Is this the time of a great falling away as warned about so long ago? Christians will know what I am referring to here. The word apostasy has to do with falling away, and the New Testament often warns us about this. And it also speaks about some hard core rebellion and apostasy occurring before the Lord comes again.
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The church has seen the rise of “celebrity cult status” pastors who act like spiritual superstars, who act as little gods who believe they are above everybody else. They walk around with an entourage, body guards, and are inaccessible to family, friends, high level staff and peers, and are an unaccountable island to themselves.
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3. They are unaccountable. Superstar pastors often think nobody is qualified to speak into their life. Some pastors and leaders think that they are so spiritual and successful, they have reached a point that nobody is able to speak into their life and teach them anything. When someone attempts to speak into them, they may ask the question in their mind, “Is this person as wealthy as me?” Or, “Do they have as many people in their church as I do?” — before they even consider hearing what they have to say!
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On a regular basis, I hear reports about believers who have been transformed through the ministry of Joseph Prince, and I thank God for every one of those good reports. Without a doubt, his message of grace is liberating many from legalism, performance-based religion and a spiritual inferiority complex, and for all of this, I am grateful. In 1992, God spoke to me to do a fresh study of grace, and the results of that study were eye-opening, to the point that one of the chapters in my 1997 book Go and Sin No More is called “It’s All Grace” while another is called “The Letter Kills.”
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All my Christian life I have found the idea that Jesus somehow endorses violent human effort (even if metaphorical or spiritual) for His cause as very odd. It contradicts the rest of His teaching, the life He lived, the example He set, and the rest of the New Testament. Typical translations of Mat. 11:12 fit like a gorilla in a tuxedo. You don’t have to be a scholar to know: “something just ain’t right!” The fact that there’s some divergence among translators provides us with its own warning: difficulty ahead. It’s always a mistake to be dogmatic, or to make much of a little, on a point based on an obscure and difficult passage. Recent discoveries of papyri and developments in scholarship have provided a more contextually valid understanding of this difficult verse.
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If blacks were held to the same standard of expectation as others, we would see an increase in the number of blacks accomplishing positive outcomes, and fewer of them spending decades behind bars for copying gangsters and amoral behavior.
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There was a time when we taught in our church that Christians could not have demons. I preached long sermons stating that Christians could be oppressed, regressed, digressed, obsessed and suppressed, but never possessed. We believed that a demon could be outside a Christian oppressing him but that it could not be inside him. The reasoning I used to defend this position was that Jesus and the Holy Spirit could not live inside the same body in which demons reside. The problem was, our experience did not match our theology. When we ministered deliverance, we frequently prayed for people we knew were born-again, Spirit-filled believers–and they manifested demons! We had to face the fact that either our experience was wrong or our doctrine was wrong.
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How long before white people, many of whom are growing increasingly resentful at being falsely maligned, decide to respond in kind? How much longer will whites stand by and allow the likes of Sharpton and Obama to continually cast them as racist villains?
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