Everyone would agree with the statement that America is in domestic crisis. Half of the country believes the other half of the country is racist simply because they belong to a different political party, the same party, I might add, which ended both slavery and Jim Crow laws, and pushed through Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. But facts no longer seem to matter. The far left has taken over the Democrat Party, the media, most universities, and are sliming their way into our K-12 public schools, spreading their agenda of socialism and using racism and lies as the bait to separate Americans into warring camps that are easier to overcome.
Black Americans, who are one of the most religious groups in America, vote 80% Democrat, the party who call themselves “the party of the unreligious,” because they have been conditioned to fear Republicans, 82% of whom share their strongly held Christian beliefs. The propaganda machine of the media has done its work well. There is Evil at work here, an Evil that was unleashed upon the world in the Garden of Eden and which works diligently and tirelessly to tear people away from the God of the Bible. And thus we come to cultural Christianity.
Cultural Christianity is very different from Biblical Christianity. Over the decades, humanism, a concept that sprung up during the Renaissance period, has begun again to reclaim modern life. This system attaches prime importance to human rather than divine matters, stressing the potential value and goodness of humans whereas the Bible stresses that humans are sinful and in need of the saving power of God. Humanism is insidious as it seems on the surface to be, in fact, beneficial to everyone.
It began to appear in schools with the idea that everyone who ran a race got a prize, not just the winner. Thus, no one had his or her feelings hurt and was made to feel a loser. And for small children, this seemed somehow nice. Everyone got a prize, but what reward was there for the person who won the race? In the classroom, Outcome-Based Education operated on the same principle. You taught to the test, and if a student failed, he or she could take it again and again until he or she got an A. Grades became meaningless and students, as students always will, learned to work the system, only studying for a test if they had nothing better to do that night, content in the knowledge that they could take the test again when they chose. Thus again, everyone succeeded! Except, of course, that real life doesn’t work that way, and the poor children we poured out of our high schools expected the same treatment from employers or the tax man and were baffled when they did not get it.
But as those children grew into adults, they began to change the culture. Everyone was good. Everyone should be equal. Equity is the word we hear now. Thus come the calls for a “living wage” for those who choose not to work and requirements to hire people based upon equity of race rather than ability to do the work. And the culture reached into our churches. How could it not? God is, after all, a God of love, ministers told their congregations. We must accept everyone just as Jesus accepted Zacchaeus, the tax collector, and love everyone regardless of their lifestyle choices.
It became gradually common, for young people to have sex as we used to have dessert after dinner on a date and to move in and live together, even have children together, without ever getting married. Marriage, after all, is just a human construct, they would argue, and thus humans can do away with it. And so parents who grew up in church have found themselves accepting unmarried daughters with babies and children who are living with others whom they are not married to. The young adults argue that everyone is doing it. Not to do so, to remain celebate until marriage, is old-fashioned, out of style. And lest we lose our children, we swallow our dismay and wonder how they never learned what sin was in Sunday School.
Homosexuality, multiple genders, adultery, transgenders, television characters always having a beer or a glass of wine when they arrive home –churches and Christians are gradually accepting these as part of our culture and being convinced that we must not teach against such cultural mores, but rather treat those who practice these with love and acceptance, forgetting that when Jesus did not condemn the woman caught in adultery, He told her most clearly to “Go and sin no more!” (John 8:11). He forgave, but His forgiveness was conditional.
Thus, today, we may find homosexuals who are pastoring churches, and cross-dressers who are reading to preschoolers at libraries. Television shows almost all have a gay couple on them and many books insert gay characters into them as if they were so pervasive in our society that you find them everywhere. Yet only 4.5% of the roughly 330 million U.S. citizens identify as LGBTQ.
What this has done to religion in America is devastating. A recent Pew poll found that only 64% of Americans call themselves Christians: 43% protestants, 19% Catholics, and 2% Mormons. Of those, only 44% of Republicans and 29% of Democrats attend church at least once a week. 72% believe in Heaven, but only 58% believe in the existence of Hell. 64% of all those who call themselves Christians, believe that God accepts all religions, and a dismaying number actually believe that once they die God will give them a second chance — the old “no one fails” mentality again. This, according to my missionary son, sums up Cultural Christianity.
How is Biblical Christianity different? Biblical Christianity believes that the Bible is the divine Word of God, delivered to mankind through prophets and apostles who were themselves inspired by God to write the words that they wrote. Biblical Christianity thus accepts as truth Psalm 33:11 which says that “The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations,” and the words of Jesus as recorded by Matthew, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away” (24:35), the words of Paul to Timothy when he wrote, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy 3:16-17), and finally, 2 Peter 1:20: “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.”
Christians who believe these verses must then believe that what was sin in Abraham’s time or Peter’s time is still sin today. They realize that culture cannot change an unchangeable God. Only people change, growing closer to God or farther away from Him as they deny or embrace the changing culture of our modern world. While they are admonished by scripture to treat those who live in sin with love, yet they cannot condone the sin. Remember the “Go and sin no more” admonition of Jesus. Thus no Biblical Christian will countenance a practicing homosexual as their minister even though they may work cordially with such an individual in their jobs. Cultural Christianity calls this homophobia and a lack of Christian charity, but Biblical Christianity requires strict adherence to the Word of God, despite what others may say. As my missionary son says, “God’s love is not permissive.”
Thus the Christian Church in the United States, even across the world, is split by a great divide. And while we pray that more and more people will return to Biblical Christianity, we are, in fact, seeing movement in the opposite direction. And this has been prophesied in two passages by Jesus Himself. In Matthew 7:21-23 He warns, “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
And later, Matthew records His parable of the sheep and the goats where Jesus warns, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. . . . Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:31-33, 42).
So the most important question that anyone will ever ask you or that you should ask yourself might be this: Are you a goat? Your answer will have eternal consequences!