Part I.   Distractions and Confusion Weaken Doctrine

And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful.  (Mark 4:19)

Right doctrine will produce right living.  However, even if we are “taught right” often we learn by example and watching others, and will act wrong if what we see and what we hear don’t match.   The interpretation is the sheep are just then a bunch of rebels, but I think part of the issue is the sheep are confused.  MY sheep hear my voice says Jesus.  However, there are much louder voices screaming out for our attention.  These can come from the constant blaring of media and liberal psychology and the medical community and Hollywood.   However, in the church house today we can hear conflicting messages as well because even if we might be hearing the truth, what we see often doesn’t add up.

Hence even right doctrine might not be enough today to turn this country around.   We can yell louder and try and fleece more out of the sheep.  Or we can look more at our message and ask if there is something we are missing.   Some of the message is lost from interference from the louder distractions around us and the affairs of this world.  Many hear a great message that would be life changing to the saint of 100 years ago, but the seed that was planted is soon uprooted by the birds and buzzards of the land, or the bills and affairs of this life, or even the entertainment today.

The typical American Church goer spends an hour and a half listening to solid preaching a week but spends 10 times that surfing the internet, on Facebook, on CNN or TimeWarner news, or ESPN.    And that is the “good Christians”.    Many are also adding a steady diet of HBO, Cinemax, internet porn, and MTV.   The best deacons in Calgary that are thinking about the Flames of hell during the 12pm church service are thinking about their Calgary Flames Game 7 playoff game faceoff at 2pm when church is over.  When the buzzer rings, soon many a man may find that the football  flock of birds of the Falcons, Eagles, or Cardinals or a swarm of Hornets may immediately steal our hearts and affections.    For others, we can be so beat down by our faults and failures that we hear the truth but get stuck in unbelief.

Apathy and fear are other obstacles that hinder the truth from becoming action.  We might know what is right, but the power to do right, and knowing how to do right are areas we as a whole are missing the mark on.  A lot of us are like me.  We honestly believe we know the answers for America and our families in only someone would ask us.  We know what is right, but we are discouraged and overwhelmed and have no idea how to dig ourselves out of the hole we are trapped in.  Especially when this hole had been dug and dug and dug for the past 100 years and we simply fell in and got stuck.    We look up and plead for someone to send us a rope, and instead the typical christian brother comes over and dumps more dirt on us.  And if we can ever get out of that pit, the brethren cry out “unclean! unclean!” and refuse to share any soap.

Part II.  False Converts — Turning from Goat herding to Good Shepherding

Across the board in Christianity today, there is something seriously and radically wrong regardless if we are told what to do until the Preacher is blue in the face.  The church of today seems to want to take the credit for the few “we save” but we hide from the responsibility of those that got away.  I will bring up a restaurant example later in this section, but if a restaurant is going under from lack of business, you can either address things with management or yell at the customers for not coming back.  In church terms we can harp more on the sheep or we can see if there are areas that the under-shepherds are missing or weak in.

I think there are serious problems with the “sheep” today.  A conviction of many preachers of the past 50 years have been the reason is mostly due to false converts.   This truth might be responsible for 90% of the problems but is not all-inclusive.  However, if the majority of the church is lost, before the un-churched of America can wake up, the church needs to be awakened.

This is what I believe from experiencing 12 years of every type of Christianity in America and seeing the same results no matter where I go.  This has been also a conviction of men like AW Tozer and Ray Comfort and Leonard Ravenhill who have shown false conversions to be a sad reality.  I am not attacking the “church”.  I am saying let’s stop beating our head against the wall wondering why despite truth being declared at a level never seen before in the last 2000 years, and information available and books written that have deep revelations from God never before known,  America continues on it’s path to destruction.  The country would wake up if the churches were aflame.   You can’t do much with an almost entire country of churches who are content where they are and think it is perfectly ok to let a lost and dying world go unwarned.   The wonderful world of Disney is more real to us than the horrible flames of Hell.

