Chuck Smith – Jesus is Coming Again

John MacArthur – It’s Hard to Believe

John MacArthur combats the deception of easy-believism. It’s not easy. You must strip yourself of all your pride and rely on Jesus and His work alone. No exceptions.

Part 1

Part 2

Part3

Fast-Growing Christian Churches Crushed in China

Please pray for these people.

Towering eight stories over wheat fields, the Golden Lamp Church was built to serve nearly 50,000 worshippers in the gritty heart of China’s coal country.

But that was before hundreds of police and hired thugs descended on the mega-church, smashing doors and windows, seizing Bibles and sending dozens of worshippers to hospitals with serious injuries, members and activists say

Today, the church’s co-pastors are in jail. The gates to the church complex in the northern province of Shanxi are locked and a police armored personnel vehicle sits outside.

The closure of what may be China’s first mega-church is the most visible sign that the communist government is determined to rein in the rapid spread of Christianity, with a crackdown in recent months that church leaders call the harshest in years.

Story continued here

Paul Washer – The Judgment of God and the Great White Throne

More U.S. Christians mix in ‘Eastern,’ New Age beliefs

Very disturbing. If this is describing you, you are guily of a very serious sin. God does not share His glory with anyone. Fortunately, this is a sin that Jesus has died for, so repent and be forgiven.

Exodus 34:12-14

Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee, But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:

Link here

Going to church this Sunday? Look around.

The chances are that one in five of the people there find “spiritual energy” in mountains or trees, and one in six believe in the “evil eye,” that certain people can cast curses with a look — beliefs your Christian pastor doesn’t preach.

In a Catholic church? Chances are that one in five members believe in reincarnation in a way never taught in catechism class — that you’ll be reborn in this world again and again.

Elements of Eastern faiths and New Age thinking have been widely adopted by 65% of U.S. adults, including many who call themselves Protestants and Catholics, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released Wednesday.

Syncretism — mashing up contradictory beliefs like Catholic rocker Madonna’s devotion to a Kabbalah-light version of Jewish mysticism — appears on the rise.

And, according to the survey’s other major finding, devotion to one clear faith is fading.

Of the 72% of Americans who attend religious services at least once a year (excluding holidays, weddings and funerals), 35% say they attend in multiple places, often hop-scotching across denominations.

They are like President Obama, who currently has no home church. He has worshiped at a Baptist church, an Episcopal one, and the non-denominational chapel at Camp David.

“Mixing and matching practices and beliefs is as much the norm as it is the exception,” Pew’s Alan Cooperman says. “Are they grazing, sampling, just curious? We really don’t know.”

Even so, says Pew researcher Greg Smith, “these findings all point toward a spiritual and religious openness — not necessarily a lack of seriousness.”

Among the findings:

•26% of those who attend religious services say they do so at more than one place occasionally, and an additional 9% roam regularly from their home church for services.

•28% of people who attend church at least weekly say they visit multiple churches outside their own tradition.

•59% of less frequent church attendees say they attend worship at multiple places.

The survey of 2,003 adults Aug. 11-27 has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. It measures Protestants, Catholics and the unaffiliated; there were not enough people of other faiths surveyed for analysis.

“For an extremely long time, most of us thought belonging or membership or home church was monogamous, even if it was serial monogamy, because we all know about church-switching,” says sociologist of religion Scott Thumma, a professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Hartford, Conn. “Today, the individual rarely finds all their spiritual needs met in one congregation or one religion.”

‘Rampant confusion’

In the 1980s, Albert Mohler and Julia Jarvis were in graduate school together at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

Today, Mohler is president of the seminary and a leading voice for Baptist orthodoxy. He sees a “rampant confusion” about faith revealed in the Pew findings.

“This is a failure of the pulpit as much as of the pew to be clear about what is and is not compatible with Christianity and belief in salvation only through Christ,” Mohler says.

Pew says two in three adults believe in or cite an experience with at least one supernatural phenomenon, including:

•26% find “spiritual energy” in physical things.

•25% believe in astrology.

•24% say people will be reborn in this world again and again.

•23% say yoga is a “spiritual practice.”

Mohler calls these “the au courant confusions,” attachments to the latest fashionable free-floating beliefs.

“One hundred years ago, it would have been ‘spiritualism.’ They wouldn’t have known what yoga was but might have been attracted to the ‘New Thought’ of the time,” Mohler says.

