“Some people thought there was something odd about Jesus’ birth... It may be that Jesus was an illegitimate son” (Desmond Tutu, Cape Times, October 24, 1980).

“The Holy Spirit is not limited to the Christian Church. For example, Mahatma Gandhi, who is a Hindu ... The Holy Spirit shines through him” (Desmond Tutu, St. Alban’s Cathedral, Pretoria, South Africa, November 23, 1978).

By associating with the Baptist World Alliance, the Southern Baptist Convention is associating with heretics like Desmond Tutu, and the Bible warns severely against such fellowship: “If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds” (2 John 10-11).

In 1999, Baptist World Alliance General Secretary Denton Lotz urged Baptists to accept the Charismatic Movement. He said, “We need to get over our hang-up of the use of the word ‘charismatic’...” He praised the Charismatic Movement for rediscovering “the power and work of the Holy Spirit.” In reality, the Charismatic Movement preaches a false spirit that is not the Spirit of Truth of the Bible.

Also in 1999, Nilson Fanini, past president of the Baptist World Alliance, and Denton Lotz, general secretary, met with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity to discuss ecumenical relations with the Roman Catholic Church. The parties agreed to meet again in 2001 to continue the dialogue.

In September 2000, the Baptist World Alliance opened official dialogue with the Anglican Consultative Council to “foster common understanding between the two religious groups” and to see if they “could find common ground to work together in various aspects of the ministry.” Evangelist Don Jasmin observes: “This is the same Anglican Church which is seeking reunion with the Roman Catholic Church and whose leadership has already agreed to accept the primacy of the Pope” (Fundamentalist Digest, March-April 2001, p. 12).

Brutal Marxist dictator Fidel Castro, who has persecuted and restricted the churches of Jesus Christ in Cuba for decades, was a speaker at the Baptist World Alliance meeting in July 2000.

In January 2001, a delegation from the Baptist World Alliance met at the Vatican with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity to continue their dialogue. The Roman Catholic Church assured the delegates that Pope John Paul II desires to proceed with official conversations with Baptists.

On January 24, 2002, Denton Lotz, general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, joined hands with Pope John Paul II and the leaders of many other denominations and 11 pagan religions at the third Day of Prayer for Peace at Assisi, Italy. The ecumenical pagan prayer gathering featured some 200 religious leaders, including representatives of such “Christian” denominations as Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Reformed, Baptist, Lutheran, Mormon, Methodist, Quaker, Pentecostal, Mennonite, as well as representatives of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Bahai, Confucianism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Tenrikyo (Japan), and members of African and North American “traditional religions.” The religious leaders traveled to Assisi with the Pope by train from Rome, arriving at the blasphemously named Railway Station of St. Mary of the Angels. The Pope said, “Violence never again! War never again! Terrorism never again! In the name of God, may every religion bring upon the earth justice and peace, forgiveness and life, love!” The Pope’s prayers aren’t answered, and neither are those of the other false religious leaders gathered with him, for the simple reason that they worship false gods and preach false gospels and blatantly disobey God’s Word. That the general secretary of the Baptist World Alliance would participate in such a thing is irrefutable evidence of his apostasy.

Among the denominations that are united under the BWA umbrella are the American Baptist Convention and the Baptist Union of Great Britain, both of which are permeated with the most blasphemous and heretical modernism under the sun.

BAPTIST UNION OF BRITAIN

The Baptist Union was already becoming apostate at the end of the 19th century when Charles Haddon Spurgeon separated from it in protest in 1888. Today that apostasy is complete. In the early 1970s, for example, Michael Taylor, principal of the Baptist Union’s Northern Baptist College, addressed the London Baptist Assembly on the theme, “How much of a man was Jesus?” He denied that Jesus Christ is God. Though many protested the man’s heresy, the Baptist Union refused to discipline him or remove him from office. In 1986, the Australian Beacon made the following observation about the Baptist Union: “It is a Union which harbours apostates and succors infidels while ostracizing faithful servants of Christ. It is a friend of Rome, a bed-fellow of idolaters and spiritists in its membership of the World Council of Churches. No true man of God could remain within it in good conscience” (Australian Beacon, No. 240, July 1986).

In 1989, the Baptist Union yoked together with the Roman Catholic Church in the newly formed ecumenical union in Britain.

In 1995, the New South Wales Baptist, the official paper of the Baptist Union of NSW, endorsed the Laughing Revival, otherwise known as the Toronto Blessing. The article was written by David Coffey, General Secretary of the Baptist Union. Many Baptist Union congregations have welcomed the Laughing Revival. These include Randwick Baptist Church. Secular newspapers printed photos of Randwick Baptist church members lying on the floor and acting like drunks. Coffey begins his article with the statement, “We have now had the opportunity to receive reports from a wide range of opinions across the country and there is no doubt in our minds that God has been at work” (David Coffey, “When the Spirit Comes, a British Baptist Prospective,” The New South Wales Baptist, Autumn 1995).

In November 1997, the Baptist Union of Great Britain appointed a woman as area superintendent for London. A Baptist Union spokeswoman said area superintendents are “pastors to the pastors” and their families, promote the union and represent Baptists ecumenically (Ecumenical News International, November 18, 1997). The woman, Pat Took, is also a pastor at the Can Hall Baptist Church in Leytonstone, London.

In May 1998, Catholic Cardinal Basil Hume was invited to participate in the Baptist Union’s assembly. He “led their spiritual reflections and was present when newly-accredited ministers met the Baptist Union president” (Australian Beacon, August 1998). The Union’s General Secretary, David Coffey, praised the cardinal and said the Union recognizes “the deep spirituality which undergirds his ministry.”

AMERICAN BAPTIST CONVENTION

The Baptist World Alliance-affiliated American Baptist Convention (formerly the Northern Baptist Convention) is also liberal through and through. As early as 1910 Baptist leader William B. Riley admitted that the denomination had been “surrendered into the hands of the Higher Critics” (George Dollar, A History of Fundamentalism). Between 1920 and 1932 a group of fundamentalist Baptist pastors unsuccessfully attempted to root the modernism out of the convention. They formed the National Federation of Fundamentalists of Northern Baptists. In 1932, many of these pastors left the Northern Baptist Convention and formed the General Association of Regular Baptists. In 1947, the Conservative Baptist Association of America was formed by another group of pastors who departed from the modernistic Northern Baptist Convention.

The leaven of theological heresy has since permeated the Convention. The schools and pulpits of the American Baptist Convention are filled with men who deny the infallible inspiration of Holy Scripture and who question or deny Christ’s virgin birth, Godhead, vicarious atonement, and resurrection from the dead. The apostate American Baptist Convention has produced some of the most notorious, blasphemous heretics of the 20th century.

Consider just a few examples of this apostasy:

In 1926, the Northern Baptist annual convention debated for almost five hours whether to retain in its fellowship the Riverside Baptist Church of New York City, pastored by the modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick, who denied practically every doctrine of the Word of God. This should have been a simple decision, since the Bible commands that God’s people mark, avoid, and reject doctrinal heresy (Rom. 16:17; Titus 3:10-11), but by a vote of three to one the Northern Baptist Convention refused to exercise discipline. In 1945, Fosdick wrote the following to an individual who inquired about his beliefs: “Of course I do not believe in the virgin birth or in that old-fashioned substitutionary doctrine of the atonement, and I know of no intelligent person who does.”

In the first half of this century Dr. Robert H. Beaven, president of the Chicago Baptist Missionary Training School (Northern Baptist), denied that Jesus Christ is God: “Christ’s uniqueness lay not in his divine substance but in the relationship which existed between him and God. God chose Jesus, the human Galilean carpenter, nurtured in the cradle of Jewish religion, to whom he came with his living fellowship, and through whom he introduced such to men. Jesus was divine because God ‘raised’ him to a new level of life. But this was not a oneness of substance. Christ’s life is an example, revealing the kind of life God wills for, and from, man; it is not a supernatural act set before us as a miraculous means of salvation” (Beaven, In Him Is Life). This was the man chiefly responsible for the education of Northern Baptist missionaries in those days.

In 1924, missionary M.R. Hartley of India represented the views of many Northern Baptist preachers when he stated: “We have no assurance that we have a trustworthy record of anything that Jesus Christ either said or did. ... I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God but I must interpret that in my own way. I can conceive of myself coming to a position where I could sincerely say that I believe in the deity of Jesus. I could almost say it now, but it would mean something different from orthodoxy, but orthodoxy seems like an impossible view. I do not see the necessity of the death of Christ. I do not believe in the second coming.”

Dr. Frederick Anderson, secretary of the Foreign Board of the Northern Baptist Convention in the late 1920s, questioned the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. “My mind is still open on this subject, which I do not consider of the first importance. I am rather inclined to believe in the virgin birth, but it is not essential to Christian faith, and should not be made a condition of church membership or ordination” (Anderson, The Life of Jesus). This is a false and wicked statement because if Jesus Christ was not virgin born the Bible is a pack of lies and our faith is built upon a fable. Further, if Christ was not virgin born He could not have been the sinless Son of God and could not, therefore, have died for our sins.

In the 1940s Andover-Newton Baptist Theological Seminary (American Baptist) graduate Myron J. Hertel gave the following reply when asked about the blood of Christ: “The blood of Jesus Christ is of no more value in the salvation of a soul than the water in which Pilate washed his hands.” Yet the American Baptist Home Mission Society called this young blasphemer to the position of the superintendent of the Boston Baptist City Mission (Robert T. Ketcham, The Answer, Sword of the Lord, pp. 10-16).

The 1948 meeting of the Northern Baptist Convention featured the influential modernist heretic George Buttrick. On page 284 of his book Christian Fact and Modern Doubt he stated: “The future is hidden. We must be faithful to our ignorance ... Jesus apparently conquered death ... But we do not know, why pretend we do ... We covet the chance to say to God hereafter, if God there be; Lord, they told us to grab the present gain, but there was more gain in staking life on a grand Perhaps.” The Apostle Paul said, “I KNOW whom I have believed, and am PERSUADED that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day” (2 Timothy 1:12). The American Baptist-supported Buttrick said the Christian faith is merely a grand PERHAPS.

The 1950 Northern Baptist Convention meeting featured blasphemous modernist G. Bromley Oxnam, who called the God of the Old Testament a “dirty bully” (Oxnam, Preaching in a Revolutionary Age, p. 72), because his unregenerate, rebellious mind would not accept the righteous judgment of God upon sin.

Dr. A.S. Hobart, professor at the American Baptist Crozer Seminary, denied the substitutionary blood atonement of Jesus Christ: “I cannot see anything understandable or acceptable in theory that my guilt and my penalty were placed upon Christ, or that Christ’s holiness is imparted to me, in any way that involves a substitution of his holiness for mine, or his suffering for what was due me, that view of the theory of the atonement finds no foothold in my consciousness or my reason” (A.S. Hobart, Transplanted Truths from Romans, p. 29).

Another Crozer professor, Henry Vedder, concurred with Hobart in denying Christ’s salvation: “Of all the slanders men have perpetrated against the Most High, this doctrine of his substitutionary atonement is positively the most impudent and the most insulting. Jesus never taught and never authorized anybody to teach in his name that he suffered in our stead and bore the penalty of our sins” (Vedder, cited by R.T. Ketcham, The Answer, pp. 10-16).

Norris L. Tibbets, former pastor of the American Baptist Riverside Church in New York City, denied Christ’s bodily resurrection: “Then the third day came. A stone was rolled away and an imprisoned spirit was set free” (Tibbets, Secret Place, April-June 1950, published by the Northern Baptist Convention).

Duncan Littlefair was pastor of the Fountain Street Baptist Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was also a leader in the Northern Baptist Convention. As host pastor of the 1946 annual convention he said: “The Resurrection was not a physical event in history. If the body of Jesus had been raised physically it would only have been required to die again. We have made the physical aspect of the Resurrection the important thing. ... It is a shame and disgrace, really, that after all these centuries we should be living and thinking about the glory of the Resurrection on such levels as these” (Littlefair, The Nature of God).

Littlefair also denied that Jesus Christ is God: “Was Jesus God? There are two major approaches to this question. One of them seeks to make Jesus God. That seems to be the traditional notion of Christianity or at least the popular understanding of it, but I want to say here this morning, once and for all, if I haven’t said it before, and if I don’t say it again -- That is idolatry. Jesus is not and cannot be God. He was God in the same way that you and I may be God, by being an expression of him, and allowing him to express himself in us” (Littlefair, cited by R.T. Ketcham, The Answer, pp. 25-31).

American Baptist minister Jitsuo Morikawa, former pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, said in 1964: “God has already won a mighty redemption ... for the entire world ... The task of the church is to tell all men ... that they already belong to Christ ... Men are no longer lost ... There cannot be individual salvation” (Jitsuo Morikawa, Riverside Church, New York City, Christianity Today, March 13, 1964, p. 26).

American Baptist missionary D.T. Niles of India made the following statement espousing universalism before the American Baptist Convention: “...everybody is within the ministry of Jesus Christ whether or not he accepts it ... The only question [is] ‘Do you know that Jesus Christ is your Saviour?’ Jesus is Lord whether man knows it or not -- believes it or not” (J.O. Sanders, What of the Unevangelized, p. 21).