Where we are at is I believe the church then today, naturally caters to the “natural” man.  The unconverted gets pampered and praised and promoted and the true sheep feels conflicted and sees something amiss.  But the churches must defend the majority of givers or go under, so the typical church prefers the outward conformist, one who can’t interpret the bible for himself.  I have heard it said that as you grow in Christ you die to self.  It is a gradual process and something that is dead rots.  After 4 days, “he stinketh”.   If you are truly saved, you will be unable to hide in church.  You will be backslid and try to sing a hymn and nothing will come out because you know your heart is cold.  You will try and fake a smile but  your countenance will give it away.  You will try and spray the cologne all over, but the stink always comes through if anyone gets close enough.

Artificial trees look good and you don’t have to waste time vacuuming needles.   You don’t have to prune them, pick them, plant them, or protect them from insects and termites.  There is much less maintenance involved with raising a herd of lemmings that blindly follow each other of the cliff of destruction.

I addressed a lot of these issues where the majority of the sheep in the past 100 years are more likely false converts, whom the Bible call goats.   Jeremiah 23:1 says Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD.   The church does that by turning the shepherds of today into goat herders.

There needs to be a radical change in how we reach sinners and then we can address how we treat the saints.    We need to stop creating goat-friendly special events that cater to the emotions, and get back to the Jesus exalting, holiness emphasizing messages the great awakening used to arouse the conscience.  Then we can stop trying to entertain and coddle the “converts” and focus now on feeding the flock of God.   I love the Christmas programs.  I love seeing my boys sing in a school play.   But we need to honestly evaluate that this is not what saved folks in the 1800’s.  I believe these shows and events are getting more impressive across the board.  The websites are now 1st class, the lighting and sound are state of the art, the art work is professional, the children act as good as any child on TV, the music sounds like it should be on Broadway, and the message at the end is polished and polite.  Is there a problem?

My question is if across the board everything is getting brighter and bigger, and the holiness of America is getting darker and darker, WHO must we be lifting up in our events?   Are people honestly thinking, “Wow, what a SAVIOR!” or “Wow, what an impressive church!  I don’t want to miss the next event!”  Maybe I seem mean, but my heart is heavy because I am convinced the church is busy following the crowds and will be in denial until Judgment Day that we left our first love.   I think we won’t change because we are too impressed with ourselves.   We are blinded by results  but we get hood-winked thinking God is a liar when Jesus said, “Woe when everyone speaks well of you!”  and “Marvel not if the world hates you.”   And we have gone too far to admit we might need to start listening to how Jesus spoke truth and yet most turned their backs on him saying, “this is too hard a saying!”.  We think we are more loving than Jesus.  “Please don’t turn away.  Jesus didn’t mean that.  Come back after the intermission!  There’s so much more to see!”

We currently as a whole have this “good cop/bad cop” dual-Jesus where we present to sinners the Good Cop, nice and friendly Jesus-loves-you, pray-and-ask-the-Lord-to-save-you Jesus-the-flu-shot easy no-cost version of the gospel.   Then we woo them and wow them and welcome them and wet them in baptism and work them at the next event.  And once they are “suckered in” we reveal the Bad Cop hard preaching that should have been used to awake their conscience.  Instead, they had “been there/ done that” and asked the Lord to save them, so now it is a “try harder and hope I  can please God” and they either get disillusioned and give up or they figure out how to fit in and spiritually contort themselves to a self-righteous man-made Christianity that gives them conditional peace until they hear “depart from me” on Judgment Day.   And we wonder why there is no change in the spiritual atmosphere in America.

There are two options for the church from what I can tell.  We can work harder and better train the goats to act like sheep.  Or we can get to the root and see why there are so many goats to begin with.  If you had a sheep farm, and put a male and female sheep in a pen, came back in a year, and found your 2 adult sheep and 50 baby goats, you might want to look into it.

Once the problem of the abundance of goats is addressed you can try and lead the sheep.  Many sheep are weary and worn out because I believe in the land of confusion we have out there, the goats do better fitting in than the sheep.   The devil leaves the goats alone.   They are his kids and his finest examples.   The sheep get discouraged and confused, but the goats only have to conform for the hour or two they are there.  The sheep are overwhelmed Jesus is coming back.   They are alarmed the hour is nigh.  They are not necessarily bit with a critical spirit if they bleat at the wolves that are closing in.  To the goats that is not a reality.  The sheep hate the sin that so easily besets us or the garbage that keeps coming out during times of pressure.  The goats don’t care about holiness and can hide the trash simply by eating it before it’s noticed.

