The Lie that Exists in Contemporary Christianity: Part Three

This is the third part of the series.

It has been very clear to me these last years, I never understood it before, but our churches are full of people that only have a confession, but too few are really transformed, and renewed and conformed to the image of the Son of God.

If we return to them that have some kernel of the gospel still intact, what do they teach? Usually do they make an invitation in the end of the message, this message can be about just anything, but they invite during the prayer that the one who wants to be a Christian to follow the preacher in prayer, Billy Graham could pray like this:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior. In Your Name. Amen.[1]

This prayer does not exist in the Bible in any form. They are founding that on Rom. 10:13: “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (cf. Joel 2:32; Acts 2:21). This is about that faith is by hearing the Word of God, because: “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14). I believe that some take this to be enough to be saved, that this confession is enough, that belief in the Lord is enough to be saved. But salvation has nothing to do with decisions but with regeneration and transformation, a decision does not give life to man, or transform man, the decision is man’s boasting, they decided and are now saved, they believed.

I am afraid that many today in Christendom believe that since they once prayed that prayer they are saved, that was the promise from the pulpit. I believe in Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the Saints (TULIP), in that view there is nothing to be proud of, not a thing. But here we are going to look at the lie of a conversion without transformation.

What is the order of salvation? (ordo salutis). In Stanley Horton’s Systematic Theology, it says: “The order is foreknowledge, election, predestination, calling, repentance, faith, regeneration, and the rest.”[2] The rest would be repentance, faith, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification. So, the Pentecostals, at least in 2007, recognized that salvation requires repentance. That is how I remember it, when I was young, they preached of everything that is banned today: about heaven and hell, about the second coming of the Lord, about the great white throne judgment, about premarital sex, about sanctification, about holiness, about repentance, about the will of God, they had church discipline; many things no preacher even touches today. This conclusion is with great sorrow.

Let us view five titles of a normal Pentecostal pastor in Sweden 2021: Jesus and your worry; Jesus and your future; Jesus never passes you by; Do we want to change? And to my joy, Galatians 6 (to be fair Galatians 2, 4, 6). Strange that he preached only on every other chapter. Something has happened in the modern church; I believe that it is the same everywhere. They refuse to preach anything that might in any way be controversial or in any way offensive. Still, you have a lot of faithful churches and Christians, and they suffer over what they see and hear in all this apostasy. But if you look at the modern churches in Sweden, there are very few faithful congregations, at least if we look at what they teach and how they view sin. They still believe that the seeker friendly gospel or seeker sensitive movement is the right way to go. They do not believe that the gospel is enough, and since they do not believe that God is the one saving man, that it is by grace alone and if they only preached the gospel that God would do the rest. They believe that they can talk someone into being a Christian, persuade man, like it was the choice of man. The Bible is clear that God is the one who draws man to Jesus Christ to be saved, and the one he draws is his elect since eternity past. It is an incredible thought that God does it all. Nothing depends on man in salvation, not even his choice, because the Spirit will call the elect in an irresistible way. And that is the way it must be, because God has so decreed, and that no one may boast.

The Lutheran Church in Sweden has lost its soul and left its own confession; many of the other churches have been implanted in either the denomination Uniting Church in Sweden or in the Evangelical Free Church in Sweden or belong to either Hillsong or Word of Faith or the Pentecostal movement in Sweden. All of these denominations have lost their soul, you still have churches not affiliated with any of these denominations.

In the document A Theological Foundation for Uniting Church in Sweden, you expect to see something about sin and atonement, and they actually state that sin separates us from God, but nowhere is defined what sin is, and they talk about God giving atonement and restoration, but nowhere are to be found that sin is what man brought into the world, and that God through his atonement propitiated the wrath of God. Of course, do you not find one word about the wrath of God, maybe that word would offend someone? They claim that the Word provides teaching, guidance, admonition, comfort, hope and joy. Admonition is pretty weak if they are talking about Heb. 4:12. They forget that Christ is the head, and that confession implies confession of sins. It is a very carefully written document that shall offend no one.[3]

The congregations in Sweden state things like the Word of God are the uttermost authority for faith and life, remember, they state that, they do not actually live up to it. And it is easy to say that and in the next second discard the Bible, change the message, change what the Bible calls a sin to be a non-sin, then they can continue to state their lies. I have a hard time reading these documents knowing that no one believes what they are saying anyway or follows through on their own statements of faith. These are documents that state historical facts, because once it was the truth. But today most certainly it is not. It is very sad to write this. I know this, who grew up in the Pentecostal movement, I know that the message has changed, the theology has changed, in every congregation in Sweden. I believe there are many that are spiritually homeless in our country.

