Jeremiah speaks of shepherds who are stupid, who have not sought the Lord’s advice. Instead of protecting, they cause God’s people to be destroyed. Zachariah speaks of shepherds who are foolish and worthless, who don’t seek the lost or heal the hurting. And Ezekiel speaks of God’s judgement against the false shepherds who let His sheep become prey and starved of food. 

This is a warning to the bishops and other denominational leaders to repent of wickedness and not to be conformed to this world. I think this is a stark reminder that the scriptures are challenging. They challenge us and that is the whole purpose of them because we are supposed to become better people. We are supposed to become good people. We are supposed to become holy people. 

I hope that we can challenge each other, and commune with each other as Christians. That is how we maintain His church by challenging each other in truth. 

To begin on a quotation from Jeremiah which I think is a stark reminder of how abrupt the scriptures can be – “For the shepherds are stupid and do not inquire of the Lord.” 

Christ instituted His church for us and for the Father. For us, that we have a place to prepare ourselves; a place to teach of His good news that if we repent of our sins and have faith in Him we can be saved through baptism and water and through the Holy Spirit. A place for us to gather as He commanded because when two or three are gathered, He is with us. A place for us to join with each other in communion. A place to join with Him in communion. When we receive His body and His blood, we experience a small piece of His heavenly kingdom. A place for the Father in that we have a place to worship Him, to give Him thanks and praise. We are insufficient to offer Him any sacrifice worthy of His greatness. Therefore, He has provided us with the Eucharist so that we may enter into Christ’s perpetual sacrifice; a memorial of His one-time death upon the cross for us. We remember His resurrection and glorification and hope to share in it with a bodily resurrection of our own on the day of judgment; but it is all for God’s glory. 

We sometimes forget that the church is not a transaction, that it is not about what we get out of it or how it makes us feel, but it is a time that we consecrate as holy, set apart, by literally dedicating it entirely to Him. We may aim to pray ceaselessly the rest of the time as He has asked us to do, but we are fallen and we lapse. We focus on our jobs, on our families, on our other wants and needs. But at least in church, we are reminded that we are here for His greater glory, for His praise and worship of Him. 

That is why it is so important to find a biblically orthodox church. The moment the church stops being about those things, the moment the church becomes focused on worldly facts as it stops being transcendental, it stops being a conduit to the heavenly kingdom and it becomes tethered to the very same world it obsesses over. 

Church leaders are men like the rest of us. All of us have fallen, we are all sinners. We falter, we take misguided paths so it’s no surprise that church leaders do the same. The devil sneaks in through good intentions. The old adage says “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. They say that for a reason. When a church leader talks about paying a hundred million pounds or even 1 billion pounds for reparations, they think they are doing something nice. When a church leader says there are 99 genders and we must be accommodating to all of them. They think they are doing something nice. And when a church leader says abortion is healthcare and it is a woman’s right to choose, they think they are doing something nice.

I do not think any of them set out to do evil deeds yet that is where we find them. Whilst they may think they are doing nice things, they’re not doing good things. Matthew’s gospel tells us to be aware of wolves in sheep’s clothing and that we will know them by their fruit. The fruit of these church leaders is bad. It’s rotten. The church leader who wants to pay reparations for the transatlantic chattel slave trade forgets that no one alive today was the victim of slavery. No one alive today was the owner of a slave. He forgets that the church’s role is not to fix historical worldly issues, but to teach repentance and salvation. He does not see how divisive his idea is or how patronising or insulting it is to the ethnic minority people he wishes to help. The church leader who says there are 99 genders and forgets that the scriptures teach that God made us in His image and that He made us male and female. He forgets that it is impossible to be in the wrong body because man is made of body and soul and therefore it is no more possible to be in the wrong body than it is to be in the wrong soul.

The preposition “in” is preposterous because we are our body and we are our soul. He forgets that it is not the church’s job to be inclusive in the sense that the church should welcome everyone; it’s to be changed through an encounter with Christ. The church should not welcome anyone to come as they are and stay as they are. We are to repent of our sins and to strengthen our faith in Christ. We follow Him, not ourselves and certainly not the world. The church leader who thinks abortion is healthcare has dropped his shield and has found himself deceived by the father of lies. Words no longer mean what they should and in fact are used in the opposite way of what they were intended for. That is the work of the enemy. There is no health care in abortion. Ending the life of another human being is not healthy and it is not caring, certainly not for that human being. Abortion may well be the greatest evil in the world and we probably commit it more than any other. Abortion is the biggest killer of people in the West, and we are living through a mass genocide and we don’t even realise it. When a church leader talks about a woman’s choice, he forgets that ending life is not a woman’s choice anymore than it is a man’s choice, it is a choice reserved for God. God, and only God, has the power and the authority to create and to end life.

