In the sermon on syncretism, Scott Brown addresses the significant threat syncretism poses to churches, placing it as the second greatest danger after misunderstanding the gospel. He defines syncretism as the blending of worldly philosophies with Christian beliefs, citing examples like mixing contemporary business practices with worship and integrating secular psychology with biblical counseling. Brown warns of how technology, particularly smartphones, acts as a modern form of syncretism by inundating individuals with secular ideas and altering their perspectives. He stresses the importance of resisting these influences by doubling down on three key areas: the Word of God, family life, and church involvement. Brown implores his audience to live their lives guided by Scripture, prioritize the discipleship of their families, and fully commit to their local church communities. He emphasizes that the true church can be preserved through fidelity to the Word of God, distinguishing it from cultural influences.

Please open your Bibles to Psalm 106, Psalm 106 and find verse 35. Psalm 106 verse 35. We've already read several texts that form the idea that we'll be bringing today in the preaching. I'm going first, then Jason, And I'm grateful for that because he'll be able to play cleanup for me. But this verse here in Psalm 106 is very important for the subject, and the subject is the subject of syncretism.

And here we have in Psalm 106, verse 35, this is the inerrant, all-sufficient, sweeter-than-honey word of God. But they mingled with the Gentiles and learned their works. They served their idols which became a snare to them. They even sacrificed their sons and daughters to demons. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for life in Jesus Christ and all of its goodness. We pray that we would rejoice in it and also be warned today. Each one of us, my own heart, warned deeply and all of us together warned of the ways of the Gentiles. We thank you Lord for giving us such a holy and pure and beautiful word of truth by which to guide our lives and I pray that this would be our daily exercise.

Amen. Please be seated. So thinking about what I wanted to say today, I couldn't get out of my mind in the days coming up to our time of being together. What is the greatest danger for these two churches? What's the greatest danger for Hope Baptist Church?

What's the greatest danger of Sovereign Redeemer? What is it that would drive our churches into irrelevancy? What would it be that would corrupt our hearts first, and then our families, and then multiple generations? What is that one thing? What would nullify all the preaching that takes place in this church?

What would nullify the fellowship that we've had in these churches? What would nullify the doctrine that we so attempted to teach? Week by week And what would damage our witness in the world like nothing else? And what would harm our work of true evangelism? And this matter of syncretism, this matter of worldliness, is that one thing.

Now, I think you could say that Syncretism is the second greatest danger to the church because the first greatest danger to the church is a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But if one misunderstands the gospel, If one has not truly embraced the gospel, then they will become a victim of syncretism. And so these things are so related. This is how the Bible makes justification and sanctification related, but two very different things. Justification is something that God does in God alone in justifying the sinner.

Sanctification is something that the Christian must power up and get on it. And so that's what we're talking about today. But what is syncretism? Syncretism is blending the philosophies of the world with the philosophies of the Christian. Syncretism is mixing the traditions of man with the traditions of God.

Syncretism is mixing the lifestyles of the world with the lifestyle of the people of God. And this happens in many very observable ways. The mixing of popular psychology fads with biblical counsel. The mixing of contemporary business practices and entertainment and concert methodologies in the worship of God. This is mixing.

The early church had great struggles over this, particularly with the false doctrine of Gnosticism. Mixing Gnosticism, mixing esoteric knowledge that you pull out of your heart and your head, and mixing it with Christianity. So syncretism is an amalgamation or a mixing of different things together, and for our purposes this is the whole idea of mixing worldly living, worldly thinking, worldly family life, worldly church life, mixing it with true Christianity. And this has always been the battle for the church. This has always been the greatest danger to the church.

Syncretism, mixing with the Gentiles, doing the will of the Gentiles. And of course, there's, there are many ways that this takes place. Perhaps the greatest syncretizing force in our world today is your iPhone. It's in your pocket, it's your computer. Fortune magazine says that you look at it 144 times a day.

Says that you spend four hours and 25 minutes on it per day. It's so bad that even the Surgeon General issued a warning for youth that affects their mental health. He says that these apps Introduce profound risk to mental health. Well, this is what secular people say about it But here's what you need to know. You already know this the devil is lurking for you in cyberspace and This is a sort of a new battle line of spiritual warfare that we're all involved in and you have these forces at work to defeat you and what's What's so remarkable about the moment that we live in is that with the smart phones and computers and tablets and YouTube and TikTok and X and Facebook, we're just, we're inundated with ideas.

