True prayer requires tremendous effort. You can’t lightly pray for somebody, ‘Lord, bless this person; Lord, bless that person …’ Think about the need of that person; think about the wonder of a work of grace in the life. Think of the difference it will make to deliver them from hell and put on the road to heaven and the blessing and the light and the understanding and then plead with the Lord, have some effort in it and some meaning and some sincerity. It is no light thing to intercede and to pray for people, particularly for the protection of the church at Colossae. Heresy is deadly and when we think of heresy, don’t just think of the last stage of heresy when people are called upon virtually to deny the Lord or to drop their beliefs or repudiate justification by faith alone. Yes, that extreme heresy abounds in this land, it fills many churches, sadly, when people no longer believe the Bible and no longer believe in Christ and his atoning death and the necessity of repentance and conversion. That is the deadliness of heresy but think of it in the early stages before it gets there. Think of it when it is developing because heresy always starts gently and it always proceeds slowly and it brings in small but deadly errors. It says, at first, ‘Leave your belief in place, we will go along with that. Leave your belief in the shed blood and the necessity of conversion, stay with those things, just accept our new practices and our methods and our attitudes.’ The great tragedy of the spiritual collapse of the great historic denominations happened over decades, and so most of the people of God were fooled because many were still preaching the truth and using the right statements, saying the right things, but it wasn’t true and deadly heresy was sneaking in gradually.
Constantly the enemy of souls, Satan, is attacking the church of Jesus Christ. Constantly trying to subvert the doctrine, to water it down, to bring in things that are opposed to it. to ruin the lives of individual Christians, and to take away their fervour and their spirituality and their prayerfulness. He is attacking all the time. and the apostle Paul is in great concern in prayer for them that they will be held.
Every believer is in great danger, and yet no believer is in great danger. How can both be true? Well, the moment we relax, the moment we coast, the moment we think the Christian life is easy, we are susceptible to every kind of attack. But while we are watchful and aware and concerned about the possibility of subversion and error, we are safe, we watch, we lay hold on the power of God.
In every age there has been a battle. In some ages it has been lost; in some it has been won. In New Testament times, the young churches were troubled by Judaizers and by Gnostics. They were followed by numerous heresies of the first and second and third centuries. Then you get to about the 5th century and the 6th century, AD, and you get the development of the church of Rome and the priesthood coming back. You hear high sounding arguments – ‘We need a priesthood. To be stable and to honour God, we need all the churches to be joined together and under one command, and we need a kind of hierarchical structure, local ministers as bishops, and then all the clergy, the priests, with the pope at the top, and they regard themselves as Christ’s representatives. So now the Scriptures are no longer the sole authority; the church is also the authority, and gradually that new authority becomes dominant. The result is that in the church of Rome you have the Scripture, but church traditions trumps it. New doctrines come in opposed to the Scripture, and by the 8th century, the New Testament church was no longer recognisable. Rome had its images, its clergy, its finery, its wealth, its confusion with nationhood so that everybody in a community was baptised into the church and thought to be Christian. Then comes the great burst of truth and light once again at the Reformation. But then immediately the attacks of Satan begin again. In the 17th century, we had what is called the Golden Age of Baptist church expansion when simple congregations, Congregationalists, Independents, Baptists and others, were formed up and down the land. But as you go into the beginning of the 18th century, the battle began to be lost again because although those churches kept the truth, the gospel stopped being preached and soul winning faltered. The churches underwent a sort of retrenchment and a shrinking. Then after some years, the stranglehold was broken and instruments of God arose who insisted on the preaching of the gospel to all men. Back it came and we had awakenings, one after another. But flying down to the 19th century and modern liberalism starts to come in. High sounding arguments in the preachers’ colleges, the seminaries, and taking people away from the truth as it was in Christ. I remember 50 years ago being invited to address a fraternal of ministers, a group of ministers, held in a large living room of one of the pastor’s manses, and these were ministers of the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I am independent of the Baptist Union, but I was invited to go and talk to them about essential doctrines. There were present about a dozen, thirteen, ministers from the inner south London area. Now in those days, more than half of those men claimed to be Bible believing evangelicals. They were known as evangelicals, that is how they described themselves. And some were liberal in persuasion, and I did not expect them to be too happy about the things that I would say. Among the doctrines I introduced as being so vital was the penal substitution of Christ: that Christ died an atoning, substitutionary death on Calvary’s cross, to bear away the punishment due to sinners and thus purchase their salvation, that God the Father put upon him on Calvary the eternal punishment that believers should have suffered for themselves. Sadly, even the evangelicals, bar maybe one or two, were furious. Penal substitution – that is a ghastly doctrine. Well, how can you even be a Christian if you do not believe that? It had been lost that doctrine in those circles. Astonishing. I was amazed at that. One elderly brother was quite red faced and retorted, I suppose you believe in a paper pope, and by this he was referring to the Bible. Well, don’t you, sir?