The powerful Word of God has been building Christ’s kingdom since the beginning of redemptive history. It has never been defeated, and it never will be. Satan has been opposing God’s Word since he slithered up to Eve in the Garden of Eden and questioned God’s authority, recruiting humanity through Adam to join his rebellion. But since that dreadful moment, God’s Word has been destroying Satan’s kingdom, pushing back the darkness and rescuing the elect captives. Satan has never been able to tame the Word, to chain the Word, to stop the Word, or to make the Word extinct. And the Word of God alone will revitalize a church if it is to be revitalized. The more the revitalizing leaders trust the Word of God alone, the more powerful their efforts will be.
Revitalization Comes by Hearing
Revitalization is nothing less than the transformation of individual human hearts—by either conversion or sanctification—on a church-wide scale. This work of comprehensive salvation from sin comes only through faith in Jesus Christ, and Romans 10:17 says saving faith comes by hearing the Word. It doesn’t matter what other things happen in your church; if the Word of God is not central to the revitalization effort, no genuine transformation will ever occur. The church has come to need revitalization because its leaders and members have turned away from God through sin, resulting in spiritual deadness. The Word of God in its testimony to the saving work of Christ is the only method given to churches by which they can be revitalized.
Perhaps the clearest verse in the Bible on the essence of regeneration is 2 Corinthians 4:6: “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” This is the miracle of regeneration, of being made a new creation in Christ. Paul likens the power of God to speak life into a dead soul to the power he displayed at creation in speaking light into a dark universe. This moment of spiritual creation is the basic “building block” of any church revitalization effort. A subsequent work is like it: the increasing illumination in the hearts of existing regenerate church members by the Spirit of God. This progressive work of illumination reveals God’s radiant glory in Christ, as well as God’s purposes for our lives and for his church. Faith is, as I will make plain in chapter 8, the eyesight of the soul (Matt. 6:22) by which we can see invisible realities, including the way the local church is falling short of God’s plan. Revitalization occurs when the Word of God is clearly unfolded before their very eyes. No other power or invention of human contrivance can bring about these changes in the human heart. Revitalization comes by hearing God’s Word.
Therefore, the centerpiece of the ministry of the Word of God in the pulpit, in Sunday school, and in all Bible studies and discipleship relationships must be the clear proclamation of Christ crucified and resurrected as the only Savior for sinners. Though the ongoing preaching of lesser doctrines is also essential to a complete ministry of the Word, the gospel of Christ must be paramount. As Paul said, “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:1–2). Here, Paul is rejecting the human wisdom that was the glory of Greece and the envy of the pagan world of his time. The wisdom of God for the sinful human race is the cross of Christ. Lift it high!
The Sufficiency of Scripture and FBC Durham
Peter asserted, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (2 Pet. 1:3–4). God’s Word is fully sufficient to enable us to be conformed to Christ and escape the corruption of sin. Every church revitalizer should “put all his eggs in one basket” by putting his full trust in God’s Word to prosper his efforts at transforming the church. As Psalm 1 says, “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers” (vv. 1–3; emphasis mine). What a promise! God will prosper any servant of the Lord who fully invests their heart in God’s Word.
The sufficiency of Scripture to make FBC healthy and glorifying to God has been the central pillar of my ministry since I was being interviewed for the position of senior pastor of FBC back in August 1998. During the interview, I sat in the parlor of our church and was quizzed on various aspects of church ministry by the seven members of the search committee. I had with me my pocket Bible, and as they asked one question after another about church life, I kept opening the Bible to this or that passage and answered based on the texts that I felt the Holy Spirit was bringing to my mind. As the interview wore on and I continued to do this, one of the committee members began to laugh and said, “You really believe all the answers are in that book, don’t you?” I answered, “For the life and fruitfulness of a local church, yes I do!” Her amazement and mirth were not unfriendly, but they were also warning signs as to the journey of revitalization on which I was about to embark. The idea of the sufficiency of Scripture for the full fruitfulness of any local church is, if anything, even stronger in my mind today than it was then. To deny the sufficiency of Scripture to build the church of Jesus Christ is to imply that some other human technique or methodology is necessary to supplement the Word of God. And that cannot be.
Many at FBC were strongly opposed to a faithful, biblical ministry. Their disdain of the God of the Bible became apparent at key moments. This will be common in many church revitalization situations. The teaching of the Bible, especially in the ways that most clearly run counter to the prevailing notions of the surrounding secular culture, will seem foreign to them. For me, the issue that I had to address at FBC was that of “gender and authority,” or the fact that God has ordained male leadership in the Bible. This stands in stark contrast to the feminist and egalitarian notions prevalent in our culture. As I began teaching and leading on this issue, many in the church were deeply offended and began to rise up in opposition.
