“The Church and the Times”—Frank Pack

“The Church and the Times”—Frank Pack “THE CHURCH AND THE TIMES”
Lecture by Frank Pack, February 21, 1950, at Abilene
Christian College (7:30 p. m.)

I would like to open my remarks tonight by reading a passage from the word of God. Our reading is found in Matthew 16:1-4.

“The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven. He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in. the morning, It will be foul weather today: for the sky is red and lowering. 0 ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times? A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.” May God bless the reading of this portion of his holy word.

It comes to us on authority which cannot be said to be too reliable that when Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, Adam turned to Eve as they were leaving and said, “Dear, we are living in an age of transition.” There have always been changes, and every age can properly be said to be an age of transition, and yet I believe that there are certain periods in human history that are decisive periods—periods that are crucial, periods that are of such a character that decisions are made which affect human history for ages to come. And I believe that the age in which we are living happens to be one of those periods.

We are face to face in our time with twin instruments of self-destruction: atomic power and germ warfare which can wipe out what we know as civilization. Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, who is Chancellor of the University of Chicago, recently declared that the United States has stockpiled enough atomic bombs to' blot out every major city in the world, and that we have enough bacterial missiles to destroy all of the citizens of those cities who would not be killed by the atomic explosion. In a recent book Elton Trueblood wrote, “Millions are fatalistic. They feel utterly powerless iff the presence of forces which they can neither understand nor control. In spite of our proud achievement there is a widespread sense that we are waiting for a catastrophe.”* When men that are in high places talk to us in terms of this sort, we are made to feel that these are decisive times. They are times in which you and I are confronted as citizens of the world with some of the greatest problems and 'issues that have ever confronted man.

We sit in the security and peace of this land tonight. We enjoy the blessings and the freedoms which are ours as American citizens. And yet in the midst of our world there is feverish preparation for war. There is increasing talk of destruction, of warfare, of material power, until it is alarming to any person that is interested in' the cause of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Someone might say to me tonight, “Well, what has the church to do 'n thinking about the times? Why should it be bothered with thinking about these worldly things?” Dear friends, the church is a divine institution and it has a divinely given message to be sure. Rut at the same time it is composed of men and women who are living in the midst of time, immersed in the problems of time, and confronted bv the issues of the human predicament, in which all find themselves. With the message of the Lord that is desJgned to meet human needs, it will be able all the better to advance to meet the problems of our age if it understands in some way those times in which we are living. Therefore, in standing before you tonight for a little while, Ld like to have you see with me some conditions which I’m sure you may have recognized already. May we classify them in the way a physician might give you the symptoms of a disease, for we are living in a diseased world.