A big failure of the church today is we do not disciple the sheep because undiscipled goats seem to do pretty good on their own.  And we do not allow the average Christian to find his unique God given gifts and bring them to the church nor train him how to find or use them.  Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered (Luke 11:52).   We need to encourage an atmosphere where we can ask hard questions and be willing to adjust if something doesn’t line up with the bible.  It is pride to think we are the measuring stick for how to interpret anything.  We just not be content if we can spoon feed the majority and start to think that someone who just might have a word from God that doesn’t line up with our preconceived thoughts is of the devil.  Maybe those with the truth are scared to speak up, yet see the same things those that have a voice share.  Maybe they are just so beat down and confused trying to reconcile our inner voice and inner convictions with what gets shoved down our throats by strong willed strong opinion slick smooth talkers!  Instead of spirit-led sheep enjoying the green pastures of Christianity, we tend to produce guilt-driven goats who know how to perform on Sunday but are back in the comfort zones of the world on Monday.

There is a multi-faceted explanation for the  lack of discipleship and it is unclear how much a strong discipleship adjustment would have.  Jesus said Go ye and teach all nations.  He did not say go into all the world and get a thousand decisions.  It wouldn’t hurt at any rate to address the discipleship.  It might not always expose the goats, after all, Judas was looked at as one of the best disciples.  However, the true convert will be fairly obvious as he will hate his sins and you will see God’s chastening hand and see a light bulb go off and you will see a genuine thirst for God.  To see real change takes time and a lot of effort on both parties.  First to address problems at the top first, discipleship does not produce instant results nor is it glamorous.  It can be a thankless endevour and feel like it is not producing.     You can grow an apple tree from an apple seed and spend years waiting for fruit, or you can go to the store, buy a bushel of apples and super glue them to your hemlock tree and post it on Instagram.

It is far more impressive and looks better on the resume to spend 3 weeks in Africa or 2 weeks in the Philippines or a month in Mexico and get 5,000 professions.  It is less impressive to stand up and say I met with Brother So-and-So for coffee for an hour a week for the past 2 years and we are excited that he is now helping out the Junior Boys in Sunday school.

Second, it is very difficult to get anyone to commit to anything today so it can be a challenge to disciple anyone in today’s zoom-zoom microwave high speed society.  There is a challenge even discipling the true sheep once you have one in the fold.  The vast information on the internet will have a new convert convinced he already knows 95% of what you are telling him.  The problem is it will take him 10 years of life to realize he can’t apply 85% of what he knows.  If you can read something like the “Bondage Breaker” and think you can be delivered from all your sins and struggles in an hour, why would you need to commit to 2 years of discipleship?  If you can go to the altar and answer “wilt thou be made whole?” and be promised to immediately come away a Super Saint, why get discipled?  It is too big a chunk for most and too high a cost.

Bad discipleship is often what is offered when it is given.  I am thankful for men who wanted to put the time in.  However, when I was at the mega Wesleyan church, I was first discipled by a former coke addict named Ken who seemed to have a passion for God and was excited to disciple me.  It started great.  I met him on several occasions until I started getting more excited than he was and he started rebuking me and told me that I thought I was Paul.  I was just passionate and I heard later that many will disciple you but if you start to pass them they don’t feel needed anymore and they distance themselves.  I might have been a bull in a china shop but I was respectful despite being over-zealous, so perhaps that is what happened.  Then I was discipled by their Men’s Pastor at Starbucks with my friend Tom O. until I poured out to this Pastor how hard it was witnessing to my catholic family.  He layed into me and screamed that the Pope is saved and how wicked I was for judging them.   Then a plumber turned Pastor poured truths into me and I preached my first sermon at his church.  He called to encourage me on a regular basis until he needed help selling his house and borrowed $3,000 from me.   He magically disappeared after that.

