A birthday, a doctor’s appointment, a holiday and a breakfast/lunch engagement banished the finish of this blog to today, 6 July.
Preachers must consider any change in the message they preach an abomination to God. The whole idea of the Church Growth Movement accepted the view that God was on the defensive and had to prove he had the right to be heard. That’s a wholesale perversion of Bible truth. Jeremiah’s day didn’t want to hear the message God gave him, but he preached judgment on their sins. Christ’s generation didn’t want to hear parables, but he used them. Many didn’t want to hear his claim to be the End of Law and the Beginning of Grace, but he preached both. The first motive inspiring Europeans to voyages of discovery focused on spices, not gold. Spices, pepper especially, were necessary to preserve meat. The Molucca Islands sent them by sea and land to Europe. A bale of spices packed there costing one ducat brought 150 ducats in Europe. The Conquistadors, 23-24 Jesus had but a single purpose in coming to earth. He came to save humanity from sin and never deviated from it to another. Preachers cannot care that our degraded age no longer wants to hear that message. They may want something else...that gets their attention, interests them and keeps their coming to worship—something about fellowship or human relationships, or care of the environment, etc., etc., etc. Preachers can’t care. They must instead warn humanity to repent or die in sin and spend eternity in Hell. The point is: never consult people on what they want to hear. They’ll invariably reduce the Gospel to a comfort level. They’ll never elevate it to its naturally dangerous threat of Almighty God. We are perilously close to—and may already be in—the time Paul predicted: when, to suit their own desires, men “will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” II Timothy 4:3. Let every preacher vow: they will be among the few and stand with Jesus; they will never be among the many, departing from him. -Fini-
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