Beware the Slight of Hands and 3 Card Monte Preachers, Lest You be Tempted!
Praise the Lord saints of the Most High God.
Can love bring unity? If one wants to disregard the truth, they certainly can, but it is not honored by God, only man.
We were born by an incorruptible seed, the word of truth. When people say we should accept everyone to unite even if they do not believe the same, we compromise the truth. It is not true love to do this. Why? Because neither did Jesus or the apostles do it.
When Jesus publicly condemned the Pharisees calling them whitewashed tombs, dead men’s bones, was this unloving? (Matthew 23)
Was the Apostle Paul unloving when he rebuked Peter publicly for his compromising with the Galatians? Was the Apostle Paul unloving when he named the name of false teachers and messengers such as Hymenaeus and Alexander several different times in the Pastoral Epistles? Was the Apostle Paul unloving when he forbid women to have authority over men in 1 Tim. 2?
What would have happened if he kept silent?
I wonder if we would be comfortable with the apostle Paul in the church today; we love what he wrote but if he came through our door, what would he have to say to us? I guess this would be the difference between a real apostle and those that are passed off as one today.
I believe we would hear a rebuke as well as encouragement from him. But Paul’s blunt truth would be so offensive some would never come back to church after hearing him; they would say he’s judgmental he doesn’t have love.
Paul wrote in Eph. 4:15 “but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ.”
It seems society is still singing the Beatles’ tune “all you need is love.” And it has influenced the Church.
The Climate in the end of time
The Matthew 13 parable describes the course of the “Church age,” from its inception as a progression of moving away from the truth, until it finally culminates in what is called the apostasy, which means to fall away, a departure from the true Faith found only in the word of God, the Bible. The parable of the leaven, illustrates a woman putting leaven into three measures of meal, “until the whole was leavened.”
Leaven in Scripture stands for sin and error (1 Cor. 5:6; Gal. 5:9). The woman is a symbol of the Church, Christ’s bride. This parable tells us that error was introduced by false teachers during the time of the Apostles and afterward. This became fixed inside the church in various degrees until it increases in intensity and affecting the Church throughout the centuries. It ends with all areas of the Church affected at the end. Yet there will be a remnant.
Jesus said at the end of time, that because lawlessness would abound, the love of many will grow cold. What Jesus is describing is Christians will live in a time where society will influence them instead of their being salt and light. Obedience to the Word of God will be affected as well as their care for each other. They will shrink back from telling the truth because their love is cold. They will become self-absorbed living like the world.
Today loyalty, compassion, mercy, servanthood is missing even when Church attendance is up as never before. It has begun.
As Israel had their love of God grow cold we can see this currently exhibited by the Church here in America. Jer.7:28 ” So you shall say to them, ‘This is a nation that does not obey the voice of the LORD their God nor receive correction. Truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.”
Jer.9:5 Everyone will deceive his neighbor, and will not speak the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves to commit iniquity. That’s our society today and sometimes it can be the Church because we have not kept anchor but have drifted with the tides of the culture. we will either influence society or it will influence us, there is no in between.
We are also told about those in the world in 2 Thess. 2:10-12 …”They perish because they refused to love the truth and so as to be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.”
The prophet Hosea wrote in 4:6 “My people perish for a lack of knowledge”, it never says we perish because of a lack of love.
Till next week,
God Bless.
Rev. Dr. Robert L. Harrison, PhD
