Notes From A Retired Preacher

Entries from September 2008

Apostate Churches Meet With Ahmadinejad

September 28, 2008 · 14 Comments

These apostate churches — members of the World Council of Churches [WCC] co-sponsor international dialogue between religious leaders and political figures.

If we ever wonder what is happening to our churches in this country, you need not go very far to find out. The WCC on their own web site advertises their “dialog” with the “Butcher of Iran” who has vowed to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth.” He has also called for the destruction of the United States of America.

Yet these churches want to “dialog” with him. These people are insane.

Quoted from the WCC Web site. Their meeting is:

“aimed at exploring faith perspectives and the role of religion regarding global issues such as poverty, war and prejudice while deepening mutual understanding.”

“The theme of the dialogue is “Has not one God created us? The significance of religious contributions to peace,” and the event will include an Iftar – a dinner to break the Muslim Ramadan fast.

WHAT? Sheer insanity.

Which churches are members of this group? Maybe yours?

  * African Instituted churches
    * Anglican churches
    * Baptist churches
    * The Catholic church
    * Disciples of Christ / Churches of Christ
    * Evangelical churches
    * Friends (Quakers)
    * Holiness churches
    * Lutheran churches
    * Mennonite churches
    * Methodist churches
    * Moravian churches
    * Old-Catholic churches
    * Orthodox churches (Eastern)
    * Orthodox churches (Oriental)
    * Pentecostal churches
    * Reformed churches
    * The Salvation Army
    * Seventh-day Adventist Church
    * United and Uniting churches
    * Free and independent churches
Go HERE and then click on your denomination
 to see if you are one of them.
You will be outraged...
Something you won't find on their site is:
HOW TO HAVE ETERNAL LIFE

Categories: Christianity · Faith · Israel · Obama · Palin · Patriotism · Religion · Terrorism · Uncategorized

Obama, America, Spiritual Warfare

September 21, 2008 · 8 Comments

Obama, America, Spiritual Warfare

America is in a spiritual battle for its very soul. The drumbeat of Socialism/Marxism never ceases and because of the state of our current edicational system, our citizens don’t even recognize it. Our liberal churches welcome it.

Here is a great article from The American Thinker which should make every American of Faith stop, think and realize — We are in a Spiritual Battle.

=============

The Drumbeat

By William Staneski

The drumbeat. It’s always there. Day and night. Rain or shine. Winter or Summer. Sunday or Monday. It comes at you from every direction. It comes over the TV, the radio, at work, at school, in music, in the newspapers, from the politicians, in conversation with others, even in church. It wears you down. It robs you of the will to resist its message. Even short-lived victories, which stop it briefly, leave you with the knowledge that it will return; each minor victory bound to be lost to the redoubled efforts of this patient and persistent force. You can’t escape it. It never stops. It never gives up. It never ends. It rains upon you from every possible angle, from every possible source.

It’s the drumbeat of the left. It is political, philosophical, theological, and social. It pervades every activity. It is post-structural, post-modern, post-everything in the parlance of the day. It is tolerant, diverse, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory, egalitarian, politically correct, multicultural, globalist, and collectivist. It insists that there are no rights and wrongs, no moral absolutes. It turns everything upside down in its looking glass world. It denies the correctness of all that produced what our culture revered before the deconstruction of the world in accordance with the tenets of cultural Marxism.
It denies God, human exceptionalism, and the soul. We are reduced to Darwinian animals floundering in an amoral sea of meaninglessness. It is a product of the nihilistic, existentialist philosophical movement, which went hand in hand with modern art, atonal music, scientific materialism and modern physics, and the generally discordant nature of the twentieth century.

It is said that a fish is not aware of the water in which it swims since it is totally immersed in it. This is the way cultural Marxism is taking over our world in its inexorable Gramscian march. We swim in it. It enters every pore of our existence. It is everywhere. We can’t escape it. Many people accept this world without even realizing it, just as the fish accepts the water in which it swims. They don’t realize it as the left creates new conventional wisdom and new intuitions about truth.

