I have my laptop plugged into the same surge protector as our lamp. There are times when my computer is "plugged in" but the only way I will truly know if there is any real current flowing to my computer is if I try to turn the lamp on. When I turn the knob for the lamp and nothing happens, I can deduce that in all likelihood the power strip was flipped off by one of my young-ins. If I don't do the lamp test, I can go typing normally on my laptop, thinking it is plugged in. Only when the low-battery warning comes up would I then realize something was wrong.
By no means am I slamming the church. But if you love something you long for it to be better than it is. The Bible warns in the end times there will be a great falling away and the church will be assaulted with false prophets, false converts, and false doctrine. In the last days, says the Bible, perilous times shall come. We are living in that day. World War III can happen at any moment, and only the Lord Jesus is restraining everything and hitting the pause button on the world events.
Jesus is coming. For every mention in the Bible of his first coming, it is reported there are 8 times as many mentions of his 2nd coming. The first time caught most of the world off guard, and for many it wasn't until they woke up in hell the second after they died did they truly realize the opportunity they missed. How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation? If I have cancer but don't know I am sick, or I never fill the prescription because I don't believe it will do anything and hence neglect the cure, or if I flat out tell the doctor off and dismiss him as a quack, I die. Jesus is coming but this time there will be no hiding the fact but then it will be too late. We are in the last inning, the signs are everywhere, and I can almost hear the trumpet. When the trumpet from heaven blows and Jesus cries, "Enough! Come up hither!" we fly away! The we, though, only pertains to the saved, blood bought child of God.
This is the message of the hour, and the message the churches need to convey to a lost, blind, and dying world. When I preach at a Sabres Hockey Game, I see thousands of blind and indifferent people all walk past me and I get a sense of what Noah felt. Noah preached righteousness and just wanted to tell people to get in the boat and that God is angry with the wicked every day. The Bible says that. The Bible says knowing the terror of the Lord we persuade men. The churches in many instances are repackaging the Lord Jesus into this warm fuzzy cozy teddy bear who loves humanity too much to send them to hell. They deduce since God loves them then he must let them into heaven. What mankind doesn't understand is God is a God of love, but just as strongly are his other divine attributes, holiness, justice, wrath. If you truly love God, you will hate evil. You will hate anything that is ungodly and seeks to destroy what God loves. You will hate hypocrisy because God cannot lie. You will hate things that blind those from the truth. You will hate sin. When we see our sin, we see how hell deserving we really are and we run to the cross for mercy and deliverance. We see our sin will put us in hell and we flee from the wrath to come and come to Jesus.
Most churches are doing more damage than good because they present a powerless Christ and the world loves this new and improved Jesus who is more like the fun genie of Aladdin than the God of the Bible. They have "powerful emotionally charged" services with loud music and their Sunday Morning services are often a pep rally laced pregame church tailgate party minus the booze. We don't need to give Jesus a hand. We need to give him our lives.
The power is out in most churches, but unless they look at the world and see their light is dark, they won't see they are not plugged in. Jesus is standing outside the end times church and waiting to be let back in. Like I said before, the rapture will hit and many churches won't even notice because the only ones who would be gone, they were trying to run off anyway.
Churches, make sure to see you are truly plugged into the Lord Jesus Christ. When you see the light out there in the world, it should be obvious that there is a major power shortage. The problem is we are examining the impact of the church by the amount of the world it draws, not how much light it produces. When you use the world to draw the world, you will look like the world. And the world likes the darkness. The church is supposed to be the light because Jesus is the light of the World. We are supposed to let our light so shine before men so they can see our good deeds and glorify our Father which is in heaven.
Maybe the fact there is no light is related to the fact most churches are not truly glorifying the Lord Jesus Christ. It is one thing to jump your spiritual vehicles every Sunday and have enough battery to get home. It is another to have enough power to drive the whole week. As John Wesley said, if Jesus Christ sets us on fire for him, people will come to watch us burn.
If the church can admit our fire is out, and as Evangelist Don Hardman puts it, "the church is producing paper fire", we can get back to the source and get re lit. The churches today are more imitation fireplaces and from a distance they look inviting and it looks like real fire. But it is not melting the cold hearts, it is not pushing back the flames of hell, it is not causing the cockroaches of sin to flee, it is not shining a lighted path to those blind in sin, it is not dissolving the metal chains of bondage around people, it is not exposing the errors of false doctrine and liberal opinions, and it is not a warm inviting fire that the lost want to hover around because they have such hypothermia because the world has chilled them to the bone.
The Bible says our God is a consuming fire. If we get around him long enough, our hearts will burn for the things of God because that fire will be a purging fire. I fear that the next time the majority of professing Christians all across America face the fire of God it will be Hellfire. Whosoever was not found written in the book of life shall be cast into the lake of fire warns Revelation. Church today seems to merge their church membership roll and the book of life. Head knowledge and a membership card are not what makes you saved. Jesus makes you saved. He that hath the Son hath life the Bible says.
And if you are truly saved, your heart will burn with the things of God like a furnace, and the light that is produced will be seen by a dark dark world.
Christian, church, can you see that the light is getting dim, and in many cases, out completely?
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