Edition 392: November 21^st 2017.

When should you leave a church?

Introduction:

This edition is addressed to believers in churches, to believer’s not in regular churches and to those who receive from YouTube and Internet ministries.

It’s not my business to tell anyone to leave a ministry /church or not. It’s really between you and our Lord. There are some churches that you should never set foot in! But there are a great many in which you can grow well and correctly.

Bear in mind that we are in a unique time in which the Spirit of God is being poured out more and more, enlightening many churches who were not right with God. Many are changing fast and that’s great news. So, our Lord may want you right there to be part of the awakening.

At the same time some churches are growing darker and more dangerous. You must wait on the Lord and move when and if He wants you to move.

If you are a believer not in a local institutional church, and receive from YouTube or other internet based ministries, much the same applies to you.

If you do leave a church, do it correctly and not out of pride or bitterness. There may be situations where you need to run fast from a church and shake the dust from you as you go!

This edition is about some of the pointers you may want to consider.

At the end of the day, it’s not about institutional, organised churches, although they play a part. It’s about the kingdom of God and your personal growth in Messiah in that eternal kingdom.

If you are not growing and moving forward in our Lord, it will have eternal consequences for you. Your reward state is an eternal state. We will all shine as differently as the stars, forever.

The model church / ministry:

The biggest issue within any ministry is its doctrine and application thereof.

It is all revealed in two verses of scripture! Every doctrine of the new covenant fits in here:

Hebrews 6:1-2 “Let us go on to perfection in the elementary doctrine of Messiah: Repentance from dead works, faith towards God, the doctrine of baptisms (plural), of laying on of hands, of resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgement.”

Of course the model church is one that is primarily led by, and actively influenced by the Spirit of God, making it other-worldly, supernatural, and of the kingdom of God.

The Bible reveals clearly that there will be two types of churches in the end days.

One will be a spirit-less, man-made institution, following the dictates of modern man, full of dead doctrine, relevant to the present evil world. It will be full of demons, counterfeits and frauds. It will become a huge world-church.

The second is revealed as a church of victory and glory, with an open door before it, watching, awake, having the “key of David”, loving and keeping God’s entire word, overcoming the world. It is like a “pillar in the temple”. (Revelation 3:7-13) It will be small in number.

The “key of David,” above, refers to a pro-Israel church assisting the Jews. (Isaiah 22:21-22)

Questions for the modern church:

What benchmark, measure or standard are you using for your growth in Messiah?

Are you arrested by the truth, seeking it, and its safety, cleanliness, purity and holiness?

The word “truth” appears 235 times in the Bible. The intensity or frequency of the usage of “truth” increases dramatically in relation to end-time events. Bible warnings against deception increase just as dramatically for these end-times.

The main ingredient for peace of mind and inner rest as you move forward is truth. It is as our Lord gives you His truth to own, internalise and make a part of you, that you endure through to victory and beat discouragement.

Isaiah 30:15 “In returning (repentance) and rest you shall be saved. Quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”

I am constantly amazed at the wisdom of the Bible!

Can your church see dangerous error and approaching deception? Do you know it?

The only way you can know error is by knowing the truth. It is your benchmark. But the catch is; you cannot know the truth while not in the light of God’s revelation.

Psalm 43:3 “Oh, send out Your light and Your truth! Let them lead me...”

Psalm 119:105 “Your word (truth) is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

Is your church moving forward? Evil is! Is your church a light shining more brightly as the Day approaches? Is your church being swallowed by the deepening darkness?

Is your church a witness to this world? Are you a living testimony and witness to the world and in fact to other believers too?

The original Greek word for “Witness” is the same as the word for “Martyr” It is Strong’s G3144 “Martyrus.” That puts a more severe and serious emphasis on witnessing! (Thanks Rabbi Jonathan Cahn for that.)

Is your church persecuted for its stand on many issues, especially moral, in these days? Are you persecuted for your walk in the Lord? If not, you really are one of Satan’s good friends.

►The world doesn’t really mind “Jesus”. Their Jesus is the one whom they can control and make say what they want Him to say, and silence what they don’t want. If they can put their words in His mouth – He’s okay then, He’s on their side!

You are powerful when you are separate, clean, in the light and truth!

Without being well founded and established in all truth, you will not be able to resist the end-time onslaught of error. You have no internal resistance.  Your internal weapons of defence have spiritual leprosy!

Does your church modify the truth? Do you change verses to suit yourself? It’s a funny thing that churches that lose the most members over time are those that change and modify the truth or miss-apply it. Studies have been done to show that a church that stands against sin and error is unpopular with the masses, but they endure!