The cultural Marxists convince us that the truth is that there is no truth. And even though this unresolvable paradox lies at the very center of all this, the constant drumbeat keeps the masses in line, anesthetized enough to not make an issue of it. Fed a constant diet of sex, drugs, poisonous pop culture, materialistic trinkets, and unkeepable promises of security provided by huge leftist government, ever more globalist in nature, the masses are diverted from realizing, as they are told there is no truth, that this claim itself is subject to the same test. It is logically impossible for the leftist drumbeat to be true by its own axioms.

The principles upon which Western culture rests and upon which America was built are under attack by these slow acting but deadly forces. The drumbeat is grinding down the will of the West to maintain itself. The ideas of individual sovereignty and responsibility, natural rights, and objective truth have been derided by the left to the point that many of our young people reject them, if, indeed, they are even aware of them as the basis for our culture. All that ensures that a culture will pass its ideas down from one generation to the next is its cultural memory. The drumbeat is slowly but surely replacing our cultural memory.

As each school is renamed and the name of a Founder or other great person from our history is removed from its entrance way, we lose a bit of that memory. As our great authors and works of Western culture are replaced with those in line with the message of the drumbeat, we rapidly lose our cultural memory. As each school textbook is rewritten to reflect the new ideas of family and cultural heritage, our children are lost to the forces of the drumbeat as they learn to view America and traditional Western culture as oppressive and imperialistic. And it doesn’t take long for there to be only a shell left, the substance of our culture sucked out and destroyed by the cultural Marxists.

If you believe that all this is a paranoid overreaction, you have plenty of company. Those of us who can still see the water and hear the drumbeat are subject to attempts to make us sound evil and foolish. To believe in traditional Western cultural values, American Exceptionalism, God, and moral truth is to be branded as old fashioned and foolish, even by the best assessments of those who have bought into the cultural Marxist’s message. And by the worst of them, we are branded as stupid and evil, and in need of being destroyed.

It may be too late to do anything about this as the world plays out its story. The power-hungry arrogance of human beings seems to be the force that underlies the events carrying us forward to the final chapter. And as this arrogance and lust for power feeds the wills of those who would gain control of the world, humankind is gaining just enough knowledge to destroy itself in that arrogance. Never before in human history has there been such a confluence of forces. Technology, globalism, and the leftist drumbeat are joining together in a way that is allowing mankind to believe, on a worldwide scale, that it can control its own destiny.

The main thing that is being ignored in all this is human nature. It is all based upon the arrogant presumptions of the elitist cultural Marxists concerning how people ought to act. It leads to totalitarianism and destruction.

In truth, and in direct opposition to the drumbeat, each human being must be accorded his or her natural rights, individual sovereignty, and self responsibility to be in harmony with human nature. Each of us must have the freedom to succeed or to fail. Western culture, culminating in the great American experiment, has been perverted. Due to these perversions, many failures have already occurred, which have then, ironically, been used to justify further perversions of the same sort as those which caused the problems to begin with.

Generally, these perversions are manifested in bigger government, more laws, more bureaucracy, more regulations, more taxes, and government controlled redistribution of wealth, more collectivism, less individualism, and less freedom. We all hear it constantly from leftist politicians as they add their part to the drumbeat:  government must do more to ensure Americans avoid the consequences of their choices.  We all know the song, sung to the cheers of the unthinking throngs who would give up their very humanity for the promise of a free lunch. These are the joys of cultural Marxism.

And the drumbeat goes on.
===========
The Spiritual Battle goes on. We must share our faith with with everyone!

Be sure of Heaven!

Categories: Christianity · Faith · Obama · Palin · Patriotism · Religion · Terrorism

REMEMBER 9/11 – NEVER FORGET

September 11, 2008 · 2 Comments

Never forget……………

Watch the video below of the events that horrible day.

