~~~This was a message I preached in the fall of 2010. The Spirit fell that Sunday morning in a mighty way and many in doubt gave themselves to the Master through the “evidence” of the Holy Ghost. I pray that as you read that it will minister to you also and, if you have ever doubted, convince you of the evidence that God has given us!~~~
The Gospel According to Who?
The world is fraught with religion. A recent National Public Radio broadcast report stated that, it is estimated, that 20 new religions spring up every year.
- According to David Barrett et al, editors of the “World Christian Encyclopedia: A comparative survey of churches and religions – AD 30 to 2200,” there are 19 major world religions which are subdivided into a total of 270 large religious groups, and many smaller ones. 34,000 separate Christian groups have been identified in the world.
- The church of Jesus Christ of LDS is currently the fastest growing religious sect in the world. There are now over 10 million registered and accounted for and in author Harold Bloom’s book, The American Religion: The Emergence of The Post-Christian Nation, based on recent statistical growth of the last decade there will most likely be 300 million mormons worldwide by the year 2080, second only to roman catholics under the auspices of Christendom.
- The doctrine of pleural wifery, or polygamy, both the same horse with a different name, is nothing more than a mask for adulterous and pedophiliacal activities never sanctioned by God in the Old or New Testaments, and men are clearly instructed in 1 Timothy 3:2 to be the “…husband of one wife…”
- The United States government, indeed the LDS church, has told the world that “this mockery of Christianity” has been stamped out, the “Holy Doctrine” of Angelic marriage removed from the sacred covenants and rituals, even though it is revered as the most sacred and holy mormon doctrine, given personally, by God, to Joseph Smith. During the time the “revelation” was given, Smith was a known charlatan and womanizer and the doctrine simply gave him the outlet to place the blame on God, for it was His law. After the strife of the latter 1800′s and early 1900′s with the Federal Government, the church claimed to have ceased such activities, but to the contrary, communities of the fundamentalists in Colorado City, Provo, and Three Forks flourish, fraught with bigamy, and child molestation confirmed from first hand, eyewitness accounts of those who have escaped the controlling grasp of the LDS church.
As of mid 2010, there are an estimated 1.57 billion Muslims worldwide. With that number, they represent about 22% of the world’s population. They are the second largest religion in the world. Only Christianity is larger, with 33% of the world’s inhabitants — a little over 2 billion.Their claim is that all who do not claim that Muhammed was the last, most holy prophet, and that Jesus Christ was just another in a long line of good prophets, you will be damned to everlasting torment.
- To the Muslim, the Bible is a good book, it has wise instruction, but that is all, and the Quran is the only God-inspired work mankind truly has.
- The Catholic church, the Methodist, and Presbyterian bishoprics are ripe with the foulness of homosexuality and child molestation, all while the world is screaming “death to religion! God didn’t make man, man made God!”
With all of these voices crying out their own God-given, “Holy,” truthful versions of God’s Word and principles, that they are right, and everyone else is wrong, who is to be believed? Is there a certain truth? Is there a higher moral law?
- Indeed, God’s Word proclaims to you that THIS and THIS alone, is the Godly-authored, unadulterated WORD of the LORD Himself, but in the end, who will you listen to? Have you seen it for yourself? It is your choice, your decision, and no one holds sway over you. Who is your Gospel, “according to?”
John 5:38-43 (KJV)
39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. 40 And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life. 41 I receive not honour from men. 42 But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you. 43 I am come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.
In the this scripture, the LORD prophesied His own rejection by most of mankind, and that other teachings would be more easily accepted.
- He says “search the scriptures!” We have been instructed to find it for ourselves! Do not believe me just because you hear it here, but go home, open the book, and read it for yourself. Read it, know it, think on it, meditate, yay, pray on it, and believe, for you!
- In these last days you must have a grounding for yourself, you must be firmly planted on something for in the day of Judgement, when the Holy Books, the Book of Life and the WORD, are opened forth, it will be you and you alone who stands before God for your own actions.
- You are responsible for what you learn, what you know, what you have seen and heard in this Book, and what you choose to do or do not.
- When the trumpet sounds, the dead rise, and the saints are called up to meet Him in the air, there will be a day when all will see and know, all knees will bow, and every tongue confess, that Jesus is Jehovah!
2 Tim 3:1-7 (KJV)
1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. 2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, 4 Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; 5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof… 7 Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
- Recent studies of philosophical thinkers and the reasoning ages that have come out of the last 500 hundred years have displayed a definite trend in the moving of events into the last days.
- Indeed, when Jonathan Edwards delivered his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God,” in Enfield, Connecticut on July 8, 1741, he could not have known how much lower the world would sink into depravity. It seemed to him, as you can feel and hear in his words, that man was at his lowest and judgement just around the corner; had he only known, there was more yet to come.
- Out of the ashes and death of the dark ages sprang forth the “Renaissance” of mankind, and from it came the “Great Enlightenment.” The world was then ripe, ready for the taking, to accept the “Existentialist Movement,” or, that man should primarily be concerned only with the existence of the individual person and their emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts, not the ungrounded contemplation of a higher, moral law, or a God, who can neither be proven or disproven.
- When this next century comes to an end, and you look back at the historical record, you will find that the most influential writer and philosopher of the last 300 hundred years may well have been Friedrich Nietzsche.
Allow me to read one of his writings, “The Madman”:
THE MADMAN—-Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. ‘Has he got lost?’ asked one. ‘Did he lose his way like a child?’ asked another. ‘Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?’—Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose, you know. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem, ‘aeternam deo.’ Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God? God is dead, we have killed him.”