We're being radicalized by ideas coming to us from the outside randomly. Oh, but it's not random. It's not random at all, because someone is looking for you. If you view a site, most of the time, somebody paid to find you, and when you clicked on it somebody got paid so you are being stalked by the algorithms of this world and and frankly I think this is spiritual warfare and for and you know what what is what is happening in the world that we live in today, it's actually an altering of your thinking about yourself, about your family, about your church, about the problems of this world. And it moves your hands and your eyes and your ears.

It's like Big Brother, you know, looking out after you. It's bigger than Big Brother because it can neutralize everything you're trying to teach your children. Make... Mark this. Your phone, your computer, in your hands and in your children's hands is probably worse than the public school system if it's used the wrong way.

Don't think just because you got your kids out of the big bad public school system. Guess what? There's a bigger system going after you and your children and somebody is paying to find you. So this is the great warning and of course in the Word of God we are called to live differently. The people of God don't live like the people of the world.

They don't think differently. They don't think the same way. They don't walk the same way. They don't raise their children the same way, they don't educate their children the same way, they don't dress the same way, they don't talk the same way, because they have God, they have God teaching them how to walk, how to do all these things. And this is what the church has, and what God is doing with his church is creating a holy nation.

You know, people are so concerned about Christian nationalism. The greatest nationalism is a holy nation. It's the people of God who live within all the nations of the earth. And God has desired for his church to live differently, and he has done it through the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ. But yet at the same time, we often, a backslide, we often go lax on the things of God.

But God has always been about creating a holy nation. You can see it, you can trace it from the very beginning, and we don't have time to do that, but God has always gathered his people together to make them holy, to bring them before instruction, to bring them before worship. What we're doing today is just something that God has always done. He brings his people together for their salvation and for their sanctification. And this is the glory of the church.

You know, there are factors working against the Church of Jesus Christ that are insidious and often not completely understood. You know in fact our two churches embrace the Baptist Confession of 1689. This confession is like guardrails against the world And you have to ask what kind of church do you want to have and our confession Keeps the church from drifting at least into doctrinal and some practical matters of worldliness and you have to ask You know, what kind of church do you want to have? Will you have the sufficiency of scripture? Or will you have the sufficiency of culture?

Will you have the regulative principle of worship? Or will you have Every man does what's right in his own eyes Will you have a Sabbath keeping culture or will you have a Sabbath breaking culture in your church? These are all matters of our confession. These are the guardrails Will you have the applicability of the law or will you have a rejection of a proper use of the law of God? Will you have in our in this gathering will you have age-integrated worship or are you gonna are you gonna throw the children out of the services so that they never worship with the people of God?

Are you gonna have pragmatism? Are you gonna have a church that is guided by the Word of God alone? Are you going to have biblical manhood and womanhood or you're going to have egalitarianism and the incursions that begin incrementally in churches and we've seen it over the years. So most of these are confessional matters. Okay with that I'd like to just walk quickly with you through scripture in getting ready for this I walked from Genesis to Revelation to try to trace What what the Bible says about syncretism about what the Bible says about walking in the ways of the Gentiles.

So I've had to cut out dozens and dozens of references. So I'm just going to drop on representative references, but what you find is Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles, they all address this. This is not something that we've made up. So I'm just, you don't need to turn to these passages because I'm just going to skate over them, but I hope they sort of form a sense of this, how serious this is, and really what is the greatest danger to these churches. In Deuteronomy 18-7, Moses spoke of the common practices of the nations.

He says, when you come into the land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominations of the nations. In Leviticus 18 the Lord tells Moses to tell the children of Israel to reject the culture of Egypt and then to reject the culture of Canaan. He says you shall not do according to their doings in the land of Canaan He says you shall observe my judgments and my ordinances to walk in them I am the Lord your God by the way You can trace this word walk through the Bible and you find this very same doctrine that exists. The way that you walk. Do not walk in their ways.

