I had a meeting with a friend yesterday and he mentioned something very disturbing to me. I’d asked him if he would accompany me to a very important meeting at the end of the month with an Anglican Archbishop who is working directly on behalf of Pope Francis. The goal of our meeting is to explore opportunities whereby the body of Christ can reduce division and fragmentation within the church and work together to accomplish the Lord’s work, particularly with respect to preaching the Gospel throughout the world.
We aren’t meeting to plan strategies designed to convince anyone to change churches, or to start a new church or denomination, or make anyone believe a certain dogma. We just think the body of Christ could get further in accomplishing the Lord’s work if we all worked together where we can instead of independent of each other.
Teams win games; not individuals.
My buddy’s response was perplexing to say the least. Basically he said he’d been warned by some of his friends in the apostolic church movement not to participate because they were wary that such a move could lead to a one world religion. I urged him to listen to God and not men. The Bible states in 1 Cor.10 I appeal to you, brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another so that there may be no divisions among you and that you may be perfectly united in mind and thought.
That is just one of many similar verses in the Bible that tell us to be united as one.
Now it seems to me that we must either believe the Bible to be true and obey it, or not believe and disobey. Failure to obey God has disastrous results. For example God told Eve: Genesis 3:4: “but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.'”
Unfortunately she chose to listen to someone else: “The serpent said to the woman, ‘You surely will not die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” . . .
Well we know who to believe now, because we surely die – Adam and Eve should have listened to God.
My buddy and I had another conversation about what I call watering down of the Gospel by some pastors in order to maintain high attendance, (and giving). He said some mega pastors have recently told him that they water it down and stay away from contentious issues like gay marriage and abortion, because it improves their chances of getting more people into the church whereby they can be evangelized.
Let me get this straight. Men of God censor the Scripture and preach the parts of the Gospel that “they” think are more palatable to their congregation because they think it improves their odds of evangelizing larger numbers of people.
Huh?
Who are they to make that determination?
What does the Bible say about it? 2 Tim.3:16 All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.
Personally I think on behalf of the 63 million aborted babies and millions of people being lulled into acceptance of engaging in the sin of homosexuality due to the silence of the pulpits that we pray for these pastors that they would return to preaching the entire Gospel and allow the power of the Holy Spirit to draw those hearing THE TRUTH to Him. We need to preach boldly. Paul asked that his contemporaries pray that he would do so and we should pray for modern day preachers to do the same.
Eph. 6:19:“ . . . and pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel . . . ”
Finally another friend told me I was too controversial with Words for the Day and implied that perhaps I should be more thoughtful and less controversial in order to unify.
Yikes! Enough already! I feel an obligation to call sin – SIN. I hate sin but I don’t hate the sinner of which I am one. In fact I consider myself to be the assistant chief sinner, (right under Paul who stated he was the chief sinner). We all need the blood of Christ and his broken body sacrifice and we should preach sin and its remedy a resurrected Jesus Christ!
Have a great weekend and go to Honey Lake Church (or somewhere) Sunday. Also mark your calendar for a special service with internationally acclaimed speaker and seven mountains authority Os Hillman who writes the devotional TGIF (Today God is First) who will be speaking at Honey Lake on November 30th. You definitely don’t want to miss it.
Also please pray for us this weekend as 900 of us enter prison yards and minister to over 14,000 inmates in Dallas Texas and surrounding area. Pray that we preach boldly and that the Holy Spirit will move through those prison yards like He did on the Day of Pentecost!
2 Peter 1:21
For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
November 14, 2014 – Click here to listen