- Adolph Hitler was an ardent admirer of Nietzsche and he was greatly influenced by his works like the prophet Zarathustra, claiming that there is nothing after this. Get all you can now, for that is all you will ever get. Above the gate at Auschwitz a sign was posted under the order of Hitler himself, and in his own words, stating:
“I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of a conscience, imperious, relentless and cruel.”
- Indeed, Hitler gave his own personal copies of Nietzsche’s work to Mussolini. Joseph Stalin, also, had read and was intimately familiar with the works of Nietzsche. As recounted by his daughter Svetlana Alliuyeva, who was present in the dying moments of the tyrant, Stalin, with his last gasp of breath lurched his limp, lifeless body upwards in the bed, looked up with the most horrid of grimaces and last shred of energy, and shook a clenched fist towards Heaven in anger. With that, he fell backward, slumping into the pillows, and was lost to eternity, a man responsible for killing perhaps 15 million people.
- What was it that put such a hatred of God in this man, the anger that made him doubt God’s existence, or that, in his own fledgling life and power he could overthrow the Holy God?
- It was an ideal, the belief that there is a God, but he is man, and Heaven is what man makes on earth. It was the work of Nietzsche that influenced him to believe there is no higher power, that there is man alone.
- It was His goal, Hitler’s goal, Mussolini’s, and for many adhering to humanism today, for there to be a reigning legion of “super men” on earth.
- Nietzsche’s prophet Zarathustra teaches us that, “there is no hell to be feared, no Heaven to be gained,” no wrong to be shunned, that there is nothing absolute.
- Knowledge is a deadly friend when no one sets the rules.
In all of this, the age of reason, the atheists with their scientific, cognitive theories, the time in which the classroom is filled with the teaching that there are no absolutes, everything is relative, all echoes of the existentialist mind, where do God’s people find themselves?
- Whose Gospel will we adhere to?
- You believe something, we all serve something, whether it be God or man’s vain glory. We believe, but according to who?
- The inescapable fact is that all philosophy, existentialism, relativism, Kantian though, deontology, and utilitarianism, with equally brilliant minds on each side of the argument, all come back to their grounding in “an ethic,” the very idea of which cannot be fathomed by any of these thought processes excepting that there is a higher, greater, moral law which each answers to, and that which each of these manmade ideals is trying to reach to, extract only what it likes, and run away from.
I believe it has been put best in his Modern Creed, by Steve Turner, a British Journalist:
“We believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin
We believe everything is OK
as long as you don’t hurt anyone
to the best of your definition of hurt,
and to the best of your definition of knowledge.
We believe in sex before, during, and
after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that taboos are taboo.
We believe that everything’s getting better
despite evidence to the contrary.
The evidence must be investigated
And you can prove anything with evidence.
We believe there’s something in horoscopes
UFO’s and bent spoons.
Jesus was a good man just like Buddha,
Mohammed, and ourselves.
He was a good moral teacher though we think
His good morals were bad.
We believe that all religions are basically the same-
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of creation,
sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.
We believe that after death comes the Nothing
Because when you ask the dead what happens
they say nothing.
If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then its
compulsory heaven for all
excepting perhaps
Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Kahn
We believe in Masters and Johnson
What’s selected is average.
What’s average is normal.
What’s normal is good.
We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between warfare and
bloodshed.
Americans should beat their guns into tractors .
And the Russians would be sure to follow.
We believe that man is essentially good.
It’s only his behavior that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.
We believe that each man must find the truth that
is right for him.
Reality will adapt accordingly.
The universe will readjust.
History will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute truth
excepting the truth,
that there is no absolute truth.
We believe in the rejection of creeds,
And the flowering of individual thought.
If chance be
the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky
and when you hear:
State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Youths go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man worshipping his maker. (Himself)
Joshua 24:15 (KJV)
15 And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
We are here to make a call to truth!
Who will rise up and proclaim that you are the church of the living God, that we serve Him and His message!?
- How do you know this is truth?
- How do you know THE book, the Bible, holds the answer?
- God knows us; He made us, and he knows we are creatures that demand evidence, proof, reassurance, plausibility, judgement beyond a reasonable doubt, the need to know, not just believe.
- With his understanding of our nature, God has not left us with what we clamor for; he has given us proof! He has given us hard proof, factual, undeniable experiential evidence to show there is something greater than what we see here!
- He has given us His Holy Spirit, with the evidence of speaking in other tongues!
Isaiah 28:10-12 (KJV)
10 For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little: 11 For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people. 12 To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear.
- Over 750 years before it took place the prophet foreshadowed the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost!
Acts 2:1-17 (KJV)
1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. 3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
5 And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven. 6 Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. 7 And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? 8 And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? 9 Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, 10 , and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. 12 And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? 13 mocking said, These men are full of new wine.
Peter preaches the Messiah crucified, risen, the worker of miracles
14 But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you, and hearken to my words: 15 For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. 16 But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; 17 And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams:
1Co 1:22 (KJV)
22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:
1Co 14:22 (KJV)
22 Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but to them that believe not: but prophesying serveth not for them that believe not, but for them which believe.
Acts 2:36-39 (KJV)
36 Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ.
37 Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do? 38 Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. 39 For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.
Don’t take anybody’s word for it! Come to God and ask for the gift for yourself!
Don’t believe the masses! He is real! You can feel Him! You will speak in another tongue! This is the sign! This is the evidence that demands a verdict, the Gospel, according to GOD!
Is there a church? Who will rise up? Who will stand and refuse to be moved back another inch by the enemy of doubt?
- Who will stand and proclaim that you believe, and that you have proof?
