them or I'll go to church elsewhere." The ego reigns supreme. (68)

The average modern evangelical believes that revivals come via techniques; our Puritan and Pilgrim fathers believed revivals were sovereign acts of God. Today the local church is held in low esteem and evaluated not by the fruit of obedience and changed lives but by the standard of numbers: how many buildings, how much money, how many converts. Today the mind is seen as a hindrance to true spirituality. Jonathon Edwards and the average minister of his day believed the training of the intellect to be of paramount importance. (69)

Did teaching "moldy orthodoxy" bore people? Then it must be replaced with emotionally challenging storytelling that will move the masses. Did the singing of the Psalms excite the masses? If not, write simple (simplistic?) choruses and put them to popular tunes. Everything the church did had to be evaluated by one thing - results. (70)

Chapter 8: Church Discipline: Missing the Mark by R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

The decline of church discipline is perhaps the most visible failure of the contemporary church. No longer concerned with maintaining purity of confession or lifestyle, the contemporary church sees itself as a voluntary association of autonomous members, with minimal accountability to God, much less to each other. (171)

Historian Gregory A. Wills aptly commented, "To an antebellum Baptist, a church without discipline would hardly have counted as a church." Churches held regular "Days of Discipline" when the congregation would gather to heal breaches of fellowship, admonish wayward members, rebuke the obstinate, and, if necessary, excommunicate those who resisted discipline. In so doing, congregations understood themselves to be following a biblical pattern laid down by Christ and the apostles for the protection and correction of disciples.
No sphere of life was considered outside the congregation's accountability. Members were to conduct their lives and witness in harmony with the Bible and with established moral principles. (172)

"Go and sin no more" has been replaced with "Judge lest you be judged." (174)

The identity of the church as the people of God is to be evident in its pure confession of Christ, its bold testimony to the Gospel, and its moral holiness before the watching world. Nothing less will mark the church as the true vessel of the Gospel. (177)

Chapter 9: Preaching: The Decisive Function by Arturo G. Azurdia III

God is not negotiating with this message; He is not asking for discussion or attempting to strike a bargain. As the Lord of the universe, He is declaring a word that demands compliance from his creation. (195)

To be sure, a true gospel preacher longs to see the experience of authentic conversion in the lives of the people to who he preaches. However, he understands that if the response of a listener is drawn out by the dimming of the lights, the playing of soft music, the powerful stories of the preacher, or the pressure of surrounding multitudes streaming forward to the altar, it is highly unlikely that such a response will prove to be saving. (198)

It may be surprising for some to discover that when the Spirit of God powerfully attends the preaching of the Word, one of the common indicators is a heightened sense of quiet; not shouts or ecstasies, but rather an unnatural silence. The ever-present coughing ceases. The incessant movement of people is overcome by dramatic stillness. And suddenly, though the features of the preacher's face and the timbre of his voice are still identifiably his, the words coming forth from his mouth seem to have been sent from heaven itself. (208)

Chapter 9: Richard Sibbes and the Union of the Heart with Christ: Lessons on Godliness by Paul R. Schaefer, Jr.

In a very insightful article, J.I. Packer has written the following on why we modern evangelicals need "Puritans": The answer, in one word, is maturity. Maturity is a compound of wisdom, good will, resilience, and creativity. The Puritan exemplified maturity; we don't. We are spiritual dwarfs. A much traveled leader, a Native American, has declared that he finds North American Protestantism, man-centered, manipulative, success-orientated, self-indulgent and sentimental, as it blatantly is, to be 3000 miles wide and half an inch deep. The Puritans, by contrast, as a body were giants. They were great souls serving a great God. In them clear-headed passion and warm-hearted compassion combined. (216)

Chapter 11: Unity of Doctrine and Devotion by Donald S. Whitney

The Dangers of Mysticism

1. Mysticism tends to overemphasize direct, subjective experiences with God rather than experiences rooted in and interpreted by Scripture and reason.
   
   Yes, direct experiences with God are valid, but what is normative? Evangelicals with a consciously theological spirituality would assert that encounters with God that begin with Scripture should have the central place in our spiritual experiences. Scripture induced experiences with God should be the norm in our spirituality, not the exception; and the Scriptures are the standard by which all other spiritual experiences are evaluated. (246)
   
   The evangelistic method of Jesus and the apostles was not to urge people to seek direct experiences with God; instead they went about preaching and teaching the Scriptures (see Mark 1:14-15). (246)
   
   I am concerned when I read quotations like the one he cites from the seventeenth-century French mystic, Madame Jeanne Guyon: "May I hasten to say that the kind of prayer I am speaking of is not a prayer that comes from your mind. It is a prayer that begins in the heart…Prayer offered to the Lord fro your mind simply would not be adequate. Why? Because your minds is very limited. The mind can pay attention to only one thing at a time. Prayer that comes out of the heart is not interrupted by thinking!"
   
