CHRISTIAN NO MORE
By Lee Duigon
June 5, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
June 5, 2014
NewsWithViews.com
The flatline Protestant churches of America are giving birth to a new, false religion—one that will continue to call itself “Christianity,” but won’t be Christian anymore: one that will have an outward form of godliness while denying the truth of God’s word.
It will be to Christianity what reality TV is to reality.
Our Lord Jesus Christ said something which I’ve always had a hard time understanding. But I think I understand it now.
“Many will cry to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” (Matthew 7:22-23)
No one can do enough good works, wonderful or otherwise, to earn eternal life, as if God owed it to him for services rendered. Otherwise you could teach people that Jesus Christ is not our Lord and Savior but only a nice guy with delusions; and as long as you put in enough hours at the soup kitchen, God will have to pay you with eternal life whether He likes it or not.
Good works are good in themselves, but they are not the means of salvation, not a substitute for faith. Salvation is the free gift of God. It comes by faith—faith in Jesus Christ, who atoned in person for our sins and obtained God’s grace for us. That’s Christianity. You could look it up. This is what the Bible teaches.
The United Methodist Church, America’s second-biggest Protestant denomination, is close to splitting down the middle and making it official. The Presbyterian Church USA is shrinking faster than the Aral Sea.
For both denominations the fracture line is the same: there are a lot of people in the church who want a pseudo-Christianity that allows them to fornicate with members of the same sex. The PCUSA will hold its annual General Assembly this month in Detroit—a dying church convening in a dying city. On the agenda, as usual, is a hard push for the ordination of unrepenting, openly practicing homosexuals as clergy and church officers, and the performance of same-sex imitation marriages in PCUSA churches. (Source: “The Layman,” Vol. 47, No. 2/Spring 2014)
There is no ambiguity in the Bible’s teaching that homosexual acting-out is a grave sin, repugnant to God. The PCUSA delegates respond with a variety of lame excuses. Those verses of the Bible are old and obsolete. God didn’t mean the kind of homosexual sex we have nowadays, as if the kind they had back then was something different, and God just didn’t realize we would invent a right way to have gay sex. He likes it now, and means for us to “celebrate” it. Blah-blah-blah. And regardless of what those verses in the Bible say, it’s not a sin and God was just plain wrong for saying that it is.
How do these innovators paste fig-leaves over their rebellion against God’s word?
They cover it up with works of the flesh, of course. So the rest of the agenda is a hodge-podge of boilerplate left-wing politics: higher taxes on “the rich,” siding with the Palestinians against Israel, down with private charity, amnesty for illegal aliens, down with fossil fuels, stop Global Warming, abolish the death penalty, more gun control—they touch all the bases. These they imagine to be good works that will make God marvel at their righteousness and overlook their disdain for His word on marriage and morality.
This is not Christianity. It’s only Democrat talking-points repackaged as theology.
“Be not conformed to this world,” the Bible teaches (Romans 12:2). So naturally the flatliners want to conform to this world, or at least to the left-wing portion of it, as thoroughly as possible. Their theology couldn’t be more non-Christian if they were atheists or worshippers of Zeus.Down the road, their avowed passion for “radical inclusiveness” will lead them more and more to exclude Jesus Christ, and into an already-burgeoning taste for “goddess” worship and idolatry. They make something up and then they worship it.
Whatever is condemned in the Bible, they embrace. Not one of the Ten Commandments is safe from their experiments.
This is America, and the law is that they can believe and worship as they please. We have no power to forbid them, and I don’t suggest we try. It’s too bad, but there’s nothing we can do. We who remain faithful to God’s word can only witness to the truth. If people don’t want to hear it, that’s their problem.
But we can at least insist on truth in advertising. And these flatliners need another name than “Christian.”
© 2014 Lee Duigon - All Rights Reserved
Share This ArticleLee Duigon, a contributing editor with the Chalcedon Foundation, is a former newspaper reporter and editor, small businessman, teacher, and horror novelist. He has been married to his wife, Patricia, for 34 years. See his new fantasy/adventure novels, Bell Mountain and The Cellar Beneath the Cellar, available on www.amazon.com
Website: LeeDuigon.com
E-Mail: leeduigon@verizon.net
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