HAS THE GOSPEL FAILED??

By John Stallings


Surveying America today we see a wicked world, a weak church & unconverted multitudes. The reasons God could chastise our nation are nearly endless.

Many ministries & individuals are putting forth an effort to stem the tide of unrighteousness but a far higher number of lukewarm Christians sit on the sidelines expecting someone else to do the work & make the sacrifices.

We are killing babies by the millions in our abortion clinics. Laws have been passed to protect those who engage in these savage acts of butchery. We sugar-coat this horror with words like “pro-choice” & “a woman’s right to choose.”

We kicked God out of the public school system & replaced Christianity with the false teaching of evolution. Many young people have turned away from God because they’ve been falsely told evolution proves the Bible wrong.

Our schools indoctrinate children to believe homosexuality is a morally acceptable life-style. This is in conflict with God’s Word & is often done against the wishes of the parents. Our society is so inundated by sexual imagery that many of both sexes admit to sexual addictions.

NASA spent billions of dollars ransacking space trying to find the origins of life in hopes of finding some proof that man can comfortably be his own God, while all the answers to what they seek have been right under their noses for thousands of years in the Bible.

All kinds of “new age” philosophies are sweeping our country. Many states sponsor lotteries in spite of the fact that it’s nothing but gambling, a sin that dooms more people than many other addictions combined.

Far to many folk would rather have a known serial adulterer & rapist in the White House than a person who has a sense of morality as well as a Christian testimony. Partially for this reason premarital sex as well as having a baby out of wedlock have lost the stigma they had just a few decades ago.

Stay at home mothers are mocked by society as being out of touch with the way a modern woman should be living her life. Corporal punishment which is strongly supported by the Bible has come under secular liberal attack & because of this children are disrespectful toward their parents & other authority figures.

Divorce rates are high.

Fathers in large numbers are failing to teach & train their children & dump this responsibility on already over- burden wives, or on the church, or it doesn’t get done at all.

T.V shows are filled with openly gay characters who shamelessly parade their lifestyle before a morally anesthetized nation. Our society is far more interested in sports & other entertainment than they are Godly matters. Every sign the Roman Empire evidenced before it crumbled into the dustbin of history is seen in today’s America.

ALL THIS RAISES A QUESTION; HAS THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST FAILED? HAS THE GOSPEL FAILED?

After all there’s a church on every other corner in America not to mention the fact that Christian television & radio saturate our airwaves. Christian book stores stocked with the finest of spiritual reading are easily assessable to most Americans. If the aforementioned sins go unchecked in our beloved nation there has to be a reason.

Is the gospel we believe to be so powerful only performing a holding action? What is the answer to this conundrum? Perhaps we’ll find the answer by examining some of the parables of Jesus.

Some of Jesus’ richest teachings are found in the parables. He used parables for several reasons; to reveal, to conceal & to bring his teachings from head knowledge to heart knowledge. When Jesus wanted to separate truth-seekers from curiosity-seekers He used parables. Parables are also hyperbole all of us use because sometimes words can’t convey the true feelings of the heart. For instance when we say to someone, “I love you so much I could eat you up,” we’re using hyperbole. When we say “we’re so hungry we could eat a horse” we’re using hyperbole.

Matthew 13 contains several parables so let’s delve into them & see if we can find any answers to the question, “has the gospel failed?”

First is the parable of ...

THE SOWER.

In this parable Jesus tells us that the sower is the witness, the seed is the gospel & the soils are the hearts of men. There are four soils; the hard heart, the shallow heart, the worldly heart & the receptive heart. Again, the sower is the witness or the person who plants the seed, the seed is the gospel or the Word of God & the soil is the heart where the seed falls.

Notice that only one of the four soils is responsive to the gospel. What was Jesus teaching us here? The lesson I see is that if the seed doesn’t take root & spring up, it’s not the seeds fault; it’s the fault of the soil. Some seed falls on soil that receives, protects & nurtures it but most of the seed “fails” because it falls on the wrong soil. This doesn’t change our responsibility to take the gospel to the world but certainly Jesus was giving us a template that the gospel will only be successful when it falls on fertile soil.