The need of watchmen in the church today:

Because of the specific threats and dangers spelt out in the Bible for the end-time church, it goes without saying that it needs specific, called and equipped watchmen.

The office of the end-time watchman is a calling. It involves watching relating to the full prophetic word of present and future events. It also involves watching for false watchers and failed predictors, and warning against them.  It involves listening to many hours of other peoples teachings.

It involves knowing exactly where the church is today and what dangers and threats lie ahead.

It involves a deep sensitivity to the Spirit of our Lord and the use of the revelatory gifts of the Spirit. It involves not being a chicken. It involves speaking rebuke and correction. Please bear in mind that it is always the unrepentant who will not receive correction.

The entire end-time scenario is likened to a dark night in numerous verses.

Isaiah 21:11“Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?”

Excuse me for sharing this personal experience, but it’s always so powerfully vivid for me.

I’m a wildlife freak, a conservationist, a nature lover and tree-hugger. I’ve spent a great deal of time working with endangered species and in some of the great and wonderful wild places of Southern Africa. (In the days when I was mobile)

Many times I’ve slept under the stars on one of the thousands of large islands in the 15,000sq.km Okavango Delta. We always kept a fire going through the night to keep the wildlife away. It worked most times! But the amazing thing is that as soon as the night arrives, so do millions of new sounds, new nocturnal beasts and new dangers hidden in the dark.

In the daytime you can see a lion coming. At night you hear it breathing, but you can’t see it. You shine the torch around and suddenly it picks up wide, staring, glowing, fiery lion-eyes in the mist of its breath!

Beautiful sounding, spectacularly coloured little frogs come out to play – so poisonous that just a touch can kill you!

We would divide the night up and one person would sit night-watch for that section of time to keep the fire going and make coffee for the next watchman, while you went to peaceful sleep with lions roaring in the darkness. We would always hear elephant tummies rumbling, but we couldn’t see them.

Sometimes there were just two of us and sometimes I was alone. Night-watch was always a most intense and thrilling time!

The point is that the church today, needs to have a watchman on duty 24 /7! The coming night will bring its own new dangers.

Today, many churches have no watchmen and especially no one on night-watch!

Some churches and YouTube ministries have watchmen repeatedly looking in the wrong places and then proclaiming that to the world! In fact they are a dangerous curse on the body, leaving it wide open to attack, while they ride their dead hobby-horses.

My friends, this ministry, The Prophetic Scroll is not designed to take the place of any church and most churches need not feel threatened. But if you are not getting your fill, please feel free to return here as often as you wish. I will always be watching – and not just for dangerous wildlife.

Special needs in the church today:

Today many Christians are falling apart. Many have the characteristics of a floppy doll! They get knocked flat by every wind of doctrine. They live in a spiritually superficial world with no backbone. They get hit by the stresses and strains of the world.

Is your church able to effectively counsel shipwrecked, stressed out believers?

If you, or people you know, need counselling today, please read Edition 83, entitled “Counselling believers in perilous times.” Click HERE. Or Edition 372, “God’s Psychology for Today.”  Click HERE

These editions should make up the backbone of all Christian counselling, but even more so for today. They are radically different to secular psychology and counselling, which mostly compounds people’s problems.

Your journey to maturity:

Do you know that you are in a race to the finish line, and it’s very near? Are you ready for the final sprint to the finish line? The final sprint comes after the long haul of endurance.

Today we are in a spiritually shallow world of instant everything. But Christian maturity does not come that way – deception does!

Today many churches and ministries are influenced and led by the mass-media. It’s their job to desensitise you to sin and evil. Only the Spirit of the living God in your heart can alert you to that and re-sensitise you.

Too many churches today are creators of their own truth, and their own “Jesus.” They have no vision of holiness. The result is an unholy church.

You may have heard about the unforgivable sin, but closely related is the irresistible sin. It is: “I can do it my way.” This was the sin of Nimrod, and Babylon. God commands us to come out of the world and be separate from it. It is only as you come out of the world, that you can go in to deeper maturity.

The irresistible sin is humanism in a nutshell. It involves using the Bible – the dead letter of the Bible, with no revelation.

The irresistible sin will make you ineffective, and impotent. You will not mature in the Lord. You will remain an obnoxious, spiritual brat!

We as true believers live in two worlds. The world we see is dark and getting darker. As true born-again believers in our Lord, most of us are very eager to get out of this crazy doomed world into our new glorious bodies and abodes.

We are often criticised for being “doom-merchants.” Of course the Bible is full of doom for the unsaved world.

But why are the unsaved critical of us for that? It’s simply because they have only one world. They can’t see the kingdom of God. They can only see, touch and experience their own world and we proclaim their one and only world – doomed...as God does!

