Important Takeaways:
- The Bible uses strong language to describe any form of compromise with worldly thinking. And it doesn’t just apply to the ancient Israelites.
- Hosea 4:12 says, “My people ask counsel from their wooden idols, and their [wooden] staff informs them. For the spirit of harlotry has caused them to stray, and they have played the harlot against their God.”
- Hosea used strong language against his fellow Israelites, calling them harlots because they had violated their vows to remain faithful to the one true God. Is it possible that Christians today, and particularly Christian leaders—in their zeal to make Christianity more enticing—are actually “playing the harlot,” too? Here is what I mean.
- Born-again Christians who love the Lord, preach the gospel, and insist on the inerrancy of Scriptures are saddened when they read how the Israelites compromised God’s Word as they embraced more and more pagan beliefs (including idolatry) from the nations around them. God calls such compromise “harlotry.” Over and over again, Scripture gives clear instructions concerning the worship of the one true God, and it condemns compromise with pagan beliefs as harlotry (Jeremiah 3:6).
- Universal Fallen Nature
- Because of our sin nature, God knows how we humans are more likely to be influenced by that which is wrong than that which is right. God describes our heart this way: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).
- Despite all the miracles many Israelites saw God do for them, many compromised their worship of God with idolatry and pagan rituals. As we read about this in the books of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, and Amos, we shake our heads and say, “How could they do this? How could they play such harlotry, as God describes it?”
- But I’m also reminded of the verse, “And there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). You see, ever since Adam sinned, man’s sin-cursed nature hasn’t changed. Certainly, those who are born again, as the Bible defines this, know that their sins are forgiven and they will spend eternity with the Lord. Nonetheless, such Christians still have to deal with their sin nature daily while in these sin-cursed bodies. Even the great apostle Paul had this battle: “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice” (Romans 7:18–19).
- All Christians have feet of clay. All, no matter how dedicated to the Lord and His Word, are susceptible to being drawn into error because of our sin nature. Indeed, we are all guilty of “harlotry” (idolatry) to one degree or another every time we choose sin and love the world rather than loving God and following His rule (1 John 2:15; see also Colossians 3:15).
- Commands to Avoid Compromise
- Because of man’s fallen nature, God frequently gave instructions to the Israelites such as this: “You shall not make anything to be with Me—gods of silver or gods of gold you shall not make for yourselves” (Exodus 20:23).
- In fact, because man is so likely to compromise God’s Word, God gave further instructions: “And if you make Me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stone; for if you use your tool on it, you have profaned it.”
- Why is that? In Genesis 3 we read that the serpent said to Eve: “For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Humans want to be their own gods—our nature is that we want to replace the true God with our own god. So God told the Israelites not to use any tool on the stone for an altar. In other words, He did not want them to be tempted to make a god when they carved in stone.
- But sadly, the Israelites gave in to this temptation and did adopt the false gods of the pagan nations into their own system of worship. They compromised God’s Word. “My people ask counsel from their wooden idols, and their staff informs them. For the spirit of harlotry has caused them to stray, and they have played the harlot against their God” (Hosea 4:12).
- And then we find how God responded:
- He has withdrawn Himself from them (Hosea 5:6).
- “I will send a famine on the land . . . of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11).
- “I will despise your feast days. . . . Offerings, I will not accept them. . . . I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments” (Amos 5:21–23).
- “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge . . . . I also will forget your children” (Hosea 4:6).
- Yes, their children rebelled against the Lord—the parents lost their children to the pagan world. As for all their offerings, praise, and worship, God did not hear them or accept them.
- Compromise Today
- I submit that there “is nothing new under the sun.” The same situation, albeit portrayed in a different way and using different terminology, is happening today. I suggest much of the church today is really no different when we consider this sin of harlotry.
