Obedience! How much we need obedience, even in Calvinistic circles! We get a lot of doctrine these days, and if you go to those celebrity preachers on the Internet, you will get a lot of Reformed doctrine. Where has the obedience of faith gone? What extraordinary things they do, turning the methods of the Bible upside down, innovating almost on a daily basis. We are locked into faith and obedience to Scripture, and living our lives separate from the world, and in a scriptural manner, and winning souls in a scriptural manner. Where is the obedience of faith? Suddenly there is a flood of doctrine but without obedience.
It is strange how these things get repeated in evangelical history over time. We read that at the end of the 19th century when the movement for higher criticism came in and began to pollute and pervert churches, when almost all the churches were Calvinistic and evangelical, that many of the very popular church leaders would not oppose it. Doubt was pouring on the gospel and upon the word of God but instead of opposing it, they started mounting huge evangelistic crusades. This went on for years, and some big societies were founded from the 1890s through to 1910 and 1920. The damage was done because everybody was distracted – and you would think this was very good – by evangelistic crusades, and nobody was closing the open door to modernism, liberalism, and defending the church from these attacks. The obedience of faith: Abraham is an example of faith obeying God, obeying the word.