Conclusion of the Lies

What are the lies telling us? No one with the Bible in hand can tell me that what the church has served us here is nothing but a lie. And you have these two kinds of churches today; the church that does not care about transformation and sanctification of their members, they do not teach it, they do not expect it; and the church that does expect change, but only up to a certain point.

Why are we talking about transformation in this way that it means that a man will stop lying, stop to gossip, stop being sexually immoral, stop with his violence, stop beating his wife and children, stop talking before he thinks, stop watching pornography, stop being disobedient, stop with his boasting, stop being proud, stop being unmerciful, stop with all of this, but not stop being a homosexual, he will not stop being gender confused. Why would the Holy Spirit stop at our sexual orientation when we presume that he would stop the sexual immorality? All of the sins that Paul is lining up in Rom. 1:29–31 we assume would stop if we were being true Christians, but not being homosexual. The Bible does not say that the Spirit of God transforms every man but the homosexual, or that he transforms every man, even the homosexual from all of these sins save the sin of homosexuality itself. Where does the Bible say that? Does not Jesus say to his disciples who wonder if anyone ever could be saved that, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matt. 19:26). The text does not say that all is possible with God except transforming sexual orientation or gender confusion. All things are possible with God.

Paul who was filled with hate against the Christians, and gave his approval when Stephen was stoned and killed, he was so completely transformed, and he went to the Gentiles with the gospel. God can certainly transform and change both feelings and will and sexual orientation. The thing is that many do not want to be transformed, that goes for many sins, where some want to continue in their sins.

The notion that the churches are in fact filled with non-transformed people is very clear, both in reality and in what the Bible tells us of what has happened and will happen in the future. The members of the church prefer worldly wisdom: philosophies, theories on gender, queer and feminism, social justice is viewed as the gospel itself, they allow the world to influence them; TV is more important than to read God’s Word; to be acknowledged by the world is more important than to be acknowledged by God, and they are rather friends with the world than with God; they have bought the whole lie that the LGBTQ+ community, the left, has served them, and in a way do I understand that it is hard because the world is so pressing on with these issues, but the church should be a counterforce to all of this, but instead it behaves like a fool who runs for the world errands free of charge. I cannot understand if the church is fooled or does not care or just want to continue with its friendship with the world and continue to live in enmity with God, and in that case might what we see being God’s judgment on the church.

We know that the judgment of God must begin at the house of God. (1 Pet. 4:17) Is that what we see today? I do not know, but we know that God can give us over, that is the meaning of the Gk. verb παραδίδωμι, to hand someone over to another (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28). To be given over to our sins, given over to the wisdom of the world, given over to meaninglessness, given over to a reprobate mind, which is a mind that has lost all of its function, it is discarded, unapproved, worthless. That is what we see in the world and in the church, worthless thoughts, worthless minds that have no normal function. And the church is instead of being the body of Christ on earth the enemy of God. Jesus is not the head anymore, but the meaningless wisdom of the world, with its empty philosophies and theories, is the head, what is leading and influencing them.

The thing is that everything is not bad. The churches does many good things in themselves and in the society, they are still the body of Christ, they are still believing something, they are still preaching from the Bible, they are still praying to God, they are still inviting people to be followers of Christ, they are still preaching the gospel, they are still caring for people hurt in many ways, they are still providing food for the one that has no means, they are still visiting the sick, in all of this they are fulfilling what we are here to do, but James is saying this: “Pure religion and undefiled before God is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world” (Jas. 1:27). We cannot do one thing and not the other, we must do both.

The biggest problem today is that they try to make the Word of God unto something it is not. The Bible is mostly very clear. But today they claim that they have new knowledge, what Paul described is not what we see today. Two examples of today are the following: One is the denial of roles in the church, man and woman have different roles, and this difference is founded in the order of creation, before the fall, they deny that, and they deny it in incredible ways sometimes. The other thing is that they want to make what Paul describes as homosexuality and sin to be the opposite, a non-sin, because they claim that the kind of homosexuality, we have today is something different than what Paul described. This is a hard sell, but still does this winning ground in the church. The most worrying thing with these two examples is the contempt they show toward God and his Word, because this contempt will affect everything else, there is no stopping it; this is happening all over the world today. What God abhors they embrace, what God forbid they allow, what God denies they confirm, what God says they silence, they live in opposition to God, and that can never end well.

