The evangelical church as a whole has lost its mission and has an identity crisis. Many who attend an evangelical church has a minimal idea of what it means to be an evangelical. The meaning of evangelism no longer means reaching the unsaved. The "social gospel" of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and caring for the sick has replaced a transformational salvation message that changes the believer's life. There is an absolute hatred of sin in the life of the believer. The evangelical church has accepted the "easy believism" that does not require a changed life and condones many of the sins God condemns.
I have talked with many evangelicals who have a pagan view of God. Worship of the LORD has been replaced with a creedal belief of the LORD. Worship is a living act of religion, while creedal belief is just quoting your faith. To say that you believe in one God is good. However, that is not enough. Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe and tremble. James 2:19 True belief is putting to action what it is you believe. James says, But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? The work of faith is keeping the commandments of the LORD.
The problem in the evangelical church today is "believers" do not know the LORD. They know what the church's creeds say about God, but they have never had the personal fellowship of knowing the LORD. There would be a significant change in the church if people knew the LORD. They would not need a creed to tell them what they believed. To have a Christian view of who God is is fundamental to Christian living. True worship is based on our concept of God, which is essential to our belief system. Most evangelical Christians are very comfortable with science and with all of the discoveries of science. The past year the world has been saturated with "follow the science." Christians have bought into the concept that science is to be followed, and God ignored.
The concept of who God is has been neglected, ignored, and abused by the evangelical church. The idea of "cherry-picking" Scripture has given a false view of God and His character. There was a time when the whole Scripture was used to support the belief of the church. Today much of the Scripture has been excised from our theology. Much of the belief system is based on a secular humanist view of life. Many of the teachings found in evangelical churches are far from scriptural fundamentals.
In some cases, evangelicals are advocating ideas that are prohibited in Scripture! Marxist teachings of wealth redistribution are contrary to Scripture. Exodus 23:3 states that favoritism should not be shown to a poor man even in a lawsuit. There was also no partiality when Moses took a census, and God required an offering of half a shekel from everyone over the age of twenty years (Exodus 30:14–15). The rich were explicitly forbidden from giving more, and the poor were expressly prohibited from giving less.
Anyone who advocates 'redistributive justice' imposed by the government: rich countries taxed their citizens to aid more impoverished countries. But Micah 6 takes the form of a lawsuit. The prophet, on behalf of the Lord, brings a case against Israel. The prophet proclaims that God ultimately requires all His people to act justly. The Hebrew word used refers to the administration and maintenance of justice concerning resolving legal disputes. It never refers to anything close to 'social' or 'distributive' justice. Those who hold such views are reading neo-Marxist socialism back into the text, not extracting biblical principles.
Biblical truth as revealed in Scripture defines Christianity and guides Christian practice. Once our theological confession loses its Scriptural foundation, it finds its subject matter anywhere along a line that runs from paganism, Eastern spirituality to radical politics, and feminist ideology to environmental concerns. In one way or another, and despite the warning in Romans 1:25, many evangelical churches have exchanged evangelism and the proclamation of biblical truth for pagan ideas based on a false idea of the character of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment