Reality Check -- It is all about perspective

It is comparatively easy to spout off religious doctrines and discuss our different views of the Biblical text. It is entirely another thing to live them in a world were 5,000 people die every day and go to hell in America alone. That is 208 each hour, 4 each minute. At the same time 1 person every 3 minutes is murdered for their faith in Jesus Christ around the world. At the same time we have approximately 175,000 different books about Jesus in 500 languages, increasing by 4 newly published every day. While the cost for outreach is $330,000 for each and every newly baptized person (baptized not necessarily saved, some of these are as I call them recycled. They moved from one denomination to another so they have to be rebaptized.) 124 million new souls begin life on Earth each year, but Christianity’s 4,000 foreign mission agencies baptize only 4 million new persons a year. 91% of all Christian outreach/evangelism does not target non-Christians but targets other Christians in World C countries, cities, peoples, populations, or situations. 818 unevangelized ethnolinguistic peoples have never been targeted by any Christian agencies ever. Each year,180 million Bibles and New Testaments are wasted -lost,destroyed,or disintegrated -due to incompetence, hostility, bad planning, or inadequate manufacture. There are more lost people on the face of the earth than have lived in all of time until today. Just food for thought.

The challenge is not in discovering this perspective, but maintaining it throughout.

I agree.

Here are a few more numbers to help with the perspective:·\t1 of 4 Pastors admits to have been involved in adultery.·\t80% of all church members are backsliders.·\t95% of all Christians never lead a single person to Christ·\t18 % of American Christians tithe. ·\tAverage evangelical Christian gives 2% of their income (Government gets on average 31%)·\tThere are 1.9 Billion Christians in the world and 1.1 Billion members of Islam.America is still number one in giving to the for missions. We are now #2 is the sender of missionaries and #1 in receiving foreign missionaries.Beaux Pilgrim

Heres my perspective.The problem with sin in the Church will continue until the real Holy Spirit is invited back into our midst.We have been fighting sin in our own strength. Not good! I could do nothing about my sin before I was saved and can do nothing about it now. Victory over sin the work of the Holy Spirit:Rom 8:13 For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.It's the Holy Spirit that mortifies (deadens, makes powerless) the deeds of the body, not us. Heres another one:Gal 5:16 This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.The problem is that the Holy Spirit is missing from the church. Most people who think that they have the Spirit, don't. Someone laid hands on them and told them utter some gibberish, and then called it the Holy Spirit.When the real Spirit of God comes upon you, you will be the first one to know it. The Holy Spirit is the victory over sin, He enforces it. He leds and guides us into all truth. He tells you who to witness too and who to leave alone. He will tell you what your place of service is in the body of Christ.We as a church have been going under own power and failing miserably. Program after program with low budgets, tired people and minimal results.Lets get on our face and repent of our useless self effort and get the real filling of the Spirit is us and then watch revival breakout!One previous post mentioned the low percentage of tithers. Let me say this. We are bought with a price and do not own ourselves anymore. Christ owns us, and with us comes our wallets. Its a miserable, ungrateful, wretch living under the letter of the law (Hebrews 7:5) that offers his Redeemer, Owner, and Master only 10% of his paycheck! By offering only 10% you declare yourself an unprofitable servant by doing only that which is your duty to do (Luke 17:10).Grace and peace to all!

My reader, because the Church has lost Holy Ghost fire, men go to hell-fire! We need a vision of a holy God. God is essentially holy. The cherubim and seraphim were not crying, "Omnipotent! Omnipotent is the Lord!" nor "Omnipresent! Omnipresent! is the Lord," but "Holy!Holy!Holy!" This vast Hebrew concept needs to penetrate our souls again. If I make my bed in hell, if I take the wings of the morning--yet He is there. God compasses us in time; God, the inescapable God, awaits us in eternity. We had better be at peace with Him here, and be in the center of His will now!To wait tremblinbly before this thrice-holy One before we leave home for the day's work would be a mighty soul-stimulant. He who fears God fears no man. He who kneels before God will stand in any situation. A daily glimpse at the Holy One would find us subdued by His omnipresence, staggered by His omnipotence, silenced by His omniscience, and solemnized by His holiness. His holiness would become our holiness. Holiness-teaching contradicted by unholy living is the bane of this hour! "A holy minister is an awful weapon in the hands of God." so said Robert Murray McCheyne.~Leonard Ravenhill~Why Revival Tarries