- When I debated Bill Nye in February 2014, he was not just defending molecules-to-man evolution and millions of years; he was also defending naturalism. Naturalism is the belief that the whole universe, including the earth and all life, is explained by natural processes. This is Bill Nye’s religion—the religion of the secularists.
- The belief in millions of years to explain geology and molecules-to-man evolution is the secularists’ attempt to justify their religion of naturalism. It is really human beings attempting to be god and worshipping matter and time (millions of years). In fact, Neil deGrasse Tyson stated in episode 8 of the recent Cosmos television series: “Our ancestors worshipped the sun. They were far from foolish. It makes good sense to revere the sun and stars because we are their children. The silicon in the rocks, the oxygen in the air, the carbon in our DNA, the iron in our skyscrapers, the silver in our jewelry—were all made in stars, billions of years ago. Our planet, our society, and we ourselves are stardust.”
- Sadly, many Christians, including many Christian leaders (pastors, seminary and Bible college professors, Christian college professors, and so on), have adopted evolutionary geology, biology, astronomy, and anthropology, along with belief in millions of years, and they have mixed such beliefs with God’s Word. Because such beliefs are founded on an antibiblical, anti-God worldview, I do humbly submit that such is harlotry no different than that of the Israelites.
- Now I also state, as I have many times before, that salvation is conditional upon faith in Christ as the Scriptures teach, and not upon one’s view on the age of the earth or evolutionary ideas. Certainly many born-again Christians have adopted evolutionary beliefs, which doesn’t mean they can’t be saved. But it does not alter the fact they have played harlotry with man’s religion that opposes God’s Word.
- I also submit that what happened to the Israelites is happening today. There is a famine of the hearing the Word of the Lord in our Western world, as many church leaders water down the teaching of the Word and adopt the world’s views in regard to marriage, abortion, and so on.
- We are losing most of the coming generations from the church—over 60% of those in their twenties right now who were once connected to the church are not connected any longer. Yes, churches all across our Western world have emotion-touching music and well-run programs—but I submit that in many instances God is not hearing them because they have not taken an uncompromising stand on the Bible’s authority.
- So I challenge those who do compromise God’s Word in Genesis by adding man’s ideas to contemplate these things. And I end with this challenge that God gave to the Israelites: “Therefore say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘Return to Me,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘and I will return to you,’’” (Zechariah 1:3).
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Important Takeaways:
- Public trust in pastors has dropped to a new low, according to the latest Gallup poll. The survey finds that only 30% of Americans rate clergy as highly honest and ethical, continuing a downward trend.
- Gallup’s findings, released last week, place clergy in 10th position among the 23 professions measured. Clergy were ranked below auto mechanics (33%), judges (28%), but above bankers (23%) and nursing home operators (21%).
- The poll, conducted Dec. 2-18, 2024, also revealed that 20% of Americans rate clergy’s honesty and ethics as low or very low, while another 42% see pastors as having average standards. Seven percent said they had no opinion about clergy.
- The polling organization, which has tracked some occupations annually since 1999, said most professions have recorded lower honesty and ethics ratings over time. “The proportion saying the clergy have high or very high ethics is down from an average 56% in 2000-2009 to 30% today,” Gallup noted.
- “Previously, a broad majority of the U.S. held pastors in the highest regard,” Lifeway stated, recalling that 67% of Americans considered pastors highly honest and ethical in 1985.
- However, reports of sexual abuse in religious settings, such as the 2002 investigations by The Boston Globe, appear to have eroded trust. Gallup described 2002 and 2018 as points in time that mirrored negative developments in the Catholic Church and other denominations, while Lifeway pointed to the “additional sex abuse reports in other denominations and Christian groups” as relevant factors.
- Americans have consistently had low esteem for lobbyists, members of Congress and TV reporters, which Gallup identifies as three groups receiving ratings below 15%. Advertising practitioners (8%) and car salespeople (7%) remain near the bottom of the scale.
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Important Takeaways:
- So, what does Metaxas say? He says North American Christianity is too much the same as that found in the German Church of the 1930s. In his view, that’s a bad thing.
