Spontaneous Compassion

by Joni Earekson Tada

Bureaucracies aren’t programmed to be compassionate. It’s not in the nature of the thing. Take my friend, David Bowie, in his big, bulky wheelchair. After he became a quadriplegic in a car accident and his wife left him, he moved into a cramped one-room apartment and learned to rely on three or four part-time attendants to get him up and put him to bed. Life’s not easy.

Thanksgiving

by Mike Ratliff

A Psalm for giving thanks. Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth! Serve the LORD with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! Know that the LORD, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations. (Psalms 100:1-5 ESV)

O, let us give thanks to the Lord for He is exceedingly good to us. No person born of Adam deserves anything from Him except eternal judgment yet every person, whether they are a believer or not, receives from God His common grace. However, those who are in Christ should joyfully give thanks to Him for the miracle of their salvation along with all of the heavenly promises that go with it. I was in a discussion on Sunday with a friend at church about how awesome it is that God has made Himself known to us through the Son and through His Word. We rejoiced together in our fellowship just seconds before the worship and praise part of our Sunday morning began. What a joy that was!

False Prophets and False Prophecy

by Mike Ratliff

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel, who are prophesying, and say to those who prophesy from their own hearts: ‘Hear the word of the LORD!’ Thus says the Lord GOD, Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! Your prophets have been like jackals among ruins, O Israel. You have not gone up into the breaches, or built up a wall for the house of Israel, that it might stand in battle in the day of the LORD. They have seen false visions and lying divinations. They say, ‘Declares the LORD,’ when the LORD has not sent them, and yet they expect him to fulfill their word. Have you not seen a false vision and uttered a lying divination, whenever you have said, ‘Declares the LORD,’ although I have not spoken?” (Ezekiel 13:1-7 ESV)

A false prophet is one who claims to teach the truth from God and His Word, but who actually teaches from the counsel of his or her own heart. God is forever unchanging. He is immutable. His ways never change. His standards never change. At the time of Ezekiel, the kingdom of Judah had become consumed with idolatry. The people mixed Temple worship of YHWH with the worst forms of idol worship. They had taken on the culture and religion of the nations around them. Their culture had become pluralized. They were no longer a separate and unique people from the rest of the nations. The mechanism in people that powers this is compromise. The standard for God’s people has always been to be eternally focused with God in control. Compromise always moves God’s people to make decisions that are temporally focused because obedience to God is always counter to the demands of culture and the temporal.

Called to Salvation as Exiles

by Mike Ratliff

Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:13-16 ESV) 

I was inundated with bad news, it seemed, all day today. The financial news is enough to drive us despair. There are predictions of another Great Depression on the horizon that could last for years. However, unlike the one in the 1930’s, which was deflationary, this one will be hyper-inflationary much like the one that plagued Germany after World War I. There are predictions that the U.S. Dollar is going to fall and be replaced with another currency that will eventually be absorbed by a one-world currency. In light of the upcoming devaluing of the Dollar, I know some who are buying caches of food that can support them and their families for a year. Their faith in the Dollar and our consumer driven economy has failed.

Pragmatic Expediency

by Mike Ratliff 

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. (2 Timothy 4:1-5 ESV) 

The proponents of the seeker-sensitive church growth model may very well have had good intentions when through it was spawned the rise of contemporary mega-churches such as Willow Creek and Saddleback Valley Baptist and their clones. The focus was outreach to the unchurched. That is a proper function of the New Testament Church, however, one of the model’s fundamental components is actually an antithesis of the clear instruction to Church leaders found in God’s Word. That component is pragmatism. 

Ecclesiastical Myopia

by R.C. Sproul

Perhaps the most remarkable statement I ever heard a man utter from the pulpit was: “He has a penurious epistemology, which tends to be myopic.” I was seated in the balcony of the church when that statement was made, and I could not restrain myself from laughing aloud. I nudged my wife Vesta and said, “I just might be the only person in the church who understood what that man said.” What is a penurious epistemology? A penurious epistemology is a theory of knowledge that is poverty-stricken or on the verge of bankruptcy. Such a view of knowledge, if it tends towards myopia, is simply suffering a bad case of near-sightedness. I’m afraid that the American church suffers from a similar sort of myopia.

What Now?

by Mike Ratliff 

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints,(Ephesians 6:10-18 ESV) 

I have been in a state of mourning since the Democratic Primaries came down to only two candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama. I had little confidence in any of the Republican contenders after Ron Paul dropped out. I was not sure for a while what really triggered this mourning. It was as I realized that this coincided very dramatically with the drastic decline in the Christian worldview in our time that God has taken His hand of protection away from this country. Judgment is coming. 

Persecution on the horizon?

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, believes Senator Obama was elected, in large part, because the church in America has failed to address sin in its own ranks and also in society.
 
Perkins says Christians should pray for and return to a biblical model of holiness and righteousness. And believers in America, he adds, should prepare for persecution.
 
“We are going to see, I think, unprecedented attacks against our faith through measures like the hate crimes [legislation] to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act,” he says. “We’re going to see attacks on innocent human life through the Freedom of Choice Act, trying to erase all the gains that have been made in the pro-life movement. And I think even our freedoms are going to come under attack.”
 
Obama stated during the presidential campaign that one of his top priorities upon taking office would be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. Perkins says Christians will have to be resolute in defense of what they know to be right.
 
“[W]e’re going to have to stand together, and stand in defense of these truths, and be bold about that stance,” he counsels.
 
Perkins says many churches are afraid of offending people, and don’t challenge members to live out their faith in the public square.

What Sinners Should Plead with God

In light of today’s ‘church’ climate of easy-believism with all the focus on the person rather than God, as if all ‘deserve’ God’s favor, let’s take a look at what our ‘attitude’ about salvation should be if we held a genuine Biblical view of God and man.

The Horror of Sin

by Mike Ratliff

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1 ESV)

God is Holy. However, at the fall (Genesis 3) Man fell into sin. This fall corrupted all of Adam’s line so that each is born with a sin nature and completely separate from God. Why? God is Holy and is completely separate from all that is not. Christians are not separate from God because, at their salvation, they are forgiven and declared righteous by God because of the redemptive work of Christ on the Cross. The Lord Jesus Christ paid heavily to accomplish the atonement for the sins of those for whom He died.

The Word Became Flesh

By Mike Ratliff 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5 ESV)

All in Christ belong to the living God. He gave all of them to the Son (John 6:37). Each of them comes to the Son and is saved. There was a time before God shattered my religious idols back in 2004 that I was sure in my mind and my understanding that genuine Christians believed like those in my church. They had to have responded to the “gospel” as I had done. There was no way that a person could be Christian, I thought, if they belonged to certain churches that were way too formal according to my ‘standards.’ Also, genuine believers were religious in a certain way and that way looked a lot like the way my church did it and how all those churches I had been part of growing up did it.