When you think you're not needed, the city still calls

Between about 1890 and 1940 there were major centers of fundamental Bible-believing and Bible-preaching located in major metropolitan areas. Chicago at one time was the mecca of fundamental Christianity.

“One of the failures of fundamental evangelicalism in the last half of the last century was abandoning the cities of our country, and what happened was as the cities began to develop more problems, evangelicalism moved to the suburbs and left the inner cities without a real fundamental evangelical witness,” says Preacher Richard Jordan. “The reality is 53 percent of the U.S. population lives in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of our nation.

“Back in that era when there was such a tremendous recovery of Bible truth, and a recovery of the understanding of the Word of God and the Bible-believing section of the church was alive and vibrant all across America, understanding right division and dispensational things was on the front-burner.

“Men like J.C. O’Hair and C.R. Stam and people of that nature were pressing and every region of the country had major witnesses to these truths. There were hundreds and hundreds of ministries involved in that kind of thing and it was in the late ’40s when these things began to be resisted.

“In the late ’30s when O’Hair was expelled from the independent fundamental churches of America, and grace people were no longer welcome there because they didn’t practice water baptism and so forth, O’Hair gave a warning and he said if the fundamentalist church doesn’t progress on with the understanding of the distinctive ministry of the Apostle Paul (that is, they understand the difference between the prophetic program and the mystery program, between Israel and the Body of Christ, and understand that our ministry today is found in the ministry Christ gave us through the Apostle Paul), it’s going to be chastised, (O’Hair used the word scourged) ‘with the rod of Pentecostal fanaticism.’

“That warning came true starting in the early ’60s with the beginning of what is now known as the Charismatic Movement. It actually began in an Episcopalian church out East but it quickly spread through all of evangelicalism, and what the Charismatic Movement does is they put experience above sound doctrine.

“I Timothy 4:1-2 says, [1] Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;
[2] Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;

“The word seduction means to draw you away from what’s right with the promise of physical delight; physical ecstasy. You have an experience and leave sound thinking and follow the experience.

“Paul says we ‘walk by faith and not by sight.’ You think about your evangelical friends out there that you know. How many of them follow that principle? I just had a grace preacher tell me two weeks ago, ‘We don’t need to be talking about the doctrines of the unity of Spirit, we just need to keep the unity,’ meaning we all just need to get together and sing Kum Ba Yah. But the unity is based on the doctrine; there’s some truth. Paul said, ‘I would that you all speak the same thing.’ There’s some truth to understand.

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“No matter when you’re born, you live through each of the four seasons if you live a normal long life, and the time you make the most difference is in wintertime.

“Once in every life you go through the opportunity to live that once-in-a-lifetime privilege of making or breaking the heart of the future. Maybe you’re young, middle-aged or an elder when you go through it, but winter’s that once in a lifetime opportunity to heal or to destroy the soul of a people that goes through that next cycle. It’s a critical time, critical opportunity.

“The last time we turned from fall to winter, all it took was a financial collapse. The time before that it just took an election; the election of President Abraham Lincoln. The time before that it just took a little insignificant Boston Tea Party. Just throwing some tea off of a ship. Didn’t mean a lot at the time; nobody recognized it as much, but we remember that as the spark that ignited the revolution of our country and its independence. Every season turns that way on those events.

“The last winter, you know what that was? It was the era that gave birth to what we know as the Grace Movement. J.C. O’Hair became pastor of North Shore Church in 1924. He died in 1958 as pastor of the church. Almost 35 years of ministry. The heyday of the grace movement as we’ve come to understand it was there. The big names you hear—C.R. Stam, Charles Baker, J.C. O’Hair—that was their era. Baker and Stam were young men and Mr. O’Hair was an old man, but that was the era.

“Now, I’m no O’Hair and you’re no Stam or Baker, but we don’t need to be. All we need to be is who we are. All we need to be is where we are, taking advantage of who we are to the fullest to be for that season who it will need us to be.

“It has nothing to do with comparing yourself, or making yourself, or trying to be something you aren’t; it just has to do with being wise. The issue in decision-making, and the issue in the will of God; there’s no ‘Macedonian Call.’ God isn’t going to send down a lightning bolt from heaven and say, ‘I’ve anointed thee with this ministry.’

“Here’s some things I know generally, personally, individually. Paul tells Timothy, ‘Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee.’

“That’s not in the sense of the philosophers who say, ‘Know thyself and to thyself be true.’ That’s nonsense. If you want to know yourself, get in the Book! But there is another sense in which you need to understand who you are; your proclivities, your tastes, your likes, your dislikes, your skills and your abilities.

“There’s never been anyone I’ve ever met that couldn’t be my leader in some area and I want them to be my leader in that area because I’m weak there and I need help and I can make them my leader.

“I work with people all the time and I don’t try to be somebody’s leader. They don’t want me to lead them, fine; I’m willing not to be led by me. But I want other people to lead me if I can find somebody who knows something about something I don’t know about. Lead and I’ll follow.

“If you do that and you practice that in your life, what you’ll find is if you’ll let other people lead in their areas of leadership where they ought to, and you train them to do that and teach them that you count on them to do it, then in your areas of leadership they’ll follow you and they’ll be with you. But it means you need to know where your strengths and weaknesses are and how you fit.

“The idea is to magnify the positive and accentuate it and build and construct and make better all the other. The only way you do that is with other members of the body. A body of Believers gets together and the whole is so much bigger than the sum of the parts when it functions together. That terrible word they use in marketing, synergy, is a truth.

“There are two words the New Agers hijack, and I think it’s a shame, and the one is synergy and the other is serendipity. Serendipity is a great word that means ‘the fortuitous convergence of events.’ That’s what happens in life often and what a wonderful thing it is when life works that way.

“Let me tell you about this competition where horses were pulling a horse pull. One horse pulled four tons and the other horse pulled 4½ tons and then they hooked them together. The two together didn’t pull 8 ½, they pulled 12. You say, ‘Where’d that extra three and a half come from?!’ It’s called synergy.

“The combination of the two is bigger than either of the parts by themselves. That’s where some of the power in the local assembly and the functioning. You work together and you have a unity of purpose and an identity together and your heart goes the same way.

“It doesn’t mean that there isn’t diversity; it’s that the diversity doesn’t become division because you aren’t the issue. My idea isn’t the issue. The work is the issue--the truth, what’s really valuable to the front. Great discipline that is, great discipline.

“You learn so much about yourself and the work of the ministry. I know that the key issue and objective in the work of the ministry is to get people saved and to get them into the Book, so they learn to grow and function together and go out and reproduce the cycle.

“What I just described to you is the work of a local church. The primary vehicle for the carrying out of the work of the ministry in the dispensation of grace is the local church because the local church is the local manifestation in a particular geographic location of the Body of Christ and of who we are in Christ.”