Leave the Fads Out of Worship

Our current experimentation in the area of worship is too reliant on the fads of the present.  Contemporary popular verse and music is entirely too man-centered.  The focus of much contemporary Christian worship is almost entirely on man and his needs, with no hint that God wants us to praise Him.  Yet from proper praise our needs will fall into their proper places—and be taken care of.

Dr. Robert Webber, Forward to the book, And I Will Praise Him, by Ronald B. Allen

Fear Not the World

Why should you fear?  Why should you be afraid?  Do you not know that the prince of this world has been judged?  He is no lord, no prince any more.  You have a different, a stronger Lord, Christ, who has overcome and bound him.  Therefore, let the prince and god of this world look sour, bare his teeth, make great noise, threaten…he can do no more than a bad dog on a chain.

Martin Luther

Good, Bad, and Ugly

Summer time is a busy time for all sorts of things that keep me outside.  The other thing which has been keeping me busy and away from my blog is researching things for other people and providing to them what I find.  But I still get a chance to read my morning news items, so here are things you should know.

The Good:

Here is an interesting site which examines Roman Catholicism.

Very good examination of the religious cult of Freemasonry.  It is lengthy, so put it on pause and come back to it if necessary.  It is important information to know.  (There are some myths propagated, so beware of that; and they don’t have the LDS/Masonry connection correct either.  I was disappointed with these errors.)

I found this article about singing with lights ON to be thought-provoking.

Another good article about REAL spiritual warfare.

A High View of Marriage Includes Divorce.

Did Jesus claim to be God?

Can Christians “bind” Satan or “take authority” over him?  NO!

Interesting commentary on Genesis 3:16.

The Bad:

Reviewing Andy Stanley’s awful new book.  What Stanley doesn’t seem to understand is that the church (the local assembly) is ONLY for “churched people” — i.e., Christians.   Stanley thinks that idea is totally wrong, which is more proof why he is not qualified to be a pastor.

N.T. Wright is a heretic — there is no getting around it.

Willow Creek gets more and more apostate every day.

False teacher alert — Becky Fisher

The Ugly:

Bethel and Hillsong are joining together for an event — two heretical groups joining to deceive more people.  This could be some of Satan’s finest work!

An example of all that is wrong with Hillsong — Carl Lentz and Justin Bieber.  Lentz is a wolf pretending to be a pastor, and Bieber obviously has no idea about the Christian walk.

Questions, for Catholics, About Purgatory

1. Hebrews 9:27 says that after death we face judgment, not purging.  How do reconcile this with purgatory?

2. Hebrews 1:3 and 2 Peter 1:9 say Christ already "purged" our sins (KJV - others say "provided purification" and the Catholic Bible says “cleansed.”).  So if Christ already "purged" (or cleansed) our sins, what is purgatory for? 

3. 1 John 2:2 says Christ is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, as does Romans 3:23-25.  If our sins have been atoned for, what is the purpose of purgatory? 

4. If purgatory is necessary, does that not say that Christ was ineffective in his atonement in that it didn't pay for all sin? (This is also a good question about the Mass - if Christ already paid for our sins by the one sacrifice, then why is the sacrifice of the Mass necessary? (Hebrews 10:18 - and actually read the whole chapter up to that point!) 

5. How does one know if they have spent long time enough in purgatory? When buying indulgences, how does one know when enough has been paid to release them from purgatory? 

6. Why is it that purgatory didn't become part of the doctrine of the Church until 1438 if it was a true biblical position? 

7. Does the "gospel" sound like "good news" if you can attend thousands of Masses throughout your life and still not die fully purified from sin? 

8. Since Philippians 1:23 and 2 Corinthians 5:8 say Christians go immediately to be with the Lord (as also the thief on the Cross), how does this reconcile with purgatory? 

Truth is More Important Than Peace

We must not so seek peace with others as to wrong truth.  Peace must not be bought with the sale of truth.  Truth is the ground of faith, and the rule of life.  Truth is the most orient gem of the churches’ crown.  Truth is a deposit, or charge that God has entrusted with us.  We trust God with our souls.  He trusts us with His truths.  We must not let any of God’s truths to fall to the ground.  Luther says, “It is better that the heavens fall—than one crumb of truth perish.”  The least filings of this gold are precious.  We must not seek the flower of peace as to lose the diamond of truth.

