How Cowardly Preaching Hurts People

A practical, real-life example

Last week, in a heartbreaking article from the New York Times, men and women discussed their struggle to come to grips with the fact that they won’t be having grandchildren.

As their Millennial children forego childbearing for careers, travel, or general lack of interest toward kids, the parents are realizing that they will never experience the joys of having grandchildren.

The article is drenched with the cognitive dissonance created by the understanding that grandchildren are one of life’s true gifts and an expectation of human nature, yet juxtaposed against our cultural insistence that individual happiness is the highest good.

Oddly enough, the NYT reporter unwittingly quoted Scripture, saying “It doesn’t help that our society tends to paint grandchildren as a reward for aging.” That’s not a thing “society tends to do,” that’s God’s truth (Proverbs 17:6).

It only makes sense that when society plugs their ears and tells God “Shut up, I don’t have to listen to you!” that families would start to turn on each other and sadness and isolation would ensue.

But what I hate the most about it is that Christians helped and continue to help facilitate this social breakdown.

Since there is ample Biblical wisdom on this matter, Christians should be well-equipped to avoid falling into the same painful trap in which the world finds itself.

And yet, while traveling to speak I’ve run into numerous older Christians who have told me about their families before sadly adding something akin to, “And, they decided not to have kids. I guess we’re just getting a granddog.” Despite the advantage the Bible should have given their families, they’re in just as sad a place as those NYT folks outside the church.

Why? Well, I can tell you one likely reason.

Every time a preacher says “It is good and proper for most Christians to pursue marriage, and married couples, if capable, should have children,” Christians come out in full force to oppose them.

Just look at the vitriol in the 350+ comments my colleague Brad Harrub received when writing on the matter of young women choosing travel and career over marriage and family. (“The dumbest thing you’ve ever written,” said one man.)

I’m not here to re-litigate the importance of marriage and children or get into why our cultural bias makes us misread 1 Corinthians 7 on this matter, as I’ve already said what I have to say on that. Nor is this about those who can’t have children, as we are discussing general truths and not obvious exceptions.

My point is this: all of God’s Word is for our good, and hiding the parts our culture doesn’t like only hurts people.

We have found ways to preach on day to day life that would be fully acceptable to the unconverted.

As always, my guy Francis Schaeffer was on this one as well. In his book Death in the City, he said, “Men today do not perhaps burn the Bible… But men destroy it in the form of exegesis; they destroy it in the way they deal with it. They destroy it… by saying only the ‘spiritual’ portions of the Bible have authority for us.”

In other words, instead of tearing pages out of the Bible, we find a way to explain how the parts that would require us to change our lives or our understanding of the world don’t actually mean what they say. In this way someone can look exactly like the world while still claiming to hold a high view of Scripture.

So, “Be fruitful and multiply” becomes a commandment made irrelevant on this side of the cross. “Children are a heritage from the Lord” means “having kids is good… if that’s the kind of thing you’re into.” You can do this kind of bobbing and weaving with any number of culturally unpalatable verses.

“Wives submit to your husbands… but that doesn’t mean ____, and husbands have to make her want to submit, and [insert 50 other qualifiers.]”

“Yes, only married heterosexual couples can have sex… but the church has been mean and judgmental toward people on sexuality and we need to be far more welcoming and understanding and listen to them and…”

“Sure, Titus 2:5 says the women are to be workers at home but the Proverbs 31 woman proves her family is just as good or even better off if she works a 9-5.”

Learning from the prophets

We read the OT prophets and see them talking about social injustice and think that should be our message. But we have both a culture and a church that are on board with charity and welcoming people, even to a fault.

The lesson from the prophets isn’t to preach the exact message they preached; rather, it’s to never avoid preaching God’s proclamations that people don’t want to hear.

We do this not to be controversial, but because we believe God and because we love people. “Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am foremost.” Saving sinners means pulling them out of their sins and the wiles of the devil. We do our part in this by preaching the Word that we and everyone else need to hear to snap us all out of the philosophical spells the world places us under.

The answer then, is specific, Biblically grounded teaching.

It must be specific because if we are generic, the culture will fill in the gaps. One of the clearest examples of this has been with the issue of racism. We should say from our pulpits that racial hatred is sinful, but if we aren’t specific as to what is and is not racism, our people will be discipled by the world’s “everything is racism” teachings grounded in Critical Race Theory.

But this applies to all kinds of Biblical teachings. If we tell our folks the Bible generally teaches that marriage and children are good, that leaves room for the culture to fill in all the exceptions. If our teaching about masculinity is that men should read their Bibles and pray—good ideas, but not specifically masculine in the least—the culture will drive them toward chauvinism or nice-guyism. Specificity matters.

And, we have to let the Bible teach us about the culture, and not the other way around. It’s impossible to read the Bible without any kind of preconceived ideas or cultural bias, but to the best of our ability we have to see our biases as much as possible.

This means knowing what pressures we face from our culture and our social circles and realizing the influence those have on our Bible study. The radically individualistic culture says no way of life is to be preferred over another in any sense for any body. Everyone is the captain of their own ship.

Indoctrinated in that viewpoint, we open the Bible and figure out how to start reading verses about family, civic, and church commitments in a way that accommodates our individualism. Instead, every time we open our Bibles we should be seeing just how much it has to say against our culture of self.

Specific, Biblically grounded, whole counsel preaching shields people from the consequences of Godless philosophies. Cowardly, culturally acceptable preaching sets people up to be hurt by the natural consequences of deviating from God’s designs for our lives. No, people may not always want to hear it, but love compels us to preach Christ’s wisdom for all of life.

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Notes

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