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The Old Paths Newsletter Issue No. 7 is available for download here. I was able to go to the Calvary Chapel's Pastors Conference recently and heard these messages that I am featuring in this newsletter. The world is looking for people preaching with an utmost conviction of reality of the bible and the truth about God. The church does not have any outside enemies, "nothing shall prevail against the church," rather THE CHURCH HAS ONE ENEMY ITSELF - DEAD ORTHODOXY.
I would encourage you saints to listen to this message by Don McClure: True Courage and also the featured sermon: Believe His Word Powerfully. So many churches are trying to be relevant to this world that we are in but what is needed is people who have tasted of "canaan" who believe the Word of God as SUPREME, having a authority, conviction, power, having a holy attitude for the Scriptures. Are we in Canaan, are we preaching from experience? Allow these sermons to challange you, and not only challange but change.
Here is another message that was preached at this confernce by Pastor Jack Hibbs: The Times And The Seasons, we have to realize we are in the end times and Christ is coming back soon. Listen also to this message: Can A Nation Rise Again?. Oh Lord send revival, allow us to rely on your Word soley.
"...And that's where this religious world is today! They would rather destroy the image of God than bend their knees to the Lordship of Christ. I am going with him even if it means being on a collision course with the social religiosity of our day." - Carter Conlon
I have also been listening recently to a refershing series of messages by Chuck Smith, I encourage you to download all of these and go through them, I pray many pastors are encouraged and blessed by this newsletter to "hold fast to the word of God, and the suffiency of God's Spirit.":
(People God Uses) 01 The People Used by God by Chuck Smith
(People God Uses) 02 The Need for Faith by Chuck Smith
(People God Uses) 03 Beware of Ambition by Chuck Smith
(People God Uses) 04 Knowing the Word of God by Chuck Smith
(People God Uses) 05 Be Filled with the Holy Spirit by Chuck Smith
Featured Sermon - Believe His Word PowerfullyDon McClure shares his heart towards a great need for ministers and Christian believers to believe the word of God as it is. To believe something powerfully, to love someone passionately and to live expectantly. All God to impart to you a renewed desire to believe the word of God as it is.
Has this sermon impacted your life? share what you think: Add a Comment.
\t\t\t Greg Gordon
\t\t\t\t SermonIndex.net Moderator
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\t\t\t\t We Must Have Better Christians
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\t\t\tby A.W. Tozer.
To talk of "better" Christians is to use language foreign to many persons. To them all Christians are alike; all have been justified and forgiven and are the children of God, so to make comparisons between them is to suggest division and bigotry and any number of horrible things.
What is forgotten is that a Christian is a born-one, an embodiment of growing life, and as such may be retarded, stunted, undernourished or injured very much as any other organism. Favorable conditions will produce a stronger and healthier organism than will adverse conditions. Lack of proper instructions, for instance, will stunt Christian growth. A clear example of this is found in Acts 19, where an imperfect body of truth had produced a corresponding imperfect type of Christian. It took Paul, with a fuller degree of truth, to bring these stunted disciples into a better and healthier spiritual state.
Unfortunately it is possible for a whole generation of Christians to be victims of poor teaching, low moral standards and unscriptural or extrascriptural doctrines, resulting in stunted growth and retarded development. It is little less than stark tragedy that an individual Christian may pass from youth to old age in a state of suspended growth and all his life be unaware of it. Those who would question the truth of this have only to read the First Epistle to the Corinthians and the Book of Hebrews. And even a slight acquaintance with church history will add all the further proof that is needed. Today there exist in the world certain Christian bodies whose histories date far back. These have perpetuated themselves after their kind for hundreds of years, but they have managed to produce nothing but weak, stunted Christians, if Christians they can be called. Common charity forbids that we identify these by name, but any enlightened believer will understand.
Evangelicalism as we know it today in its various manifestations does produce some real Christians. We have no wish to question this; we desire rather to assert it unequivocally. But the spiritual climate into which many modern Christians are born does not make for vigorous spiritual growth. Indeed, the whole evangelical world is to a large extent unfavorable to healthy Christianity. And I am not thinking of Modernism either. I mean rather the Bible-believing crowd that bears the name of orthodoxy.
We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low. We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone. Large and influential sections of the world of fundamental Christianity have gone overboard for practices wholly unscriptural, altogether unjustifiable in the light of historic Christian truth and deeply damaging to the inner life of the individual Christian. They have imitated the world, sought popular favor, manufactured delights to substitute for the joy of the Lord and produced a cheap and synthetic power to substitute for the power of the Holy Ghost. The glowworm has taken the place of the bush that burned and scintillating personalities now answer to the fire that fell at Pentecost.
The fact is that we are not today producing saints. We are making converts to an effete type of Christianity that bears little resemblance to that of the New Testament. The average so-called Bible Christian in our times is but a wretched parody on true sainthood. Yet we put millions of dollars behind movements to perpetuate this degenerate form of religion and attack the man who dares to challenge the wisdom of it.
Clearly we must begin to produce better Christians. We must insist on New Testament sainthood for our converts, nothing less; and we must lead them into a state of heart purity, fiery love, separation from the world and poured-out devotion to the Person of Christ. Only in this way can the low level of spirituality be raised again to where it should be in the light of the Scriptures and of eternal values.
To read the entire sermon go here: We Must Have Better Christians.
Quotes on Revival - Arthur T. Pierson
"If missions languish, it is because the whole life of godliness is feeble. The command to go everywhere and preach to everybody is un-obeyed, until the will is lost by self-surrender in the will of God. There is little right giving because there is little right living, and because of the lack of sympathetic contact with God in holiness of heart, there is a lack of effectual contact with him at the Throne of Grace. Living, praying, giving and going will always be found together, and a low standard in one means a general debility in the whole spiritual being."
"The only hope of missions lay in a revival of religion, wide-spread and deep-reaching."
"Closet communion needs time for the revelation of God's presence. It is vain to say, 'I have too much work to do to find time.' You must find time or forfeit blessing. God knows how to save for you the time you sacredly keep for communion with Him."
"Wherever the Church is aroused and the world's wickedness arrested, somebody has been praying."