Richard Beck 5-10-26

I'm excited to be with you this morning as Shane is on his sabbatical. One of my. One of the great pleasures of my life is I get to spend time with different churches from lots of different denominations. I spend time with Presbyterians and Catholics and Methodists and Nazarenes. And whenever I sit with my host, they ask me, where do you go to church?

And I say, I go to the Highland Church of Christ. And then the next question is obvious. What is a church of Christ? And I, for years, man, I felt awkward trying to answer that question, like, as a part of some, like, weird cult, you know, and. And I was a little embarrassed by some of our history, but I, I.

Over the last 10 years, I had be. Be become increasingly excited to tell the story of where I am located in, in the Christian landscape, because I think there are some things that are part of the churches of Christ that have given us a lot of good DNA. I would even describe it this morning as kind of an immune system for resistances to a lot of things that are going on in our culture. Sicknesses that I think are affecting and making parts of Christianity pretty feverish. And so what I want to do this morning, just take the opportunity to kind of walk through the answer that I give to these churches.

Why am I a member of the Church of Christ? And why do I think this is a really great place to be investing my life? And so here's the list. It's not a full list, but it's a lot of things I talk about. And I begin with the sacraments.

I begin with the Lord's supper and baptism. So let's start at the beginning. Why are we here today, your Church of Christ? This is a quiz. Are you here for the sermon?

No. We can skip the sermon, right? Are you here for the worship service? Yeah, but we can skip the worship service I was taught growing up in the Church of Christ. Why do we gather, everybody?

We gather to celebrate the Lord's supper. And yes, we will hear his sermon, and yes, we will experience praise. But the one thing that is absolutely necessary, the one thing that calls us out of. Out of the world to this place, is Christ's call to his table. And what I love about that is how it kind of marginalizes us in a Christian landscape that has become increasingly consumeristic, where an entertainment culture is on the rise.

We don't gather around a charismatic speaker. You can say, like, that's totally true today, like, and we don't. We don't gather to hear a praise band concert. We Gather around the celebration of the Lord's Supper. And I think that's good DNA.

It's a good part of our immune system to remember that it's Christ we gather around and not ourselves. It helps us resist the consumerism that is afflicting a lot of, like, church shopping, as we even describe it. Also baptism. Now, again, baptism has been a worrying aspect of our history. We have typically used the way we thought and taught about baptism as a boundary marker that anybody that disagreed with us on our baptismal theology, we questioned their salvation.

And that is. Thankfully, that's not Highland, as Highland says there is. How many churches in Abilene? There's one church in Abilene. So we don't use our baptismal theology to question the salvation of our brothers and sisters of Christ in Abilene and around the world.

And yet on the inside among us, baptism is absolutely essential. Baptism is absolutely essential, and it's the foundation of. Of the Christian life. So this hasn't been said clearly to our young people. Baptism is the critical hinge point of your story.

It is not optional. It is vital that we're drawing you into that identity, that baptismal identity, as that's a part of our. Our pathway. And one of the things I love about that is how it pushes back on another temptation in our culture, and that's the individualism, because you can't be saved all by yourself in a quiet room. You have to have a church to baptize you.

And it pushes against the individualism in our culture to realize that God is saving a people, God is saving a church, and that you need a church to be baptized. So those are two quick things that I talk about. How we think about the Lord's Supper, how I think about baptism. But then I quickly get to our most famous thing, acapella music. Now, again, I used to be embarrassed about this because this was another one of our boundary markers, that if you worship with an instrument, your salvation was at risk.

Let me be honest. The first service people are really worried about y'. All. Okay? I mean, they're.

They're a little anxious about what's happening here. Okay. Now. And so we obviously know that, like, that we've moved past that anxiety. And Janet and I were second service people.

We love contemporary praise music, and we love the old hymns as well, but so pivoted away from being embarrassed about it. But more and more especially, as you see that entertainment culture take over Christian worship, where there is a kind of a passivity that is settling into us that. That the band is so good and so excellent, we can go quiet. And so one of the things I love about being raised church of Christ is congregational singing. I sat in a pew on Sunday evenings with about 20 other people in the Erie Church of Christ in an un air conditioned room and we would have on the fifth Sunday of every month a hymn sing and that still today is my heart language with the Lord.

And so although I love instrumental music, I, I love how you raised me to be a singing Christian. And let's not let our praise ever go quiet in the pews. And Highland does an excellent job of this. We keep the decimals at a level where we can hear ourselves. We tune the instruments to suit voices and not the instrumentalists.

There are things that we do to kind of keep us safe singing. So Highland, keep singing. One of my favorite quotes from St. Augustine is this. The one who sings prays twice okay, the next one. We are a part of an Arminian tradition.