That language exists all the way through the Bible. In Deuteronomy 12, Moses tells the children of Israel that they must be careful, that they might fall into the net of syncretism. He says, take heed to yourself that you are not ensnared by them. And that's a critical word, to be ensnared. There is an ensnaring that takes place among the people of God.

David spoke of it this way, but they mingled with the Gentiles and learned their works, which became a snare to them. Isaiah speaks of it. He says, they've embraced Eastern ways, and he's using really the language that speaks of embracing foreign ideas You know in his case Eastern mysticism that actually came out of the East he says they are Soosayers like the Philistines they are they become the children of foreigners and that's, it's so easy for that to happen in particularly in the internet world that we live in to become a child of foreigners, of all these voices. And of course, you know, what I wanna say, we'll get to this later, but it's the Word of God that should saturate our every thought. You have Jeremiah, of course, in Jeremiah 10 verse 2, Do not learn the ways of the Gentiles, for the customs of the of the people are futile.

You have Ezekiel saying that the people have have lost the ability to see the difference between the holy and unholy. He says they they have not distinguished, it says, between the holy and unholy that's Ezekiel 22 verse 26 and And he says and and as a result they've hidden their eyes from my Sabbaths so that I am profaned among them." The ways of the Gentiles working, the ways of dealing with the Lord's Day. Do it just like the Gentiles do it is what he's talking about. Nehemiah picks it up the same idea. He identifies really one of the most common syncretistic things that happen in the modern church today and that's the dishonor of the Lord's Day.

He tells the story of the men of Tyre coming into the city to bring fish and their goods and sell them to the children of Israel and Nehemiah stands up in there and he says don't you realize God sent us into captivity for breaking the Lord's day what why are you doing this and so you have these matters of incursion you have the Lord Jesus Christ in Mark chapter 7 he talks about talks to the people about how they've respected cultural traditions more than biblical truth, teaching his doctrines the commandments of men. Jesus said, they hate me because I tell them that their deeds are evil in John 7.7. So we could go to the Apostle Paul, we could go to the Apostle Peter, there are many places that we could go. Now, Again, the greatest danger to these churches is first of all misunderstanding the gospel, the power of its transforming work, and syncretism. I think that's the greatest danger to these churches.

And those are the things that will diminish and kill off these churches now you can actually You can actually grow a big church by doing a lot of syncretistic things But we're talking about preserving the true church and and that really is done by fidelity to the Word of God Okay, I'm gonna give you three ways to respond to this. Three things to do. Okay, are you ready? First of all, double down on the word of God. Double down on the word of God.

Get your, live your life out of the Bible stop living your life out of your emotions Stop living your life out of what you think other people think and and get to a quiet place Declutter your life get things out of your life All those people who are chasing you down on your phone, get them out of your life. And turn your eyes upon Jesus, and look at his face in his word. And let God in his word direct your mind. That's what I want to do every day. It's so imperfect.

I wish I wish I was so much better at it I wish I was so much more transformed by it But when I get out a bed in the morning the first thing I do After I get a cup of coffee and take it to my desk I open that Bible and I just I just want him to shape my mind my emotions to fix me I need to be fixed every day and To let the Word of God be the thing that fortifies your soul Not the thing you're addicted to looking at all the time to think that that's gonna somehow make you happy and make you make you satisfied. But mobilize yourself to the Word of God. Meet with God every day and regardless of how you feel, regardless of your schedule, Double down on the Word of God. This is a this is a great hedge against syncretism now also You might want to identify any bad habits That are keeping you from the Word of God Habits Not only shape you but you are also shaped by your habits. And if a person is not driven by his emotions, and how he feels about, well, do I feel like getting into the Word of God?

If a person is driven by their emotions, they're always going to be up and down. But if they're driven by their habits, they do it because they know it's right. And they just, They do it because they do it. That's actually the right thing to do. And when you embrace the Word of God, you'll find that your habits transform you, and it goes the other way as well.

So, consecrate yourselves to God. Double down. Double down on the Word of God. Are there things that you're looking at in these phones that you need to stop looking at, so that you can take the opportunity to look at something far better, far more nourishing, far more helpful to you. And you have to ask, how much time in this life do you want to spend scrolling, endlessly scrolling through sites?

