top of page
Aug 63 min read

Speaking Truth To Power


Sunday, August 4th, 2024

 

Speaking Truth To Power If the church does not affect the culture, the culture will affect the church.

 

Speaking This Week Pastor Hylan Slobodkin


The Renaissance Pleasure Faire story, 1977:

  • 1st – four monks

  •  2nd – five Puritans

 

Who was John the Baptist?  He came in the spirit and power of Elijah.  Who was Elijah?  He went right to the evil king, Ahab, and spoke truth to power.  Noah was a preacher of righteousness.  How do we know?  Because that’s what Peter calls him in 2 Peter.  Noah couldn’t avoid sin.  It was all around him.

 

Genesis 6:5 (NASB)

 

Jesus called out sin wherever He went.  “Go and sin no more!”  He called the ruling scribes, Pharisees, and political leaders: hypocrites, blind guides, whitewashed tombs, fools, serpents, a brood of vipers.  “Outwardly you appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”  He spoke truth to power.

 

John 2:13-16 (NASB)

 

Wurmbrand and his wife, Sabina, attended the meeting.  In his classic book, Tortured for Christ, he wrote, “Sabina told me, ‘Richard, stand up and wash away this shame from the face of Christ!  They are spitting in His face.’  I said to her, ‘If I do so, you lose your husband.’ She replied, ‘I don't wish to have a coward as a husband.’”

 

Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas

“As it happened, what Bonhoeffer so clearly said in ‘The Church and the Jewish Question’ was not at all clear to most pastors in Germany.  They balked at its conclusions, which seemed to them premature and radical.  Even many of those whom Bonhoeffer knew to be his allies in this fight thought he was being unmeasured and hasty in pushing them to take a united and dramatic stand against the Nazis.  Surely the Nazis might be reasoned with.  Surely things would shape themselves in a more positive direction over time.  It would never do for august pastors and ministers to seem unreasonable, or nakedly political, or – God forbid – political enemies of the state.

 

This was tremendously frustrating for Bonhoeffer, because he knew that unless the German Church leaders clearly saw the urgency of what was happening and acted with even greater urgency, all would be lost.  As long as they dithered and debated, the Nazis would retain the upper hand, and would win.  Did these pastors not understand that things had changed dramatically and that they must respond dramatically?  With each day that passed, the deeply unscrupulous Nazis masterfully exploited the scrupulousness – or actually the overscrupulousness – of the timid pastors, and thereby consolidated more power.  The clock was ticking, and Bonhoeffer saw that if the German Church was not decisive and heroic in that hour, it would soon lack even the ability to fight back.  It would be taken away from them.  Indeed, it was being taken away from them with every minute that passed.  The window was closing on whatever chances they had.

 

Did they not understand that actually being a follower of Jesus entailed radical obedience?  What had become of their faith so that it was now so flabby and unable to stand against the enemies of God in their time?”


We’re supposed to bring our faith into these places; not hide in a religious corner.  God calls us to apply our faith in every sphere of influence, into all aspects of society, and to affect culture for His sake and for the gospel.

 

In the last chapter of his book, Letter to the American Church, Metaxas writes this:

“The question comes to us in the American Church all these years later: Will we heed Bonhoeffer’s cry for a full-throated faith that does not hope, but the knows God has defeated death, and that lives in a way that makes this plain to anyone who cares to see?  Will we kick away the traces of our dead religiosity and fear-based pieties and speak truth whenever we have that opportunity, come what may?  Will we wipe away the false boundaries between our faith and everything else – whether ‘politics’ or culture – and act as though Truth is a Person who knows no bounds, who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, and who died that we who are the crowns of God’s creation might at last live in true freedom, with the authority that He gave us when He died and rose from the grave?”


Download the 08-04-24 Sermon Documents Here:



Comments

bottom of page