When Jesus walked the earth 2,000 years ago He wasn’t personally “successful” with everyone He came in contact with. The Rich Young Ruler came running to Christ but when he was challenged to give up everything & follow Him, he couldn’t do it. Did Jesus fail where this young man was concerned? Certainly we can’t say Jesus failed. The failure lies at the feet of the young man & his unwillingness to commit to Christ. He was so concerned about finding eternal life that he ran to Jesus but in the final analysis he loved his possessions more, & went away sorrowful.Notice that Jesus didn't go after the young man & try to convince him to change his mind.

In 1967 I was privileged to visit Athens Greece & stand on Mars hill where Paul preached in Acts 17. Embarrassed as I am to say it, I used to have pictures of me standing on the hill striking a “preacher pose.” I’m not sure where those photos went but they vanished somewhere along the way.

NO CHURCH IN ATHENS

One thing we didn’t do while in the beautiful city of Athens was to visit the ruins of the church Paul planted there. I visited the ruins of the churches in Philippi, Corinth, Ephesus & Colosse. In almost every city we visited we viewed the ruins of the ancient Christian church.

If I were to ask you to turn to Paul’s letter to the Athenians, you’d quickly remind me there isn’t such a book. Why is there no letter to the church in Athens? Well; Paul didn’t build a church there. He planted a church in just about every place he visited but Athens. Why was there no church in Athens? I’m sure it wasn’t Paul’s fault. I’m sure Paul would have been especially anxious to have a church in this metropolis city teeming with false gods & false teaching. If you read Acts 17 you’ll find the Athenians mocked Paul when he preached the Resurrection of Jesus. They were just not that interested in the gospel Paul preached, it’s just that simple. You & I know the gospel didn’t fail, Athens failed to receive the gospel.

Juda & I were ministering in a church a few years back where the people could best be described as “DOA,” dead on arrival. Good people, but DOA. I would struggle to preach each night & I understood what our good black preachers mean when they say “You’re not helping me preach.”

One day Juda, who was almost as frustrated as I was asked me, “Why don’t you preach that sermon you preached last week in that other church?” I said, “The sermon I preached tonight WAS that sermon.” There it is in a nutshell; the unresponsiveness of the church we were in made the exact message sound differently than when it was preached to open receptive folk.

This parable teaches us to sow gospel seed everywhere possible but not to expect everyone to receive it, because they won’t.


WHEAT AND WEEDS

The next parable Jesus tells in Matthew 13 is the parable of the wheat & the tares. Many people look at the church, see hypocrites & say, “I’ m not going back to church because there’re too many hypocrites there.” I have often told people “if there’s a hypocrite between you & God the hypocrite is closer to God than you are.” Jesus made it plain that the devil had sowed the tares.

I think it apparent that we can’t call Christianity a failure because of hypocrites. I’ve also told people who quit God & His church because of the tares, “I’d rather spend a few years of my life in a church with a few hypocrites than to die unsaved & spend all eternity with them.”

I’ve known people who quit watching Christian T.V because of some inconsistency they saw in someone. One man I knew quit watching TBN because he saw a young man in a band with long hair that “looked like a hippy.” That was against his principles so he stopped watching Christian T.V. Of course I didn’t make any points with him when I asked him if he quit watching CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN or FOX when he saw someone on there who wasn’t dressed or coiffed according to his standards. His answer included a few coughs & a lot of throat clearing but as you might expect, “he’d never thought of it that way.”

One thing to remember is that church leadership should have a different standard of dress & overall conduct than those who sit in the pew. If we go to a church & see people shabbily, or perhaps less than modestly dressed (unless it's totally ridiculous)sitting in the pews, that's understandable. What are we going to do, drag them to the door & give them the bum's rush? The Gospel will raise these folk to another level if given the chance. However, it's a different "kettle of fish" to see people on platforms slopping around or presenting themselves in a less than & exemplary manner. The people on the platform or podium after all represent what the church stands for & we need no one to tell us what that looks like.

Why should the church be subjected to criticism when they do what they’re called to do --reach the lost? Isn’t that a strange standard to force on the church, when it should be a place where all can come & hear the gospel? Some people want to clean the fish before they catch them. Jesus told us in this parable not to go around judging & pulling up tares, but to let the wheat & tares grow until the day God separates them. 1 Cor. 3:11-15.

