Edition 289: December 9^th 2015

Dangerous or safe churches:

Dangerous or safe churches::

Introduction:

Do you know that everyone has the truth before them? For those in the deep dark forests with no written Bible available, the gospel is still right before them. (Romans 1:19-21)

The amazing thing is that Gods real, critical, all-important, all-relevant truth can’t be seen by the majority, even though it is much closer than they think. The verse above says clearly that “their foolish hearts were darkened.” This is because of their unbelief.

Untold millions are coming to our Lord in salvation in these days. Their eyes see the truth and they respond.

Untold millions are falling away from spiritually dead churches in these days and the reason is that they can’t see the truth. The wolf behind the pulpit is blind to the truth and he spreads the darkness. He can’t do anything else because he is blind. He can only pretend that he sees the truth, but his light is dangerous darkness.

One of the most powerful truths ever:

“If the light in you is really darkness how great is your darkness”. (Matthew 6:23)

I could write ten books on that verse alone. It speaks of the great majority of people.

 It succinctly speaks of the entire unsaved world from Einstein to Freud, to Marx, to Kennedy, to Theresa and all the popes, to Madonna and Monroe, to Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. Gates and Jobs are in the list so is de Gaulle. Plato and Paul McCartney are in the list. Pasteur and Picasso, van Gogh and Beethoven. Tutu and Dali, Barak and Branson, Lennon and Lenin are in the list. Pele, Castro, Charles, Adolf, Ronald Reagan, Trotsky, Diana and you can put all your own favourites and celebrities in here too.

You see, these people were all famous in the eyes of the world. They had the spot lights of the world upon them.

They were known for emitting light of various sorts which gave them their fame.

But their light was and is darkness – great darkness! In fact in reality it is terrifying darkness because it is darkness that is alive with spirits, demons, principalities, powers and Satan himself.

Today we have many churches that are in the light, of the Light and spreading the light of God. At the same time we have many who think they are in the light, but as this verse says, “The light that is in them is really darkness.” And this is what they produce – pure spiritually charged dangerous, humanistic darkness!

An uncertain future?

One thing we don’t know is the precise future regarding who will be saved and who will not. We also don’t know which churches will stay on the straight and narrow and which ones won’t. We also don’t know which churches will turn around completely in repentance before we get taken out of here.

My point is that we dare not write any people or churches off completely. I believe that as the world shakes and the pressures increase, many will come running to our Lord in repentance and surrender.

But before we come up with any fancy philosophies let’s remember that the Bible itself plots, predicts and prophecies the tragic future of much of the church in these last days. The same Bible also plots, predicts and prophecies a small part of the church, being right on course and right on track to fulfill God’s call and plan in these days.

Many churches will grow weak and fall and many will grow strong and stand securely in these days. Churches growing weak and falling are of course, the dangerous churches.

Far too many churches are all about the religion and works of their institutions which they have to feed and perpetuate, instead of presenting the living Messiah and His word.

People have been put to sleep spiritually and have grown complacent and satisfied with their useless Sunday performances. They may as well go to the bowls club.

Dangerous churches:

“A house divided will not stand.”(Matthew 12:24-25) Obviously the divided church is in danger right from the start. I realise that this is the world we are in and it’s almost impossible to even imagine churches coming together in Godly unity. But, that said, there are some drawing together in these times.

If some can do it and the Bible commands it, why can’t we all or at least a lot more come into truth-based unity?

The quality of leadership is all important. If a church is a dangerous place, it’s the fault of the leadership – always.

Some of the real big issues within many dangerous churches include:

●They are full of worldliness and worldly ways. ●Their doctrine excludes doctrines they don’t like.  ●They do not preach or teach the cross of Messiah and personal cross-bearing. ●They do not teach or centre on repentance and brokenness. ●They are products of Babylon, Rome and the reformers. ●The big issue with almost every dangerous church out there is that they reject the baptism in the Spirit and therefore have to rely on their own insight, intellect and strength.

●They are influenced by crowd psychology, which comes about as a result of ignorant leadership. It is also called “Confirmation bias” which occurs as people look for anything that confirms their own beliefs in the crowd of the world.

●They are afraid to rock the boat because they are led and manipulated by the fear and approval of man! Proverbs 29:25 “The fear of man brings a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord will be safe.” Galatians 1:10 “If I sought to please men, I would not be a servant of God.” John 12:43 “They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.”

Dangerous churches are without exception, those who interfere with the Bible and remove what doesn’t suit them.

What you remove from your gospel automatically gets replaced with something else, normally, the opposite, or inverse, or diametrically opposed, or antithetical. Things never stay the same or neutral. Your gospel becomes more and more loaded with error. In fact you can also put it this way: What you remove from the word of God will be replaced in your life with the word of the world and Satan himself.