Thomas Watson, Puritan preacher (1620-1686)

Good, Bad, and Ugly

Well I got my computer back for the second time this past Monday, and it’s all fixed.  But it’s been a very chaotic week, so some of this stuff I’ve collected you may have already seen on other sites. On Monday I played for the graveside service after a funeral for a friend who died; 88-year-old Korean War veteran.  Tuesday the air conditioner got fixed after being without it for five hot and humid days.  Wednesday we traveled 93 miles north so I could play for a graveside service — one I got paid for!  Thursday was morning haircut and vet appointments, with evening band practice (70 miles east).  Yesterday was doing some service for an elderly couple, then up to the airport to photograph a rare, freshly restored B-29 bomber arrival, followed by a late lunch date with my wife.  Returning home for 15 minutes, we then headed back to the airport for a 3:30 appointment with a friend who works at Rockwell-Collins and who got me a pass to tour the B-29 (which was on its way to Oshkosh but stopped in Cedar Rapids to allow R.C. employees to tour it because R.C. did a lot for them).  We stood in line for 1.5 hrs and watched a nasty storm building (got some great photos of the storm) and, just when we were about 5 minutes from our turn to go inside the plane the downpour began and we were all ushered into the hangar.  Well I decided that was the end and we headed on into town to pick up photos which had been processed the previous day.  By the time we got home it was almost 7:30.  Whew!  Oh, and we got an inch of needed rain.  So now let’s look at this week’s news.

The Good:

A good examination of the reason “The Message” is to be avoided at all costs!

The Watchman Fellowship has published a profile exposing John Dominic Crossan.

Fred has posted episode six of his review of the book, “Navigating Genesis.”

Neil examines the Problems With Pro-Gay Theology.

I wish this was really true.

Good article about real spiritual warfare.

The Bad:

David Jeremiah is now promoting false teacher Sarah Young.

A Catholic university has bought into the “Islamaphobia” lie.  Wasting donors’ money.

A Trojan horse in women’s ministry.

The Ugly:

Global Leadership 2017 doubles down on carnality

More about Debi Pearl’s horrid book.

Eugene Peterson came out in favor of same-sex unions.  Oh, wait a minute, he has done some flip-flopping about them; Lifeway said they’d pull his books and suddenly he decided such unions weren’t right after all.  Another bad thing about this is that SBC leader Russell Moore says Christians should still read and learn from Peterson!

This is some old Benny Hinn stuff, including Suzanne Hinn’s teaching about a Holy Ghost enema, but it demonstrates just what charlatans they are (a commenter said that this isn’t Benny Hinn’s wife, but this article contradicts that claim).  These people are not Christians.

The love of money leads many “evangelicals” to embrace pro-gay theology.  This article demonstrates the same problem.

Mary Dalke has a very thorough study about the Roman Catholic Virgin Mary (which isn’t the Biblical mother of Jesus) and the so-called apparitions of her.  The RCC idolatry of Mary is a very ugly and demonic doctrine.

A Treasury of Excellent Hymns

We have a treasury of excellent hymns, lying in a chest in an attic.  Bring them down.  This is not a matter of prescribing one style for everyone.  There are two reasons why.  The first is that those hymns we no longer sing represent a wonderful variety of styles already.  There are the straightforward American revival hymns (“Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross”).  There are haunting Irish folk melodies (the tune “Slane” for “Be Thou My Vision”).  There are the poignant Negro spirituals (“There Is a Balm in Gilead”).  We have medieval plainsong, featuring some of the oldest extant melodies (“Creator of the Stars of Night”); harmonization or Renaissance melodies by Johann Sebastian Bach (“Jesus, Priceless Treasure”); melodies specifically written for fine religious lyrics (“Lux Benigna” for Cardinal Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light”); lilting melodies from the Scottish tradition (“Saint Columba,” “Crimond,” and “Evan” for “The King of Love My Shepherd Is”); the powerful shape-note hymns from Appalachia; French carols; English anthems for the Church militant; texts whose authors range from the Church Fathers to the pious blind poet Fanny Crosby; melodies from the time of Ambrose to the beginning of the twentieth century, from every single nation in Europe.  If someone rejects all of that, it is not because he does not appreciate “the” style.  It is because he has a lust for destructiveness or because he does in fact want one style to prevail, the style of the jingling show tune, a style that has no place in the liturgy.

Some church choirs with a chokehold on the music protest that it takes them many long hours to learn a new hymn.  That would be true only if they were singing in harmony, and most do not.  It should take only a few minutes for anybody, in the choir or not, to learn to sing a new melody.  The old hymns were written precisely for congregational singing.  You do not have to be Beverly Sills or Mario Lanza to sing them.  They are waiting; just as if there were a great wing of a castle that no one every entered anymore, filled with works of art by the masters.  No doubt a painting of the Prodigal Son by Murillo or Rembrandt reveals its secrets only gradually, so that you can look at it for the fiftieth time and notice something that you had seen but taken for granted, such as why Rembrandt’s prodigal has a shaved head, or why there is a little white dog in mid-leap after Murillo’s prodigal, wagging his tail for joy.  But those great works also appeal to us immediately, impressing us with their beauty and suggesting that there always will be more, and more, to see and to learn and to delight in.  The great hymns are like the paintings in that way.  They give us riches at the outset and yet have more and more to give, in abundance.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.39-40

