How to Cripple Your Church in 10 Easy Steps

Here's a video explaining the top 10 best ways for a worship leader to hinder a church.

Agree?

Disagree?

Discuss.

(HT: Christian Research Net)

Is Free Will God's Greatest Gift?

I had lunch the other day with a good Christian friend. He brought up the issue of free will, a subject that had weighed heavily on his mind recently. He confided with me that he thought he heard the voice of God speak to him one day.

This is what the Lord supposedly told him.

"Free will is the greatest gift I have given to man." - Or something close to that.

My friend did a remarkable thing after hearing the word of the Lord, something I see very few Christians do when they supposedly hear God speak to them.

He discerned the message.

He rightly divided the word of truth. He questioned the scriptural integrity of those words. He did as Spurgeon advised; judged the right from the almost right.

See, the words 'free will is God's greatest gift' may sound good, right and true on the surface, especially in the midst of a doctrinally confused generation of semi-Pelagians dominating the face of evangelicalism.

But is the notion scriptural?

Pastor Bob DeWaay on Pietism

When I hear the word piety I immediately conjure an image of a self-righteous religious pharisee type, praying long-winded prayers, fasting with hunger pangs etched on his face, looking down his nose at the unclean mass of humanity who are not worthy to look up and behold his blinding glory.

A pious person in the world today denotes a religious hypocrite, a sanctimonious spirit, concerned more for dotting his I's and crossing his T's rather than walking in love, mercy and compassion toward others. So, if someone ever calls you a pious churchgoer, don't say 'thank you'. You've just been backhanded!

This caricature has been manufactured by a contemporary evangelicalism that disdains 'dead orthodoxy' and 'dry doctrine'. It is not an accurate depiction of true piety. It actually once had a very positive, biblical definition. Piety meant a deep reverence for God and a sacred obligation to religious duties. Piousness parallels holiness. But there have been some in church history who have taken true piety to unhealthy extremes, creating a man-made system of sanctification outside of God's ordinary means of grace.

Pastor Bob DeWaay of Twin Cities Fellowship in Minneapolis has written a superb and eye opening article on a heretical movement that has infected the church for centuries. It has taken on various forms and has been called by many different names, but at its core is called 'pietism'. It is not the same as practicing true piety, but bases its belief off of it.

I'll let Pastor DeWaay define the term:

My Conversion to the Doctrines of Grace - Part 3

A great mystery once surrounded the circumstances of my salvation experience that for a decade confounded all my attempts to unveil its secrets.

Let me start at the beginning. In the summer of 1993 I found a job at the recycling center of a local non-profit agency. They provided a training environment for people with developmental disabilities. The job humbled me, but I did enjoy working with the people. My supervisor lived his Christian faith openly, and stood boldly for his convictions. To make a long story short, he preached the gospel to me for a solid year-and-a-half, slowly chipping away at my granite hard heart. One day he quoted a scripture that flew like a steel-tipped arrow, breaching my great wall of enmity.

Put on the whole armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the world's rulers, of the darkness of this age, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Eph 6:11-12)

Seek The Lord

God hath said to all men who draw breath:

"Seek the LORD while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. "For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
(Isa 55:6-11)

It's interesting that God says His word does not return to him empty. What do you think this means? Does it mean that all who hear the word will be saved, or does God have a double-edged intent in the proclamation of biblical truth?

Any thoughts?

Post of The Week: Are Arminianism and Open Theism Related?

World From Our Window has an interesting article examining the relationship between Arminian 'free-will' theology and the latest and greatest heresy sweeping the landscape - Open Theism. The author poses the question whether Arminian theology, if consistently applied, naturally leads to a belief in Open Theism.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the past several months I have heard a couple of Calvinists make statements along the lines that "consistent Arminianism leads to Open Theism." This is not to say that all Arminians are Open Theists (a heresy that the vast majority of Arminians repudiate), but that if Arminians were consistent they would be Open Theists. Therefore the only thing that keeps an Arminian from being an Open Theist is inconsistency.

Read the entire article here.

A Friend of Sinners

I found this cool sidebar banner on one of my favorite blogs, Pyromaniacs that strikes me as somewhat familiar - but I can't quite put my finger on it...



Can you?

I wish I had the Photoshop skills these guys do, then I could fashion my header in a more creative way. It looks very good! I can't use it on my blogroll yet because of the limitations that accompany the free blog package I use here at Wordpress. Oh well, TeamPyro can still count me in as a Friend of Sinners.

A Little Levity

I about spewed my Mt. Dew when I saw this biting piece of satire from the Sacred Sandwich.

 

After a thorough examination by Arminian church officials,

Bob was found to be only "slightly dead" in trespasses and sins.

Post of the Week: The Church is Full of Hypocrites

Extreme Theology has posted an exceptional article on hypocrisy in the church by Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller.

Here is an insightful excerpt:

There are two things at work behind the accusation of hypocrisy, one true, the other false. The first is the sad reality that the church is often marred with shameful sin. More on this later. But, the second thing behind the accusation of hypocrisy is a wrong assumption about what Christianity is. Those that accuse the church of hypocrisy often assume that the whole point of the Church is to make people good, moral. “You're a Christian: you're supposed to be good and holy and all that stuff.” The world sees the church as a place where people go to learn about God's rules, and to talk about how they are keeping them and the world is not.

Here we must be clear that the main point of Christianity is not our morality and goodness. This is, to be sure, the thing driving every other world religion from Judaism to Hinduism, Islam to Mormonism and even Atheism! All of these “ism's” are pointing mankind to achieve more and be better, to climb the ladder of moral success and be a good person. But Christianity is different, it begins not with man's goodness or potential goodness but rather with man's wickedness. From the first chapters of Genesis until the Revelation given to St John the Bible is a record of mankind's failure; it is a testimony of his sin.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

John Piper on The Origin of Faith

You did not make the cross effective in your life by faith. The cross became effective in your life by purchasing your faith.

Christ tasted death for everyone who has faith. Because the faith of everyone who believes was purchased by the death of Christ.

– John Piper

My Conversion to the Doctrines of Grace - Part 2

Surprisingly, my conversion from free-will, Arminian theology to Calvinism came rather swiftly. It's shocking really, if you only understood the depths of hatred I once held toward those doctrines. (See Part 1 of this series for proof).

I resisted initially, desperately hopeful that some sensible compromise existed between these diametrically opposed belief systems. I figured Arminianism fell into one ditch while Calvinism veered clear over to the other side of the road. I searched in vain for the imaginary highway that ran through the middle of both views, but of course I never found any signs to point the way. After wrangling with Calvinism for about 4 months, I finally beheld its beauty with a clarity only the Holy Spirit could grant.

The ditch I had plowed into, turns out, is really an off-ramp exiting the pothole plagued 'Free Will' service road. It flows into a smoothly paved four-lane interstate winding a clear path to the Celestial City. The road first runs through the firmly established townships of Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Solus Christus, Sola Scriptura and finally Soli Deo Gloria, which lies at the very gates of the streets of gold.

My Conversion to the Doctrines of Grace - Part 1

Remember my series on TULIP I started many moons ago? I have pretty much finished up articulating the doctrine of Radical Corruption of human nature, but I do have an allegory I plan on penning to help illustrate the point forcefully. Hopefully, I will publish it before twilight sets on 2007. I will then resume the series with a closer look into the doctrine of Unconditional Election. But before all that takes place I thought it might be beneficial to relate the convictions that have brought me to my current level of understanding concerning God's sovereignty in our salvation.

True Discernment

"Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather, it is telling the difference between right and almost right." - Charles Spurgeon

I don't know if there is a greater need in the Body today than the gift of discernment. The number of teachers and preachers in the modern church who sound good and seem right but truly are not, has multiplied exponentially just in this generation. I have rejected a great number of fine-sounding televangelists, teachers, authors and bible commentators over the past couple of years that I had once respected. So much so in fact, people often wonder if there is anybody I do like.

Fair question.

My answer is 'oh yes, a great many fine teachers exist, you just have to seek them out, because most refuse to parade themselves or exploit fellow brethren."