Category Archives: Pop Christianity

What Is Your Focus?

Christian’s these days don’t seem to make much of their salvation. They don’t seem to have a focus on the proper thing, namely the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They don’t seem to realize that the supremacy of Christ is suppose to be their ultimate priority and focus in every breath they take. Daily, we go about our lives wondering what exactly the next buzz will be that will allow us to enjoy the season. We are all-too-often seeking our own sensational pleasure instead of being satisfied in and pleased with the God who has saved us. He alone is who we are to live for and anything less than that is sinful and unholy. Anyone who thinks that they will be saved from this fallen world without holiness has not learned from the Father. “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” (Hebrews 12:14, KJV)But you may then ask why does the Christian “world” (at large today) not seek to be holy and find their fulfillment in Christ and His greatness? Well, the answer is simple… we don’t know God as we should know Him. We have not sought Him where He can be found.

But then you may ask “where can He be found?” The answer is simple once again… we can find Him in His revelation of Himself, namely His spoken word – the Old and New Testament. The Bible must forever be the Church’s sole infallible rule of faith for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. (2 Timothy 3:16-17) If it does not hold that position then anyone who claims the name of Christ will never know Him as they should and some may even find out on the Day of Judgment that they never knew Him at all, but even more so, that Christ never knew them. He will say to them, “Depart from me, you who work iniquity, for I never knew you.” (Matthew 7:23)

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Hebrews 3 – NASB

Therefore, holy brethren, partakers of a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the Apostle and High Priest of our confession; He was faithful to Him who appointed Him, as Moses also was in all His house. For He has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses, by just so much as the builder of the house has more honor than the house. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God. Now Moses was faithful in all His house as a servant, for a testimony of those things which were to be spoken later; but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house — whose house we are, if we hold fast our confidence and the boast of our hope firm until the end. Therefore, just as the Holy Spirit says,

“Today if you hear His voice,

Do not harden your hearts as when they provoked Me,

As in the day of trial in the wilderness,

Where your fathers tried Me by testing Me,

And saw My works for forty years.

Therefore I was angry with this generation,

And said, ‘They always go astray in their heart,

And they did not know My ways’;

As I swore in My wrath,

‘They shall not enter My rest.'”

Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you an evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God. But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called “Today,” so that none of you will be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end, while it is said,

“Today if you hear His voice,

Do not harden your hearts, as when they provoked Me.”

For who provoked Him when they had heard? Indeed, did not all those who came out of Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was He angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were not able to enter because of unbelief.

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Now, understand the thrust of this entire passage with all its richness and power… We know that all who hold fast their confidence and hope in Christ to the end of their mortal life have already been made partakers of Christ. But to any who fall away, they prove themselves to have never been partakers of Christ to begin with. Their ‘enlightenment’ was nothing more than a winsome show that inevitably results in greater punishment being delivered to them on the Day of Judgment. This is why we are to encourage one another and fellowship with one another, unless we should find that one of us is not really part of Christ and His people.

It is the failure of so many churches to encourage one another and confront each other when their brother or sister is fulfilling the desires of the flesh. Yet, all-too-often, it is us who is also listening to the sin that is in us and not able to help our brother or sister because of the “plank” in our own eye.

Therefore, we must seek this day to seek Christ through His revelation – the Bible – in order that we may remove the plank from our own eye and exhort one another toward Godliness that we may be holy and blameless on the Day of Judgment, knowing that we have been made partakers of Christ and His Kingdom!

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A Prayer from The Valley of Vision

Continual Repentance

“O GOD OF GRACE,

Thou hast imputed my sin to my substitute,

and hast imputed his righteousness to my soul,

clothing me with a bridegroom’s robe,

decking me with jewels of holiness.

But in my Christian walk I am still in rags;

my best prayers are stained with sin;

my penitential tears are so much impurity;

my confessions of wrong are so many aggravations of sin;

my receiving the Spirit is tinctured with selfishness.

I need to repent of my repentance;

I need my tears to be washed;

I have no robe to bring to cover my sins,

no loom to weave my own righteousness;

I am always standing clothed in filthy garments,

and by grace am always receiving change of raiment,

for thou dost always justify the ungodly;

I am always going into the far country,

and always returning home as a prodigal,

always saying , Father, forgive me,

and thou art always bringing forth the best robe.

Every morning let me wear it,

every evening return in it,

go out to the day’s work in it,

be married in it,

be wound in death in it,

stand before the great white throne in it,

enter heaven in it shining as the sun.

Grant me never to lose sight ofthe exceeding sinfulness of sin,

the exceeding righteousness of salvation,

the exceeding glory of Christ,

the exceeding beauty of holiness,

the exceeding wonder of grace.”

