Friday, July 21, 2017

Compromise: the ecumenical spirit and the celebrity handmaiden

The following excerpts are in response to “The Nov. 17-19 conference, “An International Interreligious Colloquium on The Complementarity of Man and Woman,” will feature about 30 speakers from 23 countries and 14 religions.”

The gospel is not something to be discussed along with social causes. Noticeably our ages’ most celebrated compromisers generally use the term ‘gospel’ without identifying it as the gospel of Jesus Christ, which alone is the power of God unto salvation. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not some conference admission tool. It is not a ‘discussion’ between men with the hope of settling on some middle ground. It is not some intellectual debate. In fact, the Scriptures are not up for debate.

The visible church has defaulted on sounding the alarm and has stoned the discerning in the court of public opinion. In recent years, men such as John Piper and Mark Driscoll have affirmed the ecumenist Rick Warren. Their affirmations have legitimized men such as Warren. The three men must be avoided and the alarm must be sounded with more vigor, even if men would criticize because the alarm is too loud and frequent. Joining the Vatican Council is not the unity of Christ. It is the unity of the kingdom of darkness. It is not the unity of the faith, but the unity of the faithless. The faith does not need men’s help for exposure. In fact, a mark of the true disciple of Christ as not that the world unequivocally embraces the man, but that they unequivocally despise him (Matt. 10:22)....

This brings the final issue. We must stop our own love affair with coddling false teachers and apostates. We must stop criticizing those who are warning us of these things. We must stop pretending that we care so much for the local church that those who warn us about the universal church are labeled as bitter Christians. We must not accuse them of fault-finding, when Satan laughably sets the faults on the table, God exposes them for us, and we continue to excuse these faults, because the trojan-horse carriers are well-published, well-liked, and well-commended. The standard cannot be our own minds and feelings about men. This is folly. We must think God’s thoughts after Him concerning these things, namely as Paul the apostle has said in 1 Corinthians 1 that the gospel of Jesus Christ is foolishness to the wise. It confounds them. It brings up from them hatred of the blessed Son. God has not chosen the wisest, most esteemed, and beloved as vessels for His truth. It is the despised, the lowly and the maligned who bear true witness and testimony of His holy Gospel. In other words, we must repent of our desire to raise up celebrities, emulating them, and raising them up as the standard; finding them beneficial, even though they have demonstrated persistent disloyalty to Christ.

Have we become dull of hearing and seeing like those in the time of Isaiah and the Prophets? Have we refashioned Christ so much that when His modern disciples cry out to us, we scorn them and cast them from our presence? We must repent of mocking those whom God has given the sorrowful burden of seeing these things and sounding an alarm from rooftops. We must stop deriding them as those who correct us too much or label them as discernment divas. We must see their faithful, biblical words as pure gold and batteries for our compass. Satan loves nothing more than to raise up his ecumenists, but more than that, he loves to use the mouths of compromising ‘evangelicals’ to commend his servants. We must not only test these things against the infallible Holy Scriptures, but also test ourselves in the faith to see if we are truly in Him. We must ask ourselves do we have a fraternal spirit of pseudo-gospel progress? Has this caused us to despise the true Christians who plead with us to return to our first love: Christ? Do we believe that the family is more important than the Gospel of Jesus Christ, when the biblical gospel and true discipleship carries us away from our families into the bosom of Christ (Matt. 10:37)? ~Excerpts from "The Ecumenical Spirit And the Celebrity Handmaiden"

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