   Is this the way Jesus taught us to pray? Does the New Testament teach that there is "prayer that comes form your mind" and that it is inadequate when compared to a completely different kind of prayer, heart prayer? Doubtless one may speak words in prayer that are not heartfelt or sincere, but that's not the same as claiming that the heart can communicate directly with God and the mind know nothing about it. How do you know when your heart is praying? How do you know that what your heart is doing is praying and not something else? Again, we cannot accept these mystical distinctions, as devout as they sound, an d we must hold fast to the priority of the Christian mind. (248-249)
   
   In contrast to the modus operandi of many mystics, one of the driving principles of the Protestant Reformation was sola Scriptura - that is, Scripture alone is the final authority. This was set against the claim of the Roman clergy that the collective wisdom and experience of the church was equal in authority with Scripture. While most evangelicals would reject Rome's claim, they affirm it in practice when they seek experiences with God that are self-generated and self-interpreted and therefore simply that the Bible is at best supplemental to the experience. (249-250)
   
   
2. Mysticism tends to assume too much about man's natural condition. (man has a natural ability to commune with God in a direct way)
   
   Scripture is clear that communion with God does not come through some mystical effort at ascending to God, or descending deep within oneself to find God, but through hearing and believing the Word of God. (252)
   
   
3. Mysticism tends to misunderstand the purpose of the work of Jesus Christ.
   
   the definition of Christian mysticism at eh beginning of this section spoke of it as an experience that is "unmediated", in other words, without any mediator between the mystic and God. while the mystic would confess that Jesus is God, terms such as "unmediated" imply no dependence upon Christ to make the experience possible. Not that Christ Is ignored; for some He is all their focus. Underhill classifies mystics as either "theocentric" or "Christocentric." But even the "Christocentric" ones, according to Underhill, tend to view "the Risen and Exalted Christ" as "Master, Companion, and Helper of the soul." She refers to Jesus as the "Founder" of Christianity and reports that He "is to His closest followers not merely a prophet, pattern of conduct, or Divine figure revealed in the historic past, but the object here and now of an experienced communion of the most vivid kind." While Christ is all these things, there is no emphasis on Him as Redeemer, which is His most important work. He is mentioned as "Risen and Exalted," not primarily because of our justification as the Scripture emphases (Romans 4:25), but for other reasons. (253)
   
   
4. Mysticism tends to overemphasize the introspective, individual, and detached elements of spirituality to the detriment of the outward, corporate, and everyday aspects of the Christian life.
   
   More broadly, this means evangelicals won't isolate themselves in their Christian village to practice their spirituality. As Alister McGrath wrote in Spirituality in an Age of Change: "Just as the Reformers rejected a retreat to the monasteries, so their modern heirs must reject a retreat into the narrow withdrawn confines of Christian subculture. The world at its worst needs Christians at their best." (255)

We must pay attention to our doctrine because it is the fuel for the fire that burns in the heart. Heart-fires that burn only on emotion or experience will flame out soon after the experience or once the emotion is replaced by another. R.C. Sproul is right: "There can be nothing in the heart that is not first in the mind. Though it is possible to have theology in the head without its piercing the soul, it cannot pierce the soul without first being grasped by the mind." (256)

"Nothing Upon Earth Can Represent the Glories of Heaven" by Jonathon Edwards (good sermon)

Chapter 12: Evangelical Ministry: The Puritan Contribution by Sinclair B. Ferguson

Comfort was by no means their aspiration in life. (265)

Perkins divided hearers into seven categories
1. Ignorant and unteachable unbelievers.
2. Ignorant but teachable
3. Knowledgeable but unhumbled.
4. The humbled - either partly or thoroughly
5. Those who are already believers.
6. Backsliders - of various kinds.
7. Congregations containing a mixture of believers and unbelievers. (269-270)

What is taught must be biblical truth; in addition it must be clearly drawn from the text or passage so that people can see for themselves that it is biblical and learn how they themselves can draw that truth from the same Scripture. (271)

Chapter 13: Evangelicals and the Christian Ministry: A Tragic Loss by John H. Armstrong

If you are called to the gospel ministry, the preaching of the Word, you will have a proper calling and at rue sense of divine appointment. This will exhibit itself in (1) an amazed humility to even be in the ministry, (2) a sense of authority and boldness in the delivery of God's truth, (3) an endurance in the face of discouragement and opposition, (4) an unusual earnestness and seriousness with true intensity, and (5) the performance of your work with a view to Christ's approval and not man's. (300)

Chapter 14: Thomas Boston: The Evangelical Minister by Philip Graham Ryken

Despite his breadth of reading, Boston rarely quoted from learned divines or repeated anecdotes from classical sources. Partly he was afraid of anything that would distract from the biblical message. Early in his ministry he wrote:

I have been helped to speak to the people by similitudes; but exacting an account of the sermon from the people, several of them told me the earthly part, but quite forgot the heavenly part; which was very wounding to me; so that I know not how to preach so as they may be profited. (308)

The signs of evangelical compromise and crisis are everywhere. The worship of God is casual and irreverent. Ignorance of biblical doctrine is widespread. The sacraments have been marginalized. The local church is no longer a lifelong commitment but a consumable good. As a result, Christianity no longer exercises a culture-shaping influence on western civilization. (315)