It's Sin!

(Found on Facebook)

Sin Has Unchangeable Consequences

God can and will cleanse the record, but He does not change the results. No one can unscramble an egg.

Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Real [commentary on 1 John], pg. 30

Some Good Stuff

I’ve been out of town for a couple days and stuff is piling up!  I decided to do a separate post of links to some good articles and then tomorrow get my “bad and ugly” stuff together.  I hope you find this collection to be edifying or, at the very least, interesting.

A Definitive Case Against The Roman Catholic Apocrypha

Interesting examination of the “virginity test” in the Old Testament.

Acceptable Sins Not Excepted: Gossip

Excellent chart comparing the Anti-Christ with Islam’s Al Mahdi.  John MacArthur has a good teaching covering the same material.

Two Views on the "Sign Gifts": Continuity Vs. Discontinuity

A good collection of so-called “Bible contradictions” refuted.

Some dangers of a “Christian” book store.  The article didn’t even mention the fact that at least 50% of the books sold are by false teachers of every ilk!

Did God abandon Jesus on the Cross?  Of course not, and this excellent article sets the record straight.

Good, Bad, and Ugly

The Good:

When sin goes from shocking to amusing.  Excellent article address a huge problem in the culture and invading the church.

When communicating with members of cults (and followers of false teachings) be sure to define your terms.

The Apostolic Fathers and the Deity of Christ.  Good information for defending against those who claim Christ was made God by the Nicene council.

Is Hell eternal?  Yes, because that is what the Bible says.

Women and False Teachers.

The Bad:

No, Jesus didn’t tell her to do this, and that statue isn’t Jesus; but it seems to have become her idol.

Mennonites are spiraling quickly into total apostasy.

The Ugly:

The abject heresy and apostasy which you get when put women in leadership positions in the Church.  Of course the ELCA went apostate decades ago anyway.

More proof of the heretical and apostate nature of the United Methodist Church.

The New Apostolic Reformation:  A very nutty, cultic group.

A female preacher’s conference will, by definition, be a collection of false teachers.  It’s worse than you think.

Todd White — teaches Word of Faith heresy, praises and admires arch-heretic Kenneth Copeland, and wears cultic Rastafarian hair style.  I truly think he is demon-possessed.

The Shack movie is slightly less heretical than the book.

Kenneth Copeland—false teacher/prophet extraordinaire.  Side note: Copeland is thrilled that President Trump has regular visits with “Christians,” yet those so-called Christians are all false teachers who have no clue about the real Gospel, which is why apparently Trump doesn’t either!

The Humorous:

Joel Osteen’s new fashion line hides the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Good, Bad, and Ugly

Lots of stuff coming across my computer this week, so I need to get it out before it gets too overwhelming!

The Good:

Follow-up about watching “Game of Thrones.”  I can’t understand the mentality of those who responded to the previous post.

No, reading the Bible is NOT equivalent to watching “Game of Thrones.”

Sin is NOT all the same.

Loving your neighbor.

Did Jesus visit other parts of the world?

Questions for KJV Onlyers — part 1.  Parts 2 and 3 are linked to at the bottom of the article.

Why you shouldn’t wear a crucifix.

Same-sex attraction is sinful.

The Nashville Statement — you’ll need to read this to understand some “ugly” articles below.  A good commentary on how unbelievers are responding.

The Bad:

Another reason to avoid Michael Brown. He seems to have absolutely NO discernment.

A wee bit of humor about heretics Kenneth and Gloria Copeland not stopping Hurricane Harvey.

IHOP Warning — the place is a cult with lots of false teachers.

Awana is going farther down the road to apostasy.  

The Ugly:

Christianity in the U.K. is spiraling into total apostasy.

“Transgender” heresy.  There is no such thing as “transgender” — one is born either male or female and no amount of surgical mutilation or hormones will change that.  Parents pushing that agenda on their children should be charged with child abuse.

An example of all that is wrong with Jen Hatmaker.  She continues to prove she is not a real Christian.  A lot of people are like her in regards to this subject — I saw it on the Internet.

Perry Noble — need I say more?

The Problem is the Heart of Man

The terrible, tragic fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man’s troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but to change his environment.  That is a tragic fallacy.  It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell.  It was in a perfect environment that he first went wrong, so to put man in a perfect environment cannot solve his problems.  No, no; it is out of “the heart” that these things arise.  Take any problem in life, anything that leads to wretchedness; find out its cause, and you will always discover that it comes from the heart somewhere, from some unworthy desire in somebody, in an individual, in a group or in a nation.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Studies in the Sermon on the Mount,” volume 1, p.110

Temptation Is Not Sin

A temptation only becomes sin when we accept it, when we fondle it, when we enjoy it.  The suggestion itself, the temptation, the feeling of desire is not sin.  But to accept it and to enjoy it and to fondle it is sin.  That is the vital point at which we must ever draw this distinction.  The thing itself is not sin, but the acceptance of it and the enjoyment of it is definitely sin. 

