My church wasn’t teaching me. It was entertaining me.

Greetings,

For years I attended a church that was genuinely exciting.

The worship was electric. The atmosphere was charged. People were raising their hands, speaking in tongues, calling down the Spirit. And in the moment, it felt real. It felt like God.

But something was wrong underneath. I could feel it but I couldn’t name it. Week after week I would leave energised and by Tuesday I was empty again. I was attending faithfully, serving actively, genuinely trying to walk with God — and my sanctification was barely moving. There was a hunger in me that the Sunday experience was not reaching.

And then there was the sin. When I failed — which I did, as every man does — I didn’t find comfort in my salvation. I found terror. Because the theology I had been given was so works-based that sin didn’t lead me to repentance and grace. It led me to doubt whether I was saved at all. The assurance that should have been my anchor became the thing I was most uncertain about.

The response to my struggle wasn’t counsel. It wasn’t someone sitting with me in the word and helping me understand what was actually going on in my heart. It was laying on of hands, a prayer, a retreat — and the expectation that I would come back delivered. But I wasn’t delivered. Because what I needed wasn’t a spiritual experience. I needed sound doctrine preached to me. I needed truth applied to the specific condition of my heart. And I needed men who would walk with me through it — not fix me in a moment and move on.

I remember praying and asking God — there has to be more than this.

What came next wasn’t dramatic. Some friends who attended different churches began sending me content. Sound, biblical teaching. Sermons that went verse by verse through scripture. Teachers who preached the whole counsel of God — including the passages my church had never touched. Suffering. God’s sovereignty. The doctrine of election. The assurance of salvation for those who are truly in Christ.

I didn’t even know these things were in the Bible. Not because I hadn’t read it — but because I had never been taught them. And as I began to hear them, something shifted. The hunger started to be fed. The terror started to lift. The faith I had been carrying started to have roots it had never had before.

That was when I realised it.

My church wasn’t teaching me. It was entertaining me. And there is a difference.

The writer of Hebrews saw this pattern long before the smoke machine was invented. In chapter 5 he rebukes his readers — not for abandoning the faith, but for failing to grow in it. By this time, he says, you ought to be teachers. Instead you still need someone to teach you the basic elements of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food.

By this time you ought to be teachers. You need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food.

He wasn’t describing men who had walked away. He was describing men who had been attending, going through the motions, and never advancing. Their emotions had been engaged. But they hadn’t been spiritually formed. And without the sustained nourishment of God’s word, they lacked the discernment to distinguish good from evil.

The consequences are not small. In some cases it produces false converts — men and women who have had an emotional experience and been told they are saved, without ever truly understanding what they were saved from, saved to, or saved by. In others it produces perpetual spiritual infants — tossed to and fro by every new wave of doctrine, every trending teacher, every church that offers a more compelling experience. Paul described exactly this in Ephesians 4. Not a picture of weakness. A picture of what happens when a man has never been rooted in the word.

I began to look for something different. And I stumbled across a framework called Nine Marks of a Healthy Church — expositional preaching, biblical theology, a proper understanding of the gospel, conversion, evangelism, membership, discipline, discipleship, and leadership. Each mark matters. But what they all have in common is this — a healthy church builds everything on the word of God, not on what works.

That is what you are looking for. Not the best music. Not the most engaging atmosphere. A church that takes the word of God seriously and builds everything else on that foundation.

If you walked into your church this Sunday with that question in mind — would it hold up?

Next week I want to go deeper into one of those marks in particular — the one that changed everything for me. Expositional preaching. What it is, why it matters, and what you may have been missing if you’ve never sat under it.