We live in a world of pretend. Pretend cops on TV. Pretend millionaires. Pretend heroes in movies. Pretend wizards of smart on Wall Street. We have fake hair. Fake nails. Fake Rolex watches on NYC streets for $20. We drink fake sugar in soft drinks. We buy fake diet pills…fake…fake…fake…Almost everything is FAKE!
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…
