Old Time Religion Got the Job Done

I'm not much of a fan of this newfangled religion that entertains more than it alarms and sues but fails to search. It flatters men with a false sense of security instead of flattening them with the claims of Christ Jesus. We have filled our churches today with namby-pamby religious folks who like to sing hymns but don't know hymn.

But the old-time religion got the job done of convicting and converting the most hardened sinners. The old-time religion was a time when Christianity changed the world instead of the world changing Christianity. Old-time religion gave society a moral compass and a healthy fear of God and the land.

Old-time religion had old-time preachers who weren't ashamed to preach that sin was black and hell was hot and a future judgment awaited all mankind. That old-time religion got down deep into your bones and made you walk a straighter line than we cut today. The old-time religion centered around a cross on Calvary on which the Prince of Glory died.

It pointed out your sins and then pointed you to a blood-stained Savior from sin. Old-time religion brought you to the foot of Sinai by the preaching of the law and first showed you your need of a remedy for sin until you saw your guilt of a broken law and then it brought you broken-hearted and humbled to the nail-pierced feet of that substitute for sin in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Old-time religion preached a God-centered gospel that had power to save because the old-time religion could arrest the hearts of the most foul sinners in town and the old-time religion so changed you by regeneration that you actually lived for God after that wondrous change took place.

Old-time religion reformed communities, made evil slink back into the shadows, and put down all loudmouth atheists because God held the majority in the nation back then. But somehow we lost our way and started preaching a more acceptable gospel that produced a newer, man-centered religion that centered around the happiness of man and had no constraints upon him. It taught you you could have Jesus and as much of the world as you wanted because you were the center of your world, whereas the old-time religion had at its center the glory of God.

In Jeremiah we read about the old and the new. In Jeremiah 6 16 we read, Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. Uh, but what do the people really want? Well, let's look and see.

Uh, but they said we will not walk therein. And therein lies the problem, friends. In our churches we gave folks what they wanted instead of what they needed, and you see where that's gotten us.

I believe it's time, friends, to retrace our Bible and get familiar with the God of the Bible and get back the old-time religion that made a nation God-conscious and that got the job done in the salvation of souls. Uh, let us pray.