Nels F.S. Ferre, professor at the Northern Baptist Andover-Newton Theological School, was a modernist and a blasphemer of the highest caliber. He denied the virgin birth, deity, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He claimed that the Old Testament taught an “outworn morality” (Ferre, Pillars of Faith, p. 95). He stated that “God differs from all men, including Jesus, in that His personality alone is eternal and the Creator of all other personalities” (Ferre, The Christian Faith, 1942, p. 102). He conjectured that Jesus might have been the son of a Roman soldier (Ferre, Christian Understanding of God, p. 186). He claimed that accepting the Bible as the infallible Word of God is idolatry (Ferre, The Sun and the Umbrella, p. 39).

In the 1960s, Professor William Hamilton of Colgate Rochester Divinity School (American Baptist) taught that God is dead. Hamilton was defended in 1966 by Colgate president Gene Bartlett who refused to remove Hamilton from the faculty because he “was within the allowable measure of dissent.”

The American Baptist Convention in 1968 stated that abortion “should be a matter of responsible personal decision.”

In the early 1970s Dr. L. McBain, former president of the American Baptist Convention and president of the American Baptist Seminary of the West, argued that Jesus Christ is not referred to as God in the Scriptures (F.E.A. News & Views, Fundamental Evangelistic Association, Nov-Dec. 1976).

In an article in the December 1979 issue of the American Baptist magazine, Dr. L. Howard McBain, president of the American Baptist Seminary of the West. McBain, stated that the Bible does not teach that Jesus was God.

In 1980, American Baptist Dr. Ralph Wendell Burhoe received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion for his “revolutionary hypothesis that finds religion central to the evolutionary emergence of civilized humanity” (EP News Service, May 31, 1980).

The American Baptist Biennial Convention in 1981 featured Rosemary Radford Reuther, a Roman Catholic feminist whose “language often sounds more like it belongs in the gutter than in the church” (Foundation, Fundamental Evangelistic Association, January-February 1981, p. 18).

American Baptist (Harvard) professor Harvey Cox is a notorious modernist. In his book The Secular City he claimed that “the world, not the church, is the proper focus of Christian life” and “the world of politics is a primary sphere of God’s liberating work today” (Richard Quebedeaux, The Worldly Evangelicals, Harper and Row, 1978, p. 19). In his book The Feast of Fools, Cox refers to Jesus Christ as a harlequin and a clown. Cox does not believe that followers of pagan religions are on their way to Hell. He was a speaker at the World Congress for the Synthesis of Science and Religion in India in 1986. The conference was arranged by a Hindu organization.

The June 1991 issue of WATCHword, a women’s ministry paper of the ABC, stated: “What I have come to love about Scripture is the fact that it is not inerrant. That it is not perfect. That it is not complete. That it does contradict itself...”

Former American Baptist president James Scott stated in the March 1992 issue of American Baptist magazine that the issue of homosexuality should be re-examined and that there might be various legitimate points of view about it other than the traditional biblical one that it is an abomination before God.

In August 1993, American Baptist deputy general secretary for cooperative Christianity, Joan S. Parrott, sat with 386 cardinals and bishops surrounding Pope John Paul II at the Roman Catholic Church’s World Youth Day in Denver. She was part of a nine-member ecumenical team including Protestant and Jewish leaders who were given a special banquet before the prayer vigil and met with the pope after his sermon. She had lavish praise for the ecumenical event (Calvary Contender, Jan. 1, 1994).

The American Baptist Convention sent representatives to the Re-imagining conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in November 1993. Speakers included Chung Hyung Kyung, a Korean “theologian” who equates the Holy Spirit with ancient Asian deities and who prays to trees and deceased spirits. At the conference Delores Williams said: “I don’t think we need a theory of atonement at all. I think Jesus came for life and to show us something about life. I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.” Virginia Mollenkott said that Jesus was “first born only in the sense that he was the first to show us that it is possible to live in oneness with the divine source while we are here on this planet.” Chung Hyung Kyung said: “My bowel is Buddhist bowel, my heart is Buddhist heart, my right brain is Confucian brain, and my left brain is Christian brain.” During the conference, a group of roughly 100 “lesbian, bi-sexual, and transsexual women” gathered on the platform and were given a standing ovation by many in the crowd. They were “celebrating the miracle of being lesbian, out, and Christian.” In a workshop called ‘Prophetic Voices of Lesbians in the Church,’ Nadean Bishop, the first ‘out’ lesbian minister called to an American Baptist church, claimed that Mary and Martha in the Bible were lesbian ‘fore-sisters.’ She said they were not sisters, but lesbian lovers.

The unscriptural ecumenical philosophy of the Baptist World Alliance is illustrated by that of its member body the American Baptist Convention. An ABC publication entitled “Oneness in Christ: American Baptists Are Ecumenical” leaves no doubt about their position. This publication was compiled and edited by the “Reverend” Martha Barr, former Assistant General Secretary and Ecumenical Officer of the ABC. “We American Baptists run the whole theological range -- fundamentalists, conservative orthodox, liberal ... Maybe it is partly because American Baptists are so inclusive that we affirm that we are ecumenical. ... We do not have creedal statements. We can worship and work with Episcopalian and Pentecostal, with Roman Catholic and Orthodox.”

The fact that the Southern Baptist Convention participates with and funds the Baptist World Alliance leaves no doubt about its rebellion to the Word of God. As a member of the Baptist World Alliance, the SBC is yoking together with and supporting heresy and blasphemy around the world. The Bible commands:

“Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them” (Romans 16:17).

“Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians 6:14).

“Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: For he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds” (2 John 9-11).

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SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS, ECUMENISM, AND HELL

Updated September 22, 2008 (first published May 27, 2000) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

AVOIDING THE SNARE OF SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM. This book has been called the best on the subject by the editor of The Baptist Challenge. Now it has been throughly updated and enlarged. It is diligently researched from official publications of the Seventh-day Adventist organization and proves conclusively that the Seventh-day Adventist gospel is false. The book begins with a chapter entitled “Adventists Wanted Me to Revise This Book,” describing a deceptive attempt by Seventh-day Adventists to have me change the book. The major divisions of the book are: “Adventist History Proves It is Heretical” and “Adventist Doctrine Proves It Is Heretical.” The book analyzes Adventist doctrines such as Sabbath-keeping, Soul-sleep, Annihilation of the wicked, Ellen White as a Prophetess, Investigative Judgment, Misuse of the Mosaic Law, and Vegetarianism. The chapter “Why Some Have Considered Seventh-day Adventism Evangelical" analyzes Walter Martin’s (author of Kingdom of the Cults) faulty view of Adventism. The book includes selections from D.M. Canright’s 1898 book Seventh-day Adventism Renounced. Canright was an early leader in Adventism who left and became a Baptist pastor. Third edition updated and enlarged September 2008. 206 pages, 5 X 8”, perfect bound, $8.95.

Order by phone or via the recently redesigned online catalog at the Way of Life web site: 866-295-4143, http://wayoflife.org
___________________________________

Cecil Perry, president of the Seventh-day Adventists in England, issued a warning that Hell should not be preached. He was responding to a report issued in April by the Evangelical Alliance of the United Kingdom that describes Hell as a physical place that is occupied by unrepentant sinners. Perry took issue with that, saying, “The message of hell is in stark contrast to the message of hope and love and tends to engender fear” (“British Seventh-day Adventists Warn Against ‘Stoking’ Hell Fires,” Religious News Service, April 2000).

SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM’S HERESIES

This reminds us that Seventh-day Adventism (SDA) denies many biblical doctrines. According to Adventist doctrine, for example, unsaved men do not go to Hell when they die; they merely sleep in the grave awaiting the resurrection. And when the unsaved are finally cast into Hell after the judgment, they are not tormented forever but are annihilated. Ellen G. White, the alleged prophetess who founded the SDA denomination, stated her revulsion of the doctrine of Hell:

“How repugnant to every emotion of love and mercy, and even to our sense of justice, is the doctrine that the wicked dead are tormented with fire and brimstone in an eternally burning hell. . . . And how utterly revolting is the belief that as soon as the breath leaves the body the soul of the impenitent is consigned to the flames of hell! ... the doctrine of natural immortality first borrowed from pagan philosophy, and in the darkness of the great apostasy incorporated into the Christian faith, has supplanted the truth. . . . The theory of eternal torment is one of the false doctrines that constitute the wine of the abomination of Babylon. . . . But those who have not, through repentance and faith, secured pardon, must receive the penalty of transgression ... covered with infamy, they sink into hopeless, eternal oblivion. . . . There will then be no lost souls to blaspheme God as they writhe in never-ending torment; no wretched beings in hell will mingle their shrieks with the songs of the saved” (Ellen White, The Great Controversy, pp. 469, 470, 477, 478, 483).”

Regardless of whether it rubs uncomfortably against human reason, the Bible teaches that the unsaved must endure eternal conscious torment. Proof for this is found in Matthew 25:46, in which eternal life is compared to eternal punishment in duration and state. “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous unto life eternal.”

Revelation 14:10-11 says those who receive the mark of the Antichrist will not be annihilated, but will suffer eternal torment. “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.”

Another passage that describes the eternal state of the wicked is Revelation 20:10-15. Here Satan, together with the beast and the false prophet, are “tormented day and night for ever and ever.” If the Devil and Antichrist and the False Prophet of the Great Tribulation are tormented day and night forever in the lake of fire, this obviously will be the lot of all who are cast there.

The Lord Jesus Christ taught that the lost would suffer eternal torment. Three times in Mark 9 Christ spoke of hell as “the fire that never shall be quenched: where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched...” (Mk. 9:43-48). This is the language of eternal suffering.

Some have argued that though the fire is eternal, the punishment is not. This is an impossible interpretation, because Christ taught that the punishment of the lost would be worse than a violent destruction or loss of existence. Mark 9:42 warns that it is better for the wicked to hang a millstone about his neck and be cast into the sea than face God’s judgment. In verse 43, Jesus began to describe the horrors of Hell. In other words, Hell is going to be worse than any violent destruction. The suffering is eternal in duration. In Matthew 26:24, the Lord said Judas’ punishment will be worse than loss of existence. “...it had been good for that man if he had not been born.”

None of these verses make sense unless interpreted to describe the eternal conscious torment of the unsaved. All the ramifications of this doctrine might be difficult for us to understand, but the truth remains that God has revealed it and our part is to accept it by faith. Hell is a place of fire, and it is a place where the suffering is eternal. These Scriptures should be a loud warning to every man, woman, and child that life is no game; salvation is not a thing to delay for even an hour. No time should be wasted in finding security in the Savior, whose blood “cleanseth us from all sin.” No effort should be spared in reaching lost souls for Christ. God is not only a God of love, but also a holy God of judgment. The torment of Hell is as eternal as the bliss of Heaven.

THE CONFUSION OF THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

This also reminds us of the confusion created by the ecumenical movement. It is confusion for those who believe in a literal hell, or believer’s baptism, or eternal security, or a literal millennium, or the cessation of sign gifts to associate with those that denounce these doctrines. Yet the ecumenical movement is promoting this very thing.

The Seventh-day Adventists are becoming increasingly involved with ecumenical endeavors. The door was opened by the late Walter Martin, founder of the Christian Research Institute, who taught that Adventists should be accepted as an evangelical group with a few quirky doctrines. Martin disseminated this dangerous thinking widely in his influential book Kingdom of the Cults, and he was joined in this by Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. These two prominent evangelical preachers entered into “sweet fellowship” with Adventist leaders. (See the previous chapter “Why Walter Martin Considered Seventh-day Adventism Evangelical” at the Way of Life web site — http://www.wayoflife.org.)

New books on cults are going a step further than Walter Martin by omitting Seventh-day Adventism altogether. An example is What They Believe by Harold Berry and published by Back to the Bible. Previous editions (1979, 1982, 1986) of this book were entitled Examining the Cults and dealt with Roman Catholicism and Adventism, but the 1992 edition omits both. Another example is the 1999 book Fast Facts on False Teachings by Ron Carlson and Ed Decker, which completely omits Adventism.

Everywhere we look we find Adventists participating in ecumenical ventures.

As far back as 1962, the 10th annual convention of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship featured Adventist preacher H.M.S. Richards, Billy Graham, and Pentecostal faith healer Oral Roberts.

In 1986 SDA leader George Vandeman published What I Like About...the Lutherans, the Baptists, the Methodists, the Charismatics, the Catholics, Our Jewish Friends, the Adventists. It was an attempt to promote sympathetic feelings toward Adventism on the part of other denominations, but Vandeman was a strong promoter of Adventist heresy and his objective was always to win non-Seventh-day Adventists over to his “church.” It was Vandeman’s book Planet in Rebellion that the devil used to confuse me as a young Christian.

Seventh-day Adventists are members of the Evangelical Alliance in Romania and the French Protestant Federation.

Adventists are members of many local ministerial associations, including Riverside, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Seventh-day Adventist CCM group Take 6 participated in the Billy Graham rally in New York’s Central Park, September 22, 1991. Adventists participated in a Graham crusade in Germany in 1993. Three prominent Roman Catholics were on the committee.

Speaking in 1992, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals in America reported that there is growing cooperation between evangelicals and Catholics and others, including Seventh-day Adventists. He spoke of “permeable denominational walls” and “the broad evangelical tent” that is being stretched to include Charismatics, Adventists, and the Churches of Christ (who teach baptismal regeneration).

Seventh-day Adventists participate in the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) meetings each year. In 1994, the NRB presented its Milestone Award to The Voice of Prophecy, a broadcast that promotes Seventh-day Adventist heresies.

Evangelical leader Tony Campolo has spoken on numerous Adventist university campuses and in 2004 he spoke at the International Conference on Adventists in the Community. He refers to the Seventh-day Adventists in a positive manner in his 1993 book 20 Hot Potatoes Christians Are Afraid to Touch (chapter 3) and in his foreword to Adventism for a New Generation by Steve Daily.

