What stood out, to me,  was how one man handled adversity and another lived. NY Giants quarterback Eli Manning, the latest of the successful Manning football clan, had become well-known for last minute comeback wins. This most exciting of Super Bowls was no different, as it went down to the last second! The super-rich and seemingly unbeatable Patriots quarterback Tom Brady was a different story.

Brady is a man who has everything: from three Super Bowl rings to a new $20 million dollar mansion outside Hollywood to a famous international supermodel wife. In Boston, he has almost the divine right of kings and treated as local royalty. So it was, after leading in the game, for most of it, after a rough start, Tom Brady soon got in a dazed and confused state. He was suddenly watching a team with no outstanding celebrity being led by a good old boy from Mississippi, who lives in the deep south as a regular guy in the off season!

Because of his superior talents, this man, Tom Brady, expected to win and win big. However, because football was his god, when things went south towards the end of his pending loss, Brady got in a surreal funk. This has also led his celebrity wife into a controversy of her own, when she used four letter words to blast Brady’s fellow team members for costing her husband the game by dropping catches. The media seemed captivated by a beaten man, who could not even speak, as this loss shook him to the core.

None of these sports teams – from the Giants to the Patriots or even last year’s baseball World Series winners St. Louis Cardinals – could be classified as full of born again Christians. In fact when they win, not one of them give credit to the Holy God Who gave them their gifts. But what is evident is that these teams are full of men who are narcissists and so full of themselves that they think themselves to be godlike.

Jesus said in Mark 8:36 NLT “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?” We have people here who, while possessing every worldly benefit and all the riches they desire, are unhappy to the core, because their joy and happiness is completely dependent on WHAT they do. The object of their happiness is their opinion of themselves. The core of their being is defined by how many trophies and wins they have over the other guy. They define winning by, well, winning this thing at all costs.

Because they have no core set of true beliefs….because their lives are not enriched by the knowledge of the wonder of the eternal God of Heaven….because their sins are not washed away by surrendering to the Blood of the Lamb of God, when it all goes south, they are devastated.

The Apostle Paul was the Tom Brady of the great Religious order of the day. He was on a path to be high priest of Jerusalem one day. But God had another plan. He took this man, then called Saul, knocked him off his high horse, just like Brady was,  and humbled him to the point of blindness. Saul came to realize not just how spiritually blind he was, but how much he saw once he looked at life through the very Eyes of Christ! When God changed Saul’s name to Paul, He gave him a new heart of flesh and hope in his heart which he carried through the end.

Nobody was persecuted, beaten and almost killed many times before his actual beheading in Rome, than the Apostle Paul. Yet he kept his eyes on the real prize – the Prize of Christ. Paul was the opposite of Tom Brady. How many men would have the following last words as they face execution for winning millions of souls to Christ from then until, now, with his writings. Here, we see Paul’s final words …..

(photo by Reuters)

The culture elevates fake over real.

The culture bows down to people you won’t even let into your living room, were it not for the fact they appeared in some movie.

The culture worships at the pagan altar of glitz and flashing man-made light, while ignoring the True Light of the World – Jesus Christ.

The culture uses Him as a swear and cuss word, all the while twisting His Words to fit their ungodly secular agenda….and the culture has crept both inside the church, and inside of us!

The reason why the church is dead, dead, dead….and therefore ineffective in both Canada and America is this – the culture;  and the secular world can’t tell the difference between them and us!

The seeker-sensitive movement of the 1990’s accelerated the slide by watering down the True Truth (as Francis Schaefer called it) so as to bring people by the numbers. Many followed this formula to the letter, and even removed crosses from their sanctuaries. They drew millions into their buildings….and what buildings they were!

They put up huge structures with multi-millions dollar mortgage debt. They put in high priced coffee and book shops and restaurants. The House of Prayer became First Corporation of Suburban USA Church, with multi-campus satellite feeds of the main preacher, who stays in one “main campus”, while the sheep adores him on the jumbotron TV screen! 

There is one deadly problem with all that MTV styled “worship” chock full of celebrity pastors and contemporary rock band stars on “christian” radio – IT IS BUILT ON SAND! Bill Hybels, who created the Seeker-sensitive movement that led many over the cliff, finally had to man up and admit in 2007 it was a complete failure. Hybels admitted they had failed to make Disciples of Christ. (By the way, Hybels never went back to Biblical standards to correct this error!)

Nowhere in the Bible, does it say to ‘go become like your rich celebrity culture; remove the Cross of Christ; water down your bible translation to the Message; bring unintelligible hard rock music into your church platform; run up and down the aisle and call it prayer and worship the man supposedly representing behind His pulpit’!!!!

Instead you will find two things:

1. And He was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after (or be a disciple) Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me” Luke 9:23 NASB.

2.”Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” Matthew 28:19-20 NASB.

The modern church has failed on both counts! The Persecuted underground church in China has the most Christians in the world – over 300 million real ones. If anyone wishes to know why – it is because it is set apart from its culture…and not just that…it faces daily death for the Cross, by following Christ completely in an evil, godless Communist regime.

Look at the picture above. It is “fake Jesus”. If we really search our own hearts, we will find some of that in all of us.  One line always struck me from the movie ELMER GANTRY…