A Call to Truth!

While Martin Luther called the Church back to the truth of Scripture and the simplicity of the gospel, modern movements like the “Emerging Church” uphold “mystery” and question the traditional understanding of the gospel.

“We want to embrace mystery rather than conquer it,” declare leaders within this movement. One prominent Emerging figure was quoted in Christianity Today: “I don’t think we’ve got the gospel right yet ...I don’t think the liberals have it right. But I don’t think we have it right either. None of us has arrived at orthodoxy.”

Emerging Churches are an informal network of worldwide Christian communities who believe God’s way for today’s generation is to focus more on relationships and emerging ideas than hard-and-fast truths and traditional statements of faith. They favour dialogue over doctrine and are filled with people who say traditional Church no longer works for them. Inside their walls, you’ll typically find couches in place of pews, conversation instead of preaching, compromise in place of convictions, and questions in place of truth.

An evangelical writer and pastor recently expressed his deep concern about the Emerging Church - "While those leading the movement say that the gospel can’t be clearly known, they presume to know one thing for certain: “The Bible doesn’t mean what traditional people think it means.”"

The Emerging Church is just one of the latest assaults on the truth and certainty of God’s Word. They are saying, in effect, that God may have spoken, but He mumbled, and we’re not really sure what He said.

But, saying that Scripture is not clear is just another way to undermine biblical authority!

The Emergent movement is not an intellectual movement. This is not a movement that has discovered evidence that overturns inspiration, evidence that overturns inerrancy or authority. This is a movement born of people who do not want to accept the clarity of Scripture.

“Solomon’s Porch”, ‘pastored’ by Doug Pagitt, is a popular Emerging Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This and other Emerging Churches seek to embrace mystery and put less emphasis on truth.

This kind of thinking is very deceptive. If God’s Word is not clear, then we’re not responsible to follow it.

It allows them not to take a position on homosexuality, premarital sex, or anything, besides ‘Let’s light some candles and incense, think good thoughts about Jesus, and give to the poor.’

Furthermore, to claim that the Bible is not sufficiently clear is to assault God’s own wisdom and integrity.

Sadly, some Christian bookstores now devote entire sections to books promoting the Emerging Church movement.

There are several reasons for the movement’s explosive growth:

• If they don’t believe anything, they can’t offend anybody.
• They’re not under any mandate to say anything in particular.
• They play on the bad experiences and disappointments of a number of people raised in the Church.
• They basically can define themselves by experiences that are familiar to the culture.

“Just Give Me Jesus - But Don’t Make Me Change My Ways” This is a metaphor for the whole movement. A young lady stated that she “loves Donald Miller, the author of Blue like Jazz, because [she] wants to be religious but isn’t prepared to let religion alter her lifestyle.” “I’m a Jesus girl,” she said. “But I also like to go out and do tequila shots with my friends.”

Doubting God’s Word - from the Beginning?

Is this truth war unique to today’s post-modern culture?

No, the assault has never stopped since the Garden of Eden. It just escalates and escalates and escalates. It takes different forms and moves in whatever direction the mood of the mob - the spirit of the age - dictates.

Not only have people questioned God’s Word from the beginning of time, but many Christians today doubt God from the beginning of His Word. Such doubt is usually the result of a very flawed view of Scripture. For example, just take note how few Christian colleges continue to believe and promote the literal creation account.

The Emerging Church promotes a different version of Church history. According to the Emergent movement, the great men of faith end up becoming fools. And the fools who compromise and who don’t take a stand become the heroes. It’s an attempt at turning history on its head. They try desperately to undo the Reformation so they can go back to a quasi-Christian, medieval ‘spirituality’.

The Church today is much more susceptible to false teachers, doctrinal saboteurs, and spiritual terrorism than any other generation in Church history. Biblical ignorance within the Church is deeper and more widespread than at any other time since the Protestant Reformation.

As a result of the last twenty years of the seeker-friendly movement, which stripped Bible teaching, especially expository teaching, out of the pulpit, we have now ended up with a very, very marginally knowledgeable Church, largely made up of unconverted people.

Many pastors today simply tell a lot of stories with powerless, silly little cultural insights. They seem to think that their own inventions have more power than the Word of God.

However, no matter what deviations Satan comes up with, God’s Word endureth forever! [1st Peter 1:25]

Truly, genuinely born again Christians have the obligation to protect and defend that truth. It is our duty to guard, proclaim, and pass that truth on to the next generation. We who love God and believe His Word must awaken to the reality of the battle that is raging all around us. We must do our part in the ages-old truth war. We are under a sacred obligation to join the battle and earnestly contend for the faith!

Division Is Not Always Bad

“When to unite and when to divide, that is the question, and a right answer requires the wisdom of a Solomon.

