Religion in America is being miserably reduced to just another product in a very glutted market of commodities and services. However popular, consumer-driven theories of “church” wreak utter havoc upon the church’s divinely mandated ministry and focus, with the most egregious fruit being the neglect and adulteration of God’s word, preached and heard with faith. A few examples should suffice. Baptisms are now regularly accompanied by biographical videos playing overhead, with the finished recording given to the initiate as a record of his special moment. So inept in handling and experience of God’s word are many pastors and teachers that a growing number borrow themes from television, movies, and even, God forbid, the lives of actors, with many others using prepackaged sermon outlines with accompanying, sure-to-inspire anecdotes, stories, and poems. Some rely on audience giveaways to lure new consumers. To complete the cycle, really successful churches are packaging their particular brand, opening chain churches in other cities and around the world, all in the name of the emerging church. Call it instead the devolving church, the church lost in its own consumer hubris, the church that thinks God speaks through the digitally produced thunderstorm rather than in a still, small, non-computer generated voice of the humble preacher who simply opens the living and powerful word of God. Call it a church that has lost any sense of God’s majesty.
Making disciples of Christ does not consist of gaining converts to a particular brand of Christianity, or to a hip music or youth program, or to self-help recovery programs baptized with Jesus jargon. True disciples of Christ are marked by one thing they are not likely to find in many of our churches: a sense of the holiness of God. They will rarely encounter the God who cannot be downsized to fit our packaging, changed to suit our bad theology, or manipulated to suit our low-demand piety.
Adherents of these and many other nifty programs and marketing techniques query: “Who are you to define God? If our product works, if people are attracted to our definition of God, if our churches and programs are growing, who are you to judge?” This response has an apparent legitimacy, for to our own Master we will stand or fall. Take this response to its logical conclusion, make it absolute, however, and it is a circular argument, an argument that assumes what it must prove: that we are free to package God however we wish as long as positive results seem to follow. Of course, without an objective standard, are the results good or bad? Are people encountering the true God or the God of someone’s creative imagination, which the Bible calls idolatry? Is the standard of measurement man-defined results or faithfulness to God’s word? We do not really want to pursue this path, do we, that there is no standard other than what I feel is acceptable to God? This is the way we get cults. This is the way the true God is lost in the shuffle of our misguided zeal. This is the way we are lost in the labyrinth of our vanity. This is the way relevance actually becomes irrelevance. In my zeal to identify with my neighbor, whose house is burning down, should I set my house on fire?
Let us return to the idea of God’s majesty. In the Bible, whenever man encounters God, the true God, when he is confronted with God’s holiness, love, and righteousness, he does not shout, curse, roll in the aisles, beat a drum, sputter gibberish, go out and get a tattoo in the name of Jesus, shout down anybody who questions his doctrine or life, or sing Pink Floyd as he offers himself to God as a living sacrifice. He is undone. Undone. He is done with cool, with hip, with worrying about being relevant to a lost world, with preserving his precious self-image. He is immediately aware of his own sinfulness, of the evil of sin in the light of God’s holiness, of the just judgment hanging over his head because he has not loved this God, the only God, with every ounce of his being. He is silent, becoming like a dead man: as John the beloved before Jesus the enthroned. He puts his hand upon his lips in deep contrition and a sense of the impurity of his lips: as Isaiah the reluctant messenger before the Son of God, the living Word. And when, in a moment of gross stupidity, like Peter wanting to erect three tabernacles, an early and immediately condemned attempt to promote and control God, he immediately falls down and disclaims any right to put God in the tent of his own arrogance.
These were unique examples, admittedly, but they are paradigmatic. They give us some sense of man before the majesty of God, of legitimate encounters with God, of man coming to know himself in all his filth when he looks even for a moment into the face of the Holy God. It is because we spend more time looking at our own faces, that we no longer know ourselves, for we do not learn about ourselves by studying ways to improve ourselves or comparing ourselves with others but by hauling our consciences before the throne of God. When we see him, we know ourselves. Naked of all righteousness, we come to him to be dressed. Blind, we come to him to give us sight. Cripple, we come to him to make whole. Unclean, we come to him for cleansing. Self-knowledge and, therefore, knowledge that will help us help other dead men, comes only through the revelation of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ, a revelation found only in the Bible and proclaimed with promised power only through those God raises up to preach it to us. All else is delusion and blindness and confusion.
