Southern Baptists must remain faithful to the conservative resurgence to avoid making a “Titanic” mistake, Ken Whitten told messengers during his convention sermon at the SBC annual meeting in Nashville.
Whitten, senior pastor of Idlewild Baptist Church, Tampa, Fla., said the Titanic was thought to be unsinkable, but “the unsinkable did the unthinkable.”
Drawing analogies between Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27, the sinking of the Titanic and the SBC, he said the Titanic’s designers made the mistake of dividing the ship into compartments, rather than building it as a unified whole. When an individual, family, church or denomination tries to compartmentalize, they will compromise and capsize, he said.
The “conservative resurgence” saved Southern Baptists from sinking, Whitten said. The movement never was about power, politics or position, he said, but always about integrity, about “keeping a denominational ship afloat.”
A denomination can’t have literature, schools and pulpits going in different directions, Whitten said. The “tongue in your mouth and the tongue in your shoes” have to go in the right direction, he said, or else “you’ll make a Titanic mistake.”
The question for the current generation is not inerrancy, Whitten said, but “do we believe in the sufficiency of God’s Word?” It is not whether the Bible is inerrant and infallible, he said, but “whether we have integrity that is relevant and believable.”
“Our great captain” is asking whether we will rescue those who are sinking and perishing, he said.
In the story recounted in Acts 27, Paul gave four warnings, Whitten said: warnings against doubting, drifting, discarding and despairing. Paul had counseled against sailing at that time of year but the caption doubted him. After running into a storm, the ship was left drifting and the crew started discarding cargo, food and the ship’s tackle. Ultimately they despaired for their lives.
Whitten warned against the dangers of doubting God, drifting away from the Bible, discarding core values and worship practices, and despairing of hope. To counteract the dangers, Paul threw out four anchors, Whitten said – the anchors of God’s presence, purpose, promise and provision.
God has used Southern Baptists to throw out those anchors, he said.
Southern Baptists might not all agree on literature or worship style or what to call Sunday School, Whitten said, but they can agree that “God has taken a denomination and turned it around… to rescue the perishing and care for the dying.”
(News Network)
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