Scriptures teach consistently that faith comes through the proclamation of the gospel, not through good works. Christ himself was not arrested and arraigned because he was trying to restore family values or feed the poor...The mounting ire of the religious leaders toward Jesus coalesced around him making himself equal with God and forgiving sins in his own person, directly, over against the temple and its sacrificial system. Michael Horton
Well, Paramount has done it again! The studio has produced a new trailer for Noah
movie (to be released in theaters March 28) that I believe is really
another Hollywood deception (like the previous video clip). It’s
designed to make Christians think this Noah movie accurately portrays the account of Noah, the Ark, and the Flood in the Bible—which it certainly does not. (See my previous blog post on the film that was previewed by one of our staff members a few months ago.)
The new video trailer is described this way:
The video. . .features a short introduction from
actress Emma Watson. In the movie, Watson’s character Ila is the adopted
daughter of Academy Award winners Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly;
Crowe stars in the title role and Connelly plays his wife Naameh.
The story of this movie is based on the famous biblical tale, “Noah’s
Ark.” Director Darren Aronofsky worked on the screenplay with long-time
collaborator Ari Handel. The movie will be released on March 28, 2014. Continue at Answers in Genesis
Just the other day I posted that Christians should be wary of God“experiences.” Although there are many prominent promoters of practices
that claim to be ways to hear directly from God (other than by reading
the Bible), it is my fear that these are really paths toward
self-deception or worse.
As a follow up I’d like to share my thoughts about a book whose
author purports to have received messages from God (which she turned
into a bestselling book).
A couple months ago I was given a devotional book called Jesus Calling,
and although I never read devotionals I began to examine the book. What
I found shocked me. The author, Sarah Young, claims to have received
revelations from Jesus through dialogue journaling (something she
learned from two “listeners” who wrote another book called God Calling.
I’ll get to that in a minute). Her book is even written as if Jesus is
speaking those messages directly to the reader, which I personally think
borders (or crosses into) blasphemy.
Alarm bells began to clang in my head.
Young writes that a year after reading that book, God Calling,
“I began to wonder if I, too, could receive messages during my times of
communing with God. I had been writing in prayer journals for years,
but that was one-way communication: I did all the talking. I knew that
God communicated with me through the Bible, but I yearned for more…” Continue at Julia
Three years into our marriage, my wife, Trisha, woke up in the middle
of the night and realized I wasn’t in bed. She walked out into the
living room and as soon as she looked at the TV, I quickly changed the
channel.
She began to question me about what I was watching, why I wasn’t in
bed, and why I would immediately change the channel. Then came the
repeated question: Do you struggle with lust and pornography? The more
she asked the more intense the conversation became.
So I denied everything. I told her I was just channel surfing. I
argued with her about what she saw. I convinced her that I didn’t
struggle with porn or lust. She had nothing to worry about. I was lying.
For the amount of people who struggle with this, we don’t talk about it near enough.
I didn’t know it at the time, but that night was the first of many
opportunities I had over the first 10 years of our marriage to be honest
about my porn addiction. I was a pastor and pastors don’t struggle with
lust or porn. At least, no other pastor I knew struggled with it, I
felt all alone.
The truth was, I wasn’t alone. I had friends I could have talked to. I
had accountability partners I lied to. I had other pastors I blew off
when asked about sexual sins and struggles. Continue at Relevant
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) – Thousands, if not millions, of church members sitting in America’s pews aren’t really born-again Christians, a
Washington, D.C., pastor said April 10 to a pastors’ conference in
Louisville, Ky.
Mark Dever, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in the nation’s capital, warned
on the opening day of the 2012 Together for the Gospel Conference that
“false conversions” are “the suicide of the local church.”
Dever was one of four religious leaders – with Albert Mohler, president
of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; C.J. Mahaney, president
Sovereign Grace Ministries in Gaithersburg, Md.; and Ligon Duncan,
senior minister at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Miss. – to
convene the first Together for the Gospel event in 2006 to combat what
they viewed as false teaching in many churches today. A statement of
unifying doctrines includes male headship in the church and home and the
need for church discipline of wayward members in local congregations.
This year’s conference, the fourth, was expected to draw 8,000 pastors
and ministers April 10-12 to The Kentucky International Convention
Center and KFC Yum! Center, with messages uploaded daily on the website
t4g.org.
Dever described “members of the church who live worldly, carnal lives” as a “serious problem” in American Christianity.
“The problem I am pointing to is not just that of the occasional
hypocrite lost in their own unrepentant sin,” Dever said. “I’m talking
about systems which seem to produce false converts so much that it’s not
just one man … but whole congregations that like Israel of old are
typified and characterized not by holiness but by worldliness.”
Dever said that is a problem for church members who are “deceived about their own state before the Lord.” Continue at Bob Allen
I got another one of those emails calling me a liar. It
comes with the territory. It was not that my particular view was wrong,
misinformed, or even misguided. Nope. I was a liar. I was deliberately
misleading people. I know the truth, but I withhold it so that I can
consciously exchange it for something that is false. The old
bait-and-switch. I was a “liar from the pit of hell.”
I am often humored by extreme rhetoric that Christians will employ,
but never more so than when people become so loose with the accusations
about lying. Maybe humored is the wrong word: it’s a very disturbed type
of humor.
The presupposition is this: Whenever someone teaches something we
disagree with, the rhetoric employed to combat such is accusations of
lies. In other words, if someone does not teach the truth in our
opinion, they are lying.
Period. No question about it. Since I am right
and they are wrong about the issues, they must be liars. That is the only solution, right?
Be careful with such rhetoric. Better, let’s just stop it.
