Things People Should Never Say They Never Heard at Your Church

I cringe every time I hear the testimony of a Christian who grew up in the church and only later came to understand some fundamental article of the faith. Granted, some things are hard to understand. We have to drink milk before we get to meat. I’m not chagrined about the folks who never learned the word propitiation or never knew the difference between Christ’s active and passive obedience. Those are incredibly important concepts and we ought to teach them from the ground up. But I’m talking about the basics, about the things that every Christian should know backwards and forward, the things we should hear in church all the time.

Granted, people do not remember all they should remember. It’s possible the fault lies with the hearers as much as the speakers. But still, that’s only more incentive to make certain thing crystal clear. We must not assume our people know what they need to know. We can’t assume they’ve heard what we think we’ve told them.

As a pastor, there are certain things I hope the people at my church will never say they never heard. These are not necessarily the most important doctrines of the faith (though some are). Rather, these are the things we easily assume our people know, but often still miss.

And when they miss these things they can end up missing everything.

1. “Being a Christian is more than going to church and being a good person.” We have to make this one absolutely and repetitively clear. I promise you there are people in your church (and mine) who think Christianity consists of attending religious services with some regularity and not screwing up in major ways. Make sure they know the gospel, that Jesus Christ lived the life we couldn’t live and died the death we deserved so that by faith alone we can be made right with God. Make sure they can articulate the gospel too.

2. “We must be born again.” I’m struck that the history of revivals shows that awakenings often follow when preachers return to this theme again and again. Do your people know that they are dead in sin and need the miracle of regeneration?   Continue at Kevin DeYoung

Two Rival Religions? Christianity and Post-Christianity

On November 3, 1921, J. Gresham Machen presented an address entitled, “Liberalism or Christianity?” In that famous address, later expanded into the book, Christianity and Liberalism, Machen argued that evangelical Christianity and its liberal rival were, in effect, two very different religions.

Machen’s argument became one of the issues of controversy in the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversies of the 1920s and beyond. By any measure, Machen was absolutely right: the movement that styled itself as liberal Christianity was eviscerating the central doctrines of the Christian faith while continuing to claim Christianity as “a way of life” and a system of meaning.

“The chief modern rival of Christianity is ‘liberalism,’” Machen asserted. “Modern liberalism, then, has lost sight of the two great presuppositions of the Christian message — the living God and the fact of sin,” he argued. “The liberal doctrine of God and the liberal doctrine of man are both diametrically opposite to the Christian view. But the divergence concerns not only the presuppositions of the message, but also the message itself.”

Related Posts

• Two Rival Religions?
• Two Rival Religions?
• Two Strands of Faith? No, Two Different Religions
• Machen on Christianity as a Way of Life ‘Founded Upon a Doctrine’
• Two Competing Religions–The Legacy of the 1960s

Howard P. Kainz, professor emeritus of philosophy at Marquette University, offers a similar argument, warning that it is now modern secular liberalism which poses as the great rival to orthodox Christianity.

Observing the basic divide in the American culture, Kainz notes: “Most of the heat of battle occurs where traditional religious believers clash with certain liberals who are religiously committed to secular liberalism.”   Continue at Al Mohler

Will The Defenders Of Michael Servetus Please Stand Up

Some words of Michael Servetus provoking John Calvin:

"The title makes me marvel at the impudence of the man who boasts of being a Catholic, although he is a disciple of Simon the magician, as I have evidently shown in my Apology. Who will say that a prosecutor* and a homicide is a true minister of the Church?" 

“You do not know what you say—you are a wretch, if you persist in condemning what you do not understand. Did you think to stun the ears of the judges by your barking? You have a confused intellect, so that you cannot understand the truth. Wretch! perverted by Simon Magus, you are ignorant of the first principles of things—you make men only blocks of wood and stone by establishing the slavery of the will.”

“If I have said that—not merely said it, but publicly written it—to infect the world, I would condemn myself to death. Wherefore, my Lords, I demand that my false accuser be punished, pœnâ talionis, and that he be detained a prisoner like me, till the cause be decided for his death or mine, or other punishment. And to accomplish that, I now lodge an accusation against him for the said pœnâ talionis. And I am content to die if he be not convicted of these things, as well as of others which I shall bring forward” (emphasis mine).

“Wherefore, like a magician, as he is, he ought not merely to be condemned, but to be exterminated and hunted from your city; and his goods ought to be confiscated to me in return for mine, which he has caused me to lose; which things, my Lords, I request from you” (emphasis mine).

William Tweedie writes:

As to the right to inflict punishment for the excess of religious opinion, and to chastise impiety, that was never a question in the mind of the magistrate. In condemning Servetus and his doctrines, the Council of Geneva did not think that it was doing aught more strange than in declaring Berthelier capable of receiving the communion.  Continue at Fernando Ramirez

Top 50 Doctrines of Demons

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...