And REMEMBER

Pray that God will continue to bless America!

Pray that God will continue to protect America!

Prat that Americans will wake up and open their eyes to lurking danger.

Pray that the lost will seek the Truth and trust Jesus Christ as the only Savior.

Eternal Life For You

Categories: Christianity · Faith · Obama · Palin · Patriotism · Religion · Terrorism

Obama’s Faith?

September 7, 2008 · 38 Comments

It seems Obama is not sure which faith is his faith or to which audience he was addressing.

This quick video indicts him. How could anyone who calls himself a Christian say, “My muslim faith..?“  Oooops, I forgot?

Read it and weep. Americans, and all Christians beware!

Find out –

What is the True Christian Faith?

Categories: Christianity · Faith · Obama · Patriotism · Religion · Uncategorized

John MacArthur / Lordship Salvation

September 6, 2008 · 47 Comments

I was recently challenged by a person who responded to my comment on another Blog. Because he was a devotee of John MacArthur, he was upset that I called MacArthur a proponent of “Lordship Salvation.” (LS) He claimed, in very eloquent language, not to understand LS, indicating he had learned much from MacArthur.

I also made the statement very clearly that MacArthur is a Reformed Calvinist.

This is my answer to him — which, unfortunately, leaves much unsaid on my part — simply for fear of too much verbiage and a lack of time to prove a point. The gentleman never answered my comment.

My definition of “Lordship Salvation” is described as any doctrine which adds works to salvation or to the keeping of salvation. Christian carnality is a shame but cannot be cured by adding or demanding works to gain, keep or insure salvation.

LS has its roots in Covenant/Reformed/Calvinist teaching, which leads a person to believe he must continue in good works to prove his salvation to God, the “P” in the Calvinist TULIP,  Perseverance of the Saints.

Here are some quotes where MacArthur misses the mark in his teaching. He is indeed a learned man and respected by many, but alas, he projects errors in some of his doctrine. There are many references where he utters truth but likewise, there are too many times when he contradicts himself and the Bible.

MacArthur espouses Covenant/Reformed/Calvinist doctrine and consequently, this evidently influences his teaching of Lordship Salvation. It seems deliberate, not accidental, even though at times he denies his Reformed teaching. Look at some of his quotes:
From Saved Without A Doubt – MacArthur Study Series (Chariot Victor Books, 1992), p 58.

“….. It’s not that He [God] merely sees what will happen in the future; rather He ordains it. The Bible clearly teaches that God sovereignly chooses people to believe in Him.”

This is clearly Covenant/Reformed/Calvinist teaching with no scripture to support it. And yet in his statement before the Independent Fundamental Churches of America (IFCA) Board, 1989, in plenary session he said,

“I believe with all my heart and soul that you cannot come up with a covenant view of theology and maintain any kind of coherent hermeneutics.”

This contradicts his theology quoted above that  “God sovereignly chooses people to believe…” Incidentally the words “sovereign” and all its derivatives do not appear in the King James Bible, but are catchwords of Calvinists.

An example of his Lordship teaching:
John MacArthur – Grace to You

http://www.gty.org/Resources/Issues&Answers/349
….. no one can be saved who counts the cost and is unwilling to pay it.”

My friends, this is the confusing essence and tenet of Lordship Salvation. Clear Biblical teaching says there is NO cost to being saved or staying saved.

Ephesians 2:8-9
For by grace are ye SAVED through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is THE GIFT OF GOD: NOT OF WORKS, lest any man should boast.
(Red caps my emphasis)

From: Grace to You Website (Grace Community Church – MacArthur, Pastor)

What we teach about God:

He has graciously chosen from eternity past those whom He would have as His own.”

