Matt Chandler - An Inadequate Faith

Well, good morning! It’s good to see you. If you have your Bibles, go ahead and grab those. We are going to be in John chapter 2. Every once in a while, I can, as a kind of living illustration, bring your attention to something that can help us be really grateful for the grace of God here at the Village Church. If you pay attention to the propaganda about the Church of Jesus Christ in the West, you will hear a lot of things about how it’s dying or aging out. Although I think those numbers are legitimate in some ways, our worship team this morning has a median age of twenty-five, and five of the eight are actually singles. That’s a pretty cool thing in an environment where the church seems to be losing young people, but the majority of people on this stage today are in their 20s. I am skewing that number terribly as the old man up here, but I was just encouraged as I watched this group lead worship. I thought, «Oh my gosh, „—twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two—Charlie just turned, I think, twenty-six today. Most aren’t married, which, apparently, means you don’t have to wait to get married to be profoundly used by God; which sounds crazy, right? So there’s much to rejoice in and celebrate about God’s good graces on our church.

You don’t have to respond out loud, but I want to warn you right out of the gate that the text today has some weight to it. If you’ve been here a while, you know that I tend to lean into that weight and let it be what it is. I just want to let you know that this is a hard text. It’s a text that can discombobulate us, and yet, I think it is necessary for us to see rightly the glory of God in our salvation. When I became the pastor of the Village Church—sixteen years ago now, which is hard to believe—there were two books that I read that significantly started to shape how I watched the gospel play out here at TVC, which is in the buckle of the Bible Belt, if you will. Both books were by the same author, Christian Smith, who is a sociologist at Notre Dame. He wrote two books based on one of the largest research initiatives trying to pin down the spirituality of young people.

The first book was called *Soul Searching*, and it followed a group of teenagers around for five or six years, trying to pin down where they landed on religion, faith, and spirituality. The second book was called *Souls in Transition*, which looked at that same group of teenagers as they became what is called an „emerging adult,“ which is now defined as ages eighteen to twenty-eight. The research in that was profound, and Christian Smith argued that there was a new way of thinking about Jesus, thinking about the Bible, and thinking about the gospel that differed from how it had been considered for the previous two thousand years. He went on to name what many of us have embraced as Christianity—not biblical Christianity—but what he called Christian moralistic therapeutic deism. Are you tracking with me? He said that really, no longer is the idea that Christ is my King and I will surrender everything I have to Him, and He will be enough regardless of life circumstances; that idea has been driven out and replaced instead by a belief system that has Jesus’s name on it.

So, it is Christian in name, but the intent and purpose behind it is therapeutic. You want to feel good about yourself; you’re a great person, right? The ills and difficulties of your life have to do with other people doing bad things; you’re amazing. Right? Therapeutic—but moralistic: you better behave yourself. Why? Because there’s a God. That has replayed the idea of the gospel as the Scriptures have revealed it and as the church has understood it for two millennia. I think the way you see this play out most frequently is around the ideas of felt needs as opposed to ultimate needs. Are you tracking with me on that?

Now, God cares about felt needs. I never want to talk about felt needs as though He does not care about them. I think the two broadest categories of felt needs would be money and relationships. Those are kind of where our felt needs really play out. Relationships might be a significant other, a spouse, friendships, or our children. Money could range from our jobs to our careers to our debt load to our aspirations of ownership. All of those things are felt needs. The church has, by and large, kind of left behind the gospel message of old and honed in on felt needs, trying to provide therapeutic answers to felt needs rather than getting underneath the felt needs to identify what the actual problem is. Are you with me? If our message is, „Your marriage can be amazing, ” but we don’t get underneath why your marriage might not be—or that maybe marriage is just difficult—but Jesus will be with you in that difficult marriage, then we can’t get to that.