Dallas Theological Seminary professor Howard Hendricks spoke at the Seventh-day Adventist Southern College in Collegedale, Tennessee, in 1994.

Adventists participate in the massive Urbana conferences for college students sponsored by InterVarsity Fellowship. At the Urbana conference in 1996, convention director Dan Harrison observed that “InterVarsity serves the whole church in all of its diversity” and stated that there were Catholics, Adventists, and many other denominations represented (Foundation magazine, Jan.-Feb. 1997). InterVarsity obviously has a heretical view of the “church.”

The Alabama State Evangelism Conference in January 1998 featured a choir from the Seventh-day Adventist Oakwood College. Southern Baptist president Tom Ellif was one of the speakers.

In the 1990s it was reported that Seventh-day Adventist minister Bertie Degraphenreed was the office receptionist at Fuller Theological Seminary (Calvary Contender, June 15, 1994). In April 1999 Fuller professor Margaret Suster, (who teaches preaching) was a guest speaker for an SDA-sponsored “interactive seminar.”

It was reported that Adventist churches participated in the Franklin Graham crusade in Jamaica in March 1999.

The Festival of Christian Unity for the Great Jubilee Service conducted in Huntsville, Alabama, January 23, 2000, included Roman Catholics, Charismatics and Pentecostals, Southern Baptists, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and Seventh-day Adventists. An Adventist pastor said: “It is our hope that all barriers of divisiveness will be moved, and we will focus on the things that unite us and draw us together” (Huntsville Times, Jan. 15, 2000).

Some Seventh-day Adventist churches are listed as members of the Willow Creek Community Church Association founded by church growth guru Bill Hybels.

In 2006 the Seventh-day Adventists held their first meeting with the World Evangelical Alliance. Adventist representative Angel Rodriguez said: “Although we come from different religious traditions, there was much that we shared in common and was useful to both parties. The meetings were designed to gain a clearer understanding of the theological positions of each body; clarify matters of misunderstanding; discuss frankly areas of agreement and disagreement on a Biblical basis; and explore possible areas of cooperation” (Seventh-day Adventist Interfaith Relations,” Wikipedia). The two groups met again in August 2007.

The SDA have also held dialogues with the Lutheran World Federation, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Presbyterian Church USA, the Salvation Army, and others.

The ecumenical tent is being expanded every few years. See also “Mormons Added to the Ecumenical Stew,” which is available on the Way of Life Literature web site -- http://www.wayoflife.org.
________________________

AVOIDING THE SNARE OF SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISM. This book has been called the best on the subject by the editor of The Baptist Challenge. Now it has been throughly updated and enlarged. It is diligently researched from official publications of the Seventh-day Adventist organization and proves conclusively that the Seventh-day Adventist gospel is false. The book begins with a chapter entitled “Adventists Wanted Me to Revise This Book,” describing a deceptive attempt by Seventh-day Adventists to have me change the book. The major divisions of the book are: “Adventist History Proves It is Heretical” and “Adventist Doctrine Proves It Is Heretical.” The book analyzes Adventist doctrines such as Sabbath-keeping, Soul-sleep, Annihilation of the wicked, Ellen White as a Prophetess, Investigative Judgment, Misuse of the Mosaic Law, and Vegetarianism. The chapter “Why Some Have Considered Seventh-day Adventism Evangelical" analyzes Walter Martin’s (author of Kingdom of the Cults) faulty view of Adventism. The book includes selections from D.M. Canright’s 1898 book Seventh-day Adventism Renounced. Canright was an early leader in Adventism who left and became a Baptist pastor. Third edition updated and enlarged September 2008. 206 pages, 5 X 8”, perfect bound, $8.95.

Order by phone or via the recently redesigned online catalog at the Way of Life web site: 866-295-4143, http://wayoflife.org

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

“Elvis Presley never stood for anything. He made no sacrifices, fought no battles, suffered no martyrdom, never raised a finger to struggle on behalf of what he believed or claimed to believe. Even gospel, the music he cherished above all, he travestied and commercialized and soft-soaped to the point where it became nauseating. ... Essentially, Elvis was a phony. ... He feigned piety, but his spirituals sound insincere or histrionic” (Goldman, Elvis: The Last 24 Hours, pp. 187,188).

The Bible warns that friendship with the world is enmity with God (James 4:4); and while we hope Elvis did trust Jesus Christ as God and Savior before he died, there is no evidence that he truly repented of his sin or separated from the world or believed in the Christ of the Bible. The book he took to the bathroom just before he died was either The Force of Jesus by Frank Adams or The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, depending on various accounts. Both books present an unscriptural, pagan christ. Pastor Hamill, former pastor of First Assembly of God in Memphis, says that Presley visited him in the late 1950s, when he was at the height of his rock & roll powers, and testified: “Pastor, I’m the most miserable young man you’ve ever seen. I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need to spend. I’ve got millions of fans. I’ve got friends. But I’m doing what you taught me not to do, and I’m not doing the things you taught me to do” (Steve Turner, Hungry for Heaven, p. 20).

ELVIS’S DRUG ABUSE KILLED HIM

Elvis did not drink, but he abused drugs most of his life. He began using amphetamines and Benzedrine to give him a lift when he began his rock & roll career in the first half of the 1950s. It is possible that they were first given to him by Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips, who helped popularize Elvis’s music by playing his songs repeatedly (Goldman, p. 9). The drugs “transformed the shy, mute, passive ‘Baby Elvis’ of those years into the Hillbilly Cat.’” He also used marijuana some and took LSD at least once. In her autobiography, Priscilla Presley says that Elvis was using drugs heavily by 1960 and that his personality changed dramatically. After the breakup of his short-lived marriage in 1973, Elvis “was hopelessly drug-dependent.” He abused barbiturates and narcotics so heavily that he destroyed himself. He died on August 16, 1977, at age 42 in his bathroom at Graceland, of a shutdown of his central nervous system caused by polypharmacy, or the combined effect of a number of drugs. There is some evidence, in fact, that Elvis committed suicide (Goldman, Elvis: The Last 24 Hours, pp. 161-175). He had attempted suicide in 1967 just before his marriage. Fourteen drugs were found in his body during the autopsy, including toxic or near toxic levels of four. Dr. Norman Weissman, director of operations at Bio-Sciences Laboratories, where the toxicity tests were performed, testified that he had never seen so many drugs in one specimen. Elvis’s doctor, George Nichopolous, had prescribed 19,000 pills and vials for Elvis in the last 31.5 months of his life. Elvis required 5,110 pills per year just for his sleeping routine. Elvis also obtained drugs from many other sources, both legal and illegal! It was estimated that he spent at least $1 million per year on drugs and drug prescribing doctors (Goldman, p. 56). Dr. Nichopolous’s head nurse, Tish Henley, actually lived on the grounds of Graceland and monitored Elvis’s drug consumption. In 1980, Nichopolous was found in violation of the prescribing rules of the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners, and he lost his license for three months and was put on probation for three years. In 1992, his medical license was revoked permanently.

After a protracted legal battle, Elvis’s daughter, Lisa Marie, inherited his entire estate, now valued at over $100 million. Graceland was made into a museum, and it is visited by more than 650,000 per year.

A SELF-CENTERED MAN

Elvis was self-centered to the extreme. Though he gave away many expensive gifts, including fancy automobiles and jewelry, it was obvious that he used these to obtain his own way. “But when his extravagant presents fail to inspire a properly beholden attitude, the legendary Presley generosity peels off, revealing its true motive as the desire for absolute control” (Goldman, p. 104). He could not take even kind criticism and was quick to cut off friends who crossed him in any way. “A little Caesar, he made himself all-powerful in his kingdom, reducing everyone around him to a sycophant or hustler” (Goldman, Elvis: The Last 24 Hours, p. 15). He was hypercritical, sarcastic, and mean-spirited to people around him. When Elvis first began touring with Scotty Moore and Bill Black, they traveled in the automobile owned and maintained by Moore’s wife, Bobbie. She worked at Sears and was the only one who had a steady paying job at the time. When Elvis became an overnight star and began to make big money, he purchased a Lincoln, but he never made any attempt to replace Bobbie’s car or to pay back what she had put into it for them. Elvis promised Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the members of his first band, that he would not forget them if they prospered financially, but he did just that. While Elvis was making tens of thousands of dollars by 1956 and 1957, Moore and Black were paid lowly wages and were finally let go to fend for themselves as best they could. Elvis never gave his old friends automobiles or anything of significant value. Reminiscing on those days, Scotty Moore says, “He promised us that the more he made the more we would make, but it hasn’t worked out that way. The thing that got me, the thing that wasn’t right about it, was the fact that Elvis didn’t keep his word. ... We were supposed to be the King’s men. In reality, we were the court jesters” (Moore, That’s Alright, Elvis, pp. 146,155). Elvis turned them “out to pasture like broken-down mules, without a penny.” Elvis kept up this pattern all his life. He would fire his friends and workers at the snap of a finger, and he “was not one to give his buddies a second change” (The Boy Who Would Be King, p. 197). Bobby West served his cousin Elvis faithfully for 20 years, and was rewarded in 1976 by being fired with three day’s notice and one week’s pay. Delbert West (another cousin) and Dave Hebler were similarly treated.

ELVIS’S RAGE

Elvis often exhibited a violent, even murderous, rage. He was “notorious for making terrible threats.” He cooked up murder plots against a number of people, including the man his ex-wife ran off with and three former bodyguards who wrote a tell-all book about him. He threw things at people and even dragged one woman through several rooms by her hair. He viciously threw a pool ball at one female fan, hitting her in the chest and injuring her severely. One of his sleep-over girlfriends almost died of a drug overdose he had given her and she remained in intensive care for several days near death. He never once went to see her or call and had no further contact with her. According to his cousin Earl, he never apologized for anything. He drew and fired his guns many times when he could not get his way, firing into ceilings, shooting out television sets. When his last girlfriend, Ginger Alden, attempted to leave Graceland against his wishes, he fired over her head to force her to stay. Elvis hit Priscilla, his wife, at least once, giving her a black eye. He also threw chairs and other things at her. Once he tore up her expensive cloths and threw them and her out into the driveway. He even mocked and flaunted her with his affairs. When his father remarried, Elvis treated him and his wife very badly. When he first learned of it, he “threw a tantrum of frightening proportions,” destroying furniture and punching holes in the walls with his fists. On one occasion he stormed around the dinner table and threw the plates full of food at the wall, cursing his father and stepmother and blaspheming God (The Boy Who Would Be King).

ELVIS’S IMMORALITY

Elvis was a fornicator and adulterer. He had “a roving eye.” “His list of one-night stands would fill volumes” (Jim Curtin, Elvis, p. 119). He began sleeping with multiple girls per week when he was only one year out of high school and discovered the power of his music to capture sensual girls. His cousin Earl notes that the sleazy music clubs Elvis was visiting “satisfied more than his thirst for music—they unleashed Elvis’s sexuality” (The Boy Who Would Be King, p. 122). He slept with many girls before his marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, and had multiple affairs after his marriage. Priscilla was only a 14-year-old ninth grader when Elvis began dating her in 1959 during his army tour in Germany. At the time he met Priscilla, he had an even younger girl living in his house (Moore, That’s Alright, Elvis, p. 162). Elvis corrupted the shy, teenaged Priscilla. He gave her liquor and got her drunk. He got her hooked on pills. He taught her to dress in a licentious manner. He encouraged her to lie to her parents. He led her into immorality and pornography. He taught her to gamble. He used hallucinogenic drugs with her. (These are facts published in Priscilla’s autobiography.) In 1962, the 15-year-old Priscilla moved in with Elvis at his Graceland mansion in Memphis (after Elvis lied to her parents about the living arrangement) and they lived together for five years before they married in May 1967. (The marriage was probably due to pressure put on Elvis by his manager, who was worried about the star’s public image.) Elvis and Priscilla had constant problems in their marriage and were divorced in 1973. Elvis had many adulterous affairs during his marriage, and Priscilla admits two affairs of her own. Scotty Moore’s second wife, Emily, said she felt sorry for Priscilla because of all of the women Elvis was seeing. Elvis seduced his stepbrother Billy’s wife, Angie, and destroyed their marriage. He then banished Billy from Graceland. Elvis’s cousin, Earl, who was his best buddy in high school and during the early years of his music career and who worked for him for many years after his success, describes how Elvis became addicted to orgies involving many girls at one time. Elvis cursed and profaned the Lord’s name continually in his ordinary conversation. Even during his earliest concerts he “told some really dirty, crude jokes in between his songs” (RockABilly, p. 120).

_________________

For the conclusion, see Part 2 of 2 of the article “Elvis Presley: King of Rock & Roll.” The complete article is in the Music section of the End Times Apostasy Database at the Way of Life Literature web site.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS: TEMPTATIONS YOUNG PEOPLE FACE GROWING UP IN THE CHURCH

September 18, 2008 (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is by Dave Crowe, an Australian missionary to Papua New Guinea. It was sent to us by Buddy Smith, pastor of Grace Baptist Church, Malanda, Queensland, Australia .

“Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, neither was the word of the LORD yet revealed unto him” (1 Samuel 3:7).

“Now the sons of Eli were sons of Belial; they knew not the LORD” (1 Samuel 2:12).

The 23rd of March this year was the 25th anniversary of my Salvation. As far as I know, I was the first of a long line of unbelieving ancestors to call upon the name of the Lord. I am a first generation believer. As such, some might not consider me qualified to deal with the subject matter of this article. That could quite well be so, if it were not for the fact that over the course of the last 15 years my wife and I have had the privilege of rearing five reasonably normal and healthy children, all of whom profess to be Christians, second-generation Christians.

