Albert N. Martin
Following are a few excerpts from the series of messages on “God’s Word to Our Nation” preached in the 1980s by Albert N. Martin.
We have never been a Christian nation in the sense that the majority were in vital union with Christ. But we were a nation marked by national righteousness, and in that was our exaltation. “Righteousness exalts a nation.” And so powerful was the direct influence of the gospel through revivals, so widespread…the direct influence of the gospel upon our national life, that it was true of us as a nation. Righteousness exalted this nation.
But now our sin is a reproach to us—not only our sin of putrid moral degeneracy, but our sin of horrible religious apostasy. How has that apostasy manifested itself? Jeremiah 2:11-12: “Hath a nation changed its gods, which yet are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit…My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.”
…Let me point out some of these broken cisterns that constitute the undeniable evidence of our national sin of apostasy in the realm of religious truth.
Decadent Humanism
Why have animal experiments become, as it were, the dictates as to the nature of man and the patterns of behavior expected of man? Because of the curse of this wicked decadent humanism that says: “Man’s mind is the measure of all reality. He can find out who he is, why he’s here, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s acceptable or unacceptable, by having no recourse to the supernatural: It is all within himself.”
Religious Liberalism
I’m not speaking of political liberalism but…of religious liberalism…So-called Christian churches…hold the name and the forms and the rituals of Christianity—but they have rejected everything that is distinctively Christian according to the Bible. There has been a rejection of the infallibility and inerrancy of this blessed Book…It is looked upon as the fallible, error-ridden, pathetic account of man’s developing and changing religious consciousness. No longer is there a view of man that he is essentially and fundamentally evil, having fallen from Adam, each man or woman, boy or girl, conceived in sin, born with a positive bent to evil…
Liberalism has jettisoned an infallible Bible, jettisoned a depraved man, jettisoned a supernatural Savior, jettisoned the heart of the gospel, which is penal substitution…
The tragedy is, dear people—and may you never forget it—millions in our nation every Sunday are put to sleep and lulled in the lap of deception until they will land in hell by the broken cistern of a deceptive liberalism.
Weak Evangelicalism
Finally, we have turned to the broken cistern of a weak, man-centered, flesh-pleasing, fad-conforming, self-flattering evangelicalism. [It is] marked by a professed adherence to an infallible Bible, a supernatural Savior, man as a sinner in need of supernatural grace, but the message that is preached and the climate in which it is preached negate [that] profession…Who are the popular preachers in our day? The preachers of health, wealth, and prosperity gospel.
…The Scripture says there is a time to laugh and a time to weep, but this evangelicalism has no place for weeping. In fact, it lives in morbid dread lest it should give the slightest impression to the world that Christianity is anything other than “Happy, happy, happy, all the time, time, time” …Its message lacks a clarion call to deep and thorough repentance…
…It lacks a call to radical discipleship…Whole pages in our best evangelical magazines [are] given over to the cult of materialism. No call to radical discipleship with self-denial, with agonizing to enter, cutting off right hands, plucking out right eyes.