I worked with our deacons (the lay leaders of the church at that time) to lay a biblical foundation for these convictions. We had a Saturday teaching time that was greatly irksome to many of them. For that session, I had written a thirty-page paper titled “Gender and Authority in the Church” and presented it to them. It was one of the worst meetings I have ever attended. I went step by step through the document, describing first the authority of God in the universe, how God delegates that authority to created beings and gives them laws by which they are to exercise their authority, how God will call each leader to account for his leadership, how Christ serves as a clear example of servant-leadership, and how God established male leadership in the home and in the church. We went through key passages like 1 Timothy 2; Galatians 3; Ephesians 5; 1 Corinthians 11 and 14; and so forth. It became clear at that point how divided our church was. Some of the deacons were truly delighted in the clear teaching of Scripture. Others were aghast and enraged.
I remember well the most powerful leader of the faction that was most threatening the church and the horrible look on his face as I was teaching. At one point, I was asserting that God has prescribed in Scripture how the church is to be run and that we have no right to seize hold of the church and do it our own way. I used the story of David bringing the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem on an oxcart (contrary to the laws of Moses), and when the oxen stumbled, Uzzah grabbed hold of the ark to stabilize it. When the Bible declared that God struck Uzzah dead for his irreverent act, this deacon recoiled physically in his chair and was appalled. He gestured down at the open Bible on the table before him and said, “I could never believe in a God like that!” That moment crystallized the need for reform at FBC. This man could not believe in the God who is clearly revealed in the pages of the Bible lying open on the table in front of him. What God could he believe in then? One of his own imagination, it seems; one who would never kill people out of holy indignation at the violation of his laws; one who certainly would never send any “good person” to hell for an eternity. His god was a reasonable god that made sense to him—an idol.
That Saturday morning was an abomination to many of those deacons. They wanted a church that was socially comfortable, a pleasant place of barbecues, family gatherings, and entertaining messages about God’s love. Others were more aggressive in their opposition, saying to me, “Where does your authority come from to tell a woman she may not run for deacon? Who do you think you are?” For them, it was an issue of power and control. Still, some were more pragmatic in their arguments and less confrontational, but no more motivated by scriptural truth than the others. Then there were some who were delighted in the faithful teaching of the Word of God.
At many meetings after that, I came face-to-face with the deep antipathy many of the church members had to more controversial aspects of God’s Word. At one point, one woman said, “I don’t give a flip what Paul thought about this!” She was willing to throw out the apostle’s teachings if it did not agree with what she thought was right. Another time at a prayer meeting, a woman prayed, “Lord, help us to realize that we are a modern people, and we do not need to do whatever the Bible says.” One godly member of the church later said it should be included in a top-ten list of “Prayers Least Likely to Be Answered by God.” As I continued to preach chapter after chapter of the Bible from the pulpit on Sundays—not using the pulpit to voice my personal opinions on the growing controversy but simply seeking to feed the sheep and preach the gospel to the lost—the church was being revitalized before our eyes.
Sola Scriptura and Luther’s “Laziness”
The phrase “the sufficiency of Scripture” is merely a modern English way of referring to one of the five central pillars of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sola scriptura: “by Scripture alone.” Martin Luther, the leader of the German Reformation, began his spiritual pilgrimage for salvation from God’s wrath by joining an Augustinian monastery in 1505. Yet no matter how hard he worked, his conscience was always there to accuse him of his latent sins. He was about to drive himself insane with all his efforts for inner peace. But God, in his rich mercy, illuminated one key passage of Scripture: “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’” (Rom. 1:17). Luther pondered this text and began to realize that the “righteousness of God” in that verse was good news for sinners, because it explained the gospel as the “power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom. 1:16).
Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the “justice of God” had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.1
For Luther, the liberation of saving faith in Christ came only from Scripture, not from the Roman Catholic Church’s elaborate system of religious works. At that time, all spiritual truth was mediated to the people by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. No individual church member had direct access to the Word of God, and all the speaking done in the mass was done in Latin, which most of the common people of Germany could not understand. The Protestant Reformation cut through all this, with Luther boldly leading the way. Luther’s courage in standing alone, his life in peril, against all this human power and human tradition represents the main idea of our faith—the responsibility of every individual to make a wise decision for their own soul and to trust in Christ based on God’s Word alone, not on human inventions.
At his trial for heresy at the Diet of Worms in 1521, Luther made this powerful assertion: “Unless I am convinced by scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.”2 Luther staked his life and his soul on the Word of God.