- “So the only question,” he writes, “is whether we might understand those parallels, and thereby avoid the fatal mistakes the German Church made during that time.”
- What fatal mistakes did the German Church make? We don’t have to guess because Bonhoeffer, as Metaxas makes clear, identified those mistakes for us. The German Church’s first mistake was the failure to recognize with the coming to power of Hitler and the Nazis, the world changed and not for the better. As Metaxas puts it, “They seemed to think what might have worked in 1915 or 1925 would work in 1935… They refused to see the new situation and to act accordingly.”
- Metaxas then gives details to show the same situation prevails in North America today. We don’t face Nazis but “the emergence of ideas and forces that ultimately are at war with God Himself.”
- All of them, Metaxas says, spring from a central source, “atheistic Marxist ideology,” as expressed in Critical Race Theory’s many guises, and “radical transgender and pro-abortion ideologies” that are “inescapably anti-God and anti-human.”
- To summarize, “These ideas have over many decades infiltrated our own culture in such a way they touch everything, and part of what makes them so wicked is that they smilingly pretend to share the biblical values that champion the underdog against the oppressor.”
- What, then, are we to do? Bonhoeffer spelled out his position in an April 1933 essay, The Church and the Jewish Question. In the essay, written on behalf of the “Emergency Pastors League,” Bonhoeffer argued “the church was the conscience of the state and must call it to account,” and “that it must loudly object if the state was doing wrong.”
- Churches must not, as Metaxas denounces in scathing terms, retreat to a focus on “the gospel” as though God has nothing to say about public evil.
- “This is not just nonsense,” Metaxas writes, “but is a supremely deceptive and satanic lie, designed only to silence those who would genuinely speak for truth.”
- But more from Bonhoeffer as Metaxas reports it: “… the Christian Church was obligated to help any victims of the state,” he wrote. Then he really bore down, “… if the state refused to change course and do the right thing, but rather continued in its sins — which in this case were principally focused on persecuting the Jews — it was the solemn obligation of Christians to take action. They were not merely to protest verbally and to help the victims, but were also to become actively political — to ‘shove a stick in the spokes’ of the wheel of the rumbling machine of the state.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Why is the church quiet? The revolutionary pastors fought and urged congregants to be involved. Why has the church lost its zeal today?
- Speaking of revolutionary pastors, back in 1776, a pastor in Woodstock, Virginia, John Peter Muhlenberg, stood up in front of his congregation and preached from Ecclesiastes chapter 3. When he got to verse 8, he talked about how there was a “time for war and a time for peace,” and he unzipped his black clerical robe to reveal an officer’s uniform in the Continental Army. He marched to the back of his church, and he called the men of his congregation to fight. They formed the 8th Virginia Brigade, which is still in active duty today.
- James Madison, one of the great founding fathers in Virginia, was running for the first Congress in 1789. While he was running for the fifth district to sit in Congress, he met with the Virginia Baptists in Richmond. They told him that he wouldn’t get their support unless he wrote a Bill of Rights for the First Amendment protecting religious Liberties. Madison did just that, and he won that seat in Congress.
- My point is that the church has always been involved in the past, so why be silent today? I think there are a few reasons.
- Some have misinterpreted the First Amendment—the idea of a separation of church and state. The First Amendment was intended to keep government out of the church, not the church out of government.
- When Thomas Jefferson wrote his letter in 1802 to the Danbury Baptists in Connecticut, he was interpreting the constitutional rights that churches had to be involved in politics. The separation of church and state was intended to help churches and Christians realize that the government can’t intrude, not the other way around.
- Then, in 1959, the Johnson Amendment came into law. It muzzled Pastors in the Pulpit from endorsing candidates.
