A great falling away… times of tribulation!

pmurphy88 — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:44:17 +0000

When I look at the current state of “the church” in North America I see the foreshadowing of 2 Thessalonians 2:3, “…let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come , except there come a falling away first…” We have become so fat and lethargic in our prosperity that we seldom venture outside the comfort zone of the four walls of our trendy churches. We have the best rock band entertainment that rivals the world in quality and professionalism. The poor and downtrodden come and ask for our help and with a very pious, but un-Christlike attitude we respond, “If you want what I have brother, then just sow your seed and get it the way I did.” Or, my favorite, “If someone comes to me and asks for money, I would give them a shovel and tell them to go dig a ditch. Then I would give to them because the bible teaches that if a man doesn’t work, neither should he eat.” When did the flagrant disuse of scripture such as the former statement become de rigueur in the body of Christ? Do we actually think that this cold calloused attitude would be that of our Lord Jesus. How far we have fallen from the truth. The extravagant lifestyles of today’s megastar prosperity teachers fly’s in the face of everything that Jesus stood for when he was on this earth as our example. There are so many more things that I could say on this topic but that will be the subject of a future blog. My point here today is to give a general overview of what is really going to come on this earth and where we need to be as Gods people in these last days. Christians in North America have a general belief that comfort and prosperity is a God-given right. Unlike the rest of the world and the true church throughout its history, we rebuke persecution and have puffed ourselves up to believing that “walking in faith” means we will never have to worry about true persecution. If we should venture to mention Jesus at our workplaces and someone ridicules us we whine and then brag about being “persecuted for Jesus”. Give me a break, has our faith become so anemic that we actually think this warrants persecution. No, we have been duped. The word of God declares that… “in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.” There has been a plethora of false doctrines slowly creeping into the Christian faith for several years now. Satan knows that his time is short and he has been bringing the water to a slow boil around us for a long time. His plans and purposes are very insidious and have gone under various guises such as a false doctrine of unity, and the current fascination with ecumenicalism. The whole idea of all faiths being able to coexist in unity is a diabolical scheme of the enemy. The word of God is very explicit on the matter of light and darkness being able to coexist. 2 Corinthians 6:14 tells us that light cannot have communion with darkness. Our Lord himself told us that in the world we would have tribulation. And yes, he did finish by saying that we should be of good cheer because he has overcome the world, but the fact still remains that we will suffer persecution and tribulation in this world, particularly so as we approach the time of the end. I firmly believe that the church in North America especially will have considerable experience with the falling away that the word of God has prophesied for the end times. Our place of complacency and wealth coupled with the predominate teaching that God is going to remove us via the rapture before anything bad happens has not prepared us for the time of tribulation that will come on the whole world before the end comes. The current belief is that there will be a great revival and that an amazing number of people are going to be born again in these last days. Yet there is no evidence from scripture to corroborate this theory. The opposite, in fact, is what the bible teaches. “Narrow is the way, which leads to life, and few there be that find it.” And let’s not forget about the falling away that God’s word said would precede the last days. There is, I believe, a direct correlation between the comfortable teachings of the prosperity gospel and the falling away. When people are set up with a false sense of security and have a belief system that totally shuns the idea of tribulation, they are not prepared for serious calamity to befall them. When the pressure is turned up and we are faced with true persecution for the cause of Christ where will our faith stand. Will it stand in the false doctrines of materialism and escapism Christianity, or will we be able to say I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, and I will not deny Jesus even if it means my life. These are hard thoughts to bear but that day will come. We have to be prepared, do we stand amongst those whose robes are washed in the blood of the lamb or do we join those who fall away and go into eternal damnation. Poignant thoughts for now; something to seriously consider for the future.

The place of the cross!

pmurphy88 — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:52:42 +0000

For at least the past 15 years in the circles which I’ve been a part of the favorite buzzword has been revival. All it seems that anyone wants to talk about is how revival is going to start in one part of Canada and will spread to the rest of the country. However, if anyone should dare to mention the word repentance the people look at you as though you had just said a curse. Blessing brother, this is what they say, don’t you know God is blessing us with riches from his storehouses. We don’t need repentance, we need the river. However, true revival cannot come apart from repentance. We have been so inundated with blessings and talk of “the river” that we think our hearts are in the right place and God is already raining revival upon us. True revival only comes from the place of death. The church today, particularly in North America, needs to be brought back from the dead, hence the term, revival. Two words that you will find in a good thesaurus relating to revival are resurrection and rebirth. That is where we are in this age, despite our religious posturing through rolling around on the carpet claiming to be in “the river”, we are instead at the place of death. While we roll around in super-spiritual bliss our hearts are empty, we are devoid of true fellowship with our creator because we have forgotten about the cross. For it is at the place of the skull, Golgotha, at the foot of the cross of Jesus that we truly realize our condition. Only there can we ever find true life. Without death we can never be truly alive. That is the whole crux of what the epistles teach us. Colossians 3:3 tells us…”For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.” The greatest message that the church needs in this day is that we have to return to the cross. The old revivalist Charles Finney had a lot to say on the subject of revival. His book, “Experiencing Revival” was a treatise on repentance. In his estimation true heart-rending repentance was the only way to experience revival. Going back to Colossians, I am Dead! That’s pretty straightforward. My life is hid with Christ in God. If you take that verse to mean precisely what it says then it follows that unless I am dead, that is dead to my self, to my own will and desire, then my life is not hid with Christ in God. I have to die to self in order to be in the place where I should be. The Apostle Paul made it quite evident that this was where he desired to be. In Philippians 3:10-11 he states, “That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead.” This came from a man who by all accounts must have been crucified to self from the time of his conversion. Yet we find here that his greatest desire was to attain to the resurrection of the dead. Why? Quite simply, there has to be a daily dying to ourselves. We have to follow after our Lord Jesus Christ daily. We must return to the cross daily, we cannot let it out of our sight for when we do we have no power to stand. Jesus told us that the preaching of the cross is foolishness to those that perish, but to us which are saved it is the power of God. We stand only in the power of the cross, let us not forget that. For too many years we have presented a white-washed Christianity to the world around us, devoid of true power, let us now return to the foolishness of the cross. If there is to be true revival in our land it will not be found in some mystical river experience but only in returning to the preaching of the cross. Lift the banner of Jesus high, return his cross to the place of prominence in your life, he will resurrect us from the dead but only when we come to the place of true repentance. This is the voice of one crying in the desert, prepare ye the way of the Lord!

Last Days Prophecy

A great falling away… times of tribulation!

The place of the cross!