Safe churches:

The two very big things in the believer’s life are the condition of his heart and his doctrine.

The safe church is the one that preaches and teaches the full truth – all of it, but rightly divided and applied. The full doctrine of the Bible is revealed very succinctly in two verses.

Hebrews 6:1-2 “Let us go on to perfection, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works and faith towards God, of the doctrine of baptisms, of laying on of hands, of resurrection of the dead and eternal judgement.”

Do you know that every doctrine of the Bible can fit in here somewhere! The safe church will preach and teach all of this – the full “doctrine of Messiah.”

The leader must be able to endure and withstand hardship.

2 Timothy 2:3-4 “You must endure hardship as a good soldier of Messiah. No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who enlisted him as a soldier.”

Today there are a great many ministers of denominational churches worldwide that are leaving the ministry in droves because of the hardships. The numbers are shocking indeed (Pew Research has put out a number of reports on these staggering numbers.)

To me this is a great shame. These people should never have been in the ministry in the first place. They are imposters and frauds.

Your heart before God:

If you have a heart in line with God and His word, you won’t have much in common with most other people and very little in common with the world.

The overall ultimate purpose of any and all churches is to slay you and break you so that the living God has unrestrained access to every part of your life. The church must be where you can have your heart moulded and melted into God’s.

I know a number of people who started off well. They ran well. They were full of the Lord and His Spirit. Some of them, I could see and sense were not all the way for our Lord. They had areas where they drew back or could not move forward. It’s like one or two doors in the home of their lives were still open to the ways of the world.

Sure enough, the devil crept in and grew and became more dominant and eventually led them astray.

Real brokenness is the biggest blessing ever. It opens you fully to the abundance of all that God is and has for you. Real brokenness defeats and deals with self in our lives.

Self doesn’t, mustn’t, and can’t be the decider of what is right or wrong. Truth must be cleansed; it must go through the cross and have all its humanism stripped out. Love must be purified. Self- constructed truth can be very humble, loving and holy – but totally wrong.

The same is true for the world system. Brokenness destroys our attachment to the world.

How can the world decide what’s right or wrong? Satan is the god of this world. How can Satan decide what truth is or love is?

There are vital signs of your sensitivity and obedience to God.

●When you discover pure biblical truth, how quickly do you respond?

●How quickly do you drop traditions or things that are contrary to biblical truth?

●How quickly do you change into an oddball, compared to the world around you?

●How quickly does it take for you to be hated by the world?

Many churches teach self-motivation and how to be happy. They teach you how to fit in with the modern world. They are preparing you for hell.

►There is a very easy way to make your life happy. It is the way of great, ultimate regret. Just cut up your Bible with a big knife. Once you’ve cut it up, make two piles out of the verses.

In one pile, to be thrown away, put all those nasty little self-affronting verses. Cut out all the hard sayings. Cut out all the verses about the severity of God. And especially cut out all the verses about the world system being the playground of Satan.

On this throw-away pile go all the verses like: ●“If you find your life in the world you will lose it.” ●“Take up your cross daily”. ●“I die daily”. ●“O wretched man that I am.” ●“In me dwells no good thing.” ●“I count all things as dung.” ●“I must decrease.” ●“You can of your own self do nothing.” ●“Death works in me.” ●“Fall on this Rock and be broken.”

Then from the cut-up Bible make another pile of verses. These ones you keep and confess and quote them all the time, like a good little Charismaniac. (By the way, I’m one of them!)

●“I have abundant life.” ●“I’m more than a conqueror.” ●“I’m a joint heir of all things.” ●“I am seated in heavenly places.” ●“I can do all things through Messiah, who strengthens me”. ●“I am complete in Him.” ●“Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.” And of course don’t forget all the prosperity verses (You wouldn’t do that though would you?)

You see, if you embrace and apply verses only or mostly from the second pile and reject those of the first pile (even though you would never admit it), you are going to be totally unbalanced. You can quote verses about how strong you are in the Lord until you’re blue in the face, but you are a weak, spineless push-over for the devil, and that is what you spread and transmit!

►There’s a way to make your life full of joy! Bear in mind that the word “happy” comes from the old English word “hap” and is related to chance. Today I’m happy, tomorrow I’m unhappy. This or that “happed” upon me. But there is no such thing as un-joy. Joy is a deep, internal welling up of spirit, sourced in God Himself, and has nothing to do with outward circumstances.

To be full of joy you need to throw away the big knife and leave your Bible intact! Embrace all the hard discipleship verses and all the good positional truth verses, but rightly divide and apply them, as you are led by the Spirit.