So we must pray. We must pray for our church leaders. We must help them to avoid the pitfalls laid out by the evil one. We must remind our church leaders that they are not an authority. They are servants, bishops, priests, pastors, elders. Call them what you like, but church leaders are there to serve a community, to serve God’s children. Church leaders have no power or authority of their own. God is our ultimate authority, and the scriptures are an authority as His written word. They are our ultimate earthly authority, if you will. Everything should be tested through them but not on our own. The moment we rely on personal interpretation, we risk falling into error and heresy, wokeness. The church collectively through the Holy Spirit interprets the scriptures. 

Church tradition is important because it unites us with our forefathers, with the church fathers, with the apostles, and with Christ. Uniting our faith with theirs through the lens of the apostles – through the anchor of the scriptures – is how we try at least to remain rooted in the truth. We can take scripture for granted, the enemy has been busy. We as Christians know that God wins the war in the end, but the enemy is trying to win as many small battles along the way as he can. These culture wars that we find ourselves in, they’re not cultural, they are spiritual. This is a spiritual war and it is not even ours. We find ourselves caught up in a war that has been going on since long before we were around and one that goes on until the end of time itself. That might seem intimidating, but hopefully it can provide some perspective too.

The devil cannot create; God is our creator. The enemy manipulates creation. He takes something good, something true or something beautiful and he makes it evil, he makes it false and he makes it ugly. And he does this as an affront to God. Take these three examples we’ve mentioned, for example, race, gender, abortion. These are all tools in the enemy’s chest, many weapons in his arsenal. We could talk about feminism, sexuality,  and Mohammedanism, but let us take a look at the three we have raised already. 

Race is clearly not just a social construct.  It is a very modern one. Historical texts, including the Scriptures, do not talk about human beings in the way that we do today. They do not segregate people by skin color. In the Bible, we often read about the Jews and the Gentiles, in church history we read about Moors Turks, even Persians. It is only in recent times that we have referred to people as black, white, Asian or other. Christ told us that there is neither Jew nor Greek because our immutable characteristics in that sense are superficial. 

God came to earth as man incarnate in the person of Jesus, fully God and fully man to offer us all eternal salvation. He grafted the gentiles in with the Jews, and He offered us the ability to become His adopted children through baptism in water and the Holy Spirit. We become adopted children of God no matter our ethnicity or even our nationality. So when churches jump on board with modern ideas like Black Lives Matter, what they’re actually doing incidentally is to undermine the scriptures. They are saying skin color does matter; it is a defining characteristic. What we should be hearing instead is that our identities are found in Christ alone. We are to love our neighbor as ourselves and we are to love Jesus in each other. We have to be taught to see Jesus in each other, not to see what’s on the surface. 

Churches that under to black communities or Hispanic communities or indigenous communities, they are failing in their duty to cater to God’s community. We cannot be united in Christ if we are separated in worldly constructs. And that is not to say that churches cannot take aboard local culture, but that culture of the church should be the predominant culture, not the culture of the world.

Gender. This issue is tricky because gender is the total opposite of race.  Race is irrelevant, gender is not. When I am talking about gender, obviously I am talking about sex because the two are one and the same. Christ made man and He made woman for man.  He said, “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Genesis 2:18.  Men and women share a lot in common. We are the same species after all, but more importantly, we are all made in the image of God. However, men and women are not the same. Men are faster, stronger, more logical and women are fairer, softer and more emotionally intelligent. But because we have such a broad spectrum of people each having unique gifts and many similarities as well, people conflate the exception with the rule. People see a strong fast woman or a fair soft man and assume that we are all the same. This is a logical fallacy.

Even today, just me saying those words, people’s hackles will be going up. People will say it is not just men who are strong and fast; It is not just women who are fair and soft and mutually intelligent. This is old fashioned thinking. In scripture, men provide and protect and women nurture. Women are to be obedient to their husbands. Men are meant to serve their wives. The two go hand in hand. People often say the first part and forget the second. They think something’s misogynistic or sexist but it is about how we work together as a species for the greater glory of God. Men are meant to put food on the table, to take their family to church. Women are meant to raise their children and to teach and to love them. Fathers are meant to love their children and to discipline their children whereas mothers are meant to nurture them.

