“Lord, save us from your followers” — UHD 14:6

“Lord, save us from your followers” is a culturally popular video title that confuses me. “They like Jesus but not the Church” is a popular Christian book title that disturbs me. Pray for me. I’m confused and disturbed by Christians who find these attractive. I thought that the Bible teaches that a true follower of the Jesus of the Bible tells us how to be saved from sin, not saved from God’s people. I thought a Jesus follower was a lover of Jesus and other true followers. I thought that if someone loves Jesus they love brothers and sisters in the Church. I thought the Church is Jesus’ body. If the second title refers to the unsaved world, I thought Jesus said, “Don’t be surprised if the world hate you. It hated Me before it hated you.”

Why would lies be popular among young Christians? These titles open the door to do some word-play:

Lord save us from your followers who……
….like Jesus, the Head but not the Church, His Body.
….like the Jesus they like, but reject the Christians they don’t like.
….Like the earth and the things they see but not the spiritual and the things they don’t see.
….Like the conversation about the Truth, but not the Truth.
….Like group community with other people but not individual accountability before God.
….like the Jesus of the first advent but not the second advent.
….like to bow down to tolerance but not the tolerance of conservative fundamentalists
….like to get a hold of the Bible for their earthly purposes but not for spiritual purposes
….like to reject the wisdom of their elders but accept the wisdom of their peers
….like to question propositional truth in God’s Word, but welcome the question, “Has God said?”
…like a favorable presentation of homosexuality, but not the Bible’s condemnation of it as sin.
…like no references to what God says, but celebrate human opinion.

Lord, save us from these followers!

Does Green Trump Business? — UHD 14:6

The young man went to his usual supplier and discovered that the cost of materials rose so high that his family’s small business could no longer be viable in the market.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Wood is becoming more and more scarce” his supplier said. “It is in very high demand right now. The world is going green, laws were passed, and now cutting down trees is severely restricted and regulated. You know, mother earth and all that.”

The young man and his dad probably made the chairs and the table where the lawmakers made the decision.

Jesus left the store empty-handed, wondering what his dad, Joseph, would do next. The lawmakers did find enough wood to eventually nail Jesus to a tree.

An Uncomfortable Truth – UHD 14:6

A global disaster looms over the horizon. It is the slow erosion of the Christian mindset by ideological pollutants. This seepage acts like a relentless cancer that cripples sound thinking. The malignancy travels through the air odorless and undetectable to the eye. It randomly enters the unsuspecting and otherwise healthy Christian through several audio-visual Christian mediums that ride on the winds of changing thought and it eventually erodes protective layers of the mental ozone. It raises the levels of toxins in the brain until healthy understanding and common sense is drowned out by the rising tide of high-sounding scholarship that questions the reality of God’s sovereign power over all the physical earth.

Early recognition is the key to successful treatment. What would help is early warning detection systems that automatically place us on high alert so that encounters with these toxins can be recognized and treated immediately.

In an American society that forced God out of public recognition by ostracizing prayer in Jesus’ name, a culture that banned the truth of God’s Word from education, and a populace that questions whether absolute truth can be known, anthropocentric philosophy remains as the main proprietor of the way of life on earth. Several axioms pop-up on the mental computers to indicate symptoms of polluted, earth-bound thinking: “The land is life;” “God holds people responsible for the earth’s climate;” “The good news about Jesus Christ causes the physical erosion of the ozone.”

Once these contaminants enter the brain, the damage to the cells of clear thought and wisdom is inevitable and the mental capacities are slowly poisoned until recovery is nearly impossible. This is an uncomfortable truth.