Be Watchful; Not All ‘Christian Churches’ Are Godly Or Biblically Based
Word-of-the-Day: ‘(3) For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. (4) They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.’ (2 Timothy 4:3-4)
The one thing about this election season in the United States is the exposure given to some of the churches around the country, especially those that hold strange and curious beliefs. Candidates espouse their ‘Christianity’, but when there is a deeper dive into their churches, some are not the traditional Bible-based and Christ-centered churches that are within their names.
These churches, in Truth, do not hold onto the values that a Christian church should have, and indeed should no longer call themselves Christian-based. However, they hold some tenuous belief to the Bible or to Jesus, though even those beliefs can be stretched well beyond the Gospel message, even denying some or all of it.
Paul, in his 2nd letter to Timothy, warns Timothy, his Ephesian congregants, and us that there are churches that will not hold to Biblical Truths that God provided to Moses and the prophets of the Old Testament; and to the Gospel writers, Paul, and the others authoring epistles and books that comprise the New Testament. These churches, Paul warns, will not place God and His Word as the foundational Truth, but instead attempt to mold God into their own warped image as what they want the truth to be.
In the Old Testament, this was done through idol worship; the molding of what people wanted God to look like, and in forming this idol requested He perform for them what they wanted. They placed this idol, and themselves, above God in the belief they knew better than God does; the Creator being ignorant of the needs of His creation. It is the definition of chutzpah, a Jewish word meaning to have the unmitigated gall and self-aggrandizing arrogance to believe one is superior over another, including God Himself.
There is idol worship today, of course. There are objects and things that replace God as the uppermost, number one item in the focus of people. It can be television, sports, another person, children – anything that supplants God as the focus in our lives. But the church that has the chutzpah to believe they know better than God does, and takes His precepts and words out of context (or removes them completely) and rewrites His Bible for their own belief system to be justified takes this form of idol worship, this worship of self over God, to another level.
The Apostle John, who wrote down his visions in the Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, in chapters two and three, details the seven types of churches that will be standing at the End of Times, prior to the Tribulation. The church of Ephesus holds onto and speaks the Truth, but is more focused on ‘doing church right’ than actually following Jesus and His Gospel. The church of Pergamum teaches the Truth, but intermingles it with impure doctrine, bending it to appeal to the culture around it.
In Thyatira, the church gives way to carnal pleasures, and some follow a false female prophet that, while some of the congregants do not follow, is tolerated. Tolerance of sin and improper doctrine is not a Christian virtue, which steers people away from being obedient to God and His ways. Sardis is a church that essentially is ‘lip service’, they speak the Word of God but they are found not to be doing the Word of God, or living their lives in reverence toward the Lord.
Similar is the church of Laodicea, where the people are ‘lukewarm’ to the Gospel, and more reluctant or needing to be prodded to do the Lord’s bidding. These are examples of churches today, in various forms, that are not obedient to calling the Lord has placed upon them. These churches all are examples of having degrees of chutzpah, all failing to follow the Word of the Lord but instead falling into satisfying their own desires. It does not mean all of their congregants are lost, some are following the Word and are being obedient, but the position of the church places them in the minority.
But there are two churches that Jesus recognizes as Faithful. The church in Smyrna is poor and an outcast of their own society. They suffer persecution, to the point of death, yet they remain Faithful to the Biblical worldview and in obedience to Christ continue His work. The church in Philadelphia (not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania but the church located in the city now known as Ammon, Jordan) likewise was outside of the society they resided in and, like the church in Smyrna, had great pressure from the leaders of the synagogues as being apostate to the Jewish religion as well as the societal forms of worship.
However, Jesus highly praises and lauds these churches as remaining Faithful and obedient to the Word and His precepts. He promises them, though they may suffer from the persecution and abuse the world places upon them, that they will have life with Him for eternity.
The question for us, who state we are Believers in Christ, is which of the seven Revelation churches do we want to associate with and belong to? We should not want to follow in the footsteps of the first five churches mentioned (Ephesus, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, and Laodicea), though these styles and types of churches do exist today, to the detriment of the people. It is not a complete condemnation of the people, and those who individually follow the Bible obediently and accept the Lordship of Christ are saved by His grace, but it hurts the testimony of those who belong to such churches.
The churches we should want to be most associated with are those of Smyrna and Philadelphia; society should not dictate to us who we need to be in Christ. While the world demands us to be tolerant of sin, we must remain intolerant to it, and follow God and His Word. Do not follow what the world offers, as though the world can offer temporary physical pleasure it cannot provide the eternal promise of abundant Spiritual life under God’s purview that only He can do. Don’t support those who follow their chutzpah and the idol worship it brings, but follow only God and His Word.