We long for the doom for the world of darkness, because we know who its god is, and what its destiny is, and because our new world of truth, purity, holiness, glory and majesty will soon be the one and only true, real world.

We long for the doom of this present world system, so that our new universe of eternal, absolute peace and glory will come. The unsaved can’t see our kingdom of light. They have eyes attuned to see the darkness.

Job 24:13 “There are those who rebel against the light; they do not know its ways nor abide in its paths.”

Witchcraft and idolatry in the church:

Many churches are full of idols of illegitimate worship, idols of materialism, nature, money, philosophies, politics, science, technology, humanism, sport, occult worship and even various spiritual doctrines.

Galatians 3:1 “O you foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Yeshua the Messiah was clearly portrayed among you as crucified.”

The bewitching power spoken of above is that of legalism. It shows clearly that a witchcraft spirit can and does work in the church. Note that its first objective is to lead you from the truth. Note that this spirit obscures the cross. It blinds you to the power of the cross.

Isaiah 45:16 “They who are makers of idols shall be ashamed and also be disgraced - all of them; they shall go in confusion together.”

Note that confusion is a fruit of idolatry.

Any church that does not centre on the cross of Calvary and your own cross-bearing is a dangerous place to be. It will be full of the “irresistible sin and blind to truth.

Isaiah 59:13-14 “In transgressing and lying against the Lord, and departing from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart, falsehood...Truth is fallen in the street.”

There’s a very good method of knowing if you are growing in our Lord. What do you do or where do you go when you are alone and when no one is looking? The Bibles says: “When they were alone they went to their own company.”

Do you retreat into the everlasting arms of our Saviour, or do you turn to the devil and his crowd?

Dangerous churches and ministries:

These would be churches where the Spirit of God is absent. You need to leave.

These churches and ministries will be characterised by half-truths, wrongly applied and some huge end-time false doctrines like replacement theology.  This dangerous doctrine is currently morphing into new doctrines, some which began to emerge from the Revelation 12 sign (deception) teachers.

I’m not going to get into this now, because I will soon do something new on this new deadly form of replacement theology.

But all churches without a heart for what God is doing now in Israel are to be avoided, or at least put on notice.

Many other false spirits and doctrines will be found in these spirit-less churches.

The Jezebel spirit will be evident.

Incredibly, there is a growing group of churches and YouTube ministries teaching that the earth is flat!!! Get out of them fast – run, run away. Some of these are amongst the Revelation 12 signers.

Some believe and teach that Nibiru is coming.

Seriously solemn service:

We are in seriously important service to our great King and Lord. This is not a little churchy game!

The effects of our entire Christian lives are monumental forever!

Repentance wipes the slate clean with God. The blood of the Lamb removes all sin eternally, but what it doesn’t do is fill your book of works with works you never did. There will be regret in heaven for all that we should have done and didn’t.

I’m in no way speaking of works for salvation, but after salvation, done through the leading of the Spirit.

Many will have an eternal reward state contained in a wafer-thin book of works – forever, that should have been full.

Many people will get to heaven, wonderfully saved, and then see our Lord open their book of works for their rewards and it will be a book with one blank page!

These are most important, vital issues – more important than you could ever imagine. Don’t waste your life on things with no eternal value. You can’t go back and do life again!

If you seek to be right with man and that man is wrong – Oops! But If you seek to be right with God, and man is right or wrong – you are right and safe!

Be careful who you submit to and be even more careful what you allow to get deep into your being.

You are safe with the cross of Messiah deeply imbedded in your very foundation. If that has broken you – praise the Lord.

Unbroken people minister and share God, the devil, the world, the kingdom, the church, paganism, purity, and dirt in a giant hodgepodge of mixture – essentially all nullified in power.

Finally

The kingdom is sin-free. It is everything that has gone through and been cleansed by the cross of Calvary. Those characteristics should be evident and growing in you.

We should be living in inner peace, joy and rest, yet so many are living in stress and torment. It is sin that creates stress! It is everything of the unredeemed kingdom of the world that causes all modern man’s problems.

Is your vision a kingdom vision of wonderful eternal glory, soon to come?

The best church is the one that teaches you to know our Lord more deeply and how to follow Him.

2 Corinthians 5:15 “He died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves, (cross) but for Him who died for them and rose again.”

You do need to consider leaving a church if it is obstructing your growth. Don’t leave the people though – they are family!

Do what you need to do to grow in the Lord.

The Fish Eagle grabbing a fish is a painting I did some time ago. I’ve merged it into a photograph I took of the Augrabies Falls in flood.

Shalom and grow in His Grace!