The puritan preacher Thomas Shepard wrote a book about the parable of the ten virgins, one of the points in that book is the problem with a false profession, the foolish virgins thought everything was all right. He says that in the last days carnal security will be the universal sign of the churches. And there are six signs of that: 1) in carnal security man forgets the Lord, his works and his will, 2) he fears no evil, everything is well, 3) they are like Jonah that slept in the storm while the ship was going under, 4) he has lost his prayer life, 5) his mind is grown vain and is full of fancy dreams, 6) he is overcome with sleep and there is no watchfulness.[4]

He continues to show what spiritual slumber means, they have lost the satisfying sense of the blessed face and love of God, they have lost all fear of the wrath to come, and the terror of God, so now are both the love of God and the fear of God gone. When man has lost his foresight and does not provide for the evil day, and when he receives no answer from heaven, he does not continue to pray but falls asleep, they have no wish to grow, they fear not the little sins and commit them being hardened.[5]

He talks about counterfeit grace that is not lasting. He says that counterfeit and common grace after some time of glorious profession will be quite spent. “I need not speak more, Scripture is so abundant: I say, it is after some time of profession; for the first it rather grows than decays and withers; but afterwards they have enough of it, it withers and dies.”[6] Shepard says that the Spirit of God comes upon hypocrites with an awakening grace, as it did Balaam, but this grace is only awakening not renewing and changing their nature. It is like overflowing water which spreads far and fills many empty places, but that water does not come from within, there is no living water that Jesus promises. The Spirit is coming over them but does not dwell in them. It is only awakening grace not renewing grace that changes their nature.[7] Therefore is it after a while decaying by four means: for lack of daily nourishment; when the Spirit only comes upon a man and not dwell in him, and after a time there is left only a form of knowledge, and where the Lord not dwells, there will sin reign; external temptation will prevail when the Lord is not within, it is stronger than all common grace and will draw away the heart and life.[8]

He continues to describe that the unregenerate persons may want part of saving grace. The foolish virgins knew their want of oil but were shut out. “This is the state of many a professor, many a man who is fallen from the Lord, and the affections once he had, but he knows it not; God did enlighten him, but now he is blinding of him; he did affect him, but now he is benumbing of him; he did make him tender, but now he is making his heart fat; he did make him low in his own eyes (as Saul, but, when a king, then puffed up) so God is swelling of him; but this is most grievous, he knows it not.”[9]

And the desires of the hypocrites after grace are not lasting, because they are setting up an imagination of their own heads, with a false image of saving grace, and when they have that they think that all is well, and they go no farther.[10] And too often are the righteousness they seek of their own.[11] And they are falling away because too many have followed our Lord for carnal ends, or for comfort, and when persecution comes they fall away; false teachers lead them astray, corrupt company has destroyed many good men and women; some hard point of doctrine, it is too hard to believe (like the doctrine of hell seems to be today); because of false comforts.[12]

Many in our churches are affected by the counterfeit and common grace, and the music in our churches, this contemporary music that are so deceiving in its structure and repetitions awaken something in man, and the pastor invites in this setting people to come forward, people who might not at all be called by the Spirit to make a decision, where the process of salvation is a choice in man, with a pressure on man’s will; there is no inner calling, there is not God calling. I know that I have a different view of salvation than many in that I believe in the inner calling, but Scripture is so clear on that. We cannot persuade and should never try to persuade someone to be saved, but let the gospel and the Spirit work according to God’s eternal purpose, and trust him to be the almighty sovereign God: “Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37) Or like when Paul met the women Lydia who were a worshiper of God but not transformed, her “heart the Lord opened that she attended unto” what Paul said (Acts 16:4). Let us trust in our triune God with everything that pertains to true salvation. Let us be obedient and preach the gospel, the full gospel of Christ and let the Spirit of God draw people to the cross of Christ, to saving faith, to transformation and renewing of mind, to be a new creature in Christ Jesus. To be sanctified and transformed and conformed to the image of Christ.

Notes

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinner's_prayer.

[2] Systematic Theology: Revised Edition (Springfield, MO: Logion Press, 2007), 355.

[3] You can download the PDF here: https://equmeniakyrkan.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/theological_foundationUCS.pdf.

[4] Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins (Titus Books, 2014), Kindle, loc. 6301–6329.

[5] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle, loc. 6591–6635.

[6] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle, loc. 7664.

[7] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle, loc. 7677.

[8] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle, loc. 7692–7707.

[9] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle loc. 7823.

[10] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle, loc. 8026.

[11] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle loc. 8038.

[12] Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins, Kindle, loc. 8069–8084.