Biblical Reasons Ministry
Be Mindful of Each Other: personal
& partial transcription from a sermon by Alistair Begg
From the radio broadcast of Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
Pastors and church members: Pay attention to your own spiritual condition. Be mindful of each other too. The flock cannot progress beyond the spiritual progress of their leaders. Not the business skills of the leaders. Not the academic skills of the leaders. Not the leadership skills of the leaders, but the spiritual progress of the leaders.
In the book of Titus we’re exhorted to get the leadership right. Men who are blame-worthy, one-woman men.
Who pastors the pastors? The answer is their fellow elders. Be shepherds of the church of God.
The Evil One delights to sow unbelief, discord, wrong thinking, wrong practice in the heart of places that are committed to orthodoxy.
It’s possible for a church to fall asleep. Just to drift off. Not paying attention. If you’ve ever nodded off at the wheel of your car, what an alarming thing it is when you come to. In that moment, in that nano-second when you were drifting into unconsciousness you had no thought of the danger that was before you. But as soon as you snap to, boy did you realize, that was a close one.
When the church is tempted to fall asleep, when the church becomes naïve like little red riding hood, it doesn’t realize that the wolf says, “All the better to eat you with.”
Don’t you love those little nursery rhymes? How did our kids ever go to sleep listening to it? No wonder some of our children are as whacked out as they are. It was those nursery rhymes that did it to them. {ed. congregation laughed}
Now the call is created, a call to vigilance and a call to constancy so that the leaders might provide sound instruction and be able to teach people to refute that which opposes sound doctrine. Perverse and seductive teachers will arise and distort the truth to draw disciples and attach them to themselves.
This, of course, is a mark of cultic activity always; whether you reach back into our immediate past with names like David Koresh and Jim Jones. And before they know it these naïve and devoted folks are drawn in.
John Calvin says that this teaches us that almost all corruptions of doctrine flow from pride and that ambitious men will always turn away from proper purity and will corrupt and distort the word of God.
Become like the Bereans. Check for yourself to see if it aligns with the word of God. The plain things are the main things and the main things are the plain things.
Corruption will always be a mark of the activity of the cults. Think about it in relation to Joseph Smith. Who in the WIDE world did Joseph Smith think he was? Who did he think he was?! Why didn’t somebody stand up and say, “Joseph Smith, Sit Down in the back of the bus. Shut up! You’re full of nonsense, Smith. There is only one Christ and one Lord, there is only one Word, there is only one final prophet, and it is Jesus of Nazareth. Sit Down.”
But an ambitious man veered from the purity of the gospel distorting the word of God and has left a legacy of spires that stand in strategic places from San Diego to Orlando, FL and the plan for the world standing there as a testimony to the hidden and secret dimensions of a cultish endeavor that began as the result of the ambitions of one man.
The word of God’s grace will build you up and it will give you an inheritance to the provision that God alone can make.
I thank God for the courage of men like Alistair Begg, and others, who stand to proclaim the gospel. "Check for yourself to see if it aligns with the word of God."
Russ Bales
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