Spirit of Victory
-Churches of Peril
"Then He said to them, "But now, he
who has a money bag, let him take it, and likewise a knapsack; and he
who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy
one".... Luke 22:36
.So, our Holy
scripture says it would better to be naked than to lack a sword?
What is going on here?
Here you are- filled with the Spirit and eager to serve the Lord.
And you find that you not only have to fight occasional carnality
within your own heart, but also fight the established carnal ways of
the church itself!!!! If you try to fit in you lose. If you
leave you lose. Alone.
Or if you are a young Bible school graduate with some Bible and church
management courses under your belt, what happens?
You are filled with the Spirit and ready. You take up your first post
only to find that if you try to rock the established carnal boat, the
people will stop giving and you will be starved out. And even if
you do not rock the boat you are expected to work miracles and not
embezzle church funds on starvation wages!! Your wife
understandably complains.
You are surrounded by potential enemies on every side. Even your
own heart yearns to betray you at times. So you grit your teeth
and smile. You must pretend everything is going swimmingly, while
everybody else can relax and rely on good old you to keep it all
together. Sure.
What is going on here???? How did it get this way?
Well, the story is not pretty......................
Long ago in the 1500's under Luther "lawless
believers
arose fancying themselves the dear elect people of God, reasoning
thus: "First, the earth belongs to the saints, and, secondly, we
are the saints." All things were theirs. They were complete in
Christ, and absolutely sure of salvation by reason of their standing
in Him. They went about in religious mobs to deliver people from
legal bondage, and bring them into Gospel liberty -- a liberty to
despise all laws, Divine and human, and to do every one what was
right in his own eyes. Luther was alarmed and shocked. He hastened
from his concealment in the castle of the Wartburg, to check a
movement that was disgracing the Reformation. But the mischief was
already done: the thistle-seed had been broadcast over Germany."
They had introduced a new form of the
ancient Gnostic deception of the early church. A long line of
willing-to-be-famous
theologians then went on to develop this crowd-pleasing theme of
Gnostic
"freedom". They became not only popular, but well-funded!! They had
found the key to gospel success!!
In time, this
created the gospel that all the Protestant churches (mostly the
non-liturgical churches) now take for
granted. Variations of this are now preached in every pulpit and
taught in every seminary. You inhale whiffs of it every Sunday.
But it is not the Christian gospel. It is a modern and more
sophisticated Gnosticism. These articles
explore this shocking situation.
Antinomianism
Revived
This is the disturbing story of John Darby and the Plymouth Brethren
which he
founded. ( Apparently the
landslide of Gnostic enthusiasm from the
Reformation was
virtually halted for a couple of generations by the unanswerable
arguments made by John Fletcher in his revolutionary "Checks to
Antinomianism". This lengthy tome is comprised of a series of
open letters between the saintly and sanctified Fletcher and various
Antinomian champions. It is tremendously long (over 600 pages)
but is an interesting read that can be found on the History page.)
John Darby single-handedly set the deadly Gnostic enthusiasm going
again
-but on a different footing than before. It was much more subtle
and veiled in its presentation so that the numerous and more discerning
supporters of the
legacy of Wesley and
Fletcher would not realize what traps his preaching was leading them
into. This cunning and inventive man hated all established
religion and is at
the root of most accepted common theology today. His
influence is far more profound than earlier theologians such as Calvin.
The first two chapters, especially, Chapter 2 "Antinomiamism
-Historical Sketch" will floor you. Most of the rest of
the book is a
detailed account of the various outlandish beliefs that Steele found
among them during his ten year face to face study of them. The
beliefs, the
contradictions within them, and how they subtly lead people towards
being soft on sin. So began today's common religion, sometimes
termed "The
Sinning Religion". But these days, you would hardly detect any of
these outlandish beliefs because the veiled Gnostic theology is so
settled that it
is often just kept
on bookshelves and not preached. This makes it more dangerous
because unspoken ideas cannot be refuted. Some of the early
ideas were so toxic that all who followed them were lost to the church.
58
pages by Daniel Steele
(In reading the latter chapters of
the above, I found myself worn and disgusted by all
the graphic depictions of deception and the various sins it led
to. The
following much more recent book,
"A Right Conception of Sin" by Taylor treats the same common deceptions
in a more
objective point by point manner that is much less disturbing. )
A Right Conception of Sin
"Sin, as one doctrine of the Christian system, is
the
common denominator of the other doctrines. The question of sin is so
basically
related to the nature of God and the plan of redemption, it is the
one doctrine by which all others can be reduced to their simplest
significance. Furthermore, it forms
the surest and most logical
measuring stick by which the accuracy of those doctrines can be
detected.
The doctrines relating
to sin form the center around
which we build our entire theological system. And as Christians, if our
conception of sin is faulty, our whole superstructure will be one
error built on another, each one more absurd than the last, yet each
one necessary if it is to fit in consistently with the whole
erroneous scheme. If we are to end right we must begin right, and to
begin right we must grapple with the question of sin in its doctrinal
significance until we have grasped the scriptural facts relating to
sin in all of its phases. We need to know exactly what sin is, of
what kinds, how it acts, its effects, its relation to man, how it
must be dealt with, and God's provision for it. When we arrive at a
solemn appreciation of all this, from the standpoint of Scripture, we
may proceed to build our system of theology with confidence, knowing
that our conclusions will be based on correct premises.
