Footprints #203

Chapters 10 & 11 of this letter hasn’t exactly been a heart-warming message that causes you to want to go out and love your fellow-man more. It hasn’t been particularly evangelistic either, appealing to the lost to come to Jesus. Instead it has been a hard-hitting warning that there are those in God’s church bent on destroying her. Let me tell you, the most dangerous people on the spiritual scene are not the militant Islamo-fascists pushing around the globe, not the gay-rights and its comrades in the mainstream media, neither is it the atheistic enemies of God and His salvation through the cross of Christ. The most dangerous people on the spiritual scene are those who masquerade as its friends. Both Paul and John make it clear that the greatest threat to Christianity both then and now in the end times, is the church itself – or at least the apostate version of it.

I reflect on the plight of churches throughout rural Australia. Former church buildings are now used for other purposes. 50 or 100 years ago these were robust spiritual communities of evangelical witness. By slow stages the witness was undermined and congregations were introduced to a Christ shorn of the miracles of conversion and replaced by the gospel of good behaviour and social concern. Church should be an encounter with a life changing encounter with Christ, but if all that is on offer is platitudes about helping the disadvantaged, (as important as that is) it is hardly surprising when churches empty. May God help us to be on guard against spiritual predators!