I read it on blogs and hear these accusations in debates. It is the
default position in the media. Christians—well-meaning Christians—use
such rhetoric in blogs, sermons, books, articles, and on Facebook. All
the while proclaiming to defend the faith.
According to the dictionary, a lie is “a false statement made with
deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.”
There are a couple of things to note here. A lie is intentional and deceptive.
It is not simply something that is untrue. There is the supposition of
intent with deception to make someone believe something that they know is false.
I believe that there are indeed many times when people teach
something that could truly be called a lie. I could give many examples.
But when our default position is that when someone else teaches something we believe to be wrong that they are lying, we have big problems.
Guest post by Kathy Norquist, executive assistant to Randy Alcorn
Recently
a Texas judge upheld a law that requires a woman to be shown an
ultrasound before obtaining an abortion. His decision was discussed on The View and Joyce Behar and Barbara Walters made the following stunning statements:
Joyce Behar: “It's very totalitarian in my opinion. I mean,
it smacks of forcing somebody to confront something that they have
already decided they don't want to deal with.”
So if a person doesn’t want to deal with something (in this case, someone),
you just avoid it? Can you imagine applying this principle to other
situations in your life? “I don’t want to deal with the fact that my
daughter has been molested, so I’ll just ignore it.” “I don’t want to
deal with my child being bullied at school, so I’ll just ignore it.”
Countless people suffer tremendously because they don’t deal with the
truth but disregard it. Ignorance is not bliss. Proverbs 14:8
says, “The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but
the folly of fools is deception.” It is very disrespectful to women to
withhold truth from them. They need to know facts and see their unborn
baby before they make a decision that will affect them for the rest of
their lives. Women need support, not abortion. Continue at Kathy Norquist
It is always shocking to me when people tollerate, follow, and even
adore teachers who clearly flaunt biblical standards for conduct, and
then act surprised when false teachers and outright heresy are
entertained in the church. “Naïve” doesn’t even begin to describe this
kind of complicit partnership with false teaching. Because the Scripture
warns that “Satan comes as an angel of light,” we simply cannot marvel
when his deceptions have somehow “crept in unawares.”
Second Timothy 4:3
predicts that, “the time is coming when people will not endure sound
teaching.” Too often people assume these opening words to mean that one
day, as evangelical ministry marches on with expansive gospel-momentum, a
blatant, rather foul stench straight from hell will mount an offensive
against sound doctrine so sudden and obvious that all who love Christ
will cry out in unison, “Damn the heresy!” If only that was the way it
worked.
Instead of opposing the truth with
blatant lies, Satan does a far greater work in the white spaces between
Paul’s words. When the Apostle warns that “a time is coming,”
we shouldn’t imagine a sudden plunge from the heights of doctrinal
precision, but rather a slow, imperceptible decline via subtle spiritual
optical illusions. The enemy knows that discerning shepherds would
never allow their sheep to suddenly deny truth and turn aside to
doctrines of demons. His tactics have to be implemented over long
periods of time, introducing slight, unnoticeable deviations to the
truth. So just exactly how was the enemy able to bring us to the place
where we no longer endure sound, in-depth preaching and teaching, and
yet celebrate casual conversations with false teachers? Keep Reading...
Over the past month I have made a series of videos on what I see as the Top 50 demonic doctrines that have infiltrated the professing church that is Mystery Babylon. The Scriptures tell us Babylon the apostate church would be a dwelling place of demons with said prophecy having come true already for those given the eyes to see this by the Lord. People become deceived when they eat false words or false doctrines and take them to their heart. These lies become stumbling blocks that prevent one from seeing the truth of the gospel and the whole purpose of Jesus coming and overcoming the world and the enemy and showing us the way to eternal life. To be succesful in ensnaring the multitudes, Satan’s demons bring doctrines that seem godly and very religious on the outside but the leaven, the spiritual poison is hidden in this meal that people have eaten and taken to heart.Keep Reading...
MILWAUKEE, April 12th--A new undercover video reveals medically inaccurate abortion counseling at a tax-funded Milwaukee Planned Parenthood clinic. The video, released by youth-led pro-life group Live Action, records Planned Parenthood staff distorting basic facts of fetal development and pressuring a woman to have an abortion.
In the video, a staffer tells a woman who is reportedly 6 to 8 weeks pregnant that at this stage her baby has "no arms, no legs, no heart no head, no brain." The staffer emphasizes the difficulties of adoption, urges the woman to obtain an abortion as soon as possible, says that images of abortion are fabricated, and states that the unborn child at 6 to 8 weeks has no "identifiable parts" and is just "fetal matter."
A similar video released in December from an Appleton, WI abortion clinic prompted state senator Glenn Grothman to call for an investigation of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Two leading embryologists also denounced Planned Parenthood's counseling, calling it "absurd and scientifically erroneous." Live Action also released a video last February catching Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin failing to comply with mandatory reporting laws for the sexual abuse of a 14 year old girl.
Wisconsin law requires women to receive medically accurate information before obtaining an abortion. The America Medical Association indicates in its Code of Ethics that "the physicians obligation is to present the medical facts accurately to the patient."
Lila Rose, UCLA student and president of Live Action, says the new footage further confirms the deceptive and manipulative practices of Planned Parenthood: "Planned Parenthood has an abortion-first mentality that is drive n both by ideology and the desire for money," says Rose. "Since women will often choose against abortion if they learn the scientific facts about the unborn child inside the womb, Planned Parenthood distorts basic facts in an attempt to perform more abortions."
The video is the second in Live Action's "Rosa Acuna Project," a multi-state undercover investigation documenting Planned Parenthood's deceptive abortion counseling. Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion chain in the U.S., has come under fire recently after Live Action's previous investigations found the abortion giant willing to conceal sexual abuse of young girls and accept racist donations earmarked to abort African-American babies.