Through an amazing work of Providence, on the 23rd of March this year our son Samuel who is now 15, was also saved. Samuel was not saved from a life of drugs, drunkenness, and debauchery as were his parents, but rather from a life of religiosity and ritual, a life of outward appearances and conformity to a creed he knew well, but loved little.

This is the issue upon which this short article is based.

Samuel is a Home Schooled MK (Missionary Kid). Samuel arrived on the mission field at seven months old (in his mother’s womb). Samuel was born early Thursday Morning on the 17th December 1992, and was in church on Sunday, not yet three days old. Probably the first time Samuel ever heard his father’s voice loud enough to be recognised was from the pulpit in the local Baptist Church.

We could count, probably, on one hand the number of Sundays Samuel has missed since that day. Samuel will be 16 in December this year. At a conservative estimate, Samuel has been in church well over 3,000 times since he was born. If you count up Sundays, morning and evening, for 15 years, that brings you up to a total of 1,560 sermons, add to that the weekly prayer meetings, 780 of them, not to mention Sunday Schools, 780 of them as well.

A text from 2 Timothy 3:15 comes to mind when I think of my son Samuel. “And that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures.” Samuel, like thousands of other kids growing up in Christian homes, has from a child been immersed in the Word of God. Besides his regular church attendance, Samuel has been home schooled from day one. He has memorised hundreds of Bible verses; he knows most of the major stories by heart, as do his four sisters, the youngest of whom is Hadassah, who is now 8. Hadassah can recite numerous lengthy portions of Scripture almost word perfect. All of our children are the same. They all attend church and youth group weekly; we have family devotions most days. If the Lord tarries, Hadassah, like Samuel, would have heard over 3,000 sermons by the time she is 15.

Does all of that make my children Christians? No, sadly not. In fact, despite all those sermons, my children can remain hardened sinners, too proud to see their real need to repent. Not even fifteen years on the mission field and 3000 sermons can make a child acceptable to God and ready for Heaven. No, according to John 3:3, they, like everyone else in the world, “must be born again.”

As we have found out by personal experience within our own family circle, it is possible for children to sit through, and endure thousands of hours of religious instruction, and still be none the better for it. “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.” Until such a time as a child is truly and powerfully saved by a miracle of God’s Grace, even something as wholesome as sound Biblical preaching and the fellowship of the local church can become a source of temptation and a snare to him.

Boredom, Unthankfulness, Apathy, Indifference, Cynicism, Scepticism, Duplicity, Hypocrisy, Hardness of heart, even outright Atheism and Rebellion are only a few of the nasty and eternally destructive fruits that can grow almost undetected, right on the front row of our Sunday School Classes. How can that be?

Though my children are privileged and certainly blessed to have been raised in a Christian home, taught by their own loving mother, and exposed to sound and wholesome Bible preaching all of their lives, they are not exempt from temptation. Far from it! In fact, they are actually subject to some very serious and destructive religious temptations children from unsaved homes never face.

Temptation for my children is quite different than it was (and is) for me. I have struggled in my life with the seedier side of the flesh; my children face more subtle temptations, like Nicodemus or young Samuel in the Old Testament. I was an irreligious and naughty child; my children are mostly moral and good. I was corrupted very early in life; and to my great detriment and lasting regret, I became wise concerning the things that are evil. My children, on the other hand, are mostly innocent and, thankfully, quite naïve concerning evil, but they face a host of temptations that in some ways are just as dangerous and harder to discern and much more subtle.

It is important for us here to understand a very important Biblical precept.

THE NATURAL MAN OR A NEW CREATURE?

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man” (1 Corinthians 2:14-15).

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

There is a great difference between being religious and good and being a new creature in Christ. Nicodemus was a good man, but he certainly wasn’t a new man. Samuel in the Old Testament was a religious lad, a very polite and respectful boy, “but he didn’t yet know the Lord” (1 Samuel 3:7). Eli's sons served the Tabernacle but they were “sons of Belial; they knew not the LORD.”

God recognised something about Samuel and the sons of Eli that few Christian parents discern today. They were in the right place, but not in a right spirit. Nicodemus in the New Testament was a good man, but a natural man still. His religion was based solely on the natural light of his ritual and outward form of religion, but there was no illumination. Samuel was the same.

Nicodemus knew the Scriptures by heart; he was a Doctor of the law, a ruler of the Jews, but he was unregenerate. The things of the spirit were foolishness unto him, and “he could not know them because they are spiritually discerned.”

Young Samuel heard the voice of the Lord three times and thought it was Eli; he hadn't yet had his heart opened by the Spirit of God.

So it is, I believe, with many of our children. They hear the voice of God and think it is the preacher or only their parents.

Most children in Christian homes profess faith at an early age. Our Samuel called on the Lord the first time when he was about six. We did our utmost to encourage his walk with the Lord, but over the course of the years it became quite evident to us that though Samuel was a good lad, he wasn’t a “new creature.” Like Samuel of old, “he didn't yet know the Lord.”

As he entered into his teenage years we began to detect a definite resistance to and disliking of spiritual truth. This greatly concerned us and because of that we challenged him a number of times concerning his salvation.

I have been impressed more and more over the years that the phrase “if any man be in Christ” in 2 Corinthians 5:17 also applies to children. It wasn’t only the Apostle Paul who used that phrase, The Lord Jesus also said in Luke 9:23, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.”

In actual fact, if you will look closely, you will notice that the word “man” in Luke 9:23 is not in the original. Jesus said, “If any will come after me let him deny himself...” That certainly includes children born into Christian homes. Why do we expect others to manifest a new life, but not our own children?

We ought not to be congratulating ourselves that our children are good kids and that at least they are in church. No, that position comes far short of Bible salvation. We ought to search out the matter and make diligent inquiry as to whether our precious children are truly born again; are they regenerate? Can we see Biblical evidence of a New Creature? Or are they just, going through the motions?

Children are creatures of habit. They can very easily adapt to their environment, especially if it’s the only one they have ever known. “Christian” children become experts at duplicity; they know all the right words to say at the most appropriate times. They can say their verses and get their awards. They know how to dot all their i's and cross all their spiritual t's, and all the while many of them are complete strangers to the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Often it’s not all their fault. Many Christian parents, even pastors and teachers, take much too much for granted when it comes to the souls of their children. There seems to me to be a great lack of discernment in hanging all of our hopes for our children’s eternal destiny upon some long gone profession of faith that has absolutely no bearing or impact on the general course of their present day lives. Salvation is a today issue.

Don’t ever forget that our children’s sinful natures will only be restrained for a time under the heavy yoke of the Christian home and church culture. Many Christian children in church are just doing what kids do naturally, conforming to the majority mindset around them. They are just going through the motions. That’s all fine and well whilst they are youngsters, but once the hormones begin to kick in and old Adam begins to assert his authority, Mum and Dad look out!

If children continually chafe, complain, and defy and even despise and rebel against the authority of the Scriptures and their parents, it is quite as likely as not that we are dealing with unregenerate offspring. This ought to challenge us, as it is quite obvious in Scripture that the Biblical criterion for salvation is not an empty profession of faith, but rather a new creature. If you doubt that read again Galatians 6:15, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.”

If we take the Scriptures seriously we will understand that our children, just like adults, are sinners that need repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. If there is genuine repentance, there ought to be genuine fruit. If after a Biblical evaluation of our children’s lives and testimonies we fail to see the evidences of a new creature overcoming the old, we need not despair. No, we need to go to prayer.

We prayed for Samuel his whole life, but we never really took up the matter of his salvation seriously, even unto fasting, until a few years ago. As I mentioned, as Samuel began to enter his early teenage years, old Adam began to make his presence known and it wasn't pleasant.

This was not the normal flesh/spirit conflict of the true Christian mentioned in Romans 7 and Galatians 5:17. We saw this very different spiritual conflict in our daughter Lydia, who was very clearly saved in the year 2000 whilst we were on furlough. She was only six at the time, but we have had no cause since then to doubt her decision, again because we have very clearly seen the “new creature.”

In Samuel we hadn't seen the new creature until just recently. Since Samuel was saved on the 23rd of March this year (he had no idea at the time that it was my spiritual birthday as well), we have seen a definite change. He himself has confessed Christ openly on a number of occasions; he has told me he now understands and gets fed from what he reads in Scripture. He is also experiencing the conflict with his old nature. He desires to be baptised and has expressed a very clear desire to go back to the mission field.

“If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature...”

Don’t settle for less. By making excuses for worldly-minded, unspiritual children, we are giving place to the devil and also encouraging deceit and hypocrisy. Look for the tell tale signs of dead religious observance, and pray against it for all your worth. Your child’s eternal well being could well depend on you being discerning enough to see it for what it is, unregenerate flesh.

“He that is spiritual judgeth (discerns) all things” (1 Corinthians 2:15).

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

TODD BENTLEY AND THE LAKELAND DECEPTION

Updated September 16, 2008 (first published September 2, 2008) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

Some said that Todd Bentley’s recently-ended healing meetings in Lakeland, Florida, followed the lineage of the “Toronto Blessing” and the “Pensacola Outpouring” of the 1990s. Some had even prophesied that it was the beginning of a national revival and that entire cities would be “shut down.”

In fact, it was the Lakeland Outpouring that was shut down after Bentley announced that he was separating from his wife (“Todd Bentley, Wife Separating,” Charisma, Aug. 12, 2008). A week later it was announced that Bentley was stepping down as head of Fresh Fire Ministries, after the ministry revealed he had an “unhealthy relationship” with a female staffer (“Bentley Stepping Down,” OneNewsNow, Aug. 19, 2008). The two events are not unconnected, of course. The separation from his wife was due to the fact that he “had developed an ‘unhealthy’ emotional attachment to another woman” (“Legacy of Lakeland Outpouring Debated,” Lakeland Ledger, Sept. 13, 2008). The Ledger also reported that “there were reports that Bentley engaged in ‘excessive drinking.’”

The Lakeland meetings began on April 2, 2008, at the Ignite Church, which meets in a reconditioned building supply store and is pastored by Steve Strader.

Steve is the son of Karl Strader, who pastored the now defunct Carpenter’s Home Church where a “revival” broke out in 1993 under the ministry of Rodney Howard-Browne. Calling himself “the Holy Ghost Bartender,” he dispenses spiritual drunkenness and “holy laughter.” An estimated 100,000 people attended the Howard-Browne meetings at Carpenter’s home that year and the church grew from 1,500 to 8,000. A few years later the church fell apart after Strader’s son Daniel was convicted and imprisoned for “swindling investors, including church members” (Charisma Online, Aug. 24, 2005). In 2005 the church was sold to Without Walls International, but as of 2008 Without Walls was trying to offload the property after the “international” leaders of the organization, Randy and Paula White, got a divorce.

The Bentley meetings this year at Ignite Church also grew quickly. They had to rent larger facilities such as the Tiger Town baseball stadium, and the services continued nightly for more than three months.

Bentley wears metal studs in his ears and eyebrow and is covered with tattoos, some of which he got after he was converted. He claims that multitudes have been healed and some raised from the dead. He slams people on the forehead and shoves them. He has kicked an elderly lady in the face, banged a crippled woman’s legs on the platform, and kneed a man in the stomach. He hit another man so hard that a tooth popped out.

The meetings have a sideshow feel with raucous music blaring and Bentley crying out, “Come and get some,” and “[Miracles are] popping like popcorn.” He claims to know what is happening in the audience, calling out things like, “Someone’s getting a new spinal cord tonight.” He “flings” the Spirit upon people while weirdly yelling, “blah, blah, blah, blah.”

“Holy laughter,” spiritual drunkenness, violent shaking, and “falling under the power” are an integral part of the “revival.” People bend over and can’t rise up. Women shake in weird and violent ways.

Bentley’s healing claims are spectacular and strange. One man even came on stage with two prosthetic legs and a glass eye, claiming that he could see out of the glass eye and that one of the stumps of his leg had grown an inch and a half (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHAf3W3iPPY&feature=related). This was praised as a great miracle, but if it was it was certainly a pathetic half-way thing!

Bentley made the following statement on June 23:

“We have received thousands, if not tens of thousands, of healed people’s testimonies. I have staff working 80 hours a week working on the biggest catalogue in the world of such data with names, addresses and the medical verifications. We have medically verified doctor’s evidence of the dead raised. ... every conceivable miracle we have in this catalogue of outstanding medically verified miracles. We have blood tests, x-rays, even letters from the medical community. We are making these medical stories available to any media. We also have got a video catalogue with follow ups and literally thousands of testimonies for the media for the most notable miracles to present to a skeptical world--this could be one of the most well documented revivals in history!” (“Todd Bentley’s Type of Medically Verified Healings,” http://endtimespropheticwords.wordpress.com/2008/07/12/).

A few days later the Associated Press made an attempt to follow up on a list of 15 names that were given by Bentley’s ministry to represent healings that can be medically verified.

“Expecting critics, Bentley’s ministry distributed a list of 15 people it said were cured, and vetted by his ministry, with all but three of their stories ‘medically verified.’ Yet two phone numbers given out by the ministry were wrong, six people did not return telephone messages and only two of the remainder, when reached by The Associated Press, said they had medical records as proof of their miracle cure. However, one woman would not make her physician available to confirm the findings, and the other’s doctor did not return calls despite the patient’s authorization” (“Fast-rising Preacher’s Healing Draw Ire,” USA Today, July 10, 2008, Travis Reed, Associated Press, http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-07-11-revival-healing_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip).

