Rejected introduction

The following was my original introduction to a sermon on 1 John. I replaced it with something that I think fits the passage better. I decided that having worked on this I would post it as a blog.

A friend of mine did a year’s study in a theological college in America. He was in a class for ministers-in-training and was despairing at the lack of agreement in the group. He said, ‘could we not all subscribe to a simple creed, like “Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again?”’ No! They could not even agree on those simple Biblical truths. These were people who are now leading churches.

A minister got up at the Methodist conference and affirmed the relativistic thinking of our culture. ‘God has given us many religions but only one world,’ he declared. He won’t have got that teaching from his Bible!

Liberal Christian leaders of the nineteenth century sought to adapt the gospel message to fit the thinking of their day. As a result they questioned the historical reliability of the gospels, rubbished the gospels account of miracles and even denied the actual resurrection of Jesus.

Similarly today there are popular speakers on the Christian scene who want to adjust the gospel message to suit the tastes of our culture—so they refuse to teach that heterosexual marriage is the only proper place for sexual intercourse, they question difficult doctrines like the existence of hell, and they even undermine the idea that Jesus took God’s punishment for our guilt!

The New Testament writers were not unmoved when they came across false-teaching. They would be appalled by some of the things the modern church puts up with in the name of tolerance. Indeed many of the New Testament letters were written primarily to correct false-teaching and the resulting distorted behaviour. In the face of falsehood John wants to bring his readers back onto the solid ground of truth. Indeed one version of the Bible entitles this letter ‘Recall to Fundamentals’—so I am going to be seeking to turn you into a pack of fundamentalists (in the good sense of course)!