A Healthy Theology = A Healthy Church

Two lengthy quotes from Mark Dever in 9Marks of a Healthy Church, for your edification today.

What do you think? Are people basically bad or good? That will determine much of what you think a church needs to do. If you think people are basically good, then a church is simply a place where we sseek encouragement or perhaps the enhancement of our self-esteem. We need simply to take the good that's in us and build on it. However, if you thik something is much more radically wrong with us humans, if you think that we are spiritually dead, guilty before God and separated from Him, then there is somethign different that churches must do. In that case, churches need to present the Gospel clearly. churches need to tell people how to find forgiveness or their sins and how to find a new life.

Of course, our view of ourself is a direct derivative of our view of God. Dever puts it this way:

We must udnerstand God by His revelation of Himself, not by our own hunches, not by our own wishes, not by the way we like to think of God. Too often today we speak as if evangelism were advertising and explain the Spirit's work in terms of marketing. Some even talk of God Himself as if He were made in the image of man, rather than the other way around.

A healthy church has a grasp of God based on God's revelation of himself in the Bible. A proper, biblical perspective of God will give way to a proper biblical perspective of mankind. When people see God for who he is and truly see humanity for what it is, we will all be more motivated to carry the gospel to the depraved of our world for it is their only hope. We will also be more motivated to give praise, honor, and thanksgiving to our holy God because we will better understand how much he gave for us.