I member years ago a brother in a Reformed Church telephoning me, and suddenly he found himself surrounded on all sides by contemporary Christian worship and a sudden upsurge in enthusiasm for completely inappropriate things. He said, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ Well, that is a very difficult question to answer, because what you instinctively want to say is, ‘Well for the last few years, you should have been teaching about this, and then it wouldn't have happened. When the first ideas along these lines arose, you should have been biblically showing what is right and refuting it, and then the more wholesome people would appreciate that and would be armed and ready. But he hadn’t warned and now it had happened. It is so important to warn about the wrong trends. ‘Whose mouths must be stopped’, at all costs. False teachers mustn't get a footing in the true church of Christ, and that means that the preachers and the leaders, the mature, and the shepherds of the flock, have got to warn clearly, and anticipate these things. It isn’t enough simply to inveigh against them, but explain the ground on which these things are wrong.
Again, you think of Charismatic trends. How many Charismatic believers are always looking for sensation? Their faith is grounded on something dramatic which is supposed to verify faith for them: miracles, which probably never actually happened; healings claimed, which probably never actually happened. And their faith is maintained on a constant diet of ‘Wow, this happened; that happened’, instead of the word of God and experience of Christ and love in their hearts for him, and the things that the Scriptures cause to grow as real, genuine, and strong supports to faith. They ought not be teaching those things that take people in a completely wrong direction, and make them just subjective creatures of fancy.
You ask someone, ‘What do you do for a living?’ ‘I am a worship leader.’ ‘Oh, what do you do?’ ‘Well I play my instrument and lead a band, and we have drums and we make merry on the platform, and we get well paid for it.’ Shameful gain, robbing the house of God, turning it into a place of cheap entertainment, rather than worship. And some of these worship leaders and songwriters in the contemporary Christian worship movement are extremely wealthy. Where did they learn to do that? Is that how it's done in the New Testament? Have you got bands and entertainment instead of worship? Is everything lightened up and dumbed down and accompanied by heavy rhythm to satisfy fleshly sensual wants and needs, and people making money out of it? All the worship songs that they sing: they are all copyright, and you have got to pay for them. If you want to download or get that music, you have got to pay dearly, because they are being made rich. But the inspired word says, ‘shameful gain’. It's stealing. But it's not stealing – which is bad enough – from rich people, or even poor people. It's stealing from God; it's stealing from the people of God. It’s shameful gain, and that's what they do it for. If they didn't have that gain, they wouldn't do it.
You could apply the same to some preachers who are preaching the truth, but getting vastly overpaid for it. They receive tremendous sums of money. I used to go to speak at certain conferences many years ago. But one of the reasons why I stopped going to certain conferences was they paid you so much. I thought that was shameful gain. And some of these men are very rich, even the apparently sound ones. When they die, just see what they have left, and the foundations they leave behind to perpetuate them, and their names, and what they have achieved. That is all robbery; that is all shameful gain. The preachers of God's word don't have to be poor, but they have got to be modest and reasonable, and no different from the generality of their people. They are for the Lord, not for shameful gain.