We have just come through a period of warfare and slaughter that is unprecedented in the history of the world. We have, engaged in two global conflicts that have shed so much blood that it is impossible for me to make any comparison that is adequate. Human suffering, sorrow, disappointment, and disease, and all that go stalking along in the train of war have been visited upon the human family in a way that is unprecedented. We have seen not only soldiers slaughtered by every device which the modern ingenuity of men can invent, but also we have beheld civilian populations rooted out from their homes and dwelling in concentration camps. We look upon cities that resemble graveyards more than they do places where human beings have lived. We look upon blackened earth and war orphans. Oh, can we ever forget, dear friends, those gas chambers and those piles of human ashes where men by the millions were murdered with planned intent? Can we ever erase from our minds those stacks of starved human bodies that were piled up like so many pieces of stove wood, looking more like demons from hell than like anything that resembles man made in the image of God ? Slowly, carefully, and with evil plan and satanic intent, they were starved to death because they happened to be in the way of the designs of those who were ruling and ruining the nations of the world. Can we ever forget those pictures of burned Japanese in the atomic explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How can any one stand up and talk about the inherent goodness of man? Not only has the war brought with it all of those things; in addition, it has brought hatred spewed out upon this world like a terrible vomit until men have been set at one another’s throats. Humanity (has lived and breathed the atmosphere of hatred until in our modern times there is confusion, there is mistrust, there is doubt, and men are set against men and nations are set against nations, and we talk about “blocks” now— blocks of nations blocking each other and not exactly knowing why we are blocking! Not only, dear friends, have we come through a period of warfare, but also the church is faced with a general indifference in the world, with an indifference that can be best described as a belligerent indifference. When you talk to somebody about the church, quite often you are met with this attitude: “‘I’m not interested in the church. I don’t care anything about the church. I’m not concerned about the church. I don’t want any of1 this ‘pie in the sky’ stuff that you’re talking about. I’m living for this life— I’m taking care of Number One. I’m following along the way that I think will bring me the most good.” It is that belligerent don’t care spirit that meets you as you go out to try to pierce the armor that is put up by men and women and get behind it to reach them with the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Our world is a world in which the major interests are secular. Ours is a money economy and a money world probably more than ever before in the whole history of human civilization. Oh, men have always been materialistic, to be sure, but the interesting thing of it is that today it is on such a tremendous scale. It is boomed at us from so many different angles. It encroaches upon us as Christians on every hand. We are confronted with this secularizing, pleasure-mad, self-gratifying spirit all about us. Men are willing to sell the moral life.of nations because of money. Men are willing for the sake of dollars to tear down the principles of truth and right-living in the lives of individuals. I walked into a drug store at Ballinger where I have been going and helping the church this winter. In meeting the druggist who wasn’t a member of the church, we talked a bit about just the general things that you would upon meeting a man before giving him an invitation to come to church. In the meantime there was a grown man who came 'in and bought some comic books. The druggist had them laid out over on one side of the store. I said to the druggist, “You sell quite a number of those?” “Oh,” he said, “Oh yes, and you ought to see some of the stuff we are selling. Why you fellows don’t know what is going on.” Of course, he was selling them—he was still getting money out of it—but he wanted me to see some of the stuff he had for sale over there! So I took a look. I found such comic books as “My Secret Love,” “My True Confession,” “Modern Romances,” and others. These things are no longer confined to the magazines written for adult consumption but are now placed in comic book form to influence and mold young and impressionable minds. Do you know what kind of comic books your children are reading? Do you know what kind of influences are shaping their minds and hearts? This kind of literature goes into homes and is read by the young with its damaging effect upon the fundamental principles of morality, and then we wonder why it is that juvenile delinquency is mounting at an alarming rate. This is just one illustration of what I mean in mentioning the secularism of our times. Men are willing for the sake of making their dirty dollars to stoop to any depths and to practice any kind of loathsome thing. It makes no difference how the money is made, just so it is made! This is an age which has refused to face sin. The idea of sin, it says, is an old-fashioned idea, a hangover from man’s prehistoric past. Our times desire to call it by some other name. We moderns speak of inhibitions, complexes, repressions, phobias, guilt feelings, but don’t ever use that terrible word “sin” because that will make some people feel that they are in a bad shape. And, interestingly enough, while we have driven sin out the front door by our new psychiatry and psycho-analysis and other forms of what is called the “newer psychology,” our age has been an age that has sinned on a more stupendous scale, I believe, than any other age in human history. I don’t see how a man, any man, can have the courage to stand up in the face of the brute facts of our times and talk about the essential goodness of humanity. Our times are times, too, in which intellectual sins are widespread. Atheism is no longer popularized in academic circles alone; it is fostered and featured by any number of different agencies and, instead of it being merely confined to a group of college professors or a group of college radicals who like to feel that they are somehow rebelling against the old order of things, it has become the evangelistic faith of millions of people in the modern world. Recently in the columns of the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that claims to have a very high-grade clientele, appeared an article written by W. T. Stace, who is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, in which he talked about our present situation. He said in that article that we are face to face with a tremendous problem—we are face to face with our destruction. But, he says, the interesting thing is that we cannot any longer as modern men believe in God and we cannot hold to the principles that God has put within this world. To believe in a personal God who has revealed himself in the Scriptures is outmoded. There isn’t any such thing as any right or wrong as such. So here we are face to face with a godless world, with God taken out of it. What are we going to do face to face with our own self-destruction in such a godless world? Here is all that he could give as an answer. We must all suddenly grow up so that we can more or less try to handle ourselves in the situation and make our way through because we don’t have any God upon whom to depend and to follow. These ideas are popularized through wide circles. Communism has taken up godlessness as one of its main articles of faith to present with a militant fervor. Don’t let anybody fool you that even Tito isn’t working with all the power that is at his disposal to wreck every vestige of any kind of religious faith regardless of however perverted it may be in the country over which he rules. We sometimes have tried to fool ourselves that he isn’t of the same stripe and color as the rest of them, but he walks down the same path and he presents the same evangelistic message. As this has been spread abroad atheism has gotten down into the working classes. You’ll run into it among day laborers. You’ll run into atheism now out in the rural sections. You’ll meet it on every hand —this militant, this evangelistic preaching of a godlessness that is the very destruction of all righteousness, truth, and morality in the midst of men. Not only has atheism been widespread, but in the various churches, particularly of the Protestant tradition, there .have come the teachings of what we call “modernism,” or modern liberalism, under various forms. You hear a lot about this word “modernism”—what is it? What is a modernist? What does a modernist believe? A modernist can’t accept a miracle as such. He must explain everything in terms of the natural categories of what he knows about science. He is a man that cannot believe in any supernatural power that has had any influence upon the course of man’s development religiously, or in the giving of the Bible to him. He must account for the origin of the church of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ upon the basis of processes — social processes — that can account for it without any supernatural power, without any revelation from God as such. When he talks about ’’revelation” he does not mean what you and I mean. He means that this prophet or writer has gotten hold of some great idea. He has seen it just as you can see mentally some great idea, and so he is “inspired” to write this book just as you might be “inspired” to write a letter home. The book has faults, it has limitations, and it has lots of things in it that one cannot accept. Thus the Bible becomes almost nothing in the world but a scrapbook, or, as one of them said, it is more like a museum of antique relics than anything else. Modernism takes a certain view toward Jesus; that he was only a man—:a man who lived in a backwoods part of a country in the corner of the Roman Empire, a man that was so limited in his world-view, a man that was so limited in his understanding that you can’t follow him as any model. And consequently, what must be done with Jesus is just to take out from his teachings certain things that are great principles and then leave the rest of it. He’s no standard or no norm. As one of my professors said on one occasion, “We should junk Jesus if necessary in order to establish a modern world-wide religion.” In other words, we will take all the religions of the world—they’re all on an equality; God is revealed in all of them, and God is revealed equally 'in all of them—and then we will pick out of all of these what we want for a new world faith. That kind of teaching has cut the heart out of religious faith in- our modern times.

