"If you abide in My Word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free...So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed!" (John 8:31-32,36)

Give Thanks for These

by Leave a Comment

“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yes, I have a godly heritage.” (Psalm 16:6)

We are so remiss to give thanks for the blessing of Providence. We read in the Scriptures of the saints of old – Abraham, Joseph and others – how God in His mercy saved, protected, and preserved them. Yet in our temporal freedom and abundance, we fail to show gratitude to the Father of mercies. We are an ungrateful lot! And what are those mercies we so easily neglect to consider?

Statisticians tell us that only five percent of people on this earth live under true democracy. Ninety-five percent live under military, political, or religious dictatorships. Look at the list of almost 195 nations and see the poverty, physical danger, diseases, and terror that holds these people in a dungeon of hopelessness. [Read more…]

A Frightening Prospect

by Leave a Comment

“For whosoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.”
(Mark 8:38 ASV)

John MacArthur begins each of the broadcasts we see on the NRB network with this statement:

“What in the world makes us so embarrassed about the Gospel?”

There are some good answers to this question. It would do us well to look at them briefly.

Statistics tell us that less than six percent of professing evangelicals honor God by tithing. Some have convinced themselves that the first ten percent of their income is theirs – not God’s. It’s no wonder many evangelicals meet in warehouses or other rented buildings. Our churches are filled with tithe thieves. But that isn’t the statistic that really disturbs me.

Less than five percent of professing evangelicals have ever witnessed to another individual who needs Jesus Christ as savior. For various reasons they have totally missed the New Testament teaching on evangelism. Many professing Christians would say, “Witnessing must be someone else’s responsibility…not mine.” [Read more…]

Suggested Reading

by Leave a Comment

To my Friends Across The Country:

I have wanted to write you about a series of books that I would like to recommend to you.

David F. Wells (PhD. University of Manchester, Distinguished Senior Research Professor @ Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) received a Pew grant, “Exploring the nature of Christian faith in the contemporary modernized world.” From his study he has produced a series of very good, relevant, Christ-honoring books that I feel every spiritually minded Christian should read.

Here are the titles of books written by David Wells that I hope will peak your attention:

  1. No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (1993)
  2. God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (1994)
  3. Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (1998)
  4. Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World (2004)
  5. The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (2008)
  6. God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World (2014)

I have been deeply moved and blessed by David Wells’ ministry. He has appeared on the White Horse Inn and his books are sound, relevant, and filled with Biblical Truth.

From his latest book I quote from his concern regarding worship in many, if not most of the evangelical churches in America:

“If we look at the way in which many evangelical churches have actually been worshiping since the 1970s, it is rather different from what I have been describing. It has become far more culturally defined than Biblically. It has often catered to generational niches. It has been about marketing a ‘product’ in a way that attracts new customers. The new customers, though, tend to belong to one of the generational tribes. Christian faith is pitched to them often without doctrinal truth. Pastors who have been in this business have mistakenly thought that doctrinal truth is ‘off-putting’ to believers and unbelievers alike. And the outreach that has been done often has far more in common with the entertainment world than with the truths at the core of Christian faith. Too often it has been about the worshipers, and giving them a pleasant experience as they express themselves, rather than about the God whom they have come to worship.

…Now, along the edges of the evangelical world, this disposition is producing a lot of bleeding. It has propelled an exodus out of evangelical churches. Some have moved out into Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglo-Catholicism, and Catholicism. Others have simply moved home. Born-againers, in significant numbers, are dropping out of church. This is not true everywhere, or of everyone, or of every church. But many who were once part of the born-again world are now turning away from evangelical churches. In one study done in 2013, it was found that in the recent past, 70 percent of the young people who had been raised in evangelical youth groups had dropped out of church attendance once they became independent adults. Why?”

(God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients our World; pp. 198-199)

Now, having been a believing Christian for over three-quarters of a century and a minister of the Gospel for over a half-century, this is what I have observed:

In the evangelical churches in America in the 1920s to the 1930s, liberalism and higher criticism invaded the major evangelical denominations, churches, colleges, and seminaries. The cancer of European liberalism, skepticism, and unbelief became embedded in evangelical circles. Out of this came those often condemned as “fundamentalists.” They started new denominations, colleges, seminaries and churches. They were called “fundamentalists” because they held to the major biblical truths of the Protestant Church. I am a fundamentalist! No apologies. No hedging my theological beliefs in the faith of our Protestant for-bearers. One of my ancestors, Ralph Blaisdell, was a Puritan who left England in 1635, to be a “planter” in the New World. He left the skeptical liberalism of the Church of England so he could worship God according to the dictates of his Puritan heart.