ABC Nightline also tried unsuccessfully to follow up on Bentley’s healing claims.

“When asked to present evidence of the healings, Bentley promised to give Nightline the names and medical records of three followers who would talk openly about his miracles. He never delivered. Instead, his staff gave Nightline a binder filled with what he says are inspiring miracles, but with scant hard evidence. It offered incomplete contact information, a few pages of incomplete medical records, and the doctors’ names were crossed out.

“When pressed further, Bentley provided the name of a woman in California who had a large tumor in her uterus that shrank after she saw Bentley.

“Her husband, however, told Nightline that it could be a coincidence because she was still undergoing medical treatment. He said she was too ill to talk to the media. The husband did provide some of his wife’s medical records from a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, where she went for cancer treatment after being turned away by American hospitals. The wife, however, insisted on obscuring the clinic’s name and the names of the doctors” (“Thousands Flock to Revival in Search of Miracles,” ABC Nightline, July 9, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaithMatters/story?id=5338963&page=1).

Psychotherapist Bridget Piekarski wrote to the Lakeland Ledger and gave the following warning about Bentley’s healing claims:

“After the June 22 front-page article on the Florida Outpouring Revival [‘Signs and Warnings’], I simply have to speak up. I am a psychotherapist. Several weeks ago, the mother of a young adult patient of mine called for an appointment for her son. He had been stable for quite some time on his medications for schizophrenia. He had recently decompensated, and was hospitalized in order to stabilize him and restart his medications. He had attended one of Todd Bentley’s gatherings and was told by Mr. Bentley that he was ‘healed.’ He stopped his medications, only to relapse into psychosis. The outcome could have been worse. My client has very risky behaviors when psychotic. He might have died. Please, if you think you have been “healed” of mental or physical illness, please consult your doctor before stopping medications or treatment. Your life may depend on it” (“Healed: Double Check,” Lakeland Ledger, July 5, 2008, http://www.theledger.com/article/20080705/NEWS/588942307).

It seems to me that the ability to see out of a glass eye could be verified with great ease. Bentley could send the guy for a simple eye examination, and that would be that, BUT DON’T HOLD YOUR BREATH.

Bentley claims to be following in the footsteps of the apostles and exhibiting “kingdom power,” but he is doing no such thing. The apostles did not conduct healing meetings. They didn’t call out psychic healings. They didn’t shake and laugh hysterically and stagger around like drunks and flop around on the floor. We believe in divine healing for today, but we don’t believe in Pentecostal showmen (see “I Believe in Miracles” http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/ibelievein-miracles.html). Furthermore, when the apostles healed, they really healed!

The devil is just as much in the business of religion today as God, and the only way we can discern the difference is by comparing all teaching and practice to the Bible.

Bentley says of the “spiritual drunkenness” and other phenomena, “Don’t try to figure it out with your head” (“Florida Outpouring of Drunkenness,” http://christianresearchnetwork.com/?p=5075).

This has been one of the theme songs of the Pentecostal movement from its inception, but the Bible warns of deceiving spirits and instructs God’s people to carefully prove all things. The Bereans were called “noble” because they tested everything by Scripture (Acts 17:11). Any type of Christianity that draws back from testing everything carefully by Scripture is ignoble and wrong. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

Bentley was promoted by the discredited “prophets” Bob Jones and Paul Cain, who were associated with Mike Bickle and John Wimber in the 1980s.

Jones was disciplined in 1991 for using his “prophetic” office to cause young women to disrobe before him (J. Lee Grady, What Happened to the Fire, p. 103).

Cain was exposed in 2004 for homosexuality and drunkenness, but the “restored” Cain appeared with Bentley in Lakeland in May 2008 at the baseball stadium and declared that Bentley was a “new breed” and the “spirit of Elijah.” In spite of their incredible claims about healing, Cain suffered a stroke soon thereafter and was hospitalized (“Paul Cain,” Wikipedia).

Bentley claims to have seen many angels. Not surprisingly, some of them were “financial angels” who spread prosperity to him and to those who attend his meetings.

“So when I need a financial breakthrough I don’t just pray and ask God for my financial breakthrough. I go into intercession and become a partner with the angels by petitioning the Father for the angels that are assigned to getting me money: ‘Father, give me the angels in heaven right now that are assigned to get me money and wealth. And let those angels be released on my behalf. Let them go into the four corners of the earth and gather me money’” (Bentley, “Angelic Hosts,” 2003, http://www.etpv.org/2003/angho.html).

One of Bentley’s angels is named Emma. Bentley says:

“I was in a service in Beulah, North Dakota. In the middle of the service I was in conversation with Ivan and another person when in walks Emma. As I stared at the angel with open eyes, the Lord said, ‘Here's Emma.’ I’m not kidding. She floated a couple of inches off the floor. It was almost like Kathryn Kuhlman in those old videos when she wore a white dress and looked like she was gliding across the platform. Emma appeared beautiful and young--about 22 years old--but she was old at the same time. She seemed to carry the wisdom, virtue and grace of Proverbs 31 on her life. She glided into the room, emitting brilliant light and colors. Emma carried these bags and began pulling gold out of them. Then, as she walked up and down the aisles of the church, she began putting gold dust on people. ‘God, what is happening?’ I asked. The Lord answered: ‘She is releasing the gold, which is both the revelation and the financial breakthrough that I am bringing into this church.’ ... Within three weeks of that visitation, the church had given me the biggest offering I had ever received to that point in my ministry. Thousands of dollars!” (Bentley, “Angelic Hosts”).

In Scripture there are no female angels, no angels that sprinkle gold dust, and none that float two inches off the floor.

It appears that the Lakeland Outpouring is finished, but it was unscriptural from the start.

My friends, God is not dead, but He is not a puppet on a Pentecostal healer’s string. He has given us clear instructions in Scripture about healing. Those that are sick are to call the elders of the church and he is to confess any sins and they are to anoint him with oil and pray over him (James 5:13-16). This assumes, first, that the individual is born again through faith in Jesus Christ. It assumes, second, that he or she is a member of a Bible-believing church. James 5 does not describe a raucous “healing crusade.”

As we said earlier, we believe in divine healing for today, but we don’t believe in Pentecostal showmen.

See “I Believe in Miracles” http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/ibelievein-miracles.html.

For a more extensive study of this subject see The Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements: The History and Error, which is available from Way of Life Literature. See the online catalog.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

JAMES 3 AND CHURCH SPLITS

September 16, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

“Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace” (James 3:13-18).

THE WISDOM FROM BELOW IS DESCRIBED IN VERSES 14-16.

1. The fruit of evil wisdom is bitter envying and strife.

Envy is jealousy. One can be envious because another person has more money or has a better position or is better looking or is better gifted or is perceived to be better liked or more popular or whatever. Envy does not have to have a basis in reality; it can be the mere product of one’s imagination.

Envy is a trait of the old fallen flesh (Rom. 1:29; Titus 3:13). It means that I am not content with what God has given me. Instead, it bothers me when others prosper and when they advance and when they have things and positions that I do not have. To envy means I am unwisely comparing myself with others. It means I am selfish. It means I am lacking in compassion and that I do not love others as myself. (1 Cor. 13:4).

Envying embitters. “Though these may not be expressed by words, or actions: envy at the happiness of others ... is a root of bitterness in the heart, which bears wormwood and gall, and produces bitter effects in the persons in whom it is; it embitters their minds against their neighbours and friends; it is rottenness in their bones, and slays and destroys those who are so silly as to be governed by it” (John Gill).

Strife is the opposite of peace. It refers to quarreling and stirring up trouble. It refers to backbiting and gossiping, talking against the brethren because I don’t like them and I don’t like what they do. Such strife is not caused because I love the truth but because I care more for my own selfish interests and my own desire to injure others than I do for the work of God. Even if the church splits apart, that will not bother be greatly. There is a hardness of heart caused by the sin of envy. It is the opposite of gentleness and compassion and longsuffering.

Observe that envy and strife are intimately associated. Burkitt says, “Envy is the mother of strife.” If I have envy toward others I will eventually cause trouble among my brethren. The Philistines envied Isaac and stopped up his wells (Gen. 26:14-15). Rachel was envious of Leah and caused strife in her own home (Gen. 30:1-2). Korah and his followers envied Moses and Aaron and stirred up opposition against them (Psa. 106:16-18; Num. 16:1-4). Joseph’s brothers were envious of him and sold him into slavery (Acts 7:9). The Jewish religious leaders envied Jesus and stirred up the people and the government against Him and caused His death (Mark 15:10). They also envied the crowds that followed the preaching of the gospel and stirred up strife against it (Acts 17:5).

2. Envying and strife produce confusion and every evil work.

When envy is nurtured instead of confessed and rejected, and when strife begins to run its course, there is no telling where it will lead. It led Joseph’s brothers to disregard their father’s feelings and the great love he had for Joseph and to dishonor their father by kidnapping their younger brother and to harden their hearts against his crying and even to contemplate murdering him. All of this started when they envied Joseph and nurtured this envy in their hearts month after month instead of renouncing it to God (Gen. 37:11). This led to hatred, strife, kidnapping, and lying.

3. James is emphatic that this type of thing is not of God but is of the earth or the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Worldliness does not consist merely of external things such as drinking and smoking and wearing immodest clothing. It is also a matter of one’s heart condition. One can be impressively clean on the outside and worldly on the inside. This was the condition of the Pharisees (Mat. 23:25). Worldliness consists of “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16), and those are sins of the heart that have external fruits.

The world, the flesh, and the devil are closely associated. If I walk according to the evil ways of the world and the flesh, then I am walking according to the devil, because he is the god of this world (2 Cor. 4:4) and the one that “worketh in the children of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2).

The devil is the father of envy and strife and of the selfish pride and lack of compassion that produces it (1 Tim. 3:6). When we commit these sins, we are walking in the devil’s own footsteps.

4. James warns us not to be deceived and to lie against the truth. This describes many professing Christians. They live in carnal strife and gossiping and backbiting and envy and hatred and other sins, but they claim to be right with God. Some judge themselves only by the externals. They even think of themselves as wiser and more spiritual than others. They refuse to heed reproof and repent, even though they fail the test of true wisdom.

5. Those who say they are walking in light and wisdom but live like this are liars (v. 14). They deceive themselves (Jer. 17:9), and they try to deceive others, which is hypocrisy.

6. The first step toward true wisdom is to acknowledge one’s actual condition. If I agree with God’s Word and confess my sin of walking according to the world, the flesh, and the devil, I can obtain God’s mercy and life-changing power. But if I pretend that everything is fine and refuse to acknowledge my sin, there is no spiritual progress, because I am walking in the darkness rather than in the light (1 John 1:5-9).

7. In this context, confession of sin is not a once-for-all thing but a continual, day-by-day process. Spiritual victory in the Christian life is a matter of growing in grace (1 Peter 2:1-2; 2 Pet. 3:18).

THE WISDOM FROM ABOVE IS ALSO DESCRIBED IN THIS PASSAGE.

This is a description of Christ, whereas the wisdom from below is a description of the devil.

It is FIRST PURE (Jam. 3:17). This refers to being pure from sin; it refers to holiness (1 Tim. 5:22). The same Greek word is translated “chaste” in 2 Corinthians 11:2; Titus 2:5; 1 Peter 3:2. God is first and foremost holy, and if He is effectively working in a person’s life, then that person will pursue holiness. This shows the error of “rock & roll Christianity” which emphasizes the love of God and tolerance of sin more than moral purity and holy separation.

It is PEACEABLE (Jam. 3:17).

True wisdom always inclines toward peace if there is any godly possibility of it. It desires peace, and will not cause strife based on its own selfish and sinful purposes.

This does not mean that true wisdom keeps peace at any cost. It does not care more for peace than for truth and righteousness. The Lord Jesus said that He did not come to bring peace to the earth but a sword (Mat. 10:34). This is because this world is at war with the truth. Peace at the expense of truth is carnal and cowardly compromise. The apostle Paul did not pursue peace with false teachers. Rather, he confronted them (Acts 13:7-11), exposed them (1 Tim. 1:19-20; 2 Tim. 2:16-18), and warned the churches of them (e.g., Acts 20:28-30; Rom. 16:17; 1 Cor. 15:33-36; 2 Cor. 11:1-4; Gal. 1:6-9; 1 Tim. 4:1-5).

It is GENTLE AND EASY TO BE INTREATED (Jam. 3:17). True wisdom is willing to listen to others and to submit to the truth. It is not self-opinionated. It doesn’t reject good counsel. It is willing to answer questions and try to explain itself. It is eager to solve difficulties. This is a picture of Jesus. He was easily approachable. He allowed men to ask questions. He was gentle and easy to be intreated. He explained Himself clearly.

It is FULL OF MERCY AND GOOD FRUITS (Jam. 3:17).

True wisdom is merciful and patient and kind. This is what is required of peacemakers.

True wisdom is full of good fruits. It is not content to excel in only one or two spiritual things. It wants to add to “faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; and to godliness brother kindness; and to brother kindness charity” (2 Pet. 1:5-7). It is full of “compassion and beneficence to the poor; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the widows and fatherless in their affliction; and doing all other good works and duties, both with respect to God and man, as fruits of grace, and of the Spirit” (John Gill).