His former classmate giggles at that. She’s an ordained minister in the progressive United Church of Christ and leads the Interfaith Family Project, which meets for weekly worship at a Silver Spring, Md., high school.

Jarvis, of Takoma Park, Md., also studies with Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and finds a spiritual dimension in yoga.

“I don’t do astrology, but my mother, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and was a staunch Baptist all her life, looked at her horoscope daily and totally believed it,” Jarvis says.

Jarvis says her late mother, like 49% of adults in the Pew survey, also had a moment of “religious or spiritual awakening.”

“My mother feared for years that I was no longer saved, but just two days before she died, she had an epiphany,” Jarvis says. “She said she was ‘told’ in a spiritual experience to put aside all religious and political differences and just love each other. That was her blessing to me, and that’s what I’m doing.”

Regina Roman of Alexandria, Va., calls herself “a very grounded Episcopalian” who’s active in her church. But, she says, “I’m also stretching the boundaries of how we are to be here and now in this day, age and culture.”

She leads pilgrimages to Egypt, New Mexico and Ireland to help travelers discover the truths and visions in Coptic, Native American and Celtic traditions. Roman celebrated the winter solstice with a home ceremony for guests to delight in the sun’s gifts.

“We are all in relationship with the cosmos. We need to honor that,” says Roman, who doesn’t see herself crossing barriers but rather “coming full circle” with ancient ideas.

“People have always mixed religions, either in ignorance or willfully,” says Stephen Prothero, director of the Graduate Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University.

Despite the late Pope John Paul II’s warnings to explicitly avoid Buddhist and Hindu practices, Prothero says, “American Catholics are so used to not caring what the official church tells them on birth control, divorce, premarital sex and other points that they don’t think they are un-Catholic when they believe and do what they please.”

Combating syncretism has troubled popes for centuries, says the Rev. Dan Pattee, chairman of the theology department at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.

The problem with borrowing spiritual ideas is that “the life-giving truth becomes compromised as we understand it as Catholics,” Pattee says.

The growth of mixing

Prothero sees a similar trend among Protestants, a “resistance to being told what to think.”

“Even people who call themselves by denominational tags don’t really feel the identity attachment to them as they once did,” he says. “And without that identity marker, what’s to prevent you from checking out some other church? Nothing much.”

Cooperman notes that the new survey is measuring a phenomenon that may have been going on for decades. Also, it does not clearly establish how much is due to interfaith relationships.

A new study from InterfaithFamily.com, which encourages Jewish-Christian couples to raise their children as Jews, looks specifically at the Christmas/Hanukkah season. The findings are not scientific but give an indication that in intermarried couples rearing their children as Jews, most will celebrate Hanukkah — which begins on Friday night this year — at home. Less than 48% will celebrate Christmas, and largely in a secular fashion.

Pew specifically excludes the major holidays and life-cycle events to focus on ordinary worship practices. Its report says the findings on interfaith couples are “complex,” in part because people in mixed marriages attend worship less frequently than those with a same-faith spouse.

The faith-mixing trend has been building; other surveys in the past two years have touched on the swirling, unbounded paths of believers:

•Forty-seven percent to 59% of Americans have changed religions at least once, a Pew survey in April found. The top reasons for most: Their spiritual needs weren’t being met, or they liked another faith more or changed religious or moral beliefs.

•The percentage of people who call themselves Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation, and so many people declined any religious label that the “Nones,” now 15% of the USA, are the third-largest “religious” group after Catholics and Baptists, according to the American Religious Identification Survey last March.

•Despite Americans’ overwhelming allegiance to someone they call God (92%), in Pew’s 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, 70% said “many religions can lead to eternal life,” and 68% said “there’s more than one true way to interpret the teachings of my religion.”

•Most (55%) say a guardian angel has protected them from harm, and 52% believe in prophetic dreams, according to surveys by Baylor University released in 2006 and 2008.

In short, we believe our own experiences are authentic, and no “authority” can say otherwise.

That’s a very “Eastern” notion, says Jim Todhunter of Bethesda, Md. Retired after three decades leading United Church of Christ congregations, he has studied in a Hindu ashram in India and practices Zen meditation and Christian contemplative prayer.

“In the Western religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — the focus is: ‘What do you believe?’ There is always a tremendous focus on doctrine and teachings,” he says. “In the East, Buddhism and Hinduism in particular, the leading question is, ‘Do you know God?’ It’s much more experience-based.”

Either way, he adds, “however you meet God is wonderful.”