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “The Christian Warfare: An Exposition of Ephesians 6:10-13,” pg. 294

Temptations are NOT God-given

Child molesters, rapists, and others can and often do believe that God made them the way they are, with the desires and compulsions that they have. Bible believing Christians would consider such desires and compulsions to be old fashioned “temptations,” which do not come from God. All human beings are tempted to do wrong, though not in all the same ways, certainly. We are all battling something. Calling one’s temptations natural or God given does not make them so. Temptations to engage in behaviors that God condemns are to be resisted, not accepted as normal.

Don & Joy Veinot, “Seasoned with salt…” 

Communications Are Corrupted In Our Culture

A coarseness, a looseness is creeping into conversation.  People use terms in public, that no one would have dreamt of using forty years ago [from 1982!].  Have you not noticed it coming into articles and journals, not only newspapers?  Is it not happening in general?  This curious tendency to be daring — indeed it has become so customary that it is no longer daring or shocking.  And it is becoming appallingly common.  Even journals of repute one cannot but notice the curious, sad decline that is so evidently taking place.  And often the godless world turns into a joke, and regards as amusing, that which is really tragic.  Why should a married man’s unfaithfulness to his wife be regarded as funny?  Why should there be constant jokes about this sort of thing?  Nothing causes greater unhappiness to men, women and children than just this very thing, and yet it is regarded as a theme for joking.  Acts of infidelity become the subjects of laughter and merriment!  Corrupt communication, corrupt conversation, is a mark of the unregenerate.  Have nothing to do with it, says the Apostle.  It is corrupt in itself and it corrupts others.  And this was the thing that was uppermost in the Apostle’s mind here, as it is in all these separate injunctions.  He wants believers to consider the influence of their words upon others, so he says, “Do not let any corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth; a bystander may hear it and it may do harm to him.  . . . 

Therefore, he says, for the sake of others, let none of this come out of your mouth.  To put it quite simply and plainly, what he is really saying is, “Stop doing that sort of thing!”  But notice particularly a further word he uses: “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth.”  In other words, if it even enters your mind, if it is beginning to form on your lips and your tongue, stop!  If it has even arrived in you mouth, do not let it come out!  Crucify it, kill it, murder it, stop it!  If you yourself are guilty of evil thoughts, if the devil suggests them to you — you cannot stop him, he will hurl his fiery darts at you, he will insinuate them into your very minds, subtle innuendos — even so, says the Apostle, what I am telling you is this, “Never let corrupt words proceed out of your mouth, let them die upon your lips, for the sake of others.” Such is his negative injunction before he urges the positive.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17-5:17,” pg. 257-258

Do Not Sin In Your Anger

Never open the door to the devil.  When you lose your temper you open it wide; it could not be wider.  Nothing opens the door more widely than anger, and for this good reason.  The moment you are controlled by your temper you are no longer able to reason, you are no longer able to think, you can no longer give a balanced judgment, for you are altogether biased on one side and against the other side.  In other words, the power to reason and to think and to equate and evaluate — all that makes a man man — is gone; for the time being he is like a beast, the creature of his own passion and of an instinctive kind of power.  And of course that is just the very situation in which the devil sees his most glorious kind of opportunity!  It was when he persuaded Even and Adam to be angry against God that he very easily had them in his hands.  He aroused in them bitterness and enmity against God, and made them believe that God was against them; and so immediately the devil could do as he liked.  And think of the matter as you know it in life.  Is there anything that leads to more trouble than anger?  Things said in anger and in a bitter moment! — you would almost cut your tongue off, if you could, to get them back; and sometimes, though forgiven, they leave permanent wounds and scars.  What havoc is wrought in the world by sinful anger!

And then a sinful anger leads to the nursing of grievances, to a desire for revenge and to have our own back; it leads us to despise people and to treat them with contempt.  Sinful anger!  The moment it has taken over the devil enters in.  He will keep it going and insinuate thoughts and ideas and implant them.  Indeed, the whole of life can be ruined just because of anger.  Anger is always a cause of confusion, not only in the life of the individual but in the lives of all those who are involved in the business of living with such an individual.  Nothing, I maintain, so constantly gives the devil an opportunity as loss of control in anger.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17-5:17,” pg. 233-234

Do You Feel Moral Indignation?

