The Sermon on the Mount Part 6

by Mike Ratliff

9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, 10 nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. 11 Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-11 NASB)

One marker missing from “Liberal Christianity” that is one of the major elements that disqualifies it from being genuine Christianity is its abandonment of Sola Scriptura. Because of that, all of those characteristics that makes Christianity Christian are gone such as believer’s living lives of repentance such as that “living sacrifice” analogy given to us in Romans 12:1 along with how from that flows genuine Spiritual growth into Christian maturity in Romans 12:2. With little to no emphasis on genuine Biblical repentance, “Liberal Christianity” simply tries to emphasize unity, political correctness, feelings, with a spiritual hit by using spiritual formation into all sorts of mysticism, but mostly these “churches” do everything they can to appeal to the world so the leaders in those “organizations” would never preach a sermon like our Lord preached in Matthew 5, 6, & 7. Why? Because it brings people face-to-face with their sinfulness. This is offensive and since these men refuse to proclaim the real gospel message of the good news of what God has done on their behalf that they could never do for themselves, they will never preach anything to offend anyone so the descent into darkness of Liberalism just speeds up with each compromise. 

When I was a relatively new Christian one Sunday morning our Pastor walked off the stage and sat down as three of our Deacons took his place. They then gave to us a very short, concise history of how they had been dealing with a man who was member of our church who had abandoned his wife and son to move in with his girlfriend. These Deacons followed the Biblical plan given to us in the New Testament of counseling this man singly at first then with two and then the most senior Deacon going with them to counsel the fellow. Even through several sessions with the man, he refused to repent, leave his girlfriend, and become reconciled with this wife. We went into a voting session and voted the man out of the church membership.

That was probably in 1987 or early 1988. I had never seen anything like that and have not seen it since. I shared that with some people I worked with who were professing Christians and a few of them got very angry and one even told me that it didn’t matter what the New Testament said, if you treat people like that, you are not expressing the love of God, et cetera.

³¹ “And it was said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife let him give to her a certificate of divorce.’ ³² But I say to you that everyone divorcing his wife except for the matter of fornication makes her to commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:31,32 Possessing the Treasure New Testament v1)

The Rabbis had taken Moses’ command of how to deal with an adulterous wife and turned into a legal process of divorce for any reason. However, Jesus tells us that God sees divorce as appropriate only in case of adultery. Also, if the fellow like the one in the example above divorced his wife to marry his girlfriend, he was committing adultery and forcing his ex-wife into adultery if she remarried. Now, as you can see, Andy Stanley’s examples in his cute little display here about homosexual couples committing adultery is totally bogus and unbiblical, which reveals a great deal about his liberalism.

My brethren, in our approach to our Lord’s commands, what we have to understand is that we must be neither liberal like Andy Stanley and those who emulate him in their simply shrugging them off nor must we fall into the error of Pietism by looking at the Sermon on the Mount and say things like, “God said it, I believe it, leave me alone!” No, we study what our Lord said and grow spiritually, presenting our bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is our spiritual service of worship. And we must not be conformed to this world, but become transformed by the renewing of our minds, so that we may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. (my paraphrase of Romans 12:1,2)

If we do that, will adultery be a problem? No, this is how we put into action taking up our cross and following Jesus. This is self-denial and God-focused living and worship.

Soli Deo Gloria!