Apologies, things got nerdy real quick right there. So let me explain. There's been a quarrel in Protestantism for about 500 years between the Calvinists and the Arminians. John Calvin on one side and Joseph Arminius on the other side and the Church of Christ. And you might not know this, and that's one of the reasons we're talking about this is we, we've landed on the Arminian side of this, of this debate.

Now you might not have heard these names, but you might have bumped into language that, that has been a part of this debate. Like have you heard of original sin? Or have you heard of total depravity? Have you wondered about predestination and its relationship to free will? Arminians are on the free will side.

We believe in free will. We don't believe people are predestined for damnation or salvation. That's more on the Calvinist side. But again, this part of our DNA is drifting. Just last year I was invited to they come talk to some ACU students in a chapel where they had serious concerns and questions about free will and predestination.

And I had to come in and this is at acu, a Church of Christ school, and remind them that we're Arminian. We do believe in free will. We don't believe that God picks and chooses who's going to heaven or to hell. Now be clear. I understand what my Calvinist brothers and sisters are trying to do.

I consider them Christians. But I have a quarrel with them on this, what's called the doctrine of election. That, that Amongst the damned, God picks a few, the elect and predestined to save those few. Arminians believe. By contrast, the the the confession that comes out of scripture from First Timothy chapter 2, verses 3 and 4, where it reads that God our Savior desires that all people to be saved and come to the knowledge of truth.

God desires that all, not a few, not some, not just the elect, but all people would come to salvation. That God is all the time and everywhere making his appeal. God is all the time, everywhere, addressing the human heart. God is all the time, every year, willing the salvation of every human soul. And for me, I find that a very energizing evangelistic mission that I can participate in making that appeal.

That God is all the time, everywhere, chasing every human heart. And I think that evangelistic urgency is increasingly necessary in a culture that is drifting away from Christianity. The need for evangelism is something we need. And I love how that Armenian tradition that God is saving everybody always sets me up for that, for that calling. My next A is amillennial.

So what is amillennial? What have the Church of Christ historically believed about the end times? What have we traditionally believed about what's called eschatology, the end of the world? And we have historically been what is called amillennial, as in no millennial reign. It's probably easiest to understand amillennialism by comparing it to its pronoun predominant contrasting view called pre millennialism.

If you ever read like the Left behind novels or seen some of the Kirk Cameron movies, you've probably bumped into like pre millennial beliefs. And there are different kinds of premillennial beliefs, but they all have kind of a series of end times events. They order them in different sequences. But you might have heard some about some of these end time events. One is like the Rapture, where the elect are raptured off into heaven.

You might have heard about the rise of the global Antichrist who takes over the world. You might have heard about the Tribulation, a season of persecutions that Christians must endure, a climactic battle of Armageddon and then eventually the thousand year reign of Christ. And at the very end, the judgment. The church of Christ did not believe in any of that. We have believed that all biblical prophecy has already been fulfilled, except one.

That's the second coming of Christ. All biblical prophecy has already been fulfilled, except for the coming of Christ. And the coming of Christ is absolutely unpredictable. Absolutely unpredictable. Spend as much time on YouTube as you want.

Absolutely unpredictable. It comes as a what a thief in the night, absolutely unpredictable. And how quickly does it happen? In the twinkling of an eye. It happens.

Thief in the night, twinkling of an eye. And so I was raised to believe that the only pressing end times concern upon me wasn't anything geopolitically that was unfolding, was just who knows when it's going to happen and when it's going to happen. It's going to happen lightning fast. But my calling is to just do what? Be ready.

To just be watchful and ready. Like the, the ten prepared virgins in Jesus's parable. I'm just ready all the time. And I'm always praying, come Lord Jesus. I'm just trying to be a better person today than I was yesterday.

And that's my only concern. And so let me say this very clearly from an amillennial perspective. There is nothing currently happening in the Middle east, nor will there ever be anything that happens in the Middle east that affects the second coming. I'll say it again, there's nothing currently happening in the Middle east, nor will there ever happen anything in the Middle east that will affect the timing of the second coming. And I think that historical teaching in the church of Christ is good for our immune system.

And there are three things that I think that I take as good fruits from this. Number one, it prevents you from a lot of conspiracy theories.

It really helps you resist conspiratorial thinking, trying to crack the code about the timing of it. Again, if you're on YouTube too much, you're allowed to just go. Like, who knows, you're allowed to just go out. Nobody knows you're allowed to do that. It's how I was raised.

Secondly, I think it prevents a lot of generational narcissism.

For thousands of, you know, thousands of years, Christians have been predicting the end of the world. And every generation thinks it's going down in their generation. So it kind of displaces our egos a little bit. Maybe you're just going to have a normal Monday.

And so just be a good person. But the third thing, and this is actually, to me, one of the pressing issues I wanted to bring this up, is it allows us to look at the troubles in the Middle east with the heart and the compassion of God. You do not have to partial out your compassion. You don't have to limit or circumscribe your love or your care for that troubled part of the world. You are allowed to love everybody equally.

