How Dare You!

Today an acquaintance of mine came to me with an expression of both excitement and pride. "Guess what!?" she said. "I'm getting baptized this Sunday!" My heart sank. "Baptized?" I asked. Over the next few minutes she rambled on about how she grew up catholic, but was now attending a baptist church. She said, "They told me that I just needed to pray and invite Jesus into my life. I don't remember what they called it, we didn't do this in the Catholic church."

"The Sinner's Prayer?" I asked.

"Yes! That was it!" After which came more complete ignorance of the gospel. No mention what-so-ever of repentance. My heart was breaking. She had no grasp of the gospel of Jesus Christ. No concept of what it meant to be saved, and no answer as to why she was going to be baptized. These people had taken this girl, who knew she needed God, and convinced her that if she merely repeated a human concocted saiance, she would "have God in her life" and as long as she prayed every day, she would be saved. She did what they said. She "prayed the sinner's prayer." In her mind, she was saved.

I asked her to meet me for dinner. For hours we sat and discussed what she did, why she did it, what she didn't do, what baptism means, why we are commanded to do it, what the Gospel of Christ is, who Christ is, what He did, why it was necessary. I cannot discern if my level of anger with the people she had "prayed with" was righteous or sinful. This precious girl was being tossed into the pits of Hell by professing Christians.

To the indignant reader: Who made you higher than God? Who gave you the authority to pick and choose which portion of scripture is important, and which are optional? Jesus is not a BandAid to "make our lives more fulfilled." Where is the explanation of Romans 3:23 in this? "For all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God." Where was the glorious hope, that "God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8)

Eph 2:4-9 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

Rom 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Where in Scripture do you find "the sinner's prayer?" Where does anyone "ask Jesus into their life?" I exhort you, do not preach a partial or padded gospel. Do not make the beautiful gift of salvation into a 3-step program to "your best life now."

Mat 23:15 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves."

There is no gospel aside from the gospel of Jesus Christ. In John 14:6 Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by Me." No works. No "prayers." No rules. Only Jesus.

"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel." Mark 1:15


Fallen, Fallen, Fallen! - Paul Washer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qcMdPS5I-8

This will make your day!

If you are down, or just want to smile...this will do it for you! Watch it at least once a day and your body will be healthy with laughter! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-NOZU2iPA8

The Great Divorce

The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis

Some of my favorite quotes from chapter 9:

Page 69

’Son,’ he said, ‘ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…But ye can get some likeness of it if ye say that both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective. Not only this valley but all their earthly past will have been Heaven to those who are saved. Not only the twilight in that town, but all their life on Earth too, will then be seen by the damned to have been Hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.’

This is my favorite:

Page 73 & 74

‘There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself…as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist! There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. Man! Ye see it in smaller matters. Did ye never know a lover of books that with all his first editions and signed copies had lost the power to read them? Or an organizer of charities that had lost all love for the poor? It is the subtlest of all the snares.’

Page 75

’There are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”’