Many, perhaps most, of the errors which have
intruded themselves into Christian theology can be finally traced to
a faulty conception of sin. Because someone's notions of sin were a
bit off-color, his entire trend of reasoning can be misdirected".....
All the
churches today are riddled with
centuries-old misconceptions that interfere with obtaining a full
experience of
Him. Read this and you will see why our Protestant world is so
ineffective -and what the remedy is. a 55 page PDF by R. S.
Taylor a must read.
Reformation
Events
Much exact in-depth information is
provided by this church history textbook...
An 18 page PDF made of topical excerpts
compiled by Earnest Seeker
Where
Did Our
Pentecostal Faith Come From?
Of course everybody knows
about the Asuza Street revivals, because our Pentecostal faith did
indeed
start there -but that simple fact misses the bizarre and embarassiing
details of
the
other side of the story. These point us directly to the root of the
ongoing litany of troubles and backslidings that are endemic in
Spirit-filled churches even now. A pivotal 17 page history. And
after this our forebears considered themselves extra-spiritual by
comparing themselves with those in even more trouble. Wonders
never cease.
by Earnest Seeker a must
read
The Toronto Deception
Paul Gowdy was on staff there for years. Now he tells us how it
was.....
More on the roots of the movement that
started in Toronto is on the drawing board......
Cornfusion
My years of experience in various churches have been a mixed
blessing. But what did I learn?
That
there is one thing that is the key to all the
others -and that is a wholly pure and holy heart.
-When
Pentecostal people talk to Holiness people, or the other way
around, the results are predictable: confusion so corny (ie: silly)
that it could
be called "cornfusion", and yet the solution to this is simplicity
itself. 10
pages by Earnest Seeker
The
Central Idea of Christianity
Just to set things straight again.
Bishop Peck undertook a painstaking
analysis of the flow of essential ideas in the Scripture, in order to
see which was the central one. His results were very
conclusive. by
Bishop J. T.
Peck an 11 page excerpt
Last, but not least, if you are a good leader and lead as you are
expected to, you may be shooting yourself in the foot......
God’s Plan
for Oversight in the Glorious Church
Virtually
all of our churches cannot function as they were designed to function
since one man takes the pre-eminence. This is totally
unscriptural and
a sure recipe for failure. This is about another relic from the past
instead of Gnosticism. a "must read"
for leaders 23 pages by David
A. Huston and Jim McKinley
Review
"Theological errors move in cycles, sometimes of
very
long periods. They resemble comets in this but they are not as
harmless. Often they leave moral ruin in their track. Since all
Christian truth is practical, and aims at the moral transformation of
men, all negations of that truth are deleterious; they not only
obscure the truth and obstruct its purifying effect, but they
positively corrupt and destroy souls. This is especially true of
errors that release men from obligation to the law of God. After St.
Paul had demonstrated the impossibility of justification by works
to compensate for sin, and had established the doctrine of
justification through a faith in Christ which works by love and
purifies the heart, there started up a class of teachers who drew
from Paul's teachings the fallacious inference that the law of God is
abolished in the case of the believer, who is henceforth delivered
from its authority as the rule of life. Hence they became, what
Luther first styled, Antinomians (Greek anti, against, and nomos,
law). We infer from Rom. 3:8, 31; 6:1; Eph. 5:6; 2 Peter 2:18, 19,
and James 2:17-26, in which warnings are given against a perversion
of the truth as an excuse for licentiousness, that Antinomianism,
in its grosser form, found place in the primitive church. All along
the history of the Church, a revival of the cardinal doctrine of
justification, by faith only, has been followed by a resurrection of
Antinomianism, which Wesley defines as "the doctrine
that
makes void the law through faith." Those who aver that
ultra-Calvinism is the invariable antecedent of Antinomianism, would
be unwilling to accept the necessary inference that the apostle to
the Gentiles was an ultra-Calvinist; yet it is true that the
doctrines of Calvinism can be logically pushed to that conclusion. It
is also true that other forms of doctrine that emphasize faith in
Jesus Christ, as the sole
ground of acceptance with God, are more or
less liable to have the tares of Antinomianism spring up in their
field.
The heretical Gnostic sects of the early Church
were
Antinomian on other grounds. They held that their spiritual natures
could not contract moral pollution, whatever their moral conduct
might be, sin inhering only in matter. As a piece of gold retains its
purity while encompassed by the filth of the pigsty so the soul
keeps pure amid the grossest sins." P. 10 "Antinomianism
Revived"
Did you catch "as the sole ground of acceptance with God"? That
means that they remove God the Father and His Law from the equation,
saying "this is the age of grace". The Law was just for the
ancient disobedient children of Israel.
Instead of undertaking the challenging understanding of how it all fits
together, they just throw out the parts that do not fit. And then they
just use large quantities of theological duct tape to make it all hang
together. And then they are surprised when trouble comes along!!!
Jesus fullfilled the Law in His person, instead of making it
obsolete. Should we do less?
But that takes a purified heart to accomplish.......