You don't have to let your love choose a side. And so if somebody is in pain. You're allowed to weep for them. And if you see an atrocity, you're allowed to rage about that. One of the blessings I think of an amillennial eschatology is that you get to love the Middle east with the whole heart of God.

And that brings me to my, my last a, ah political, I could say non political, but I really like the A's. And so I went with ah, political, non political. Now I was raised in the church of Christ and I was taught in Sunday school that Christians do not vote. That's a Church of Christ thing. It comes from David Lipscomb.

Does my know Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. Right. It's so Lipscomb University, one of our schools named after David Lipscomb and David Lipscomb after the Civil War, taught in the Gospel Advocate, big brotherhood newspaper that Christians should not vote. This is what he, what Lipscomb wrote. He said to vote or use the civil power is to use force.

Right. To vote is to use force and carnal right, worldly weapons. And Christians cannot use these. To do so is to do evil so that good might come. And this is forbidden to Christians.

To do so is to fight God's battles with the weapons of the evil one. To do so. To vote is to distrust God. Now admittedly that's a minority view in the churches of Christ. Christ.

But it's been a, it's been a stream that I was trained in. Like I still to this day feel guilty voting. I feel contaminated, like I touched some unholy thing. Like I still, it's, it get that stuff gets in your head. And, and the reason, here's how Lipscomb saw it.

Lipscomb, you know, he, he, he, he believed that no, there cannot be a Christian nation.

The way he saw it was this way when Jesus was being tempted on the mountain by Satan and Satan offers to give him a Christian nation. I will give you the keys of all the kingdoms of the world. You can be president. And Jesus said no.

Jesus said no. To touch that top down, coercive power would be contaminating. So Jesus says no. But we tend to say yeah, give me the keys, let me take the keys. Now again, that's maybe a bridge too far for some of us.

We vote. We feel civic responsibility to vote. We should use our power to make the country a little bit better than it was yesterday. And yet I'm drawing out this kind of more radical aspect of the church of Christ to bring into view kind of the non apolitical nature of our congregations. I don't Know if you've noticed, but being in a church of Christ during an election year is pretty relaxed.

Have you not noticed that we tend to get through election seasons pretty, pretty non. Anxiously. Nobody's really losing their mind.

And some of us, though it's sliding away from that. Have you noticed this? Our slide to a more partisan political kind of anxiety that things are getting a little shaky out there. We might need to re exert ourselves politically to rein in some of that power.

I noticed this a couple years ago, 2016. So I was preaching at Freedom Fellowship on Wednesday night. And you guys know elections happen on Tuesdays. For those of you sinners who vote, it's on Tuesdays. I'm just kidding, you know.

And so in 2016, Donald Trump had just beat Hillary Clinton. And so we were gathering and I saw the very dismayed and shocked faces of my liberal and Democrat brothers and sisters, like an atrocity had just happened at the election. And so I preached a sermon that night. And the title of that sermon was called how to Lose an Election.

Four Years Later, Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden and the shoe was on the other foot. And so all my friends from the conservative Republican side were all like, again, dismayed at what had just transpired. And so guess what I did. I preached the exact same sermon four years later, how to Lose an Election. And it's the same sermon.

And it was simply this from the Psalms. We do not put our trust in princes or presidents who cannot save. We do not put our trust in princes or presidents who cannot save.

And so, brothers and sisters, one of the things I want us to lean back into is some of that good DNA where we get our priorities kind of right sized or reallocated to the way the kingdom of God wants us to allocate those. And here's how you tell.

Just take a moment to monitor the agitation and the anxiety and the anger or the dismay of your heart when it comes to American politics. You all feel that knot of.

And compare it. And by the way, this is preaching to both sides here, okay? I mean, compare that knot of energy to how much emotional investment and treasure and time you put into that mission on that wall, the mission of the church to restore Highland Abilene in the world. Take all that anxiety and all that energy and all that weeping and wailing during election swings and ask, maybe I should give some of that energy to the church. The way historically the churches of Christ have approached this.

That's not to say you can't vote, but where is your hope? Lie and where are you putting your energy to change the world for the better? Are you trusting in presidents and princes? Are you trusting in the mission of God to restore Highland Abilene and the world? Listen, my brothers and sisters, the church has been losing elections for 2000 years.

We know how to lose elections. We do not lose our minds when we have electoral swings because our hope has never been there. And so let me call you back to gather all of this goodness up and just say here at the end, why I am, like, thrilled to be a member of the Church of Christ and why I am especially thrilled to be with you, the Highland Church of Christ.

This is a good place to be. This is a church that is loving. This is a church that is healthy, and this is a church that is sane.

And again, we're not perfect, but we got some good things going for us.

And guess what?

There's work to do. There's work to do.

So, Hyland, before you go out and spend your week doing that work, let me say one thing to the moms out there.

Mothers, we confess that God is love, and you are the.