~Archibald Brown
“A time will come when instead of shepherds feeding the sheep, the church will have clowns entertaining the goats.” ~ C.H. Spurgeon
An evil is in the “professed”
camp of the Lord, so gross in its impudence, that the most short-sighted
Christian can hardly fail to notice it. During the past few years this evil has
developed at an alarming rate. It has worked like leaven, until the whole lump
ferments!
The only power God recognizes in His Church, is the power of His Spirit. Whereas the only power actually recognized today by the majority of evangelicals, is the power of man. God does His work by the operation of the Spirit; while Christian leaders attempt to do theirs, by the power of entertainment. Bright personality has taken the place of the Spirit's influence. But only what is done through the Holy Spirit will abide eternally.
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is GIVEN (John 3:16); and the government shall be upon His shoulder: and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” Isaiah 9:6
And Micah 5:2
says, “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
who are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come
forth for Me One to be ruler over Israel—One whose
origins are of old, from the days of eternity.”
The Half-Converted Cowboy
(A.W. Tozer)
Psalm 29:2,
"Ascribe to the LORD the glory due His name;
worship the LORD in the splendor of His holiness."
There is grief in my
spirit when I go into the average church, for we have become a generation
rapidly losing all sense of divine sacredness and reverence in our worship. God
has been abridged, reduced, modified, edited, changed and amended--until He is no
longer the high and lifted up God whom Isaiah saw! We've reduced the God of
Abraham and Jacob, to a "stuffed God" that can be appealed to by
anybody at any time. The religious clown on the radio can break into his fun
and say, "Now we will have a minute of prayer." In the religious concert,
the half-converted cowboy dressed like an idiot will say after he's twanged out
some catchy numbers, "Now I'll do a holy number for you."
Through a recent exchange of “semantics” I
believe I have just had a revelation of a fundamental problem within the
Christian church as a whole. It is that we do NOT submit to the Truth of the
Word of God. Duh!
Why not?
I came away from church
this past Sunday with the distinct impression that we (the corporate church
in the world) do not really understand. It wasn’t
“church” that was disappointing... it was the bible teaching, but I’ll confess,
I could be cynical, or I’m naïve and only think I’m cynical.
"What is in the Old concealed, is
in the New revealed" ~Augustine
If you keep reading the Old
Testament you will read about the mysteries of God that even the prophets didn’t
know about as Peter wrote, “Of this salvation the
prophets have inquired and searched carefully, who prophesied of the grace that
would come to you, searching what, or what manner of time (when), the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating
when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories
that would follow (two advents). To
them it was revealed that, not to themselves, but to you they
were ministering the things which now have been reported to you through those
who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things
which angels desire to look into.” 1 Peter 1:10-12.
If you are an uneducated person, as I am, (a relative thing, no offense
intended), reading the Bible in the Greek language would be a
hilarious exercise in futility. I appreciate the English language
is difficult enough to understand, in any venue, but with regard to Bible
reading, it is important to have a QUALITY translation (very important) that is
easy to read (within reasonable consideration)… not JUST something that is easy
to read. What do I mean by that? Suffice it to
say that if you do not have a high enough standard of "quality" then
you are probably "drinking in diluted milk"… if you're lucky.