- Today, you have pastors who just don’t want to be controversial. Let me tell you something: anytime you step into the arena of truth, it will sound controversial to some people. As pastors, we must continue to urge our congregations. And as Christians, you must be active, not silent, in the pews. Get out and make your voices heard and your values known.
- Be involved in the political process today. We’re called to be salt and light. Get out there, please, and be salt and light to this world.
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Important Takeaways:
- While the Biden administration cracks down on the Christians Democrats and the press smear as extremists, church attacks are up 800 percent in the last six years, according to a new report from the Family Research Council (FRC).
- In February, the conservative group published the report, “Hostility Against Churches Is on the Rise in the United States.” It identified 915 acts of hostility against churches between January 2018 and November 2023.
- “Although the motivations for many of these acts of hostility remain unknown, the effect is unmistakable: religious intimidation,” said FRC Center for Religious Liberty Director Arielle Del Turco in a press release. “They send the message that churches are not wanted in the community or respected in general. Our culture is demonstrating a growing disdain for Christianity and core Christian beliefs, and acts of hostility towards churches could be a physical manifestation of that.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Pastor Jack Hibbs lists 5 things Christians will go to war over in 2024
- In part one of the series, preached last month, Hibbs explained that his message was centered on “the war of 2024,” emphasizing that Christians “are on a mission and we are in a war.”
- “I’m not talking about bombs, guns and missiles,” he clarified. “I’m talking about an all-out war on everything, from the spiritual realm, which is invisible, but certainly to the physical world, in which things manifest.”
- “And this year of 2024 will be unlike any other year previously lived in your lifetime.”
- Hibbs believes that, first of all, the war “will be against the truth,”… “When you tell somebody the actual truth, they don’t believe it,” he said. “It’s not that they’re being mean about it; it’s that ‘why should I believe that because I’ve just heard 10 other things.’”
- The second thing that the war of 2024 will be centered on, according to Hibbs, will be a war “against the facts,” with the pastor defining facts as “the reporting of what is observed.”
- “you are going to see deception fly like you’ve never seen it fly before. It’s going to be supersonic.”
- The third thing that the war of 2024 will include is a war “against the faith,”… against the Christian faith specifically.
- The fourth aspect of the war of 2024, according to Hibbs, is the war “against the Church,” noting that “the war has always been against the Church” and that “God loves His Church, we love each other, but the world is against us.”
- The fifth and final aspect of the war of 2024 that Hibbs spoke about was that it would be “a war against marriage,”… the cheapening of marriage in modern society
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Important Takeaways:
- A documentary that traced the struggles of three Christian churches to remain open as governments tried to shut them down during the coronavirus hysteria has surged to number one on the Apple iTunes Store in its documentaries category.
- The film follows the fight by three churches to remain open to serve their flocks even as the woke state tried to forcibly close them down during the worst of its pandemic hysteria starting in 2020.
- The film features the tribulations of Grace Community Church’s John MacArthur in Los Angeles, Fairview Baptist Church pastor Tim Stephens in Calgary, Canada, and GraceLife Church pastor James Coates also in Canada.
- The film speaks to the authority government has or should have to shut down churches, and speaks to the role that civil government has in the church, and when and how it should or should not be obeyed by Christians.
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Important Takeaways:
- Jesus Unveiled Bible Prophecy, So Why Are Only 2% of US Churches Teaching it?
- In a recent Lifeway poll they found only 2% of churches in the USA teach Bible prophecy. This is an amazing latter-days stat for several reasons:
- Roughly 30% of the Bible is prophetic. They’re ignoring almost 1/3 of the scriptures.
- 100% accuracy in past prophecies fulfilled literally separates the Bible from every other book on the planet. It not only claims to be written by God, it proves it by predicting the future.
- The entire Book of Revelation was prophetic when written. Today everything from Revelation 6 forward is still in the future and likely to be fulfilled within the next 7-14 years.
- The Book of Revelation is the only book that promises Believers a special blessing for even trying to read and understand it.
- Revelation 1:3 KJV – “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.”