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“Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, even Jesus our Lord, equip you in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.” (Hebrews 13:20-21 NASB)

The Bible says Michael Harvey is a “Fool”

Psalm 14:1 says, “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.” (ESV)Psalm 53:1 says, “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity; there is none who does good.” (ESV)

The Net Bible translates Psalm 14:1-3 in this way:

“Fools say to themselves, “There is no God.” They sin and commit evil deeds; none of them does what is right. The Lord looks down from heaven at the human race, to see if there is anyone who is wise and seeks God. Everyone rejects God; they are all morally corrupt. None of them does what is right, not even one!”

I will direct you to this Fox News report on a city council meeting in Tampa, Florida, that granted permission to atheists to speak during the invocation after they ‘scolded’ the city council for praying to “invisible men in the sky.”

Let me start by saying that everyone of us are born into this world with a specific nature. And that nature is best seen in the titles of “Children of Wrath,” “Sons of Disobedience,” and the Biblically implicit title of “Children of Satan.” Now these titles apply to all of us when we are born into the world with a sinful nature. This nature is something that pervades all of us and it is that nature that none of us can overcome left to ourselves.

It is the prominent thing for people these days to say that we can choose or reject God apart from the new birth, namely regeneration. Pop Christianity says that we must first choose God and then when we ask him into our hearts we are born again as a result of that acceptance. But the true teaching of the eternal covenant only involves God acting in accordance with His own nature and man receiving that which is against his own nature. Let us read it in several passages…

Jeremiah 31:31-34 says, “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

Ezekiel 11:19-20 says, “And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, 20 that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.”

Ezekiel 36:25-28 says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

Notice in the above passages that God is the one doing everything and nothing is required of God’s people to which the covenant is applied. In fact God clearly shows us in Ezekiel 36 that if it were not for Him putting a new spirit and heart in us, we could not obey His rules or walk in His statutes. This one thing is clear: Man cannot and will not be saved apart from being born again by the Holy Spirit of God through the working of regeneration and applying to us, against our sinful wills, the eternal Covenant of Grace.

This is echoed by Jesus in John 3:3 and Peter in 1 Peter 1:3-5 where it is clear that in order for us to gain Heaven or Change our ways we must first be born again!

To address one last issue… Pop Christianity doesn’t seem to realize one crucial thing. That just as I claim that we cannot do anything against our natural born natures, God Himself cannot do anything against His nature. This is by no means a ‘bad’ limitation to say that God cannot do something with regard to His omnipotence, but instead it is the truest understanding of reality and how mankind and God exists. Pop Christianity will rightly agree with me that God cannot do something against His nature in terms of.. “God cannot sin.” “God cannot lie.” Virtually all of Christianity will agree on that, but so many of us are so quick to say that we, merely finite humans, can somehow choose something other than rejecting God in full. It is our nature to hate Him and to reject Him! So, how is it that we can present the truth of the Gospel in the form of an option? How can we say, “You have to decide what to do with Jesus!” when we should be asking, “What will Jesus do with you?”

Instead we should do as Christ and the Apostles did when they evangelized and present the Gospel and the universal command that follows it. “Repent, and believe the good news!” “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved!” The Gospel is a command, not an option! The way we know we are in Christ and born again is because we believe and repent. Not the other way around. This is so integral to evangelism and the Gospel that it is no wonder there are so many false professions and so many nonbelievers in the church today. May God work it in you to see the truth of His word as He has done in me.

So, in establishing the Biblical teaching of the new birth that Pop Christianity so flippantly throws around as the ultimate result of people “asking Jesus into their hearts” as if Jesus were a beggar unable to accomplish what He set out to do in justifying the ungodly, I would now like to address in brief the article that sparked this blog.

We all need to be prepared to deal with this atheistic and secular uprising that is trying to ruin this nation and sensor the open expression of our Christian Faith. This is where everyone of us who can vote needs to be prepared to vote in the upcoming Presidential election or keep their mouths shut if they don’t vote in the election. We who are citizens of this country have been given the right to choose our officials and every Christian who believes in the God of the Old and New Testaments should act upon their right to vote and choose the candidate that best exemplifies the teaching of the Bible.

If we do not vote then atheists like Michael Harvey may end up getting their way in this nation and we will, possibly, once again find ourselves in the midst of full persecution. Think of it this way… What happens when those who are Children of Satan gain the majority in a country and elect who ever they desire… I’m almost certain that if secular fundamentalism and postmodernity come to their fullness in this country and are able to make the decisions then persecution will begin in this country that has never seen a national persecution of Christians so far in its existence. May God show us mercy and may reformation begin again in the churches of America so that this nation might once again worship the Triune God! Amen.