I went to school with a young man who was a very bright young fellow. He was the son of a famous Methodist preacher, and this boy had a struggle, a tremendous struggle, as a student because of the fact that his father, high in the circles of the Methodist Church, had aroused so much antagonism against himself due to his stand for the fundamental principles of faith in the Bible and in the divinity of Christ. Recently I came across a paper than the boy and his father are publishing. They are believers in the inspiration of the Bible, in the virgin birth. They are believers in Jesus Christ as revealed in this Bible. They do not agree with you and me on many things, but when it comes to accepting the Bible as authority, and when it comes to the matter of believing in the Lord’s divinity, in his virgin birth, in his death for our sins, in his resurrection from the tomb, and in his ascension on high and his glorification, they say “yea and amen” right along with us. But here’s their situation. They have to raise money and send it in to boards in their church which are fighting not only what they are doing, but are permeating their church with modernism through every fibre and cord of its being, and tingeing that modernism with a lot of the “pinkishness” that goes along with it. We are living in a time, dear friends, when we see individuals all around us doubting, questioning. Oh, I know there are many things that I have left out. I cannot do more than, just sketch this picture for you. Yet, I think as I look out upon the world tonight I detect wistfulness that is there—a longing on the part of men, “Oh, I wish it were so. I wish it could be true.” The world is ignorant of the Bible and groping in the midst of all of the “isms,” the philosophies and doctrines of men, sometimes hoping against hope that somehow there might be some truth in this thing that is railed Christianity. One of my teachers several years ago said this to me one day, “My mother believed in the Bible and she was a devout woman of prayer. I have never known a life that was so serene and so filled with faith as was hers. I wish that I could believe it but I can’t.” The training, the atmosphere, the education he had received had so preiudiced his mind until that is where he stood.