Obviously God gave us these instructions because none of us are qualified to tell wheat from tares. Would you want that job? If you’d have tried to guess which of Jesus’ disciples would betray Him do you think you’d have chosen His treasurer? You & I might have well picked Peter or Thomas as the betrayer. I’m glad I don’t have that job.

So the gospel hasn’t failed because of an unconverted world or because of hypocrites?

THE PARABLE OF LEAVEN

What can we learn from the next parable, the parable of LEAVEN? Physically leaven is an old lump of dough in a high state of fermentation or a substance that causes dough to rise. Leaven is used in the Bible as a type of evil. Yeast would be our modern equivalent of leaven. Leaven, like yeast had a stealthy quality & a small amount of it could greatly affect a large amount of dough. In Exodus 12:8 & Leviticus 2:4 God told the people to make sure the Passover Lamb & other ceremonial meals were eaten without leaven.

In 1 Corinthians 5 when telling the church to deal with immorality within their ranks, Paul tells them to “purge out that leaven.” In Matthew 16:11 Jesus warned about the leaven of the Pharisees, which was their false teachings of Legalism & Liberalism. In Mark 8:15 He warned of the leaven of Herod, which symbolized worldliness.

Leaven works quietly & insidiously just as sin does. Jesus is teaching here that sin in society, even in small amounts has an awesomely devastating effect on the whole of society. The multitudinous multiplying of the leaven of sin in our world doesn’t surprise God. If sin wasn’t as cursedly potent as it is there would have been no reason for Jesus to die on the cross. The proliferation of evil doesn’t mean that God’s work has failed, been thwarted or frustrated, it just means there’s sin in the world & it will be here until Jesus comes back & fumigates the earth.

Next Jesus gives the parable of the-

  DRAGNET.

This one must have been a familiar & vivid picture to the disciples, after all Peter, Andrew, James, & John had been fishermen before Christ called them.

Jesus said the kingdom of God is like a large net that’s cast into the sea. In those days the fishermen would drag a net along the bottom of a body of water between two boats. The wide net would catch all manner of fish, then they’d bring the net to shore & some were kept & some were thrown back into the sea.

The church today is doing the same thing in our “sea,” which of course is the world. The gospel is preached & there is no partiality to race, sex, wealth, education, intelligence, ethnicity or beauty. The churches mandate isn’t judicial but declarative, in that we don’t do the separating, that’s God’s job.

Having grown up in Florida, I know what it means to fish in the ocean & catch all manner of creatures. We caught blow-fish, all puffed up (I might add some people caught in the gospel net are puffed up with pride.) We caught Eels that would slither & slide away; we caught Dog fish & Cat fish, Grunts & Croakers. You had to be careful handling some of these sea creatures because they could bite, sting or stick you.

The gospel net pulls in all sorts of people, & just as with fishermen, some stay & some leave. Some would be useable & some would not. No fisherman expects to keep everything he catches. Jesus is saying the gospel hasn’t failed because we don’t keep all we bring in. There’s always the question of why some people leave the church. Jesus told His disciples in response to this question, “They went out from us because they were not of us.”

As in the other parables, all this will be settled at the end of the age when God separates the spiritual “sheep from the goats.”

The last parable I’ll speak about is the...

  TREASURE IN THE FIELD. 

As in all the parables, there are many out flashings of truth from this story but the basic truth of this parable is that the man who found the treasure went & sold everything he had to buy the field where the treasure was buried.

I don’t want this blog to turn into an Epistle so suffice to say, this man was willing to sell everything he had to buy this treasure. The treasure Christ alluded to in this parable is the riches of God’s kingdom & of His gospel.

When we look at the treasures in Christ, the truth is, some are willing to sell out to follow Him & some aren’t. Some will pay full price & others deem the price too high. Carnal people trample all over this field & don’t even know it’s there. Jesus also said that when the man found the treasure he covered it up temporarily to go buy the field.

That’s exactly what Jesus was doing by using the parables, He was covering up the treasure from those who weren’t interested enough to seek for it.

The gospel hasn’t failed because some don’t see the value of it or aren’t willing to pay the price to claim it.

Paul said, --

But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost. In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ who is the image of God should shine unto them. --2 Corinthians 3:3-4

Blessings,

John