From a biblical point of view, life is divided as follows. We are a spirit, (Greek original is “Zoe”), we live in a body, (Greek original is “Bios”), and we have a soul, (Greek original is “Psuche”.)

A simple key is this. The hard-on-the-flesh discipleship verses apply to the soul and sometimes the body, but not the spirit. The “more than conquerors” positional truth verses apply to our position in Messiah and relate to our recreated spirit after the new birth. But we must embrace both to be fully balanced.

In a sense you can say that we have arrived (spirit) and we are arriving (soul).

Don’t mix them up though.

A balanced safe church is one who rightly divides all these things and excludes nothing.

Your church minister can spend a lot of time telling you how valuable and precious and special you are, even though you are still full of self, the world and the demonic! Or your church minister can spend time telling you that you are a scummy rat and must die. The latter is the safe one.

As a true believer you are on a journey from Satan’s playground and one of his dear friends, to God’s holy, pure and true kingdom of glory. Severe, deep and painful changes are needed.

Many will run away at the hard sayings – let them run. If not they will stay, being full of the devil and his ways and works, and the poor pastor will end up losing his hair, become wrinkled, frazzled and fried, wishing he had become an astronaut.

A safe church is one that teaches you all about judgement. It teaches you how to judge yourself and how to examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith. But how do we do this? We most certainly don’t compare ourselves amongst ourselves. We do compare ourselves to our Messiah and His word.

But I have found over many years that we can best examine ourselves by looking at what we do, what we allow in our lives and what we don’t. How separate are we from the world? A surrendered life will have many visible fruits.

The curse of replacement theology:

Replacement theology is simply a form of religious anti-Semitism. It is a cursed doctrine maintaining that the church has replaced Israel and all the blessings of the Bible are now for the church while the Bible curses are for the Jews.

This evil doctrine was formed and fashioned by the Catholic church and has spread to most of the denominational non-spirit filled churches.

You will find it lurking behind the pulpits and pews of a great many churches today. They have been blinded by the spirit of Hitler and the Nazi Party, although they think they are good liberals fitting in with the ways of the world.

Today these evil spirits are alive and well and preparing for their final assault – the second and final Holocaust. The spirits know that, but they haven’t told their nice seminary-educated hosts.

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS) is a form of economic replacement theology and pure anti-Semitism. It is arising strongly in Europe today just as it did before the Holocaust.

If your church has any part with the BDS Movement or replacement theology – get out of it fast. Run, run, run away from it! These are not just dangerous churches they are deadly – spiritually deadly! Get out of them and don’t look back.

Some general points:

Many have a secret hatred for the truth, because it interferes with their desire and love for sin and to live with unchallenged morals.

People hate the truth of God’s word on homosexuality, because they believe it’s a modern human right. But God condemns it and its supporters, so rather than line up their lives; it’s easier just to condemn God and His word, claiming that He is the hater and they are the lovers.

Today, so many so-called Christians are perfect members of the church of the “days of Noah and Lot.”

If you do not fight for the truth, you will fall for error! Walking and keeping oneself in the truth is a fight, it’s not automatic.

A safe church will be one open to and using the gifts of the Spirit as led by our Lord. A safe church will not appoint women as pastors. Church leadership is male. In fact in the original language, the words “Pastor” and “Rabbi” are male words.

Are you part of a church on the right track? If so, there are a number of measures you can use to establish this:

●Are you hated by the world?

●Do you find it very difficult to identify and fit in with the world and do you desire to be holy, pure and separate from the world?

●Can you comfortably take the Spirit of God in your heart with you into the foul world of modern entertainment?

●Do you have an insatiable desire to be with our Lord and to be alone with Him?

●Is your life exciting with an always fresh spiritual spark?

●Do you see heaven and hell?

●Is the word of God your final authority?

Finally:

The deadly, dangerous churches of today are the ones who forsake parts of the Bible and compare themselves amongst themselves and the great world churches – the whores of Babylon.

Drawing near to our wonderful Saviour burns you and breaks you. But remember, with the great Master-Designer at work you become a great diamond, a pearl of great price, gold poured into a great mould.

As we give our crushed, broken, burnt lives back to our King, He turns ashes into beauty. (Isaiah 61:3).

Too many believers today are a cheap joke. They are like cheap plastic compared to the beauty from ashes. Too many today, believe in our Lord but want nothing of His interference in their lives – to their eternal detriment!

I took this picture in the beautiful desert of Namaqualand, one of my favourite places! I got down into the flowers, looking up into the sun.

If you want to see some more pictures of spectacular Namaqualand click HERE.

Shalom and grow in grace!