Adaptability is not necessarily Good

Contents

1 Adaptability is not necessarily Good

by Pastor David Cox

Adaptability is not necessarily Good is a brief article about what we can adapt and what we have to keep like in the Bible.

What is the main issue here?

We (church leadership) need to understand what is at issue here. First of all, Paul says he was to make himself all things to all men in order to win some. Paul was adaptable. We can say that. But the idea of adapting is being applied today to the Lord’s work in ways that are just not biblical.

So if Paul adapted to reach all men, then we go to the Methodist church with its more than half of their ministers are women instead of men. They “adapted” throwing out the requirement of 1Timothy 3:2 that the bishop or overseer must be the husband of one wife. We go to San Fransico and the churches there that are openly receiving gays without condemning their lifestyles, and even the pastors have their homosexuals husbands or women pastors with their lesbian wives, man with man, woman with woman. Is this being adaptable?

The main issue here is to use the different means at one’s disposal to minister, but not necessarily change the content of our message.

We have no permission to change the message

Many ministers have no calling from God, and they are not even saved and have no business being in the ministry. They think they have the authority “to make” the message they give their people. They are reeds blowing in the wind.

God does exist, and God has given us the message we are to give to our people and preach to the world. We cannot vary one thing in that message. We must contend for the faith and fight against those who would pervert or twist the message of God from what it originally was given to be.

God blesses only when we are true to the message he gave us

People in the ministry want to see many people in their churches and the blessing of these people financially supporting their ministry. This is not necessarily the blessing of God though. It is financial wellbeing and popularity. Although many confuse these things with the blessing of God, they are not the same.

What we can identify as truly the blessing of God, is when people stop sinning and become like Jesus in their character. Popular churches are not necessarily very good at this. They fabricate a lot of activity and claim that is the same as being the same character of Jesus, but that doesn’t work. Activity is many times necessary, but it is not spirituality.

Many of these churches produce a spirituality list of sorts, where if you 1) read your Bible every day, 2) pray every day, 3) go witnessing every week, etc. you are spiritual. I am amazed at how the Jehovah’s Witnesses have the same thing (as the Mormons, etc ad nauseam) and they originally said that their people had to go out a few hours each week, then 10 hours each week, etc. I believe now they are requiring that they spend 30 hours each week “preaching” their false gospel in order to just have a chance in the celestial lottery to get into heaven.

Truly Christlikeness is not something that can be reduced to just outward exterior things, but it is the character of the person.

What is being adaptable in a biblical sense?

First, we need to do what God has commanded us, and preaching, teaching, and witnessing in the street is the New Testament pattern. God’s work in that sense, those activities will never change except for the false prophets who directly want that to stop. That is how people are saved, how they grow, how they remove sinful habits from their character.

Second, we (Christians and ministers) need to adapt to our world, and we need to apply the spiritual principles to our lives even though we live very differently from first century Christianity. There is no sin to having a copy of the Bible on your telephone or computer or using a computer software program to study the Bible.

The two things are very different but very important (both of them) to our Christianity and obedience to God.