What is the task of the church of our Lord Jesus? May I just suggest a few things humbly tonight? I know that many of you could make many and much better suggestions than mine tonight, but may I give these to you for whatever they may be worth for your thinking, and for the searching of your own soul? The members of the church, faced with such a great responsibility, ought to be willing to sit down and look at ourselves in. the light of God’s word. For every time that you come in contact with the word of God, that word judges you. It shows you where you are wrong. It points out your sins. It shows you where you are in need of God’s forgiveness, God’s help, God’s leadership, and God’s grace. And there is not anything that is so humbling to a man as to be confronted by the word of God and searched by the word to the very depth of his being. “For the word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow and is a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart” (Ileb. 4.12). When I read my Bible, I read about a man by the name of Simon Peter who, after Jesus had been teaching in his boat, was ordered by our Lord to shove out from the land and let out his net for a draught. And when he did so and the net was filled to the breaking, you remember what Simon Peter did. He fell, on his knees before Jesus and he said, “Depart from me, Oh, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” When Isaiah saw and was confronted with a great vision of the great, high, and holy God, lifted up and exalted m the Temple, the very first words that came to his lips were, “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I am dwelling in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” Until we are humble enough to be searched by the word of the Lord and when we are confronted by that word to realize that we are in need, we are lost, we are undone, and that many things are wrong with our lives, and that our motives and our intentions need to be brought into conformity to this will, I’ll tell you, dear friends, until we are willing to do that, we have not any right to talk to anybody else about what he ought to do. The church of our Lord must be a consecrated group. There must be utter devotion to God and to his will because Christ is our head, and if he is the head of the body, then the church itself must be like its Lord, and our Lord was devoted to God’s will completely. When I read in the Bible about Jesus, I’m so impressed with the fact that here was a man that lived for God, who lived for God’s will so completely that there was never a moment nor an hour of his life that he did not do the will of God. And he said. “It is my meat, it is the food of my spirit to do God’s will. I do not come down to do mine; I came to do the will of him that sent me.” Let me tell you, dear friends, we belong to the Lord. We are not our own. We are bought. We are redeemed and we belong to him. And it is his will that is our meat, it is his will that makes us and guides us, that molds us and shapes us. So it means utter devotion, utter devotion, to the will of God. What does God want me to do? What does God want me to be? What would God have me to say? How would God guide and direct my intentions and my thoughts? And to my fellowman there must be utter good will. For after all, I’m living as a Christian, a representative of God, and you as well are the Lord’s. As the Lord would have us to love and to live that love, so it is our task as members of the body of Christ to preach it and to live it in the midst of the community. It is the church’s responsibility, then, to preach and to teach love as God teaches us that love in the New Testament. Where am I going to start it? In my home. Where am I going to start it? In my own individual life in my contact with that man with whom I work. Where am I going to start living a life of love? In my local community with that neighbor across the street or next door. Where am I going to start my life of love? In that local congregation. I cannot talk about being a Christian in something out here that is nebulously called the church and say now I am loving the church if in the local congregation, which, after all, is the church of our Lord 'in that place, I’m not willing to live, to practice, and to preach the love of God and the love of my fellowman in every way possible along the way. The church of our Lord must stand firmly against the sins and the errors of our times. And that only comes as we are searched by the word of God and we are brought into conformity with that word. We must stand against evils of every kind, and against errors of every sort, that we might exalt the truth of God and the glory of God in the midst of men. Last of all, the church of our Lord in this day and age must reassert its faith in the Bible. We do not have to take any backseat before others that are fighting the faith. We can equip ourselves and train ourselves and get the tools at our disposal to go out and to meet the enemy on his own ground. We do not have to slay him with adjectives; we do not have to call him names in order to try to beat down his arguments. But we can meet him with the evidence in such a way that the man who would destroy the faith is the man that is put on the defensive. We must reassert our faith in a God that can be known, that is not separated from his people, that does understand our problems and is the God that Jesus revealed to us in his own holy word. The church must stand fearlessly and without apology against every “ism” and every idea that will destroy faith in the Bible as God’s truth and in its power to enlighten, to lead, and to guide us out of our human predicament, and to exalt the Saviour of the world who is our Lord and Master. Peter Cartwright, it is said, was preaching on one occasion in a church with the local preacher sitting behind him on the platform. In the midst of the sermon Andrew Jackson came into the audience and sat down. The local minister tugged at Cartwright’s coattail and when Cartwright leaned back he whispered, “Mr. Cartwright, Andrew Jackson has just come in.” Cartwright spoke out loudly in the same sort of rugged way for which he was noted, Andrew Jackson? Who is he? God Almighty will send his soul to hell if he doesn’t repent and obey him just as quickly as he will a Guinea Negro.” It is this sort of fearlessness the church must have in reproaching sin.

Oh, dear friends, it is a wonderful thing to be in the church of our Lord. It is a wonderful thing for us to be members of the body of Jesus Christ that he bought with his own blood. It is a wonderful thing to stand and to see the glory of God that is in the face of our Lord Jesus Christ, to be able to have the fellowship and the friendship with a Master that walks with us every step of the way—to be able to have that kind of fellowship that the New Testament talks about. Paul could say, “No longer do I live, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live, I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” No longer is this old Paul living— it is Christ that is living here. It is no longer this old man that is there—it is Christ that is dwelling there to dominate and control every thought, every word, every deed, all brought into captivity to the will of Jesus Christ. We belong to the church of Christ, the church of our Lord, the church of the Saviour, the church of our blessed Redeemer. We are grateful for that. We ought to form the kind of fellowship with him that means that our hearts and lives will be cemented together with him in such a union that death nor any other power can separate us from our Master and our Lord.

Two men walked along a road one day, so downhearted, so lacking in faith and confidence, so full of doubt. Then you remember that a third figure joined their company and as they walked along together he began to unfold the Scriptures and show to them that the Christ must needs suffer and rise from the dead the third day. And as they got to the little inn where they were going, these men turned in to the inn and Jesus made as though he would go on. They didn’t know who this stranger was, but their hearts had burned within them as he talked to them. And then, you remember that they constrained him, they plead with him to join them. “Abide -with us,” they said, “For it is toward even and the day is far spent.” And so they turned in together and sat down together to eat, and then they saw this stranger take the loaf as they had seen Jesus so often do and bless it and break it. No one had ever broken the bread like Jesus! And their eyes were opened that they knew him. They had been walking with the living Lord and did not know it. Do you know that the Master promises to walk with us every step of the way? Sometimes we are just like those men—we do not recognize him nor see him. Sometimes we leave him behind, yet it is the Lord we need to exalt and the Lord that we need to make, the Lord of our lives. You may be here tonight and you are not a Christian. The Lord’s invitation is extended to you to come in obedience to the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.