Luther lived the rest of his life to spread the Word of God to everyone he could. God’s Word, unleashed by his and others’ efforts, resulted in a transformed German church and the salvation of countless millions around the world. This was the principle of sola scriptura: by the Scripture alone can a sinner find Christ and be saved for all eternity. How vital it is for modern church reformers (revitalizers) to remember this principle! In a sermon in 1522, Luther gave this humorous account of his “lazy” efforts at reformation:
I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And then, while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and my Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor did such damage to it. I did nothing. The Word did it all.3
This same trust in the Bible’s power to change hearts must drive all healthy efforts at church revitalization in our age as well.
The Word Alone versus the “Science” of Revitalization
We are fighting here the spirit of Charles Finney and his commitment to technique and the “science” of revival. The basic idea is that if you do the work properly, you will of necessity get a revival every time. He writes, “A revival of religion is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means.”4 The “application of means” Finney developed came to be called his “new measures,” and this became the prototype for modern evangelicalism’s faith in technique over the Word of God.5 One of Finney’s critics at the time, Princeton professor Albert Dod, declared that through Finney’s “experiments with the efficacy of different measures, the house of God becomes transformed into a kind of laboratory.”6
The idea that revival—or for our purposes, revitalization—can be reduced to a series of inevitably successful principles or techniques is still alive today. All you have to do is Google something like “ten easy steps to church renewal,” and you will get an amazing potpourri of practical advice. That is the danger of a book like this one as well. Every church revitalization situation is unique, with its own set of challenges. Yet in every case, true revitalization comes not with man-developed techniques, but with a firm reliance on the sufficiency of the Word of God to transform human hearts.
In the twenty-first century, man-centered revitalization techniques focus on other ways to tickle the sensibilities of seekers, attenders, and church members. These techniques are not much different than the approach of the medieval Roman Catholic Church or that of Finney and the other preachers of the Second Great Awakening. The appeal to the five senses in the Middle Ages resulted in amazing cathedrals with soaring architecture, stunning stained glass windows, magnificent sculptures, the majestic tones of pipe organs, and the “smells and bells” of the Latin mass. The appeal to the senses in Finney’s era centered on a style of preaching that employed high volume and energy in theatrical presentations of biblical themes, the psychological pressure made by the “anxious bench” (later developed into the techniques of the “invitation” and the “altar call”), and the use of culturally pleasing frontier music. Our techniques might include a sleek-looking building designed to look like a country club, state-of-the-art electronics, cutting-edge worship music that stays current with popular tastes, the use of handheld smartphones and Twitter accounts to enable an interactive connection with the preacher and the audience, and “relevant” sermons that immediately address felt needs of the hearers and stay away from deep theology. The employment of such human-centered techniques will never produce genuine transformation of the human heart and, therefore, will never produce genuine revitalization.
The Pulpit: The Word Alone Unleashed a Line at a Time
The most significant force in the revitalization of any local church is the ongoing ministry of the Word of God from the pulpit Sunday after Sunday. If you are a revitalizing church member, you need to pray that God will raise up a faithful biblical expositor to preach God’s Word from the pulpit of your church. If that is already happening, you must pray that God will sustain that man in his difficult work, for there often comes a time in church revitalization when the unregenerate church members “will not endure sound teaching” but will seek to gather around themselves teachers to say what their itching ears long to hear (2 Tim. 4:3). To do this, they must get rid of this irksome preacher who is offending them with powerfully convicting words of truth.
If you are the man God has raised up to preach week after week from the pulpit of a church, your calling is to be faithful to him by accurately preaching his Word. As John MacArthur’s “Grace to You” ministry puts it, “Unleashing God’s Word one verse at a time.”7 I believe that expositional preaching is by far the most effective and powerful form of preaching in the revitalization of a church. By expositional, I mean that the main point of the sermon is the main point of the text being preached. I would also say that the consecutive preaching of line upon line and chapter upon chapter and book upon book can be used by God to build a foundation of solid doctrine that will enable the church to flourish for generations to come. However, a topical sermon that the preacher selects according to what he feels best suits the moment can lead to some difficulties. For example, in writing the sermon, the pastor may come to the text with a preconceived notion of what he wants to say, and it is easier to take the passage out of context. It is also more likely that such a topical approach to preaching may result in the pastor riding certain hobbyhorses.
Paul said to the Ephesian elders, “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house” (Acts 20:20), and “I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (v. 27). In chapter 10 on courage, we will discuss the notion of “shrinking back” from texts of Scripture, but it is worth mentioning here that Paul makes it plain that he desired to unfold the “whole counsel of God” and “anything that was profitable” (which is all Scripture, not just some of it; see 2 Tim. 3:16). Gain the people’s trust by faithfully handling the Word of God. When they trust you, the church as a whole will be less likely to divide regarding difficult doctrines.
PRACTICAL ADVICE