January 26^th. 2020

9:30 am --------------------------------------------------This is The Record – 1 John 5:11-12

10:00 am -------------------------------------------------------Lord Over Devils – Luke 8:26-39

Wednesday: 7:00 pm ------------------------ To The Churches, part 7, Laodicea – Revelation 3:14-22

Message to Hear: by Bruce Crabtree: https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=611121154268

The Modern Ideology of Religion

When looking at today’s brand of Christianity through the spectacles of the Holy Scriptures we find so many discrepancies it is almost too discouraging to say or write a word in opposition against it. Man’s religion is in such a state of decay we wonder if there is any hope of reformation of true religion at all; if so, the hope is with the Lord who alone is Omnipotent. I stand with the ancient prophet looking over a vast valley of dry bones, and as the Sovereign God demanded, “Son of man, can these bones live?” “O Lord God, thou knowest.”

The flaw in most folks’ religion today is that it is completely distorted. The cart is directly in front of the horse, which makes it impossible to make any spiritual headway. Man has God off the throne and himself on it. Every time I see a new religious edifice going up with all its elaborate trimmings I say in my mind, well there stands another monument built to man’s misconception of the Sovereign God. I say men have it turned around backward. Men have God begging and pleading with sinners and sinners demanding God. They have sinners independently plea-bargaining with God, and God dependent on sinners to make Him happy. Falsely they declare that God cannot make men spiritually alive (born-again) until they make up their mind to believe. They have the self-sufficient Jehovah God ringing His hands in frustration as He waits upon the sinner’s willingness to agree with Him that heaven is the best place for him.

My dear readers, this is devilish deception. If what they are leading men to believe is true, then men become their own saviors, and there was no need for the Son of God to come at all. Men have been told, and many believe it, ‘that God has done all that He can do and they must do the rest.’ ‘That God has taken the first step and that they must take the next.’ The fact is, if you can take one step you may take them all. Is this the case, as clearly defined in the Bible? No! man is spiritually dead (see Ephesians 2:1-10). He is totally unable to make the slightest motion toward God and heaven until made alive by the quickening power of the Holy Ghost; and for this, man is absolutely shut up to the Sovereign pleasure of God. Read the dialogue between Christ and Nicodemus in John 3. The wind (symbol of the Holy Spirit) bloweth where it wills (listeth). Also John 1:13 makes perfectly clear that those who are said to believe and receive Christ (verse 12), did so because they were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, BUT OF GOD.

Biblical Christianity teaches us that there can be no spiritual belief in Christ without divine life in the soul, and God must impart that life. – Terry Worthan, Pastor, Calvary Baptist Church, Winston, Georgia

He who in his soul believes that man does of his own free-will turn to God, cannot have been taught of God, for that is one of the first principles taught us when God begins with us, that we have neither will nor power, but that HE gives both; that HE is the “Alpha and Omega” in the salvation of men. -- C. H. Spurgeon

He Who Trusts In God – Richard Sibbes

He trusts in God and is reconciled in Jesus Christ that flies to him in extremity. What a man trusts unto, when he is pinched he flies unto. How shall a man know that he is a covetous worldling? If he be in extremity, he goes to his purse, he makes a friend of that. How shall a man know that he trusts to the arm of flesh? . . . that he trusts his friend too much. In extremity he runs to him, presently he goes to a friend he hath. What we run to, that our trust is in. A Christian runs to his God; and happy is that Christian that is in covenant, that he hath a God to run to in all extremities, in sickness, in death, at all times. He is happy that he hath a God, when all fails, to trust in.

Wilt thou know therefore whether thou trustest in God or no? Whither goest thou? A carnal man, he goes to one earthly prop or other. If God answer him not presently, then he goes with Saul to the witch, to the devil himself perhaps. If God do not send him present help, he goes to one carnal help or other, to his wit, to policy, to crack his conscience, to bear out things with impudence. He hath not learned to trust in God, and he runs not to him, but to some wicked course or other.