Then I found the Baptist circles and was discipled yet again.  I thought that this time would be wonderful because this time I found the truth.  It was here I learned what a Ruckmaninte was.  The discipleship was entirely all the odd doctrines of former drill sergeant turned Florida Pastor, Peter Ruckman, from salvation by works after the rapture, to the Gap theory, to a strange belief that fallen angels had relationships with women on earth creating a horde of demons before God sent the flood, to soul/spirit circumcision where once you are saved your spirit is cut from your body (which is a wonderful doctrine if taught right — however, it can be presented in such a way as it really doesn’t matter what the body does after you are saved).  I think true discipleship is not so much taught by what we know, and forcing your hobby horses on people, but is pouring your life in someone and spending time with them and learning by watching them live.  And let them watch you live through the problems of life.  But that means you must be living for God first and share not just what you know, but who you are.

I often find that we might have right observations, but form wrong conclusions.  I am not trying to throw out the baby with the spiritual bath water, but I think that you need to repair the foundations.  If you look around at the fruit and sin of America, it is not Hollywood or the porn industry or the casinos or the bars or Amherizer Busch of St. Louis Missouri or the NFL/NHL/MLB/NASCAAR/NBA/PGA or the rest of the American idols that have caused the problems in America.  These are the symptoms of a country bent on going it’s own way because the salt has lost it’s savor and is really good for nothing except as an example to the third world countries to put the fear of God back in their hearts.  We need to admit what we see in America is primarily a spiritual problem that can mostly be blamed on the churches of America for dropping the ball from the 1900’s on.

I had started a post a long time ago called Church Nightmares. I don’t think I ever finished it.  There was a show on Fox called Kitchen Nightmares.  Gordon Ramsey is one of the top chefs in the world and while arrogant at times, he always is honest when he visits restaurants who are desperate for help.  They call him in, he spends a couple days sampling the food, interviewing the staff, meeting the customers, attending a dinner service, and then he implements the needed changes.  He calls out the failures and bad habits of the management and if they are willing to change, he then implements renovations and new menus and new marketing strategies and better ordering equipment.   These restaurants turn around in a weeks’ time and a year later they usually are thriving –unless they went back to their old ways.

He never helps anyone who thinks everything is wonderful and he doesn’t hammer the waiters or servers.  When leadership faces their flaws and stops the illusion that the food is wonderful and things are great as is, they quickly move forward.  He addresses laziness of the management, filthy conditions, horrible tasting food by the gourmet executive chef, the head chef’s in denial thinking their cooking is amazing, sloppy practices, short-cuts, and so-on.  By being honest and having the courage to look those blinded by their pride right in the eye and say “WAKE UP!” he in a business sense does more in a week to a restaurant than 1,000 evangelists do in a church sense.  The church equivalent is instead to hammer the customer for his bad taste and lack of faith in the management.  NO!  Address the issues from the top down and you won’t have a church of scared Yes Men who kiss the butt of everyone above them so they don’t lose their position.

I am not saying don’t respect authority.  However, all I see is evangelists and Pastors preaching to the sheep when it might be more effective if the shepherds were addressed as well.  Maybe this happens in inner-staff meetings, but the impression is given that those in teh congregation are dumb and can’t think on their own, and that the problems of the world are because the sheep won’t listen.  We are trying to listen but the actions speak volumes too and the end result is the sheep don’t believe because they are so beat down.  I think of the military where you go through Boot Camp and lose confidence in yourself but gain confidence in your leaders.  They train you to go into battle and hence you only care about the other person and obey orders naturally.  This might go well in a church sense if we were sent off to war.  Instead the interpretation is often, you are not good enough, so you end up neither fighting nor knowing even how to defend yourself.  I would argue that today the church really isn’t interested in training warriors to go up and fight this world, the flesh, and devil.  They want instead to raise up a group of sheep they can control, sheep that are too scared to leave the pen, and too dumb to ask hard questions, and train them to keep the shepherds well fed and pampered.

God is about authority, but when the authority is feeding themselves and not the sheep, God always raised up a Nathan or an Isaiah or a Prophet who said THUS SAITH THE LORD.  When the authority creates a system where they are never wrong and can never be corrected and are accountable to no one, and present a Catholic infallibility, someone needs to be brave enough to say, THIS IS WRONG!  THIS IS NOT BIBLE!   Today if we want results, we need to not just have revival meetings behind the pulpit.  We need to start in the offices across America and a Nathan needs to say, THOU ART THE CHURCH!

