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                        DISEASE IN THE SHEEP PEN
           Without the true and undiluted Gospel in our mouths
              and in our pulpits, what good is the Church?

                     By Mark Dixon ([e-mail])

   "Now all the tax-gatherers and the sinners were coming near Him to listen
to Him, and both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, This
man receives sinners and eats with them.  And so He told them this parable:
What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does
not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture, and go after the one which is
lost, until he finds it?  And when he has found it, he lays it on his
shoulders rejoicing.  And when he comes home, he calls together his neighbors,
saying to them, Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!  I
tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in Heaven over one
sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no
repentance."
   To me, during my childhood and particularly my teen years growing up in one
of the largest American Baptist churches in the west, we of the body of Christ
were the ninety-nine secure and protected sheep, and those outside Christ were
the one sheep still lost in the rugged canyon.  The church was a safe
sheepfold where we learned the fundamentals of the faith, basic Biblical
convictions shared by all who named the name of Jesus.  At the foot of that
old oak pulpit on Sunday nights we were taught what it meant to be His
disciples.
   We also learned things that made us distinctively Baptist, like supporting
Christian education (and for the right reasons, not to avoid or escape the
world as so much Christian education is about today, but to prepare to move
lovingly out into the world with the Gospel); investing our lives and
resources in missions (the natural habitat of the Gospel is out in the world);
congregational autonomy, open communion (it's the Lord's table, not ours) and
baptism by immersion.  But we understood that these points were not essential
to salvation, even if we sometimes thought a few of them should be, and we
were cautioned not to "major on the minors" or reject other Christians just
because they didn't share our Baptist distinctives.
   We were taught, in author-researcher Hank Hanegraaff's words, that "sincere
and dedicated believers can differ in good conscience when it comes to
peripheral issues.  They cannot do so, however, when it comes to the primary
doctrines that separate Christianity from the kingdom of the cults.  When it
comes to such matters as the fabric of faith, the nature of God, and the
atonement of Christ, there must be unity."
   When I became involved in the Jesus People movement in high school, I found
that my friends in that movement shared the Biblical fundamentals I had been
taught from childhood, and so I accepted them as brothers and sisters in the
same Lord even though they often challenged me on the "minors" that made me
distinctively Baptist.  In the Jesus movement I found opportunities, as
songwriter John Fischer has written of his own experiences in that movement,
to take my childhood faith "further than I had ever seen it go, out into the
veins of everyday real life, as it fleshed itself out for the first time in
the concrete, light-of-day world."  As Fischer would say, I was simply making
real what I already believed.
   As I survey our Christian community in America twenty years later, I am
concerned for many of the ninety-nine sheep.  Contrary to what many of my
evangelical brethren believe, the real menace to the church today comes not
from secular humanist, anti-Christian wolves that attack from outside.  Jesus
built His fold strong to withstand such attacks, and promised that the very
gates of Hell would not prevail against it.  We are not in jeopardy from
coyotes that snap at us through the slats in the sheep pen, as scary as that
may be.  All they take away is a mouthful of wool.  Any sheep rancher can tell
you that there is a danger far greater than the wolf, a danger that the slats
of the sheepfold cannot keep out, and that will take away far more than a
mouthful of wool: disease.  The deepest fear of any rancher is that a
contagious disease will break out among their livestock.  Look around you, the
symptoms are plain.  Disease has broken out in the sheep pen.
   The Gospel is our birthright according to the second birth, but Satan robs
us of that birthright when we allow "the faith once for all delivered to the
saints" to be supplanted by heresy.  Without the true and undiluted Gospel in
our mouths and in our pulpits, what good is the church?  Our raison d'etre is
to lead others to redemption through a personal relationship with the One who
alone can redeem, and to do that we must preach the life and person of the
Nazarene in fullness and truth, not tainted by heresy.
   Carbon monoxide kills not by poisoning its victim, but by replacing life-
giving oxygen with a useless molecule that will not support life.  Heresy
destroys by replacing God's vital truth with the empty hiss of the serpent.
Increasingly, we are confronted on Christian radio and television with a
religion that has departed from the historic faith of orthodox Christianity.
Heresy is being broadcast under the banner of truth.
   "In recent years," Hanegraaff writes in Christianity in Crisis, "multitudes
who name the name of Christ have adopted a wildly distorted perception of what
it truly means to be a Christian.  The true Christ and the true faith of the
Bible are being replaced rapidly with diseased substitutes, eternal truths
from the Word of God are being perverted into bad mythology, and all the while
Christianity is hurtling at breakneck speed into a crisis of unparalleled
proportions."  Today's popular heretics, claims Hanegraaff, "bludgeon many of
the essentials of historic Christianity, preaching their own deviant brand of
antibiblical theology."