- In the Book of Daniel, it says to “seal up” the words until the end of the Times of the Gentiles. In the Book of Revelation, which dovetails with Daniel, John is told to “seal NOT the words for the time is at hand”… meaning the Church Age.
- And God promises through Amos that He WOULD reveal to us what is going on.
- Amos 3:7 KJV – “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.”
- And from Jeremiah:
- Jeremiah 30:24 KJV – “The fierce anger of the Lord shall not return, until he hath done it, and until he have performed the intents of his heart: in the latter days ye shall consider it.”
- Yet only 2% of churches even attempt to try to understand the thrust of the Bible’s teaching in hundreds of Bible prophecy verses.
- I know one thing, Satan sure doesn’t want Believers to study prophecy because it gives people hope.
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Important Takeaways:
- Church in AI takeover as sermon led by ChatGPT in artificial intelligence breakthrough
- The word of God has now been officially taken over by AI as proved by this robot-generated sermon which included humans worshipping.
- You can now forget the stereotype that religion is backwards as this Methodist Church in Texas now uses artificial intelligence to conduct a service with ChatGPT.
- On September 17, 2023, the Violet Crown City Church, a Methodist church in North Austin, US, transformed the tradition of Sunday service into the new age with Artificial Intelligence.
- Pastor Jay Cooper, of Violet Crown City Church, decided to debut an AI-generated worship service for his congregation.
- Using AI, Jay recorded the service while letting the artificial intelligence generator conduct the service, with AI being able to create prayers, a sermon, and an original song based on the sermon itself.
- “The idea to create an AI-generated worship service came from my belief that the church should not only be aware of the most pressing issues of our world, but also to actively engage in them,” Jay said.
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Revelation 2:5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.
Important Takeaways:
- How Do You Resurrect an Empty Church?
- America’s aging houses of worship face a stark choice: sell, redevelop, or pray for a miracle.
- On June 25, Summerfield Church in Milwaukee held its last Sunday service. The rough-cut sandstone church, with its bright red doors and stained-glass windows, was built in 1904 to house the state’s oldest Methodist congregation, and occupies a prominent corner lot a few blocks north of downtown. By this spring, the congregation had dwindled to just 11 members, none younger than 65, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. And the repair bill to get the water-damaged structure shipshape was $1.3 million.
- It is a story replaying over and over in cities across the United States, where older churches have been hammered by neighborhood change and maintenance costs, coinciding with a national trend of plummeting religious attendance across faiths. Over the past decade, the share of Americans who attend weekly services at a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple has fallen to 30 percent, after hovering for half a century at 40 percent. Overall membership has fallen even more precipitously, and less than half of Americans now say they “belong” to a religious organization. A pair of studies has suggested that thousands of U.S. churches close each year (though a smaller, significant number are founded).
- And all of this was happening before COVID, which normalized virtual participation and decoupled people from their neighborhood institutions.
- “Churches have been on the edge of a cliff, and COVID was a blast of air blowing them off,” said Rick Reinhard
- New Jersey, whose 291-year-old First Presbyterian was among the oldest institutions to close. “There is a great mismatch between small, aging congregations and large, aging properties,” he told me. “What empty department stores were 30 years ago, empty churches are today, but much more difficult to resolve.”
- Last month, the issue made headlines in New York City, where the dozen-person congregation of West-Park Presbyterian Church is trying to sell its 19th-century building to a developer who will demolish it and build apartments.
- Tim Keller, the influential evangelical pastor who died this spring, recalled the jarring sight of converted churches in Manhattan, including a beautiful brownstone church in Chelsea that had served Episcopal worshippers since 1844. “Now it was the Limelight, an epicenter of the downtown club scene,” Keller wrote. “Thousands of people a night showed up for drugs and sex and the possibility of close encounters with the famous of the cultural avant garde. It was a vivid symbol of a culture that had rejected Christianity.”
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