Since the 1970s, a profound change has taken place in the evangelical world. To put it simply, the “emergent movement” has done to the professing evangelical church in America what liberalism did to the church in the 1920s and 1930s. Today the church has forsaken sound theology, and expositional preaching, and has turned its emphasis into what Christian Smith in his book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers called “moralistic, therapeutic, deism.” Today the church has forsaken any claim to be “fundamental” and is producing “another gospel” that offends no one, leaves theology in the back room, welcomes all into the “gathering,” and lets them leave with a gospel not demanding repentance of sin and absolute trust in the Christ of the Cross and the Empty Tomb.

The invisible Church of Jesus Christ in America is in desperate need of a spiritual revival in the hearts of her leaders. The nation crumbles in moral and spiritual darkness while the Church stumbles in dim light.

I urge you to pray for a genuine Holy Spirit rejuvenation in Christ’s body. We “come out from among them and be separate” (II Corinthians 6:17-18) or we perish with a nation that has turned itself from the God of the Bible to the god of secular humanism.

Dumbing-Down the Evangelical Scene

by 1 Comment

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)

We live in a Semi-Palagian, Arminian world. It’s a world where so-called evangelical churches no longer preach about man’s radical corruption and God’s absolute sovereignty. It’s a religious world where in a real sense the Humanist Manifesto is given credence unwittingly, as though it had the answers to our sin-cursed world. So pluralism, inclusivism, individualism, and skepticism regarding absolute truth seem to hold sway in the minds of many professing believers.

A recent blog, lamenting the same sense of decay, caught my attention:

“Why are there so many different Christian churches?” asked someone to this blogger.  “Well… there are two reasons I would suggest to you. One is something that is legitimate and one that is not legitimate. What I mean by that is that the first reason is that God didn’t make us out of a “cookie-cutter” mold, and I think that there are legitimate differences between certain churches. There are some churches that have one style of worship. Some churches where the pastor is, you know, dresses one way and another dress another. I think there are legitimate differences between some churches; I don’t think the church at Rome was identical to the church at Corinth or the church at Thessalonica. But, in reality, the reason that there are all sorts of different churches is primarily due to the fact that people will pick and choose what they will or will not believe out of the Bible! That is, men bring their traditions to the text of scripture, their ignorance to the text of scripture, and they have certain things they want to find. So instead of believing all that the Bible has to say, they’ll pick and choose certain sections they like better than others and choose to ignore others. They’ll just pick and choose. I think that’s why you have the illegitimate differences that there are – simply false teachings that divide people in various churches.”  (Dr. James R. White; “Lane’s Blog”)

A phenomenon of our 21st Century evangelical scene is the movement of many true believers from one church to another, longing to find a church where the traditional elements of Evangelical Protestantism are not thrown out in an effort for contemporary church leaders to market the church by embracing the marketing methods of our secular culture.

Contemporary, political commentators complain about the very large percentage of American citizens who are simply ignorant about the real issues facing us today. Having had the history of our nation pushed to the perimeter of the public school curriculum, and getting political information from the national, liberal news media or TV sound bites, many citizens simply can’t be bothered about the ways in which our nation is declining  – morally, politically, and internationally.

The same attitudes are seen in churches. Theology is like a foreign language that no one wants to learn; and few seem to grasp the fact that biblical theology is the foundation of the Christian religion, like the Constitution is the foundation of our American liberty. Since it appears that both are sliding toward oblivion, those who know what they hunger for are wandering around trying to find it. In the churches where they visit, the ear ticklers try to get them to join by providing religious entertainment, dressed up like a city pop concert, where everyone can get some kind of a therapeutic shot in the arm.

A revival of preaching the whole counsel of God, as found in the infallible, inerrant, inspired Word of God is the answer to our spiritual hunger. A revival in the lives of our seminary professors and their students – now filling their churches with what they think are “seekers” is what is needed.  Our church leaders need to spend more time in the Book and on their knees rather than in the coffee shop or in seminars on “church growth”. God help us to pray for and seek the Father for such a revival!

Things That Go “Thump” In The Night – Part I

by Leave a Comment

“The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?” (Amos 3:8)

As a herdsman in Judah, Amos knew the roar of a lion. Many of us have heard on nature programs what the sound of a lion is, grunting his magnificent, guttural sounds in the darkness of an arid night.If I were a herdsman in the land where lions roared, I, too, would be filled with fear, especially if I had no rifle at my side. But my nights are different.

Since retiring several years ago my sleep habits have changed. I often take an afternoon nap or doze in the evening to catch up on sleep I missed the night before.

Then I waken in the early hours of the morning and shuffle to my study. I’ve found that my best hours to read, study, pray, think and write are in those hours before the sun comes up. I’m told I’m not alone in this practice. It was even recorded of our Lord that, “Rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, He departed and went out to a desolate place, and there He prayed.” (Mark 1:35) [Read more…]