Posted on 06/30/2016 7:19:38 AM PDT by aimhigh
After a series of messages over several weeks encouraging the listeners to respond to the ‘fire of God’, Pastor Bates waded into the controversy over homosexuality, highlighting it’s sin as compared to Scripture:
“I was literally shocked, personally, when I began to see people get up, move out, walk out the door kinda shaking their heads. “
Bates says that the people who were most likely to walk out on a message on the Biblical stance of homosexuality are those people with relationship connections with those in the LGBT community. Be it a son, daughter or parent, many going to traditional churches that seek to maintain Biblical standards are being actively challenged by the LGBT agenda in our nation.
(Excerpt) Read more at trunews.com ...
Well, maybe those people needed to leave. Somewhere there’s a church with a rainbow on the sign where they’ll be right at home.
Agreed.
You can count on the vast majority of Pentecostal and charismatic pastors to hold the line against sodomy. In any pulpit where the Holy Spirit is taken seriously, there will be a hard stance against sin and cultural deterioration. There’s a sifting going on.
I could see this happening in a mainline church, but very shocked this has reached the Assembles of God. I guess the cultural indoctrination has gone very deep.
Christians who cannot follow the word of God have no business being in church in the first place.
God is separating the wheat from the chaff.
God’s word is a sharp double edged sword which separates the wheat from the chaff.
That congregation, and many others, may have difficulty sharing a message of purity beyond “just don’t do it.” God created sex to be a huge, huge positive. While there are conventions of polite society, being overly prudish can also put an unnecessary wet blanket on what the good Lord made.
It probably isn’t the doctrine nearly as much as how it is presented that is the problem in a setting like this. There are a host of issues tied up with sex in this fallen world, that shouldn’t be, but the devil has warped and polluted it and people have too easily accepted that — even “normal” people.
Let them go. They will face God one of these days with the desire to place their child over their Lord.
3/4 of my brother’s entire congregation (Presbyterian) left after the Pastor declared himself a liberal and then declared he would perform gay marriages no matter what the congregation said. He said they had to consider other view points.
(The majority’s doesn’t count I guess.)
The church is now in free fall financially. Church has been there since 1850.
Some people try to use it like Edward Scissorhands, however.
They need to stay and listen; they need to repent.
AG is to some extent being faced with the high cost of numerical success. Goats among the sheep. The same thing happened to the Methodists. As I said in another comment, God is sifting the churches today. He wants to know who’s in and who’s not.
We may be at the start of the “Great Apostasy.” A number of signs are being made manifest; the positive attacks upon our Lord, the murder cults such as abortionists and suicide lovers, the growth in disbelief, the rise of a false religion such as Islam, the active suppression of any expression of Christianity. Fell free to add to the list.
They may end up hearing it from a more apt preacher.
The church needs the “Well....Bye” attitude about some people.
Somewhere there’s a church with a rainbow on the sign where they’ll be right at home.
Metropolitan Community Church was founded specifically to minister to the homosexual community.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. --Ephesians 6:10-13
But there is also shallow cultural Christianity, which takes for granted far too much. Nobody wants to get their hands dirty with the issues implicated by sexual perversions, for instance. But when you have a toxic waste dump, you need to deal with the waste without burning down the entire property.
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