Again, this is Covenant/Reformed/Calvinist doctrine. This means God therefore chooses NOT to pick others (the un-chosen) leaving them condemned to hell. Bad Doctrine! “The Lord is … not willing that any should perish.” 2 Peter 3:9

From: John MacArthur
Master’s Seminary Journal
TMSJ 4/1 (Spring 1993) 5-24
Excerpt:

“A faith that is void of submission is a merely intellectual faith, ….. Those who adopt such a view must then scale back the definition of faith so that believing is something that even depraved sinners are capable of.”

I would ask MacArthur, “Submission how? Obedience to a doctrine of mandatory works?”
Did not Christ die for every sinner, the whole world, no matter how “depraved?” (Incidentally, the word “depraved” does not appear in the Bible but it is an invention of Calvinists). What could possibly be the difference between an ordinary sinner and a “depraved” sinner. Christ died for the most “depraved” of sinners the Apostle Paul — who called himself “The chief of sinners.” We are all sinners by nature and deed and even our finest righteousness is, in God’s words, as “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:5). We all deserve the condemnation of Hell.

MacArthur defines Perseverance of the Saints (Covenant/Reformed/Calvinist doctrine):

“It [perseverance] opposes the radical easy-believism teaching that genuine Christians can choose to ‘drop out’ of the spiritual growth process and ‘cease to confess Christianity.’ It [perseverance] is the polar opposite of the brand of theology that makes faith a ‘historic moment,’ a one-time ‘act’ that secures heaven, but offers no guarantee the ‘believer’s’ earthly life will be changed.”

Therein is the very definition of  Lordship Salvation. MacArthur thereby declares and proclaims that if your life does not change, you are not saved.

Scripture says:

“… for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7

Please remember, Christian carnality cannot be cured by adding or demanding works to gain, keep or insure salvation. The answer for the carnal Christian is (among many verses):

2 Timothy 2:15
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

And to be absolutely sure of your eternity — to be sure of Heaven some day, without a doubt:

Eternal Life For You

Categories: Calvinism · Christianity · Faith · John MacArthur · Lordship Salvation · Reformed theology · Religion · Salvation

Obama And The Palin Baby

September 1, 2008 · 8 Comments

The McCain/Palin camp announced today that Governor Palin’s daughter Bristol is five months pregnant. Bristol and her husband-to-be will be married and keep the baby. Great! This is the Biblical way to solve a difficult problem.

Governor Palin, as a good Christian mother, says she loves her daughter just the same. This is a great Christian attitude. It is a shame that some kids don’t learn until it becomes the “hard way,” but Bristol is to be commended that she chose not to go the “Obama way” and abort the baby. Bristol chooses life, the Biblical way!

Obama is to be commended for issuing a statement that this situation is not a campaign issue and should not be discussed.  — Officially, that is his position.

Of course this will not prevent his Looney Left, Soros funded and fueled comrades from smearing the McCain/Palin ticket as they so eagerly have done and will do.

It is probably with good reason he would squelch the story officially, since Obama is the result of a union between unmarried parents — with a father who was reportedly the husband of several wives. He hopes his statement will stem the tide of revelations about his and his parent’s past.

We salute the Palins for living the faith they profess.

Click here — Find out how to be absolutely sure of Heaven.

Categories: Christianity · Faith · Obama · Palin · Patriotism · Religion · Uncategorized

McCain/Palin Leader, Obama Follower

September 1, 2008 · 1 Comment

I find it interesting that Obama finally decided to follow the McCain/Palin lead and cease campaigning today. McCain the Leader and Obama the follower.

Likewise Obamessiah decided to try using his “millions” of email contacts to raise funds for the distressed in Louisiana. That is good, but again  Obama is a good follower. His handler’s decision came only after McCain/Palin decided to turn their Convention into a fundraising effort to benefit the the hurricane victims in Louisiana.

We’;ll continue to pray for the refugees in Lousiana — especially that those Christians on rescue missions to that area will be concerned for the eternal souls of those to whom they minister.

What an opportunity for believers in Christ to share their faith!

Do you want to have Eternal Life?

Categories: Christianity · Faith · Obama · Palin · Patriotism · Religion · Uncategorized