I am not just pointing out the Baptists, though I think they are the closest to the truth so they are the only ones at this hour with any hope for changing America.  I have been in trouble everywhere I went because I felt I had to obey God rather than man, and I ran from the truth but ultimately I had to give it out.  I gave out truth at the Chapel’s Vintage’s College group about false conversions and the King James Bible and the head of that ministry told me to leave and never come back because I was causing division.   TRUTH divides!   I had a friend I won over to the Baptist churches after a year of working with him and he was soon in ministry and preaching with me.  However, he noticed the same issues in our church that I had noticed.  Instead of leadership meeting with us to examine if what we said was true, he was told by authority to separate from me. Why?  Because I was a threat.

I am not saying I am always right, but I feel i get truth from God and I run like Jonah sometimes for years.  I don’t have the courage or confidence to stand up and say I know all these things are from God.  I pray for truth, I have always had the position I would rather have the truth than to stay right, and I changed doctrines multiple times after prayerful examination.  When i was searching out the King James if it was indeed the actual word of God, I first was talked out of it twice from a friend who told me it was a cult.  He had me doubting there was only one word of God because he said, “How could it possibly be true if not one member of this church nor all the leaders believe the KJV?”  I said how he saved me from a cult.  Yet, I couldn’t escape the truth.  I journaled, “you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.  we are not seeing much “free” so maybe we aren’t seeing much truth.  perhaps the KJV is true.” I then reasoned that if the KJV was just one of many versions, what would be the harm in reading it exclusively for a month and seeing if I noticed a difference?  I prayerfully read it on my knees for a month, and after 30 days I knew that I knew that I knew I found the Word of God and that all the modern bibles were watered down counterfeits.  Nothing can change my mind now.

Right doctrine produces right living but only when we can spend time watching someone, anyone living right, consistently over time, and let them pour what they know back into us.  I am slow to say the church is at fault, but I am sober in my right mind when I can have the confidence God is speaking through me.  I don’t have easy solutions nor am I being mean to relay what God has shown me.  For example, the cities are a mess.   There is very weak church expansion into the city.  Any cities.  The churches are usually in the nice suburbs and the Pastors enjoy a life of air conditioning and golfing.  The evangelists head to town, spend the day fellowshipping or booking meetings or going to Wal Mart or sleeping instead of evangelizing the outside world.  Then they get behind the pulpit and rail on church members to go out and reach this lost world.  And they collect an offering and go on to the next church.  There are missionaries that preach only one service a week and basically enjoy a paid vacation week in and week out and they write home sharing how they are suffering for Jesus.  A friend from my sister-in-law’s bible college was sending out prayer letters for support as if he was on the field –while he still was in bible college.  I am no better.  I like the AC, I like the path of least resistance and I get in my comfort zone.  I am just saying we are trapped in our American Christianity and we are raising up financial support to bring our bad habits and our false man-centered doctrines to the world around us.  They should be sending the missionaries to us.

If you have a bus ministry, I am not knocking it.  But I think God showed me it would be a better investment of money and time if the people involved in the bus ministry did a church plant in the city instead of driving into the city and taking kids out of the city.  A church would be a place to reach men.  If you reach a man, you reach the family.  The cities need churches and the cities need men.  Again, this is not something that will bring impressive results that we can make ourselves sound spiritual over.  But church planting is God’s way.  Instead we over extend, over expand, and over take with one building, and then the bills are too high to expand.  And now we have cozy impressive structures all across the land, and now the sodomites will come and want to get married and they will sue the church that refuses them a wedding as well as your church baker for not making them a cake and the church apartment owner for not granting them a house and the church lawyer for not taking their case.  And they will move on to the next church.  And we are so attached to our buildings that we will justify making a way to make them happy.

I think the right light to view the church is that of a training facility.  It is not an entertainment complex, it is not supposed to be a museum, and it is not supposed to be a tourist attraction.  Christ is supposed to be lifted up.  He was humble, he was rejected, he was a man of sorrows.  It is good to be a good testimony, but a church needs to be known for it’s zeal and holiness and it needs to have a good reputation with them within and without.  The problem though is we also think that persecution and rejection is a bad thing and that we are doing something wrong if someone gets offended.  Jesus named names, called people on the carpet, and exposed the heart sins that were hidden.