However, feminism came along and said women are equal to men, men can become women and women can become men. This was long before people took it literally as the trans movement, which is relatively new. Feminism said women are equal to men which of course sounded nice which goes back to that word “niceness.” But “niceness.” is  misleading because feminism is the work of the enemy. Of course, men and women are equal in terms of dignity and worth in the eyes of God. But we are not the same, we are not equal in the sense of being interchangeable.

The enemy has whispered into our ears and persuaded us that we are; we have women acting as men and men acting as women. The feminists said even that is not enough; it is saying, women are better than men. If today, you take a microphone out on the street of any major city in the western world, do some box pops and ask the general public, random people, do we need women? The answer will be yes, of course. Then ask those very same people this question; do we need men? The answer sadly will be no. The enemy has convinced secular society that women are important and that men are worthless. Why? 

Because feminism makes women vulnerable. If men are there to serve and protect women and children, remove the men or make them effeminate, then women become an easy target for the enemy. The devil can then tell them to sacrifice their offspring on his altar. The enemy will say it is okay, it is a fetus not a baby, it is just a clump of cells. 

Abortion. The enemy says to be a true woman, you need to be like a man. You need to be totally independent. You need to be free to live your life without the burden or the consequences of your actions. It makes sex no longer an act of union between a married man and a married woman. It is no longer two becoming one flesh under the eyes of God open to be blessed with children. Sex is about personal desire, pleasure. We have a word for personal desire in the church – that is called sin. Why would God make something that feels so good a sin? 

The enemy says, “Be free. Be free to sleep with whomever you choose. You have no need to get married. Marriage is outdated”. The enemy will say marriage is outdated which is a lie; it is a sacrament. The enemy will say it is not a sacrament, it is a contract for tax purposes so the government can control you. If contraception fails or you forget, you can take the morning-after pill and if that fails, you can always abort the fetus. It is not a baby, remember, it is a fetus. It is a technical term, it is scientific. Of course it is an attempt to separate us from the emotional reaction of killing our own offspring. It is used to divorce us from our consequences and our consciousness which God gave us to help guide us on the right path along with the scriptures.

But the enemy says, “Don’t worry. Why would you want to tie yourself down with a baby? It’s an unfortunate consequence of a fun time. Go to ‘family planning’”: yet another wicked twist of words. There is no planning and the abortion after the visit means there is no family either. “Get rid of the baby,” they say; “so that you can be free.” Every time the enemy seeks to be free, he is really saying be free to sin, be a slave to sin. 

True freedom, the only freedom that matters, is obedience to God, following God’s good order for our lives. God as our father loves us unconditionally and He provides for and protects us. He provides us with His laws to protect us from ourselves and from our own worst intentions. The enemy pretends that freedom is absence of law, the absolute ability to do whatever we choose without care for the consequences. It is individualism which is actually idolatry of the self. It is making gods of ourselves and denying the authority of the one true God. Be wary! When our church leaders talk about these modern issues, pray that they refer back to the church, to the scriptures and do not rely on their own intellect, or worse, on the pressures of the secular world around them. Pray for our leaders; pray with our leaders and encourage them to stand firm in the faith. Enable them to be soldiers for Christ so that sheep are not lost. 

This is not about the church being seen as modern or nice in the eyes of the world. This is far more important than that, this is about salvation. Lives are at stake, not mortal lives but eternal lives. God offers us eternal salvation. We get one shot at this – to choose Him or to deny Him. If we truly love the people around us, if we love our neighbor as ourselves, we are here to help them get into heaven. Our calling to disciple the nations was not for the purpose of spreading the Christian religion. To disciple the nations is to evangelize. It is to help souls to live forever in heaven rather than burn forever in hell.

There is nothing more serious, more important or more urgent than that. On Judgment Day when our Lord judges; if we know Him and if He knows us and He invites us into His kingdom, let us go in the knowledge that we have led as many souls to Him as possible. That we did not focus on our own salvation, but we focused on that of everyone else around us. Let us do for others what Christ did for us. In essence, let us save the world, for shepherds are stupid and do not inquire of the Lord.

Amen.