It is WITHOUT PARTIALITY (Jam. 3:17). True wisdom does not play favorites. It doesn’t show respect to persons. It applies the truth equally to all men. Compare 1 Timothy 5:21. “I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things without preferring one before another, doing nothing by partiality.” True wisdom does not treat the rich church member differently than the poor. It does not exercise discipline against some members while ignoring the same kind of sins of others. It does not require some workers and leaders to meet the Bible’s standards and the church’s covenant while allowing others to get by with things. It does not allow some to get away with gossip and strife while coming down hard on others for the same thing.

It is WITHOUT HYPOCRISY (Jam. 3:17). True wisdom does not preach one thing to others while living contrary to the preaching with no repentance and no intent of changing. It does not make a show of being what it is not. It does not condemn others for things that it is guilty of. It does not condemn relatively small sins in others while allowing more serious sins in itself. It does not condemn a new church member for something like wearing a modern fashion that is not exactly modest or for wearing too much makeup or such things, while allowing envy and hatred and pride and strife to rule in his own heart.

It is MEEK (Jam. 3:13). It is pride that stirs up carnal strife in churches, but true wisdom is meek. It is not self-willed. It does not think of itself more highly than it ought to think (Rom. 12:3).

THIS PASSAGE IS A TEST FOR THOSE WHO LEAVE CHURCHES.

There is a proper time to leave a church, if it is not following God’s Word, but there is a proper way to leave and many times people leave churches for carnal reasons and in a carnal manner. If someone leaves a church for biblical and spiritual reasons, the fruit will be characterized by the description in James 3:17-18--purity, peaceableness, gentleness, easy to be entreated, mercy, without partiality, without hypocrisy. Someone leaving in this mode will speak the truth in love. He leaves because he is convinced it is God’s will, but he does so in a peaceable and godly manner. He is respectful of the leaders even if he doesn’t agree with them, and he harbors no ill will toward the leaders or the church.

But if someone leaves a church for carnal reasons the fruit will be characterized by the description in James 3:14-16--bitterness, envy, strife, confusion, and other evil works. This is not of God! Many times I have observed this. People get upset at something and they leave a church, but they do not do so in a godly manner. They cause all sorts of trouble and try to hurt the church, both before they leave and after. Many times they won’t even talk about the matter with the leaders in a gracious, open manner. They are not “easy to be entreated.” All of the love they once had for the church and its leaders disappears. They deal deceitfully. They go behind the pastor’s back and despise his position.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

EMMANUEL BAPTIST THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

September 15, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

Emmanuel Baptist Theological Seminary is located in Newington, Connecticut. We appreciate this school and its Dean, Dr. Thomas Strouse, and we want to let our readers know of its ministry.

EBTS offers the advanced seminary degrees of Master of Biblical Studies, Master of Divinity and Doctor of Theology for independent Baptist ministers, including pastors and missionaries. EBTS is under the aegis of Emmanuel Baptist Church, and uses exclusively the Masoretic Hebrew Text of the OT and the Received Greek Text of the NT, while emphasizing the KJV as the preserved Word of God in the English language. EBTS began in 2000 to fill the niche of training independent Baptists in the biblical languages, upholding the exposition of the KJV, emphasizing Baptist history and NT doctrine.

Courses for degrees may be taken in residence at Newington, CT, USA, or in module courses around the USA, or by distant education videos (limited number).

For more information, contact the Dean, Dr. Thomas M. Strouse, at either of the following:

drtms_ebts@juno.com
1-(860) 667-6208
[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

EMERGING CHURCH HYPOCRISY

September 10, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

The following is excerpted from What Is the Emerging Church? which is available from Way of Life Literature.
____________________

There is a great hypocrisy that permeates emerging church writings.

They denounce dogmatism in the most dogmatic terms!

They reject judgmentalism in the most judgmental terms, having nothing to say of fundamentalist Christianity except ridicule and denunciation.

They reject traditional patterns of Bible “spirituality,” such as daily devotions, as dull and legalistically obligatory, but they accept the most stringent forms of Catholic “spirituality,” such as lectio divina and keeping “the hours” and monasticism, as exciting and life-giving.

And they claim to be “Red Letter Christians,” when in reality they don’t keep the commands Christ gave in the Gospels.

Tony Campolo says:

“By calling ourselves Red-Letter Christians, we are alluding to the fact that in several versions of the New Testament, the words of Jesus are printed in red. In adopting this name, we are saying that we are committed to living out the things that He said. Of course, the message in those red-lettered verses is radical, to say the least. If you don’t believe me, read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). ... Figuring out just how to relate those radical red letters in the Bible to the complex issues in the modern world will be difficult, but that’s what we’ll try to do” (“Red Letter Christian,” Oct. 25, 2007, http://livingintentionally.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/red-letter-christian/).

Jim Wallis of Sojourners says the same thing.

“In Matthew 5, 6, and 7, Jesus offers his Sermon on the Mount, which serves as the manifesto of his new order, the Magna Carta of the new age, the constitution of the kingdom” (The Great Awakening, p. 62).

But Campolo, Wallis, and other emergents are very selective in their obedience to the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, the Sermon on the Mount clearly refutes emerging church theology.

Christ warned against breaking even the least of God’s commandments (Mat. 5:19). This is in contrast to the emerging church’s position that only the “cardinal” doctrines are of great significance.

Christ frequently warned about hell fire (Mat. 5:22, 29-30), but this is a subject that emergents grossly neglect and even blatantly deny.

Christ warned about imprisonment for disobedience to God’s Word (Mat. 5:25-26), but emergents do not take this literally.

Christ warned strongly against divorce and remarriage (Mat. 5:31-32). In contrast we have the emerging church’s tendency to downplay the importance of strict morality. The emerging church is even hesitant to condemn homosexuality, but if it is adultery in God’s eyes for a man to divorce his wife and marry another woman, except for fornication, how much more is it immoral for a man to sleep with a man or a woman with a woman?

Christ taught against laying up treasures on earth (Mat. 6:19-21), yet Campolo and most other emergents and their churches and organizations have a great many treasures on earth. In an interview with Campolo in February 2008 at the New Baptist Covenant Celebration in Atlanta, Georgia, I asked him if he obeys the Lord’s command in the Sermon on the Mount to sell what you have and give alms. He admitted that he is something of a hypocrite in that area. He drives a nice car, lives in a nice house, has nice clothes, heaps of possessions, a retirement fund, etc. There are exceptions, but in general the emergents really don’t take this part of Christ’s Sermon all that seriously!

Christ taught the people to be heavenly-minded (Mat. 6:19-21), but the emerging church ridicules this mindset and instructs us to be earthly-minded.

Christ said to take no thought about food or clothing (Mat. 6:25, 31), but the emerging church typically takes plenty of thought about this.

Christ said to take no thought for tomorrow (Mat. 6:34), but the emerging church makes detailed plans.

Christ said not to give holy things to dogs (Mat. 7:6), but the emerging church doesn’t want to believe that there is a great difference between holy and unholy and does not believe in dividing people into groups and calling some dogs, disliking “judgmentalism” and “labeling.”

Christ taught that men are evil (Mat. 7:11), but the emerging church thinks that this is not necessarily true.

Christ taught that the way of salvation is narrow and few are saved (Mat. 7:13-14), but the emerging church claims that the way of salvation is broad and many might be saved, even if they don’t have personal faith in Jesus.

Christ taught that we should be on the outlook for false teachers (Mat. 7:15), but the emerging church claims that we should relax and not be uptight about doctrine and error.

Prominently in His teaching on the kingdom of God, Christ commanded men to repent of their sin. “From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mat. 4:17). Yet the emerging church is exceedingly weak about the business of repentance and is not even certain that homosexuals have anything to repent of!

Further, the Sermon on the Mount reminds us that Christ was a bold and dogmatic preacher, whereas the emerging church doesn’t like such preaching, preferring story-telling and “sharing.”

Thus, this idea that we should be Red Letter Christians is not consistently followed even by its own proponents. The Gospels do not present a Christ that looks anything like the emerging church.

The hypocrisy within the emerging church is amazing to behold.
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This is excerpted from What Is the Emerging Church? which is available from Way of Life Literature.

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

EAT THE MEAT, SPIT OUT THE BONES

September 9, 2008 (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) -

There are a lot of clever-sounding sayings that make the rounds among Christians, and one of these is “eat the meat, and spit out the bones.” Many have written to exhort me to do this, and they mean that I shouldn’t worry so much about exposing error. They wonder why I can’t just “eat the meat, and spit out the bones.”

There is a bit of truth to this saying, in that God’s people are always to exercise biblical discernment when hearing sermons or reading Christian books. We are to “prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

But the Bible also twice warns that “a little leaven leaventh the whole lump” (1 Cor. 5:7; Gal. 5:9) and exhorts us to mark and avoid those who teach doctrine contrary to that which we have learned in Scripture (Rom. 16:17). There is great danger in eating the wrong spiritual meat!

What if the meat is rotten or poisoned or hasn’t been cooked or properly stored? The U.S. government regulates how restaurants must cook meat, because undercooked meat is dangerous. When I worked in a restaurant in my youth, I was taught to handle the meat very carefully and to store it properly, because it spoils easily. If you eat meat that is spoiled or poisoned or undercooked, even if you spit out the bones, you will be in trouble. The writings of men like Brian McLaren and Richard Foster and Chuck Colson and Rick Warren and C. S. Lewis contain plenty of rotten meat. Those who advise God’s people to “eat the meat, and spit out the bones,” must explain to us how they know that this “meat” is safe.

Also, what if the bones have splinters or what if you get a bone stuck in your throat? When I was growing up in Florida, I went fishing often with my dad and granddad, and they were careful about which fish they kept and which they threw away, because some had too many bones to eat safely. And Mom was very careful to keep an eye on us when we were eating fish because of the ever-present danger of getting a bone stuck in our throats. This happened from time to time anyway, and it was a very unpleasant thing and, in fact, can be fatal. Likewise, very few Christians are able to wade through sermons or books by compromising preachers on their own and expertly spit out all of the “bones” of error. One of the reasons why so many fundamental Baptists are becoming New Evangelical is because they are reading New Evangelical books and blogs and listening to New Evangelical sermons.

And what if you don’t know the difference between meat and bones? A toddler doesn’t know the difference, and if it tries to eat meat and spit out bones, it will quickly be in trouble. Likewise, the average Christian today is far too biblically ignorant and carnal to distinguish properly between truth and cleverly presented error.

My friends, beware of clever sayings that aren’t supported by Scripture.

We live in a shallow, apostate, carnal age, and it behooves us to study the Bible diligently and to think biblically!!!!

One pastor who read this article replied:

“The problem I have with this statement is that sometimes the truth is hard to swallow, so it is spit out and called ‘bones.’ The ‘eat the meat, spit out the bones’ mentality is pretty much the same as Burger King’s ‘Have it your way’ mentality. Sinful man is always prone to create a hybrid Christianity that suits his tastes and preconceived notions about what he wants God to be.”

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist Information Service, an e-mail listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY IS NOT DEVOTIONAL BUT IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR. This material is sent only to those who personally subscribe to the list. If somehow you have subscribed unintentionally, following are the instructions for removal. The Fundamental Baptist Information Service mailing list is automated. To SUBSCRIBE or to UNSUBSCRIBE or to CHANGE ADDRESSES or to RE-SUBSCRIBE UNDER A NEW ADDRESS, go to http://www.wayoflife.org/fbis/subscribe.html. If you have any trouble with this, please let us know. And please be patient with us. We do not ignore any unsubscribe request, but we cannot always get to your request immediately as each person involved with maintaining the Way of Life web site does this only on a very part time basis and is busy with many other major activities, such as pastoring and missionary work. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and those who use the materials are expected to participate (Galatians 6:6) if they can. Some of the articles are from O Timothy magazine, which is in its 25th year of publication. Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site: http://wayoflife.org/catalog/catalog.htm Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061. 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org. We do not solicit funds from those who do not agree with our preaching and who are not helped by these publications, but from those who are. OFFERINGS can be made at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/offering.html. PAYPAL offerings can be made to https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=dcloud%40wayoflife.org]

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Over the past few years a number of people have asked me about Greater Joy Ministries operated by Michael and Debi Pearl, and as I have traveled on preaching trips I have found that many families in good fundamental Baptist churches are using their materials.
The following is a report on my investigation into this ministry. I have read two of Michael’s books as well as issues of No Great Joy magazine, and I have looked carefully through the material available at their web site.

There is much to praise in Greater Joy Ministries. The Pearl’s book To Train up a Child contains many very helpful things (though it often goes beyond clear biblical precepts and enters into a legalistic “Pearlosophy,” which is presented as dogmatically as the parts that are supported directly by Scripture, such as some of his teaching about education and other things that almost require an Amish-like lifestyle). The Pearls rightly avoid “Christian” psychology. They promote godly husband-wife relationships. They teach parents how to reach the child’s heart rather than enforcing mere externals. They focus on how crucial it is for the parents to live what they preach, to avoid hypocrisy. They teach a biblical approach to corporal punishment without apology. They teach parents how to jealously and carefully protect their children from evil influences. They give some excellent and timely warnings about the danger of the average church youth group that throws young people together in a secular fashion and thus allows strong but worldly personalities to corrupt heretofore innocent youth (which is exactly what happened to me as I grew up in a Southern Baptist congregation). They are clear about parental responsibility, that the “buck stops here” with Christian parents in regard to child training.

I am sure that the Pearls are genuine salt-of-the-earth people who try to practice what they preach, but I want to mention some serious errors that those who use their materials should be aware of.

THE ERROR OF EXALTING THE FAMILY BEYOND A SCRIPTURAL BOUND AND RELEGATING THE CHURCH TO A LESSER REALM OF IMPORTANCE

No Greater Joy has some excellent practical teaching on the family, but I do not believe that it is presented within a scriptural balance and framework in regard to the church. In the topics listed at the No Greater Joy web site, “The Church” is glaringly absent. When Michael Pearl speaks about the church it is almost always in a negative context.