Here are two paragraphs taken from the introduction to a commentary on Romans from Pastor Scott Osenbaugh of Calvary Christian Center (Assembly of God) in Auburn Nebraska dealing with the subject of grace and our understanding of it.But is using "grace" as a covering theme for Romans possibly missing the point of what Paul is writing? James R. White has argued that one of the reasons the Western church has become spiritually anemic is its failure to understand and preach justification by faith alone, which requires declaring the universality of sin to all humanity.Many have pondered the strange spectacle of today's Protestantism: paying homage to Luther while placating the sin-sick soul with psychological explanations of Spirit-induced melancholy; printing copies of the confessions that came from the Reformation and putting them in the pews while replacing their content in the sermon with man-centered teaching that dares not utter the word "repent". It is my firm conviction that "Protestant" means absolutely, positively nothing unless the one wearing the term believes, breathes, lives and loves the uncompromised, offensive-to-the-natural-man message of justification by God's free grace by faith in Jesus Christ alone.Justification certainly does deal head-on with the problem of sin, while it could be argued that "grace" is too broad a subject to really engage the need of man spiritually and the provision of God for man's need. I have no problem at all agreeing with White that the Western church has in a large part either forgotten about or chosen to ignore the horrid condition of man in sin and the legal remedy of justification. Perhaps this is due in part to the influence of the "pop culture' and the romanticizing of those anointed as "celebrities." For example, talk sho luminary Oprah Winfey claims to have a background founded in the Bible and in the historic Christian faith, but has gon on record as a universalist, saying, "One of the biggest mistakes we make is to believe there is only one way. There are many diverse paths leading to God." Throw in actor Tom Cruise's Scientology and the New Age prestess Marianne Williamson, who believes "Christ" signifies the mutual presence of divine love in all humanity, and the theological landscape can get bleak. Add in liberal "Protestant" theologians who are trying to deconstruct the New Testament, reduce Jesus to nothing more than an itinerant rabbi, and use their scholarship to deny the genuiness of much of the Biblical text, and it is no wonder how confusion and apathy about essential spiritual things can reign in the church.The fact that the church may have changed how it views things does not chang the facts as they are found in the Scriptures. Romans forthrightly declares that all humans are sinners, all are lost, all are deserving only of wrath and condemnation, and that all need a Savior as the divinely povided remedy for man's sin. But a look through any popular Christian magazine shows that perhaps the sense of man's sinfulness has been downplayed in favor of thngs that are more appealing to the flesh. It seems the number of conferences and seminars that "you just simply cannot afford to miss" are multiplying at the speed of rabbit. There are conferences on getting the end time anointing. There are conferences on engaging in higher spiritual warfare (whatever that is supposed to mean). There are conferences on identifying one's spiritual equipping in the new millenium. There are conferences on moving in the prophetic, on employing apostolic authority and on warfare worship. There are conferences on just about any subject except understanding sin and why man needs to be justified by God. Who would want to pay for airline tickets and hotel accommodations to go to a conference to hear someone preach about the gross awfulness of sin and the need for God's intervention, when one could pay to hear some "prophet" declaring how his visions he has received in his dreams are the true prophetic end-times revelation of what God is doing in His church today? Has the Western church traded out, for the most part, the essential cor of the Gospel in favor of that which tickles the ears? Probably one of the most chilling advertisements for a church I have encountered was the one that highlighted the fact that it was the church with the most up-to-date repertoire of Australian praise music! That one is followed closely by the church that was so proud of its incredible multi-media worship experience. After reading such things, it does not amaze me at all that, according to one missions agency, after 2000 years of the existence of the church on earth, less than 11% of the total global population is considered Christian.In Christ,Jeremy Hulsey

"I am amazed at how many people that can quote my songs, but can't quote the Bible."~Rich Mullins~

There are conferences on just about any subject except understanding sin and why man needs to be justified by God. Who would want to pay for airline tickets and hotel accommodations to go to a conference to hear someone preach about the gross awfulness of sin and the need for God's intervention,Sadly, you are right, would probably have to be held in a hotel room it would be so poorly attended. But this is the root of the problem, sin, all the bandages in the world are useless in trying to cover it up. We are swallowing up spiritual Prozac by the mega dose when what we need is The Great Physician to preform heart surgery. God help us all.May need to revisit Mr. White's "The God Who Justifies", didn't get very far the first time through, don't think my head was ready for it at the time. Here's a quip from it; "If the health of the church can be measured by how often and with what devotion and gratitude she speaks of justification, then it would seem that not all is well in our day. How often we talk of prophecy, how we receive the "blessings of God" in a material sense, end-times speculations, and what new political topic or movement we are supposed to be invovled in tells us nothing positive about the church. But when Christians are continually thankful for and amazed at the grace of God that has brought them into a state where they stand righteous before God, clothed in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, then it can be safely said that those Christians, and therefore the church, are thinking properly and are concentrating on the important issues." James R. White 'A comprehensive Study' "The God Who Justifies" pg. 15