Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Is The Church in America at Odds with Christians???
I have come very close to washing my hands of organized religion.
Reared in a devout Southern Baptist home, switching to Lutheran, in my mid twenties, I am grounded in the mainline Christian faith.
I believe the same things I believed when I was 20, or 40, or 60 years of age. Yet the church does not. The church has continued to give ground to Political Correctness, which is rooted in "godless Marxism".
Good and evil cannot co-exist for long. According to Christ, Himself, “man cannot serve two masters”. So, YOU decide if the church YOU are a part of is serving God, or serving Mammon. I decided mine was serving the latter, and so, as instructed in the scriptures, I got out.
”The Church” (meaning the Christian Church) will have a humongous list of infractions to answer for on Judgment day.
The Great Reformer, Martin Luther, had a lot of things wrong. BUT, he had more right than he had wrong. I have great admiration for Bro. Martin. He saw what he believed to be a corrupt church and decided to do something about it. The 2nd greatest Christian movement in history happened as a result of Bro. Martin’s actions.
The Christian community of the world desperately needs another Martin Luther. Our church has been hi-jacked, and splintered, and fractured, into numerous groups always at each other’s throats. In all its ecumenical struggles the church has lost it’s way. That, alone is bad enough, but what is worse, is that the leaders of the church have no interest in taking the church back to the correct path as outlined in the scriptures.
You see… we have created a hierarchy in our churches that has become drunk on raw power. To take the Christian Church back, to the way Christ intended, threatens the power of those in places of authority in our mainline denominations.
When the hierarchy of a mainline denomination takes a church body away from the dictates of God’s word and celebrates one of the worse sins mentioned in the scriptures, a sin so evil it was referred to, in the scriptures, as an abomination, a sin so grievous that the punishment for it was death, then, Dear Reader, I need no further evidence that I, as a Christian, have no business in that body.
The evidence is right before our faces and yet… rather than “rock the boat” and stand for the dictates of God’s word, the average Christian in America, indeed, in the world, had rather sit quietly in the pews on Sundays, and watch as the house which had formerly belonged to God, is slowly pulled down to the level of the lowest common denominator in society today.
But… you see, it is much easier to do nothing.
The mainline Christian churches in America today, in my opinion, are too far-gone to save. We need a new reformation. We need a leader to pull the Christians together who are sick at what their churches have become and organize us into a force for good in this world.
Look, Dear Reader, when a mainline church pulls that venerable old Hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” from the hymnal and bans it from the music of that church, you have to know that the church has yielded the field of battle to the opposition.
When leaders of a congregation, or leaders of a denomination, are no longer required to set a moral example, and a spiritual example, for the followers of that denomination to aspire to… then that congregation has failed… that denomination has failed. It becomes a cancer eating away at the church, as a whole, until it has taken it beyond the point or resuscitation.
But, Dear Reader, one has to want to change for there to be real change. The church is showing no signs of a desire to mend its ways. None. On the contrary it is becoming more “apostate” every day.
We who dare to call ourselves Christian, today, must take stock of where we are, as a church, and what we are doing. It is long past time to assert ourselves and reclaim our Christian heritage, our places of worship and most importantly the “Great Commission” given us by Christ himself as he left this world in our care.
When a frustrated Joshua stood before the Israelites, who were in a similar situation, we, as a church, find ourselves in today. He uttered the words, which echo down through eternity and resound of the walls of every house of God around the world: “Choose ye, this day, whom you will serve! … As for me, and my house, we will serve the Lord!”
We, as Christians, need to listen to the words of Joshua today. The Church has lost its way. It is up to us to either “fix it”, by bringing it back into the fold of Christianity, or abandon it to it’s own self destruction.
But, sitting by and watching “The Church” as it devolves into a useless structure, which is a stench in the nostrils of God, is not an option.
We can begin today. Remember the words of Joshua: “Choose you this day, whom you will serve...”
Longstreet
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Longstreet,
ReplyDeleteYou now see why the Assemblies of
God have had membership growth of
326% over the last 30yrs. The Southern Baptist Convention has
grown 56%;even the Roman Catholic
has seen a 35% increase.People
are looking for churches that stand
for something,not ones "blown about with every wind of doctrine" to quote St. Paul.
AMEN, Hoosier! Oh, by the way... if I haven't welcomed you back... WELCOME BACK!!!
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