Christian Experience and the Word of God →

By Nate Kreider

Many times, especially after a time of severe weather, the news station of a coastal town will show the coastline damage from the storm surge. Often when they do this, you will see houses dangling over the edge of a cliff side from the surge washing it away, and sometimes you will see that even a house has collapsed and fallen down the cliff into the waves. This is oftentimes the picture I get in my head when I think of the passage of the house built on the sand. It goes as follows,

 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” (Mathew 7:24-27)

God’s Word thus is this important: That if a man does not build his life upon it, he will sooner or later fall into destruction; and great will be his fall. 

    J. Gresham Machen in his section on The Bible talks about how this is vitally true also for the church. In his day (and in ours still, 100 years later) the scriptures are under constant attack from people who have no regard for its divine properties. The people who were assailing scripture in his day were placing experience on par and even above the witness of scripture. It was based upon experience. While Machen argues that the experience of the Christian is not a negative testimony to the works of God, it does not usurp scripture. He says “Christian experience is rightly used when it helps to convince us that the events narrated in the New Testament”, in essence saying that it can help us in part to be convinced of the truths of the scriptures, by seeing the evidence of our redeemed nature through the Holy Spirit and newfound love for God. He continues, though, in saying, “But it can never enable us to be Christians whether the events occurred or not”. In the words of the late R.C. Sproul, this point is summed up in saying “your personal testimony is not the gospel”. 

    What then is the foundation of our Christian faith and experience grounded on? On the solid ground, God’s Word. Today, many churches have simply lost sight of what it means to be led by the scriptures, that is, to have it as its foundation. Many churches today are based on experience. They are founded more so on the songs that they sing than the Word of God. They are more founded upon the experience that one receives upon entering the building than on solid food. What I have just explained sounds eerily like the Christianity of Machen’s day. Have we let liberalism slip through the back door unnoticed? Are we now undermining our own faith by usurping God’s Word for an experience? Machen drives the nail home when he says truthfully, “[The Christian experience] is a fair flower, and should be prized as a gift from God. But cut it away from its root in the blessed Book, and it soon withers away and dies.”