This is from a sermon John MacArthur preached in 2000. Aside from the dated reference to Michael Jordan, who actually retired for the second time in 1999, this message is always relevant:
We know that God uses that suffering to perfect us and to shape us and to humble us and to help us be more prayerful and more trusting in Him, and to also demonstrate His grace to us. But what it’s really saying, folks, is don’t compromise. Because the way you can mitigate your suffering is by compromising, right? It’s hard to live your Christian life in your family, so you compromise. It’s hard to live your Christian life in your school, so you shut your mouth and you compromise. Hard to live your Christian life with your friends, so you compromise, or at the job or wherever it is, and so you compromise. The will of God is that, if you suffer, you suffer for doing what is right. Just keep doing what is right, believing what is right, proclaiming what is right. And if you have to suffer, you suffer.
It’s a hard message to get across today, because the church has bailed on this. We’re in an avalanche of decline in the evangelical church today. There are three steps in that decline. I was preaching this week, all week, to the students, every day of the week at the college or the seminary. And I was telling the seminary students there are three kinds of preaching that show the disintegration of the church. And we’re…we’re in the process now.
Number one, there is Biblical preaching which is, listen, Biblical doctrine in Biblical dress. What that means is you preach the truth of Scripture by the Scripture. You understand that? That’s Bible exposition. In other words, you give divine truth in its Bible dress. And God gave us divine truth, and He dressed it in the Scripture, didn’t He? He put it in the prophets and in the law and in the holy writings of the Old Testament. He put it in the Gospels, and He put in the history of Acts, and He put it in the epistles, and He put it in the Revelation. But he dressed it in Scripture. So Bible dress covers divine truth. And when the church is strong, and when it’s healthy, you will hear Bible doctrine preached in Bible dress, because that’s how God gave it. You will hear the Bible exposited.
You won’t hear that much today. You’ll look long and hard to hear that. The new wave says, “People don’t like the Bible. They don’t relate to the Bible. They can’t connect to the Bible. It’s an antiquainted paradigm. They can’t think that way.” So we believe in…we’re still evangelical, and we believe in the truth of the Bible, but we gotta get it out of that Bible dress. So we preach on…on the Chicago Bulls, and we infuse into some message on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, something about divine truth. Or we preach on…on some parable that we have invented, some narrative story that we have invented, or whatever it might be. Or we preach on the theological implications of Harry Potter, or whatever it is. You just grab whatever is coming out of the air in the culture. You say you’re an evangelical. You hold to the evangelical truth. But you strip it of its Bible dress, and you redress it in the culture. And you say, “That’s how we’re gonna win the culture.” Truth is, you have just moved away from the Word of God. God gave us Bible truth in Bible dress, because that’s the way He wanted it taught.
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