While the family is the foundational unit in the church and society and is very, very important, I believe it is possible to turn the family into an idol, when it is emphasized beyond biblical bounds and when it becomes an end unto itself.

I don’t believe the Pearls themselves have made an idol of the home, but I believe that many associated with the home schooling movement have, and the Pearls should do more to resist this error. Debi Pearl wisely says: “Do not get caught up in pouring your life into a good cause--even the rearing of a large family. Pour your life into knowing and serving the Savior and desiring that every life you touch be touched with the knowledge of forgiveness in the shed blood of Jesus. We are called to be soldiers in the army of the living God. Raising up young new recruits is exciting” (To Train up a Child, fifteenth printing, 2004, p. 119).

The problem is that this is only a brief postscript in their book on child training, and it is not something that seems to be properly emphasized. In the dozens of articles I have read by the Pearls, this is the only time I have seen that type of emphasis. The Pearls have 150,000 on their mailing list and their book To Train up a Child has sold more than 400,000 copies. They therefore have a vast influence among home schoolers.



Christ’s Great Commission is to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth and to plant churches that are discipleship centers, the pillar and ground of the truth, where believers are trained in the service of God and in the work of world evangelism (Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:17; Luke 24:46-48; Acts 1:8). This is what we see lived out in the book of Acts and it is a program that is to be perpetuated until Christ returns.

Parents who are committed to Christ will have this Great Commission before them at all times as they raise their children.

To raise wholesome, talented, law-abiding, hard-working citizens is not enough, because it falls short of what Christ commanded.

I believe home schooling is by far the best way to educate children. That is how our own children were educated, but within some home schooling circles there is neglect toward and misunderstanding of the New Testament church.

For example, on my last preaching trip to Australia I met some godly families in one of the churches. The children play various musical instruments; they have a wide variety of interests and talents; they have serious goals in life; they are getting a wonderful education; they are separated from the wicked things of the world. There is nothing wrong with any of this, of course. It is a great blessing to see close and godly families in this wicked age. The problem is with the emphasis and balance. These families do not place the church and the Great Commission in a Scriptural priority. They attend services only once service a week, forsaking the other services for “family time,” in direct contradiction to Acts 2:42 and Hebrews 10:25. They brazenly neglected the special services that the church was hosting and thus gained no benefit from the visiting preacher. Their lives could have been challenged by that preaching, but other things were more important to them.

These parents are teaching their children many good things, but they are wrong in teaching them to slight the church.

My friends, the Bible plainly states that it is the church that is the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15). Why doesn’t it say that the home is the pillar and ground of the truth? And this is not some vague “universal” church. The context is a scripturally organized assembly that has pastors and deacons (1 Tim. 3:1-14). The believer’s service to the Lord is to be in and through such a church, in submission to God-ordained pastors and elders (1 Thessalonians 5:12-13; Hebrews 13:7, 17).

Any family that is not in proper relationship with and submission to God-ordained church authority is not in the will of God (unless, of course, no such church exists in the area). I say this on the authority of the Scriptures. I would ask such a family, “Who has the rule over you?” If the reply is, “God does,” I would rejoin that God Himself says that church elders are to have the rule over us (Heb. 13:17), not as lords over us but as under-shepherds who must, in turn, give account to the Great Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:1-4).

I understand all too well that pastoral authority has been abused at times and that this is an hour of great compromise in churches, but that is no excuse to reject it. Husbands and fathers have abused their authority at least as much as pastors have abused theirs, but that does not mean that we are free to reject them. The Lord Jesus Christ said, “I will build my church” (Mat. 16:18). It is His plan and program, and it is not to be despised.

There is nothing wrong with a “house church” as such, if that church is scripturally organized, but a loose knit gathering in a home is not necessarily a church, and a father of a family is not a pastor unless he is qualified and called and ordained (1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-11; Acts 14:23).

Paul wrote to Titus and informed him that he was to “set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city” (Titus 1:5). The thing that was wanting, or lacking, was for the new converts to be organized into proper New Testament assemblies, and this required the ordination of qualified, God-called elders (Titus 1:6-16).

This is the pattern that we see in the first missionary journey. After Paul and Barnabas had preached in many places, they returned to each place and organized the new groups of believers into churches and ordained elders in each one (Acts 14:23).

A home Bible study, a home prayer meeting, a loose knit group of home schoolers, is not in itself a proper New Testament church and has no scriptural authority to replace such a church.

If Michael Pearl agrees with us on the importance of the New Testament church, he should be very careful to preach about this, as it is an essential part of “all the counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). He should also speak out plainly against the practice of many today who neglect and discount the value of the house of God (1 Tim. 3:16). We would expect to see such a warning prominently given at his web site, since his ministry is attractive to such people.

Such teaching and warning is lacking, though. In fact, in his article “Sanctuary” (March 2005) he refers sympathetically to “several families” who have “traded church attendance for a DVD player,” and he does not explain that this is unscriptural.

Pearl complains that “church today is not a sanctuary from the world nor is it a ‘holy’ place.”

While I agree that too many churches are worldly from top to bottom, meaning that even the leaders and workers are worldly, it is equally true that a scriptural New Testament church will never be completely holy. If a church is reaching the world for Christ as it should, there will always be unsaved and newly saved people in attendance who are not very holy, to say the least. In fact, if we were to be honest with our own hearts, we would admit that there is plenty of unholiness in the most mature of saints, as even the apostle Paul lamented in regard to his own life. “For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not” (Rom. 7:18). And the apostle John added his Amen to this when he said, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:9).

The New Testament church can never be a complete sanctuary from the world or a perfectly holy place for the simple fact that it is made up of sinners who are in the business of reaching sinners. Paul referred to the unsaved who attended the meetings of the church at Corinth, and said nothing to discourage the church from having the unsaved in attendance but rather encouraged them to live in such a way that they would reach the unsaved for Christ (1 Cor. 14:23-25).

A church that is busy reaching the unsaved will not only have the unsaved in attendance at services and events but will have new believers in attendance, as well, and these will be far from “entirely sanctified” and separated from the world.

I remember when I was first saved and joined a fundamental Baptist church in central Florida. I was saved; I knew the Lord; I had truly repented; but I was still a mess! I still had hair down to my shoulders; I still smoked and listened to rock & roll and attended worldly movies. Yet the church members were so patient and kind to me, opening their homes to me, spending time with me, discipling me; and it was this that helped me to grow and to begin shedding the things of the flesh and the world and putting on Christ.

The man that led me to Jesus Christ had the same attitude. He was not ashamed to spend four or so days traveling with me, living with me, enduring my foul language and disgusting habits and vain arguments against the truth.

The apostolic churches that are described in the New Testament scriptures were far from sinlessly perfect. Consider the seven churches of Asia Minor addressed in Revelation 2-3. Most of these apostolic churches had serious problems. The church at Ephesus had left its first love. The church at Pergamos allowed false teachers in their midst, including the false doctrine of Balaam that was associated with idolatry and fornication. The church at Thyatira allowed a false prophetess to teach worldly heresies. The church at Sardis had a name that it lived but was dead. The church at Laodicea was so lukewarm that Christ warned them that He would spew them out of His mouth.

Consider the apostolic church at Corinth. This church was established by the apostle Paul himself, but it was a genuine mess! The members were carnal and divided (1 Cor. 1-3); they did not discipline even the most glaring sins (1 Cor. 5); they took one another to court (1 Cor. 6); they fellowshipped with idols (1 Cor. 10); they grossly misused the spiritual gifts (1 Cor. 14); they allowed false teachers in their midst, even those who preached false christs and gospels (2 Cor. 11:3-4) and denied the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:12).

The church at Philippi was an excellent church, but two women in the congregation were so at odds with one another that they had to be corrected by Paul in a public letter (Phil. 4:2).

The apostle Peter played the hypocrite and Paul had to rebuke him publicly (Gal. 2:11-14).

Even Paul and Barnabas had such a “sharp contention” that they could no longer work together (Acts 15:36-40).

None of this is an excuse to think that it does not matter what type of church we attend or how we live, but it is a fact of Christian living and church life that we must understand and learn to deal with.

This is not something that Michael Pearl preaches properly. In his article “Sanctuary” (March 2005) he does advise someone, “Don’t leave the church, anymore than a missionary would leave the field because there are sinners there,” but having read two of his books and dozens of his articles, I am convinced that the message to exchange the church for a DVD player and to look lightly upon one’s responsibility to the church is louder than the message to stay in the church and be a faithful, fruitful member thereof.

For more on this subject see “Seven Keys to Fruitful Church Membership” at http://www.wayoflife.org/fbns/sevenkeys.htm.

THE ERROR OF SINLESS PERFECTIONISM

The most grievous error that I found in No Greater Joy ministries is the heresy of sinless perfectionism or “entire” sanctification. We see this in the article “Living Parallel Lives in the Same Space” from the Jan.-Feb. 2005 issue of No Greater Joy.

The doctrine of perfectionism is first of all clear from what Michael Pearl plainly states. He has entitled his teaching “Sin No More” (p. 21).

He says the doctrine of sanctification does not consist of “principles for you to apply” (p. 11), meaning there is nothing to do to achieve sinless sanctification but to understand and accept one’s position in Christ.

He speaks of “the gospel of sanctification” (p. 11) and refers to the gospel of justification through grace as “half of the gospel” (p. 20). Yet the Bible nowhere refers to such a “gospel.” There is only one true gospel and that is gospel of the grace of Christ (Gal. 1:5-9). That one true gospel is defined by Paul as follows: “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4). This is the gospel that Paul preached, nothing more and nothing less. Notice that this gospel does not consist of sanctification, though it results in sanctification. Holiness and godly Christian living is an important doctrine of the New Testament, but it is not the gospel and it is very dangerous to use such terminology.

This reminds us of the Pentecostal “full gospel” or “four square gospel” terminology, which is just as unscriptural. To add anything to the gospel of the grace of Christ, whether it is tongues or healing or holy living or Spirit baptism, is to corrupt the gospel of grace alone by Christ alone through faith alone. Holy Christian living is not the gospel; it follows the gospel (Eph. 2:8-10; Phil. 1:27).

Pearl’s heresy of sinless perfectionism is perhaps why he is comfortable preaching in Assemblies of God congregations. He is scheduled to conduct a seminar at the First Assembly of God in Searcy, Arkansas, September 10, 2005.

Michael Pearl actually claims that he is living in sinless sanctification:

“WE SHOULD AND CAN SIN NO MORE! ... I have been preaching AND LIVING this gospel of sanctification for many years. It is not a theory. It is practical, Scriptural reality” (“Living Parallel Lives in the Same Space” No Greater Joy, Jan.-Feb. 2005, p. 21).

He says we should and can sin no more and in the same context claims that he has been “living this gospel of sanctification for many years.” The natural meaning of such words is that Michael Pearl has been living in complete, sinless victory for years. If this were true, it would mean that he has continually performed every biblical commandment and duty with a perfect heart.

The advertisement for Pearl’s Bible Study Series entitled “Sin No More” is as follows: “We receive many letters seeking advice. The source of most problems is personal sin, but you already know that. The big question is: ‘So how do I stop sinning?’ ... I assure you, God not only saves his children from the penalty of sin but he saves them from its power as well. YOU CAN STOP SINNING. If you want to know the Bible doctrine of Sanctification by Faith, you will hear THE COMPLETE GOSPEL in this series of messages by Michael Pearl."

My friends, any believer who would make a claim to be walking in entire sinless sanctification is either deceived or is a deceiver or he has significantly lowered the definition of sin.

Michael also says that his preaching has caused others to live in complete sanctification:

“I preach it in the prisons, and it works on men who have lived lives of total addiction and enslavement. They come unto me all the time, bubbling over with joy, and TELL ME THAT THEY ARE NOW FREE FROM ALL SIN. ... walking in complete victory over sin and self” (“Living Parallel Lives in the Same Space” No Greater Joy, Jan.-Feb. 2005, p. 21).

I can say on the authority of the Bible, that this is a deception (1 John 1:8-10).

Pearl’s doctrine of perfectionism is also clear from what he fails to mention. In the aforementioned issue of his magazine he is counseling a mother who wrote to him and described her struggle with sin. In his reply he did not mention any of the following important biblical truths:

There is nothing in Pearl’s reply about the indwelling sin nature or the struggle with the flesh that Paul describes so plainly (Rom. 7:18; Gal. 5:16-17).

There is nothing in Pearl’s reply about confessing sin and walking in the light (1 Jn. 1:6-10). (In fact, in his booklet “1 John 1:9--The Protestant Confessional,” he wrongly believes that this verse is about salvation, that one confesses sin for salvation but that to confess sins after salvation is wrong. The truth is that the context of the first chapter of 1 John plainly refers to “fellowship” and to how we “walk” or live (see 1 John 1:3, 6, 7), rather than to salvation.

There is nothing in Pearl’s reply about spiritual growth and progress, that sanctification is not a matter of a one-time experience but of gradual change (2 Pet. 3:18).

There is nothing in Pearl’s reply about the fact that the Christian life is described as an active warfare against sin and not merely believing in a position. There was nothing in his reply about yielding (Rom. 6:16), walking in (Gal. 5:16), putting off and putting on (Eph. 4:22-24), putting away (Eph. 4:31), mortifying (Col. 3:5), fleeing (2 Tim. 2:22), laying aside (Heb. 12:1; 1 Pet. 2:1)

False teaching is often characterized by the neglect of part of the truth, and this is the case here.