Really, how much time do you want to do that? How much time Do you want to fill your mind with silly songs? You know, you know, you only have so much time, you know Why why don't why don't you just entertain yourself with ungodly entertainers all the time? Why don't you why don't you spend your life arguing about politics with people you don't know on the internet. Why do you spend your life doing that?

So double down on the Word of God. You know my dad, he had a favorite verse that he would say all the time, Jeremiah 9 24. Let him who boasts, boast in this, that he understands me and knows me. That he knows me. You can know so many things, but there's really only one thing that matters the most, and it's knowing him.

And you do that by doubling down on the Word of God. Second, double down on your family. Double down on your family. You know, what in your life, what in your life is causing you to trade away the discipleship of your family. And here's the reality, the greatest impact a parent will ever have will be on his children and on his spouse.

And you can't change the world, you can't change Washington, a new president, you know, ending the border crisis, that is not going to fix our society, but what you can do, you can actually do something about this world in your family It's It's the most important thing you ever do. God has created the world to focus, to focus us in small communities. And he does it in a family, and he does it in a church, and of course we live in a nation. And he prays the Lord for people who are really called to operate in the civil sphere. I just encourage you to go support Isaac Burke and everything he's doing to try to get some of these people elected.

It's a huge blessing. Everybody's not called to that, but there are a lot of people that can help. But really the greatest influence you can have in the world is on those children and You know teaching them sharpening them disciplining them walking with them Memorizing the Word of God with them and the same thing with you children children understand it's God that put you in your family. God put you there for his for good purposes and and you should follow them with all your heart and and don't dishonor them obey them walk with them ask them how you should live your life seek them out They're actually a lot smarter than you are. So double down on your family life.

Third, double down on your church life. Devote yourselves fully to your local church. Here's a question, And I really want you to consider this very seriously Are you taking your local church lightly? Are you taking the instruction of your local church lightly? Are you taking the fellowship of your local church lightly?

In other words, you really aren't engaging with these people. You're not loving them. You're not proactively praying for them, seeking them out, seeking to encourage them. You know, you have... In church life, you always know that this is happening.

That you have people, they have plenty of time for the gym, they have plenty of time for pickleball, they have plenty of time for scrolling, but they have very little time actually to devote to the meetings of the church and the times of equipping. In our context, the times when we gather men together to study the Word of God. In our church, in our churches, the times that we gather the women together to mentor them in matters of godliness. Well, here's another thing Are you just bringing your children to church? Yeah, are you bring your church your children church kind of the way You know, you might have you might have just dropped your kids off at Sunday school?

You're just letting them go on autopilot. Yeah, you're sitting next to me, be quiet. You know, behave. But are you teaching them the doctrine that the preaching is all about? Are you helping them to learn the songs?

Are you proactively teaching them how to sing? Singing is such a great gift. You know, are you, are you helping them understand the very words of Scripture that you're being taught? Because in these churches, we focus on the words of Scripture. We want your children to learn not just the words of Scripture, but the great doctrines of the faith.

Are you doing that as parents? Are you taking action to teach them the doctrine of justification and sanctification and glorification and salvae whatever. Teach them the doctrines, grow them up quickly, make them mature quickly, and you can do that, but are you just bringing your children to church? I'm here to say double down, double down on your pastor's preaching, Double down on your family discipleship. Double down on the singing.

Double down on the fellowship. Help your children learn how to fellowship in a local church. Is the local church the center of your life or not? Well you know me, I'm always encouraging people to make a local church the center of their life. It's the right thing to do.

There are only two institutions that God established, the church and the family. You should focus on them. You should make a big deal. Are you doubling down? I'm asking you to double down on church life.

Okay, there you have it. First, double down on the Word of God. Second, double down on your family. Third, double down on your church. And along the way, throw off the ways of the Gentiles and be the people of God.

Would you pray with me? Lord, We thank you for your word. I pray that you would fortify and galvanize all of us by your word, that you would create such a dear and mighty and wonderful loving fellowship that arises out of your word. I pray that when we all go home and we enter into our regular lives, that we would first of all be saturated with your word that your word would be the guidepost of everything we do Lord we thank you that your word is truth We thank you that it is sweeter than honey. Amen.