BCC Weekly Email

Why a 'Standard' is so Vital

Pastor Jim Harper

2/20/2025 

This weekend I'm moving into week three in my 'How to be a Health Church' series.  The title of this weekend's sermon is: "A Healthy Church Submits to God's Biblical Leadership Plan."  Herein lies the challenge.  God's Biblical Leadership plan for His church, clearly laid out through the pages of both the Old and New Testaments, is wildly unpopular in today's increasingly nacissistic, 'go with the flow' culture.  Truly, we shouldn't be surprised by our unchurche cultur's Godless behaviors considering most in it have been educated and reared on a steady diet of evolutionary humanism.  It sounds like this: 'Live in the moment, for the moment because your moment will soon be gone.'  That's it?  Game over.  No meaning or purpose in any of it.  A terrible way to live?  Sure is, but again, totally understandable in a world void of God.

What's deeply troubling, however, is when the church begins to sound like, reason like, speak like the culture regarding key issues such as church leadership and others.  In Sunday's sermon, I'll discuss this very issue with our congregation.  Consider this quote from this weekend's talk:

"When Jesus and HIS WORD are set aside - INSIDE OR OUTSIDE THE CHURCH - what remains?  For starters, human feelings and emotion.  Next, whose opinion sounds the best regarding whatever issues is on the table...followed closely by...Who, seeking an audience for their ideas, is most physically attractive - has the most winsome and persuasive in personality?  There is a final option: Who is strongest and most dominating - can get their way by force?"

When God's Word is removed from the discussion, inside or outside the church, these very emotive and subjective elements of human measurement reign supreme.  The result, for better or largely worse, is that everybody fends for themselves.  In the end, may the best, strongest, faster, smartest, richest, most powerful - win.  What a tragic situation for Christ's church to find itself enmeshed in, but this ideology is everywhere, folks.  The main thing for many modern 'Christians' is no longer 'What does the Word of God clearly teach?', but 'What do I feel about what the Word of God seems to clearly teach?'  'What do I want to dowith what I hear 'rather than 'I must follow the wishes of the Master - regardless of how I feel.'  Rather than opening God's word with the eyes of a seeker and learner, more and more claiming Christians are opening God's word with eyes of a cynical narcissist.

More than ever before, friends, we need a standard.  An anchor upon which to stabilize our hearts, minds, and souls.  The writer of the Hebrews encourages us that just such an anchor exists if we'll lay aside our petty humanity and allow God to, once again, be our All in All!

"So, when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of His purpose, He guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hod fast to the hope set before us.  We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul..."

                                                Hebrews 6:19ff