What are we to do in the marketing frenzy of American religion? First, get out of it. God is not an experience to be packaged. He controls and defines himself. He will not be manipulated by our zeal and supposed sincerity. He calls us to live by his word, not by our delusions. Second, rethink your views of worship. Because God is who he is and not who we think he is, much of our worship expectations are utterly illegitimate. Feeling close to God is not the same thing as actually being close to God. How, after all, are we close to God? By covenant and by his word, the preaching of the gospel (Rom. 10:6-17). How do we know we are close to God? When we believe his promise, and in no other way. I have had a legitimate worship experience when my mind is renewed by thinking God’s thoughts after him, my life changed through confrontation with his majesty, my soul enraptured by his love and grace revealed through Jesus Christ, and my will set toward obedience by the working of his Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth. Most other definitions of “experiencing God” can be had at any rock concert on a Friday night. Change a few words, take up an offering, and you are in many American churches. This is not God; it is chaos. It is not respect for him, honoring him, revering his holy name; it is making him relate to me on my terms. It is God-control. It is a God delusion.
Third, bring yourself regularly before God. There is only one way to do this: to come to his word and seek him in prayer. He reveals himself only in his word, which he has exalted even above his name (Ps. 138:2). Examine and judge yourself in the light of his character, his holiness, his perfection, his majesty. See and meditate upon his love in Jesus Christ. Witness his inscrutable wisdom, absolute justice, and blazing love meet and kiss that day on Calvary. What mercy! O the depths! To a sinner like me? Behold the Lord of glory hanging on the cross to be the propitiation for our sins. How must he love me to have suffered his soul to be amazed, even to death, to empty himself for my poor sake, to be consecrated to the will of his Father even to the death of the cross that I might have a righteousness that will stand the gaze of omniscient justice. Think often on God’s justice, goodness, faithfulness, sovereignty. It is no wonder we are brutish; God is not in all our thoughts. Low views of God produce spiritual infancy, ignorance of self and of God.
Fourth, understand the profound connection between knowledge of God and knowledge of self. As long as I compare myself to others, judge myself by myself, I will always seem just fine. Sin will not seem so dark. All is fine in the dream world of all-about-me-religion. But let me once, just once, look into the face of God, the standard by which we must be judged, and everything that before appeared to be righteousness itself will be exposed as utter filth. And I must do this, for I will never truly give myself to God, as Calvin once wrote, until I begin to become seriously displeased with myself. But how can I be seriously displeased with myself when my religion tells me that life is about me, that God exists to help me catch my dreams? I cannot. I will remain in my self-contented delusion. I will never flee to Jesus – to be healed, cleansed, illumined, renewed – unless I see something of my filth and blindness, the depth of my depravity – like the sea underneath Peter as he was drowning – and my utter helplessness to save myself or reconcile myself to God. I will never have real joy, the joy of possessing the imputed righteousness of him who loved me to the end.
We must come again before the majesty of God. Only then will we run to Jesus Christ as our anchor within the veil of God’s presence. Only then will we be done once and for all with worrying about relevance to the world. We will be relevant for the simple reason that God’s holiness and majesty will change us, humble us, make us vocal for his glory and grace, and fill our hearts with joy and praise. Only then will we stop trying to market what cannot be marketed. The gospel is not a package to be purchased. It is a gift to be received by faith in the promise of God. It is not made legitimate through the smoke and mirrors of consumerism and adaptation to jaundiced consumers. It is the revelation of the God who will be all in all, without whom life is tasteless and meaningless, in whose majestic presence is fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore.
American churches are caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma, but because it is self-inflicted, it may be resolved by simply abandoning the faulty paradigm that created it. The more relevant we try to become in our own wisdom, the more we push God away from us. In turn, this creates even more frenzy and foolish creativity to try to regain what we have lost: like the priests of Baal, dripping in blood from self-mutilation, dancing around the altar, anything to get Baal’s attention. And Elijah? Crisis never caused him to lose sight of the majesty of God. He bowed in prayer. He called upon God in faith and humility. By comparison, a very boring show. But God answered Elijah, for he always responds to those who are humble before him in recognition of his majesty and holiness. He accepted Elijah’s sacrifice and consumed his enemies with fire from heaven. We have inverted the order. It is not smoke and mirrors, shouting and chaos, drama and man-made religion that induce God to act, that bring him down from above. He will be revered, honored. He will have quiet before him, stillness in humility before his glory. Then, he brings chaos and the fires of judgment upon the enemies of his church and Son. Let us bow before his majesty, prostrate ourselves before him, and believe his word. The King of glory will then enter the gates of his prepared city, his reverent church, his holy temple.