A Drab and Garish Culture

Drab is a favorite color in our day; its companion is garish.  I defy any of my contemporaries to name one style of public building or style of dress or form of popular entertainment that is not now either drab or garish.  Our churchmen, no better educated than anyone else in the humanities and the Christian heritage of art, architecture, and music, have gone along with the movement, mostly drab, but sometimes garish, as witness the big childish banners blaring out a favorite comforting verse (never “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God”), the glad-handing ceremonies of greeting and peace-wishing, the rock bands in the sanctuary, big screens like stadium scoreboards to flash the mantras of the songs, and the smiling Protestant minister in jeans, or the Catholic priest with a jowly smile, far more comfortable joshing with the attendees than praying with the people who are, as he is, as well as we all are, on the inevitable journey to the grave and in dire need of the grace of God.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.35

The Roots of Willow Creek

I’m still on a project of going through my apologetics file cabinet and cleaning out obsolete materials (it’s an arduous process).  This morning I came across a paper on which I typed this:

The following information is from notes gleaned circa 1990 from a television show about the Willow Creek Church.  The program extolled the virtues of this “church.”

The paper had tear-off edges with holes that fed through the old Epson printer I had when I first moved to Iowa in December 1995 but got rid of within a year.  So apparently I had found my notes and wanted to type them to keep on file on the old floppy disc.  

At any rate, I thought I’d share what the TV program (a “news magazine” in the Chicago area) had to say about Willow Creek, which was fairly new in their huge facility at the time, to show the bad ideological seeds which were sown for this mega-church.
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Bill Hybels did a door-to-door survey to find why people stay away from church, and that resulted in Willow Creek.  People need to be entertained, anonymous, and considered as guests.

Service is calibrated, choreographed.  Opening like a variety show.  Audience enjoys the performance.  Each “show” takes three weeks to write and rehearse.

Worship is safe, controlled, comfortable.  No strict emphasis on rigid morality.

“Our target” is the “marketplace person . . .  Corporate culture.”

Culturally respectable, blends into surrounding environment.

Sophisticated packaging: Music, then mini-drama.

The building was designed to be inoffensive -- no religious symbols so as to frighten or intimidate people.  Looks like a corporate office complex.

Free market means competition to draw the crowd.

The pastors are called the “Management team.”  The program is called a “product.”

Yuppies are corporate people so you have to make them feel at home.  Packaged orthodoxy; everything is corporate language.  Marketplace person needs marketplace terminology.

“Post Christian” culture needs addressed as a separate culture.  “Demand a catering to popular tastes.”

People need respectability and recognition; being part of a “big success story” at Willow Creek.  It’s reassuring to be a part of it:  “Our church is bigger than anybody else.”

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During this time of my life I was attending an LCMS Lutheran Church and my apologetics ministry was probably 95% about cults, while I was just beginning to study the Word of Faith stuff.  A fellow controller attended Willow Creek, and through him was the first I heard of the place.  However, it was difficult to believe he was a Christian because of his behavior and worldview, so when that TV show was advertised I wanted to watch it to see what W.C. was all about.  And watching that show explained everything about my co-worker.  I was shocked that such a “church” existed, and from then on I started studying more and more non-cult false teachings and false teachers.

Willow Creek’s philosophy has only  gotten worse over the years, as they have spread their ideology across the country.  Bad seed has grown very rotten fruit.

Good, Bad, and Ugly

The Good:

Warning of Error.  Well worth reading.

A very good defense of an often-raised criticism of the Bible.

Excellent history lesson on the Reformation!

Be a watchman on the wall.

The Bad:

You have to read it to believe it.  When T.D. Jakes’ and Joel Osteen’s “ministries” are involved, it has to be bad.

I’ve been saying for a long time that Francis Chan is not a teacher/pastor anyone should be following.  The news now proves my warning to have been correct.

The Church of England spirals into apostasy.

Tim Keller’s church — need I say more?  Although I disagree with the article’s calling it “effeminate” because I think it’s just ballet, I still think it is inappropriate to have entertainment at a worship service.

Popular Christian music groups teaching heresy?  YES!  Excellent article exposing CCM for what it really is.

The Ugly:

An excellent example of the rank idolatry by the Roman Catholic Church and their worship — YES WORSHIP — of Mary.

“Practicing Christians” are too accepting of evil ideologies!  Real Christians should know better.

Patricia King is one of the worst false prophets/teachers out there, and this is an example of why she is to be avoided at all costs. She speaks nasty lies.

The deceit of the Seventh-day Adventists is getting more and more subtle, and they position themselves as great humanitarians.  Their false gospel continues to take more and more people into bondage.