The church also needs to preach doctrine over opinions and over our hobby horses.  That might be more the purpose of this blog, as I rarely get into expository preaching on these posts, and perhaps that would be more beneficial than me just sharing my heart.  I might be sharing truths that have been ingrained in me and perhaps they would be topics to pray over and perhaps preach as well.  However, I would fail to feed the flock if that was the only diet I gave them.  A heavy heavy dose of expository preaching, pain-staking cross-referencing, and pouring over old tested truths from before our version of Christianity took off would help grow members instead of clone Baptists.   These all need to be added to a regular diet of Biblical discipleship.

Here is an example from my own experience of how doctrines of men can really take you down a dark path.  The Bible teaches responsible giving, to owe no man anything, and to not go into debt.  Some pastors teach responsible giving.   A balanced teaching might be to pay your tithe first, pay your bills next, offerings after that, and live on the remainder.  However, what I see many times is that opinions and testimonies become doctrine.  One Pastor quit his job and gave all his money away and had his family live on cans of beans for a year and it comes across as you are not spiritual if you work your job to provide for your family.  I felt called to ministry, so by watching the way the men I looked up to regarding finances, I concluded that you give everything away if you ever want God to provide for you.  It was taught it was lack of faith to save for things.  It was taught to take a loan for a car for your family but not take out a loan for the church for a building project is wrong.  It was taught that if you are ordering out pizza and you have cable you should cancel the cable and start packing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead and give that money to the church or missions.  Yet these men didn’t give up their cable.  And they certainly did not switch to pb & j.

Yes we are over-indulgent in America.  However, it seems that what is good for the goose should be good for the gander.  The lay-people are expected to sacrifice and yet the churches of America are increased with goods and in need of nothing.  The churches in general, to use a Dr. Seuss term, are biggering and biggering.  And when you focus on biggering as your main goal, soon when you aren’t biggering you have to start compromising.    Or making sure the top priority is paying the bills and making sure that the full time workers understand that biggering is the top priority.  It is crazy, but you start to feel guilty you spend any money on yourself.

Some preach if you don’t have life insurance for your wife you are not taking care of her.  Others will say if you have a bank account you are not trusting God.  Where I got really hurt was in taking a statement of man as God’s promise.  It has almost been a mantra that you can’t out give God.  You hear testimonies about how people prayed for a car, and God found them a car.  Evangelist Sam Gipp prayed for $5,000 and someone brought him a check as a gift for $5,000.  The person expected to be thanked, but Sam seemed to say without emotion, “I was expecting this.”

This comes across as arrogant and that the ones not in full time ministry are made fools to have to work a full time job and put in to the church part time and it still feels like it is not enough.     The problem is it comes across that if you are in full time ministry you can expect everyone to take care of you.  And the rubber met the road for me when I lost my job for being a Christian.  I felt the church abandoned me and judged that it was sin. Instead of rallying us through this we were now expendable and lost our greatest use for the church.  All of a sudden we went from feeding the church of God to being the one in need.  The church is supposed to “return the favor” and that is what is promised if you tithe.  That is what you hear is that if you tithe, God will bless.  I tithed and lost my job and couldn’t find a new one.  I felt rejected by the church, abandoned by God, and overwhelmed because I still had obligations to the church from a financial perspective.   What made it even more difficult is the lost family that watched you give and give and give now stands back and mocks your God and your church when now you are the one in need.  We did have a church family give groceries, but so did my Catholic co-worker.  We did have someone from the church gives us $200 but my brother gave me $1000 —and the money he gave paid a bill to the church!

Despite major health obstacles in my family, very few jobs in my field, and being plagued with discouragement, we were made to feel like we were under the judgment of God and they didn’t want to get in the way of the lesson God was trying to teach us.

However, then you see circumstances where those in full time ministry have a need and then the church goes and takes up an offering.  We are human, and anyone can make mistakes, but when you feel like you were taken advantage of, you are made to feel like you are wicked if you express hurt.   Meaning the church has the right to do whatever they want to you, and if you complain you are wrong with God.   This happened to me in a financial sense, but across the board this happens with sexual abuse, rape, and maybe worse.