Is not one of the greatest tragedies in the world at this hour the failure to feel moral indignation and wrath because of things that are happening?  Is not there a fatal tendency to be complacent  and to explain everything away, and to remain indifferent?  Even though we hear people “on the air” and on public platforms deliberately teaching “Evil, be thou my good,” still there seems to be no protest.  We seem to have lost the capacity to be roused morally by a sense of indignation.  This is, to me, one of the major problems in the world today.  There has been a steady decline in morals, not only in behavior but in outlook and reaction.  We merely shrug our shoulders and allow sin to go unrebuked.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17-5:17,” pg. 230

Lying Is Prominent In a Life of Sin

I would say . . . that lying is the most prominent and the most common characteristic of the life of sin.  Consider the sequence of events.  You commit a sin; you do not want to be found out, and you do not want anybody to know it, so you tell a lie.  Because you have told that lie  you have to tell another one to cover it; and on and on it goes, by a horrible process of geometric progression.  It multiplies and multiplies until the whole life becomes a lie and a sham.  Is there anything which is more characteristic of the non-Christian, sinful life than this element of lying?  Deceit and lying, sham and pretense, are more obvious in the life of the world than anything else.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17-5:17,” pg. 218

Man Is God’s Image — Before and After the Fall

God is the Lord of all; He made man in His own image and He made him the lord of creation; He made him king and prince over all the animals and everything that is in earth.  God put into man something of that which characterises Himself.  Man’s very body supplies evidence of this.  God made man upright.  The animals are not upright.  God made man upright, to show that he had this dignity, this regal quality about him.  Man does not go on all fours, he stands erect; the very uprightness of a man’s body is a part of the image of God in him.  Still more important is the fact that God made man, originally, righteous.  He gave him a moral and an intellectual integrity.  Man, as he was made by God, was righteous and holy and true.  There was no sin in him, there was no defect, he stood before God a morally righteous creature, fit for communion with God, and one who enjoyed communion with God.

Why is the world as it is? you say.  The answer is that man fell.  And when man fell the image of God in man was defaced.  I do not say that the image was destroyed or altogether lost, because when man sinned and fell he did not cease to be a man, he did not become a beast, he was still man.  And that is the tragedy of man, that he still bears some of the marks of the image of God.  He can still think; he can still reason; he still stands erect and upright; he still has psychic powers in that he can reason about himself and contemplate himself.  These traces remain.  But what was really the crowning gift of the image — the righteousness, the uprightness, the holiness, the truth — was lost, and man was driven out from the presence of God and became a stranger to Him.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17-5:17,” pg. 177

Sin Offers What It Can Never Give

Sin offers what it can never give, that is, satisfaction.  Sin never satisfies; it never has done, it never will do; it cannot because it is wrong, it is foul.  It never satisfies, although it is always offering satisfaction.  Indeed, sin working through lusts never really gives anything at all, but simply takes away.  . . .  Sin robs us, takes from us, exhausts us mentally, physically, morally, in every respect, and at the end leaves us on the scrap heap, unwanted!  It is entirely destructive.  It takes away and robs us of character, chastity, purity, honesty, morality, uprightness, delicacy, balance, sensitivity, and everything that is most noble in man.  Is it surprising that the Apostle says, “Put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts”?  Avoid sin, I say, as the very plague, get as far away from it as you can, do all you can to destroy it and to mortify it.  The New Testament is full of this teaching.  Sin is so horrible, so foul, so deceitful!

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “Darkness and Light: An Exposition of Ephesians 4:17-5:17,” pg. 139

Mankind in Sin

“[T]he man who is not a Christian is a man who is simply governed and controlled by the world, its mind, its outlook, its mentality.  I know of nothing which is more sad about man in sin than just that.  You see it in all your newspapers.  Is it not sad to see the way people are governed entirely by what other people think and say and do?  They are sorry for those of us who are Christian.  They say, ‘Fancy shutting themselves down to that one Book, those narrow miserable Christians!’  So speaks the so-called broad-minded man of the world.  How subtle the devil is to persuade people of that!  For their little life is entirely controlled by the organization of the world.  They think as the world thinks.  They take their opinions ready-made from their favorite newspaper.  Their very appearance is controlled by the world and its changing fashions.  They all conform; it must be done; they dare not disobey; they are afraid of the consequences.  That is tyranny, that is absolute control — clothing, hair style, everything, absolutely controlled.  The mind of the world!  There is no time to elaborate on the subtle, almost devilish influence that is displayed often in its fashions — sex rampant.  This is a sex-ridden age.  It comes out everywhere — photographs and pictures and placards suggesting it.  Most lives are controlled by it and governed by it, all their opinions, their language the way they spend their money, what they desire, where they go, where they spend their holidays; it is all controlled, governed completely.  Surely all this was never more evident in the world than it is today.  When people talk so glibly about their emancipation they are giving a very clear proof of the fact that they are governed and dominated and controlled by this world, the mind of the world, the age of propaganda, the age of advertising, the mass mind, the mass man, the mass individual, without knowing it.  Is it not tragic?  But that is man in sin.  He is spiritually dead, because he is controlled by this mind of the world.”

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, God’s Way of Reconciliation: An Exposition of Ephesians 2, p.21-22