   Televangelists grieve for an America lost without a moral compass in a
world of sin, but miss the fact that a growing segment of the American church
is lost without a theological compass in a world of fast-food Christianity.
"While convinced that what they hear is the real thing," Hanegraaff writes,
"they are in fact turning on to nothing more than a cheap counterfeit."
   Every day on Christian cable TV (a ludicrous concept in itself), popular
programs distort the concepts of grace and faith, the deity and sovereignty of
Christ, the position of man in relation to God, and the Biblical concept of
miraculous healing.  Bible-belt televangelists tell their misguided flock that
being poor is a sin, claim that God cannot do anything in this world unless we
give Him permission, assert that illness denotes a lack of faith, even elevate
themselves to equality with God.
   When challenged for preaching error, these unbiblical teachers dare to warn
their critics to "touch not God's anointed", advise their beguiled followers
to "let God sort out all this doctrinal doo-doo", and sometimes even threaten
to silence those who challenge them, as when TBN president Paul Crouch warned
his critics, "God's gonna shoot you, if I don't!"
   Disease is rampant in the sheep pen, but is there a cure?  The formula for
orthodoxy in the church is simple -- to believe right things, say we do, and
order our institutions accordingly -- but that is easier said than done.
   Dr. B.H. Carroll, the first president of the Southwestern Baptist
Theological Seminary in the early days of this century, spoke on his deathbed
of the urgency of keeping our institutions "lashed to the Cross.  If heresy
ever comes in the teaching, take it to the [leadership]; if they will not hear
you and take a prompt action...take it to the great common people of our
churches.  You will not fail to get a hearing there."
   We must each recognize for ourselves the importance of orthodoxy within the
Christian community, and become more like the Bereans, who "received the Word
with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things
were so."  The Bereans held Paul and Silas to accountability, and more than
ever before, we must be holding pastors and evangelists to accountability.
   We must each speak out against heresy, taking our case to "the great common
people of our churches."  Paul warned Timothy that some would fall away from
the faith and would begin to preach a different Gospel, and said that "in
pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of
Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound
doctrine which you have been following."  There is no joy in sounding the
alarm.  It is not a pleasant task to speak out against error in the church,
particularly when a popular and well-regarded teacher has strayed, but our
loyalty to the Savior demands it.  "I would like nothing better than to spend
my time painting the fresh, green pastures of Biblical truth," Hanegraaff
admits, "but when a wolf prowls the landscape, it is time for me to put down
my brush and take up a different tool.  To refuse this Biblical duty in favor
of more pleasant options is to demean Christ and to belittle the church He
bought with His own blood."
   We must withdraw our support from ministries that are found to be teaching
error.  The apostle John instructed the church that "anyone who goes too far
and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God...if anyone
comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your
house, and do not give him a greeting, for the one who gives him a greeting
participates in his evil deeds."  Indeed, how much more do we participate in
the evil deeds of the heretic when we continue to financially support his
ministry?  "Those who are feeding this cancer occupy some of the most powerful
platforms within Christianity", Hanegraaff writes; "they control vast
resources and stand to lose multiplied millions of dollars if they are
exposed."  We must at least make certain that we are not continuing to
contribute to their millions."
   Our passion for this cause must flow not out of anger toward the misguided
teachers -- we should grieve for them and for the souls they have misled --
but rather out of our conviction of the surpassing goodness of the genuine
Gospel that is sidetracked when error is allowed to prevail.  If we become
convinced of the urgency and immediacy of Christ's bona fide good news to our
world, it will be impossible for us to tolerate in silence the diversion of
human and material resources and energy to the preaching of falsehood.
   "I have not written to you because you do not know the truth", John said in
warning the church, "but because you do know it, and because no lie is of the
truth.  And who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ?"
   We owe our lives to the Shepherd.  Every one of the ninety-nine has felt
the fear of being the one small sheep, lost and struggling alone in the crags
and rocks of some distant canyon while hungry wolves looked down from the
cliffs above.  Every one of the ninety-nine has felt the joy and relief of
being lifted by powerful arms out of the brambles of the rocky crevice and
onto the broad shoulders of our rejoicing Shepherd.  How, then, can we stand
in silence while influential liars deny that Jesus saves?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MY QUARTERLY JOURNAL, WILD OLIVES.  OTHER WILD OLIVES
ARTICLES, INCLUDING "THE CHURCH AT ITS BEST" AND "MODERN DAY MARTHAS", CAN BE
DOWNLOADED FROM THE AOL CHRISTIANITY II LIBRARY.  EMAIL MJDIXON ON AOL.