My maternal grandmother was a very godly woman, a prayer warrior, a saint who prayed and fasted and saw serious answers to prayer (such as the dramatic conversion of her wayward “hippie” grandson David Cloud in 1973 at age 23). After I had been saved about a year and was struggling with many things in my new Christian life I visited my grandmother and asked her about sin in the believer’s life. I said, “Grandma, do you still have any problems with sin in your life?” She was probably the godliest person I knew at that time (that was before I met my wonderful wife!), the person I most looked up to spiritually. She was about 78 years old then, and I was hoping she would reply (as Michael Pearl teaches), “Well, Dave, I used to have some struggles with sin but that is long over, praise God! I am walking in sinlessness!” Instead, she replied: “Dave, I still have struggles with sin every day. I do still sin, though it grieves me and I look forward to that day when I will sin no more.”

That elderly saint expressed more solid biblical truth to me that day than you will find in all of Michael Pearl’s muddled teaching on sanctification.

I have written to Michael Pearl twice, but he has refused to reply to my questions and concerns. I did not ask for a long drawn out reply. I simply asked, “Do the following statements from your magazine truly reflect your doctrine? Do you live sinlessly?”

A simple “yes” or “no” would have sufficed.

My friends, the error with Michael Pearl’s ministry is subtle but I believe it is dangerous.

In the October 2007 edition of No Greater Joy, two years after I published my article, Pearl finally addressed my concerns, but in doing so he only proved that he is duplicitous. I was very sad when I read his reply, because it demonstrated a serious level of dishonesty, and I am pretty sure that dishonesty is not a reflection of sinless living!

First, he was duplicitous in not giving his readers my name and telling them where they could read my report about him. He only identified me as “my accuser.” On the other hand, I gave exact quotes from Pearl’s writings and told my readers where they could check my statements.

Second, he was duplicitous in not telling his readers that I tried to communicate with him personally TWO TIMES and that he refused to answer. I did not ask for a long drawn out reply. I simply asked: “Do the following statements from your magazine truly reflect your doctrine? Do you live sinlessly?” I was trying to make sure that I had not misunderstood the man, but he didn’t have the courtesy to answer me. He could have taken a moment to answer me personally or could have instructed his secretary or someone else to answer me, but he did not. This is a very important fact that he hid from his readers.

Third, he was duplicitous in not telling his readers that I prefaced my report by saying that there is much to praise in Greater Joy Ministries, that they have some excellent practical teaching on the family (I described eight of these in particular), and that “I am sure that the Pearls are genuine salt-of-the-earth people who try to practice what they preach.” Those are not the words of someone who is out to slander a man by taking a cheap shot at him, but that is exactly how Pearl tried to characterize me.

Fourth, he was duplicitous in saying: “I have never said I am sinless.”

In “Living Parallel Lives in the Same Space,” No Greater Joy, Jan.-Feb. 2005, Pearl says: “WE SHOULD AND CAN SIN NO MORE! ... I have been preaching AND LIVING this gospel of sanctification for many years.”

If that is not a statement of sinless living, I don’t know what it is.

Further, in the same article Pearl claims that prisoners that he ministers to “come to me all the time, bubbling over with joy, and tell me that they are now FREE FROM ALL SIN” (p. 21).

If those words don’t mean what they appear to mean, he should admit that he has been sloppy in his published statements and should correct them and thank me for pointing out this matter.

Fifth, he was duplicitous in making the following claim: “I have never used the terms ‘sinless perfection’ or ‘entire sanctification,’ nor have I taught anything that is remotely similar. All one need do is search the web, or a good church history book, to determine the specifics of that heresy in history. The doctrine of sinless perfection is the belief that believers can have a second work of grace whereby the old nature is eradicated, making it impossible for them to sin again. There is nothing in my teaching that is similar in any way.”

I never said that he taught a second work of grace or the eradication of the sin nature, but regardless of what terms he uses, he does teach sinless perfection and I proved this from his own writings. His pretty little smokescreen changes nothing.

Sixth, Pearl was duplicitous in saying: “Either he has not familiarized himself with my teaching, or he has another agenda that provokes him to deliberately slander my Biblical doctrine. What could prompt a man to attack a ministry on such false premises?”

Here he gives his readers the impression that I am either a careless and ignorant man or a wicked one who is simply out to hurt him. But that I have familiarized myself with his teaching is evident from my article in the quotes I gave from his writings, and to speak the truth about a man is NOT slander. There is nothing slanderous or false about my premise.

Seventh, Pearl was duplicitous in saying: “My accuser admits in his diatribe against me that it is the name of the series that led him to conclude that I taught the old Salvation Army doctrine of ‘sinless perfection.’”

I “admit” no such thing. It was his own statements in print that caused me to understand that he teaches a form of sinless perfection, and I quoted those statements. Further, I did not say anything about the Salvation Army doctrine.

Eighth, Pearl was duplicitous in saying: “My teaching on ceasing to sin is exactly what Baptists and other Bible-believing Christians have taught for 1900 years.”

In fact, his teaching is not exactly what Baptists have taught for 1900 years. I have a large private library on Baptist history and Pearl’s statement is simply ridiculous. There has never been “one standard Baptist doctrine” on sanctification, but most Baptists have not taught that the believer can live a sinless life. We agree that Pearl’s teaching is not new and we never said that it is, but it is heretical.

Ninth, Pearl was duplicitous in saying: “If my material is read and understood, the only thing you could accuse me of is helping people to stop sinning. So what is the problem? The women whose husbands have ceased pornography or adultery are not complaining about their husbands listening to the series ‘Sin No More.’ ... It is people who are comfortable with the modern belief and practice that we are all slaves to sin and cannot overcome temptations in this life, who are hasty to draw false conclusions about what I teach, simply based on the title of an audio message.”

This makes it sound as if I am opposed to holy living and do not believe in victory over the flesh, which is a lie. My preaching has helped many of God’s people to have victory in Christ. I do not believe that the believer has to be a slave to sin or that he is unable to overcome temptation, but that is not the same as claiming that he can stop sinning and be free from all sin. Pearl is using the old bait and switch tactic here.

THE ERROR THAT JESUS BECAME A SINNER

In the articles entitled “God Made Jesus to Be Sin” and “Imputed Righteousness” Michael Pearl teaches the heresy that Jesus became a sinner. Consider the following statements:

“God was willing to see Jesus as a sinner that He might be permitted to see us as righteousness. Jesus became what we are that we might become what He is. By the imputing act of God, HE BECAME A SINFUL SON OF MAN so we could become sinless sons of God. It was a trade. He traded His righteousness for our sin” (Pearl, “God Made Jesus to be Sin”).

“The God who ‘calleth those things which be not as though they were’ called His Son something He wasn’t--A SINNER--so that He could call us something we are not--righteous” (Pearl, “God Made Jesus to be Sin”).

“Jesus became what we are, A SINNER--no, more than that, He became sin itself, “...that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” God was willing to see Jesus as a sinner, so He could see us as righteousness. Jesus became what we are, so we can become what he is. HE BECAME A SINFUL SON OF MAN, so we could become sinless sons of God” (Pearl, “Imputed Righteousness”).

It is blessedly true that the Lord Jesus bore man’s sin on the cross and He died to pay the price for our sin, but He was never a sinner and He never became a sinful son of man.

2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin...” Thus, though Jesus was made to be sin in our place, he still knew no sin. When Christ bore our sin, He did not do so by actually becoming a sinner; rather, He bore our sin in that God put that sin to His account and He bled and died to satisfy the Law’s requirement. Likewise, when a sinner puts his faith in Christ God applies Christ’s righteousness to that sinner’s account and declares him righteous. This is the doctrine of justification.

Note the following comments on 2 Corinthians 5:21 which give the sound view of Christ’s atonement:

“He hath made him to be sin; not made him a sinner, but a sin-offering, a sacrifice for sin. Made; that is, ordained a sacrifice to expiate sin, and to bear the punishment due to sinners” (William Burkitt).

“He was made sin; not a sinner, but sin, that is, a sin-offering, a sacrifice for sin” (Matthew Henry).

“A sinner, not in himself, but by imputation of the guilt of all our sins to him” (Geneva Bible).

“... not a sinful person, which would be untrue, and would require in the antithesis ‘righteous men,’ not ‘righteousness’; but ‘sin,’ that is, the representative Sin-bearer (vicariously) of the aggregate sin of all men past, present, and future” (Jamieson, Fausset, Brown).

“... but now that this may appear to be only by imputation, and that none may conclude from hence that he was really and actually a sinner, or in himself so, it is said he was ‘made sin’; he did not become sin, or a sinner, through any sinful act of his own, but through his Father’s act of imputation, to which he agreed” (John Gill).

TESTIMONIES

I conclude with comments from readers who replied to me after reading the first edition of this article:

“I have just read your article about ‘A WARNING ABOUT MICHAEL PEARL’S NO GREATER JOY MINISTRY.’ I just wanted to write to you to provide a brief testimony and to further emphasize your warning regarding this subject. Please take full liberty to print this email.

“Approximately a year ago our church had the misfortune of losing at the time a dear member to the ‘Sinless Perfectionism’ preached by Michael Pearl. He was called to preach and was active in our church and outspoken against sin in people’s lives. Unfortunately his love for the Word of God and the Saviour was small in comparison for his love of man and vain doctrines.

“I want to illustrate the importance of folks following the leadership of the local pastor of your local New Testament Church. Our Pastor made every attempt to correct this individual on a number of occasions but the man’s heart had been stolen. He might have been saved except for his association with a friend of his from our sponsoring church who was feeding him lies along with the Michael Pearl heresy. He is now part of a cult and took a couple of families with him from our sponsoring church. I agree with you 100% that this is a very dangerous doctrine and exhort anyone who is reading his books to examine the doctrine carefully or to go one step further and just throw them out.”
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“Thank you for your helpful information regarding the Pearls and their Bible teaching. I am a pastor’s wife, and I have received their newsletters for several years and have also recommended their materials to others. I recently stumbled across a website that is hosted by their oldest daughter, Rebekah Pearl Anast, called ‘Dreaming Awake.’ Although Rebekah uses a penname (Ruby Archuletta, which she says comes from a movie) on the site, she also identifies herself within the site. The website is dedicated to recording her dreams, and she also categorizes them as ‘Assignment Dreams,’
‘Teaching Dreams,’ ‘War and Apocalyptic Dreams,’ etc. Although I have not seen any that are indecent to read about, they are very bizarre. ... You also pointed out that they tend to be negative about the church. There is another web site which is being started by Rebekah’s husband, Gabriel Anast, which he has billed as a ‘church’ being started on the internet.”
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“Bro. Cloud, I checked out Rebekah Pearl Anast’s website, www.dreaming-awake.com. At the very least, it is bizarre and very misleading. They record dreams that the family has had and they apply them to their lives Biblically just as the dreams that were told of in the Bible. I don't believe God works in dreams to tell his people how they should live or what they should do because we have the Holy Spirit and the Word for that. Not saying He couldn’t if He decides to but I don’t believe God uses dreams and visions today. I also checked out the online church that was mentioned, www.7xsunday.net. They don’t have the whole site built yet but they do have forums. And, as with any online forum, it is full of confusion and confused people bantering back and forth about ‘spiritual’ matters. I did not look at every thread but I had looked at enough to tell that, for the most part, people would not be edified or strengthened by this, only bewildered. Thanks for posting the warning. We have subscribed to No Greater Joy for a few years and have enjoyed some of the home schooling articles but it has bothered me for quite some time that Michael Pearl’s teaching is dangerous and, in some cases, heretical. After examining these other websites, I realized that we can’t try to ignore the bad while trying to glean the good because the bad will seep in some way or other. Satan is very clever and he will get to God’s people in any subtle way he can.”
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“Bro Cloud, thank you so much for your work for the Lord. Just a quick testimony about this article. I am in one of your supporting churches. It is a very strong church. Our pastor is great and preaches the Bible. About 5 years ago, the Pearl’s materials started circulating in our church. I have to admit that as a mother of five I eagerly read it all, often using their advice on child training. The Bible training CDs made it into the church bookroom and I decided to listen to the study of the book of Romans by Michael Pearl. After listening to it, my husband and I asked the pastor about it because he preached that a husband could have one wife at a time (not husband of one wife) and many other odd teachings that didn’t line up with our church or the Bible. The pastor agreed and eventually threw out all the Pearl things. To make a long story short, about 4 or 5 families have since left the church, all having their own excuses, but they have their home Bible studies and other ‘Pearl study things.’ These families were the type of families that you would think of being strong in the Lord. It was hard for me to see them leave. Since then, most of them have lost their standards, and all are going to different churches, but only on Sunday mornings and getting together Sunday nights for their private Bible studies. One other odd thing. My close friend went to one of his seminars on the teaching of Hebrews. She said that at the end Pearl turned off the taping and preached from the Bible on life before Adam and Eve, that there was another earth and that there is other life out there. And now she is convinced of it. Very weird. Thank you again for your work and your articles.”
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“What a wonderful and accurate article! I pastor a small church in Nashua, NH, and I have seen numerous of these ‘good families’ (and I agree with you they are good families that love the Lord and their family) that minimize the local church greatly. The local church is seen as secondary to the family, and yes they do view the family unit as ‘the pillar and ground of the truth.’ We have lost some families over this, because I do believe the Bible’s teaching on the local church and that it is ‘the pillar and ground of the truth’ and that the Great Commission was given to the Lord’s churches.”

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