Some settle the problem by rule of thumb: All union is good and all division bad. It's that easy. But obviously this effortless way of dealing with the matter ignores the lessons of history and overlooks some of the deep spiritual laws by which men live.

If good men were all for union and bad men for division, or vice versa, that would simplify things for us. Or if it could be shown that God always unites and the devil always divides it would be easy to find our way around in this confused and confusing world. But that is not how things are.

To divide what should be divided and unite what should be united is the part of wisdom. Unions of dissimilar elements is never good even where it is possible, nor is the arbitrary division of elements that are alike; and this is as certainly true of things moral and religious as of things political or scientific.

The first divider was God who at the creation divided the light from the darkness. This division set the direction for all God's dealings in nature and in grace. Light and darkness are incompatible; to try to have both in the same place at once is to try the impossible and end by having neither the one nor the other, but dimness rather, and obscurity.

In the world of men there are at present scarcely any sharp outlines. The race is fallen. Sin has brought confusion. The wheat grows with the tares, the sheep and the goats coexist, the farms of the just and the unjust lie side by side in the landscape, the mission is next door to the saloon.

But things will not always be so. The hour is coming when the sheep with be divided from the goats and the tares separated from the wheat. God will again divide the light from the darkness and all things will run to their kind. Tares will go into the fire with tares and wheat into the garner with wheat. The dimness will lift like a fog and all outlines will appear. Hell will be seen to be hell all the way through, and heaven revealed as the one home of all who bear the nature of the one God.

For that time we with patience wait. In the meanwhile for each of us, and for the church wherever she appears in human society, the constantly recurring question must be: What shall we unite with and from what shall we separate? The question of coexistence does not enter here, but the question of union and fellowship does. The wheat grows in the same field with the tares, but shall the two cross-pollinate? The sheep graze near the goats, but shall they seek to interbreed? The unjust and the just enjoy the same rain and sunshine, but shall they forget their deep moral differences and intermarry?

Sadly, to these questions the popular answer is yes. Union for union's sake, and men shall be brothers be for a' that. Unity is so devoutly to be desired that no price is too high to pay for it and nothing is important enough to keep us apart. Truth is slain to provide a feast to celebrate the marriage of heaven and hell, and all to support a concept of unity which has no basis in the Word of God.

The Spirit-illuminated church will have none of this! In a fallen world like ours unity is no treasure to be purchased at the price of compromise. Loyalty to God, faithfulness and truth and the preservation of a good conscience are jewels more precious than gold of Ophir or diamonds from the mine. For these jewels men have suffered the loss of property, imprisonment and even death; for them, even in recent times, behind the various curtains, followers of Christ have paid the last full measure of devotion and quietly died, unknown to and unsung by the great world, but known to God and dear to His Father heart.

In the day that shall declare the secrets of all souls these shall come forth to receive the deeds done in the body. Surely such as these are wiser philosophers than the religious camp followers of meaningless unity who have not the courage to stand against the vogues and who bleat for brotherhood only because it happens to be for the time popular.

When confused sheep start over a cliff the individual sheep can save himself only by separating from the flock. Perfect unity at such a time can only mean total destruction for all. The wise sheep, to save his own hide, disaffiliates.

Power lies in the union of things similar and the division of things dissimilar. Maybe what we need in religious circles today is not more union but some wise and courageous division. Everyone desires peace but it could be that revival will follow the sword.”

~ A W Tozer

When False Teachers Seem Good

When Joel Osteen smiles at the masses he is deceiving with his false gospel of prosperity, he seems so good, so kind and so concerned for others.

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But true love for others contains a desire that they know truth. Truth is defined by God’s Word. That is our standard. Without this standard, we can’t even know what truth is. This is where the emerging church is – drifting on a tide of change and personal preference. They have no standard and they tell you that it doesn’t matter.

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Imagine a pilot flying with no fixed standard. All his good intentions, compassion for his passengers, all his sincerity won’t matter one bit if he is off course when he tries to land. An artificial horizon is used in aircraft to determine the plane’s orientation relative to the ground. It indicates pitch and roll and is one of the most important things in the cockpit when pilots fly by instruments. It is also critical for those flying by visual flight rules.

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Yes, fixed standards are important. Think of a surgeon in an operating room conducting brain surgery. Should he re-imagine the process of operating on a human brain because he is "post-modern" and rejects all that black and white thinking of the past? Should he abandon all written protocol in his job and just embrace the mystery some day when a life is on the line?

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Imagine a Premiership football match where the rules are “re-imagined” and there are no longer any firm guidelines for play. No standards. What a mess.

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When it is eternity on the line and souls will either live forever in hell or with Christ in heaven, how much more important is it that we deal with the standards that God has laid down in His Word?

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When false teachers smile and try to charm you with their great teeth and hair and their brilliant new take on Christ and the church, there’s only one word of advice I have for you.

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Run!