Car repairs are often free, medical bills are frequently free, meals are often paid for to those in ministry.  God wants us to take care of those who give their lives to serve God, but the problem I have is it comes across expected and demanded and there is little compassion when the “bread winners of the church” all of a sudden have their own famine.  If we are in full time secular work and lose our jobs, we are of the devil if we don’t get our needs met.  We deserve to starve.  If someone in full time service has a financial hardship, the secular folks are of the devil if they can’t meet his needs.

I don’t know where it is faith and where it is welfare entitlement.  Missionary Gerald Sutak will testify of walking into a supermarket with dimes in his pocket, fill up a shopping cart, and just when he goes to have to pay, someone comes and runs their card through and pays for their groceries.  A stranger he never met.  Gerald wasn’t being foolish, he believed God told him to go to that supermarket at that moment and God provided.  Gerald did not get up in the pulpit and preach that as doctrine, meaning that you have the right to do the same thing.  God might not necessarily do it the same way with similar circumstances, but often we think we who are not in full time ministry are missing the blessings of God because that is not happening to us.  The problem is if Gerald instead preached that in such a way that you feel you are not as spiritual as he is if that never happened to you.  Could God do that for me?  Did God do that for me?  Not exactly.  But because it is a personal relationship God can use other means and it doesn’t mean he loves Gerald more and me less.

I think our faith in America is weak, mine included.  We tend to feel we have to use doctrines of men to increase the offerings.   We preach mantras that might not be biblical.  Where is “you can’t outgive God in the Bible?”  The Bible says give and it shall be given you but the way we twist this is we turn Jesus into a good-luck charm and we are no better than the TV Preachers who promise an abundant life and all the amazing promises of God all for 4 easy payments of $29.95.  Visa and mastercard accepted, so call now, operators are standing by.

If God is not leading your giving, you can easily get in bondage.  The idea of give everything away you have to the church ignores the command that a man is to take care of his family.  Yet, some preachers will give testimonies that lift that sort of thing up and then you think that is what it means to be spiritual.  I have heard Preachers say if you don’t tithe your car will break down.   Our van that we purchased from the church broke down 3 times and I was tithing.   I have heard if you say bad things about the church your children might get sick or if you leave the church your family might die.  They use OT stories to prove that, for example the book of Ruth where Naomi’s family moves because of a famine and her sons all die.

What if God wanted them to move?  We seem to believe or teach that if God calls us to do something it will be smooth sailing and a bed of roses.  However, it seems when God is in it, you get rough waters and a crown of thorns.  The church teaches prosperity and joy and peace and you tend to experience following God rejection, persecution, tribulation, trials and temptations.  Did we do something wrong?  Not according to the Bible.  Yes according to the church.

The bible says to weep with them that weep.  We would be wise to stop knowing why things happen.  A tragedy happened at a church in Texas where a young child was run over and killed in the parking lot just after church.  That was horrible and the church was devastated   However, what would be the average Baptist response if they had skipped church that day and the child was hit in the mall parking lot?

I was tithing and giving to missions and I lost my job in September 2011, because I was back then bolder in my faith.  Was it persecution or chastisement?  I don’t know but God would be there either way.  The “church” response should never be that you must have done something wrong  and instead rush to help us through this.  The goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance, so even if later I find out it was chastisement, the benevolence of the church would help me keep my heart right.    Instead the church can add to your guilt and discouragement today in times of trouble.  The church in general shoots it’s wounded, shuns it’s weary, and slams it’s whiners.

It is good for church leadership to know the truth.  The “love part” is what is often lacking.  We need to better foster an environmental where we can feel hugged during trials instead of hanged, and pulled through instead of cast aside.

We need to think right with right doctrine.  That will produce right living when we put it into action.  However, with the need to think right, so is the need to examine the leadership to make sure the right thinking starts from the top down because we are watching desperately how to live for God when every voice is yelling at us from every direction, “No, this is the way, walk ye in it!”.  If there is right doctrine and right living from the shepherds, the sheep will naturally snap into place.  And the goats would find they can no longer hide.

When this happens, suddenly, there will be an answer to the problems of America.    Judgment must begin at the house of God.  So is the church ready to answer some hard questions to get to that point?  Or are we content to keep biggering, impressing the brethren, and playing church?