Life and Death

It used to be hard for me to understand why so many who profess to be Christian were so comfortable with and in the world. Then I learned from scripture that there are two streams of Christianity that live and work side by side. One stream is the true body of Christ, God's children chosen before the foundations of the world, and the other stream are the pretenders, the tares sown by the enemy, the goats who profess Christ verbally and/or intellectually but deny him in their hearts and in their deeds.

Friendship with the world is enmity with God. Christians cannot serve God and mammon and we are not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Certainly we are required to fellowship with those who profess Christ, but we are just as certainly required to rebuke and correct those selfsame individuals in love when they err from the precepts of God as revealed in His Holy Word.

This is true love. This is true fellowship. This is not the "I'm okay, you're okay" easy-believism of the liberal post-modernist's fevered high noon fantasies. It may "feel good" to intellectually embrace and kiss one another and pooh-pooh away our "petty differences" in order to attain a false temporal unity, but when those so-called petty differences besmirch and distort the words Christ Jesus and subvert the revealed truth of God then they are not so petty after all.

The natural man is God's enemy and apart from the enlightenment and salvation made available solely through the shed blood of Jesus Christ - the Son of God - men will burn in hellfire forever. Period. End of story.

This may seem like a strident message. This message might be construed by some as unloving or intolerant, but this is the true message of love; namely God has made a way, but He has also set the terms and sinful man must meet God on the terms He has set and not by some alternate arrangement created by sinful man.

Any other message, program, or philosophical invention that seeks to circumvent the clear admonition of scripture as touching how sinful man is to be reconciled to a Holy God is another gospel, a falsehood, a sham, and a hoax. There is but one narrow way for condemned and guilty man to be pardoned, and The Way, The Truth, and The Life is found nowhere except in The Name that's above every name, Jesus Christ the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the Almighty and Everlasting God.