The Rapture – The Who, What, Where, and Why of the Rapture of the Church

The Rapture – The Who, What, Where, and Why of the Rapture of the Church
By Chris Schang

The rapture of the church is an end times event foretold in the Bible where God takes believers from the age of Grace to Heaven during what will be seen as a sudden and unexpected disappearance from Earth. The rapture is described as occuring before the Tribulation period when God pours out his wrath on unbelieving Israel and unrepentant sinners. For this reason the rapture is referred to as the pre-tribulational rapture.

Because you have kept the word of My perseverance, I also will keep you from the hour of testing, that hour which is about to come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell upon the earth. Revelation 3:10
The rapture of the church will bring to a close of the church age as we know it. The age of grace will finally be over as the Holy Spirit will not be sealed within believers as He is now. The Holy Spirit will return to his role as seen in the previous Old Testament times where believers worked out their faith and salvation. While the word rapture is not specifically mentioned in the scriptures, the event is clearly foretold in the Bible.

According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. (1 Thes. 4:15-17)
So from the scriptures we know that the rapture of the church is for believers living during the age of grace who have been saved through faith in the completed work of Jesus Christ on the Cross.

The rest of the story is here.

Do you Question? Part 2

I fear that one of the things we are inclined to do, is to place our favored teachers or pastors up on a pedestal, and then make it our personal mission to somehow come to their defense whenever they are criticized, and that criticism may or may not be just. But I contend that if we are offended when some teacher we like comes under attack by a critic that is because they, having been set up on a pedestal, they become an idol in our lives. As if one should not ‘dare’ to touch such an ‘anointed one’. The case may be that it’s the critic is the one sent by God to correct bad doctrine.

Whenever a criticism is made, we should first examine that criticism in the light of scripture. Do the criticisms have merit and weight when we do this? If not, we can begin to dismiss the criticism, but that does not alleviate us from our responsibility in this matter, because the need for criticism may be valid, but the remedy of the critic may not be valid.

For example, imagine you work in a bookstore and your coworker is loading a shelf with a new shipment of books, and he decides that we will sort the books by size, when company policy is to sort them in alphabetical order by author. Now, another coworker comes along and says that they must stop sorting the book like that, because sorting them by size is incorrect.

Are they right in pointing out that what the first person is doing is incorrect according to the instructions given? Absolutely! The correction is quite valid. Now assume, this second coworker follows up their valid criticism and says the proper way to sort the book is by color. Now you’re in a situation where the need to be corrected was right, but the remedy offered was also incorrect and one must refer back to the company policy to find the truth in the matter. In our case, the scripture is our truth that everything must be compared against.

So even though we may test what our teachers say in the name of God to the word of God, we need to be careful that our criticisms are correct as well. While it is a good thing to point out doctrinal error, we actually end up compounding the problem if we pull those who will hear us out of one ditch, only to place them in another ditch. A critic must scrutinize their corrections with as much or even greater vigor than they used in identifying the issue in the first place.

Do you Question? Part 1

In the book of Acts, we read these words:

“The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish synagogue. Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Many of them therefore believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men.” Acts 17:10-12 (ESV)

Do you question the words and teachings of those teachers and pastors that you allow to influence your life and your faith? The scripture states the people in Berea were “more noble” precisely because they did so. They examined what was being said in the name of God to the Word of God.

If God states it’s “more noble” to question and confirm the messages we receive, then it’s important for us to do the same as well.

For us, we need to take notice of the many warnings given to us in the scripture, which many false teachers will arise and teach doctrines of demons, and will tell people messages they want to hear rather than the clear exhortations given in the scripture.

No teacher or preacher is above reproach. Since the Apostle Paul can be questioned, being taught directly by Jesus Himself, then anyone else is also subject to these inquiries. We must take the message of these people and work them out to see if they are true in the light of scripture, otherwise we are subject to deception.

I challenge you to take the sermons of your favorite teacher or pastor, and break it down into individual sentences or thoughts, and examine each one with the word on its own merits. Don’t approach it as an endeavor where you seek the scripture to validate your teacher, approach it as an endeavor to disprove your teacher, and force their teaching to stand up under biblical scrutiny.

Are you saved, or do you just think you are?

Judgment Day – Are You Ready?

This is a well done depiction of how it may be for many on their day of Judgment. There is no telling how many will find themselves in this situation, not that that have lost their salvation (which is not possible), but that they were deceived, either by others or by themselves, into thinking they were true believers, but were not.