That is how churches decline. Maybe you have a pastor and he buckles to some trend. Imagine we are back in the last quarter of the 19th century, and the movement for higher criticism is coming in, and on into the 20th century. It is bringing down churches and undermining faith in the inspired word of God, and pastors are going along with it, and excusing it. That is bad enough. The Eliashibs are letting in the Tobiahs. But what are the deacons doing and the church officers? Aren’t they grieved? Why don’t they throw out those compromising pastors? Why don't they detach from a denomination which declares itself in favour of the higher criticism? Why do they fidget and cross their feet, and back off and act in a spineless way? Churches collapse not only because of pastors, but because of deacons too, so we pray to God that insofar as the present world has much time left, he will preserve to us deacons and elders who will have backbone if something goes radically wrong, and will take a stand and will act, because if only the average Baptist deacon had acted we would never have had the terrible declines that we have had over the last century, and a complete loss of so many evangelical churches to modernism.
Today you hear something quite often. You say, ‘All this Christian rock and contemporary stuff: it should be thrown out.’ But then you hear a voice saying, ‘Oh, we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater.’ You then see churches advertising how they hold services, and they say, ‘We use the best of the traditional and the contemporary.’ The best of the contemporary! You can almost hear somebody saying to Nehemiah, ‘But there's some good stuff in here. Don't throw it all out.’ It doesn’t belong in our hymn books. If a hymn book or song book is published that has only one or two of those items in it, it should go out like the stuff of Tobiah. It is contaminated. It has nothing to do with true biblical loyalty and worship. That was the spirit of Nehemiah.