Perverted Church

A Perverted Church

Is today’s church destitute of the truth? Is today’s church preaching a distorted or perverted Gospel? Do today’s preachers twist or “spin” the Gospel into the gospel and thereby lose its power? “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.” Romans 1:16 What gospel is the writer speaking about here? Why, it is the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Him crucified for our sins. It is the Gospel of the RISEN Christ, sitting at the right hand of the Father interceding for us continually.

The trouble began when man started to either expand or contract the Gospel – that’s when it became the gospel(Large G, small g). That was when it began to lose its power. It became the gospel of hate, or the gospel of greed, or worst of all, it became the gospel of religion. There are churches around today that the old Apostles would never have been able to even dream about. Churches of 20, 30, 40, even 100 thousand souls. How many of them preach Christ and Him crucified to the exclusion of all other gospels?

I do not denigrate the preaching of teaching. Indeed, the teacher is one of the five-fold ministries of the church outlined by Paul in his letters to the church at Corinth. Many churches have wonderful teaching ministries. Yet, somehow, they seem to miss or otherwise go wide of the mark. In Mark 16:15, Jesus tells His disciples, “He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” Where did the teaching miss out by omitting preaching the Gospel?

As one 17^th Century preacher put it, “Religion begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.” In our prosperity we became smug and self-satisfied. We became sanctimonious – that means we were proud and satisfied that we were OK with God. That pride and satisfaction led us into omitting the Gospel from our churches and majoring on a different gospel. Some majored on preaching and teaching. Some, a few, majored on healing. Some, especially today, have majored on prosperity and the so-called “replacement theology” which states that the church is Israel and the promises given to Israel were primarily  for  the  church. These last two are perhaps the greatest corporate follies the church has ever committed.

Still more churches preach a gospel of hatred. Race, religion, singularity (we are the ONLY church) or some other gospel. Today’s church frequently worships at the altar of religion, greed, or hatred, not the altar of god.

Hmmm – where does this leave us? Much of the Church is now a perverted church teaching a perverted gospel. Instead of preaching the Gospel they preach their latest translation of the gospel. This is the fulfilment of 2 Timothy 4:3-4 “For the time will come when men 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.  They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”

All we can do is to stay alert and guard our ears from false teachers and preachers.