Truth Matters from Pastor Dean Brdlik, June 19th
Yesterday I introduced new terminology to our church...”Moralist, Therapeutic, Deism” (MTD). George Barna, a well recognized Christian pollster and statistician, has found MTD has been embraced by today’s millennial evangelicals. The main tenets of MTD are:
Belief in a God who remains distant from people’s lives
People are supposed to be good to each other (i.e., moral)
The universal purpose of life is being happy and feeling good about oneself
There are no absolute moral truths
God allows “good people” into Heaven
God places very limited demands on people
Practitioners of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism are not anti-religion or anti-Christianity. They just are not willing to surrender themselves to Jesus Christ—or to believe that a real faith would even make such demands of them. According to Barna, “The fact that a greater percentage of people who call themselves Christian draw from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism than draw from the Bible says a lot about the state of the Christian Church in America, in all of its manifestations.” As he noted, “Simply and objectively stated, Christianity in this nation is rotting from the inside out.”
I think I know the reason...Christianity today has jettisoned having a personal relationship with Christ and substituted that with things like social justice, CRT, intersectionality, feminism, climate hysteria, globalism, etc. It is like a cancer eating at the soul of biblical Christianity. Today’s My Utmost for His Highest helps us recalibrate our thinking:
“Today we have substituted doctrinal belief for personal belief, and that is why so many people are devoted to causes and so few are devoted to Jesus Christ. People do not really want to be devoted to Jesus, but only to their causes. Jesus Christ is deeply offensive to the educated minds of today, to those who only want Him to be their Friend, and who are unwilling to accept Him in any other way. Our Lord’s primary obedience was to the will of His Father, not to the needs of people— the saving of people was the natural outcome of His obedience to the Father. If I am devoted solely to the cause of humanity, I will soon be exhausted and come to the point where my love will waver and stumble. But if I love Jesus Christ personally and passionately, I can serve humanity, even jthough people may treat me like a “doormat.” The secret of a disciple’s life is devotion to Jesus Christ, and the characteristic of that life is its seeming insignificance and its meekness. Yet it is like a grain of wheat that “falls into the ground and dies”— it will spring up and change the entire landscape (John 12:24).”
When we read or study the Word of God, we often get side-tracked into asking, “What significance did this have on David, or Paul, or John, or Abraham....ect. That is part of proper biblical interpretation, but the more important consideration is “what is my Lord trying to get across to ME personally?”...and “will I respond in faith to what the Lord is revealing to ME?” The question is: Are we devoted to Jesus Christ or some cause we gin-up ourselves? Let us be careful and discerning that MTD does not overtake us or our families. My prayer for you and me this day is: Lord, we live in a day of deception and self-indulgence. Many seem to be falling away from “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” (Jude 1:3) Keep us steadfast to our Lord Jesus and to His word. Won’t be popular, but it never has been. It is to You that we commit our lives. Amen.
Walk with the King today and be a blessing.
