SADDLEBACK ROCKS OUT FOR EASTER
Rick Warren has announced that The Jonas Brothers rock group will be performing at Saddleback Church’s Easter celebration at Angel Stadium on April 4. It is also the megachurch’s 30th anniversary. The Jonas Brothers is a boy band with a following of thousands of carnally-infatuated young girl fans. The band members are professing Christians, but their music is worldly. Their song “Burnin’ Up” says, “Baby, who turned the temperature hotter? Cause I’m burnin up, burnin up for your baby. ... I fell so fast/ Can’t hold myself back/ High heels, red dress/ All by yourself, gotta catch my breath.” There is nothing biblical or wholesome about that type of thing.
The Bible forbids God’s people to be conformed to the world (Romans 12:2) and warns that “the friendship of the world is enmity with God” and “whosoever will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4). Those powerful words are ignored in the average church today. The modern explosion of conformity of churches to the world has walked hand-in-hand with the progress of contemporary Christian music, beginning in the 1960s.
It was then that A. W. Tozer stated: “For centuries the Church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment, recognizing it for what it was. For this she was abused roundly by the sons of this world. But of late she has become tired of the abuse and has given over the struggle. If she cannot conquer the great god Entertainment, she may as well join forces with him and make whatever use she can of his powers. So today we have the astonishing spectacle of millions of dollars being poured into the unholy job of providing earthly entertainment for the so-called sons of heaven. Religious persons now carry on ‘services’ so carnal, so pagan that they can hardly be distinguished from the old vaudeville shows of earlier days. And for a preacher or writer to challenge this heresy is to invite ridicule and abuse from every quarter. When the Church joins up with the world, it is no longer the true church but a pitiful hybrid thing, an object of contempt to the world, and an abomination to the Lord. We must have a new reformation. There must come a violent break with that irresponsible, amusement-mad, paganized, pseudo-religion which passes today for the faith of Christ and which is being spread all over the world by unspiritual men employing unscriptural methods to achieve their ends.”
If men of God were saying this 50 years ago, what should preachers be saying today!
THE REJECTION OF THE DOCTRINE OF HELL
In a recent interview, emerging church leader Brian McLaren blatantly rejected the doctrine of hell. He said, “On hell, here’s the issue. That six-line narrative I talk about in the book, as interpreted by many people, suggests that every person who does not say the sinner’s prayer, personally accept Christ as their savior will spend eternity--which means absolutely forever without ever any abatement or termination--in conscious torment. So every second will be like they’re burning in fire, every second they’ll be in absolute agony, every second.
And so a lot of us find that is not something you can just lightly swallow. ... You think about someone who went through the Holocaust. They were so horribly treated by the Nazis and then the Nazis kill them and then they go to something even worse just because they weren’t Christians. A lot of us say, when we read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and really when we read most of the Bible, the image of God that we see does not seem like an eternal torturer. ... We’re asking that because we get a vision of God in Jesus Christ that just doesn’t seem to match with that” (“Interview: Brian McLaren on Sin, Hell, New Kind of Christianity,” Christian Post, March 8, 2010).
The fact is that the Jesus presented in the Gospels preached the doctrine of eternal hell for unbelievers in no uncertain terms. It was one of the major themes of Christ’s preaching! But when a man is willfully blind and has rejected the gospel that his own godly grandfathers preached he can read the Bible all day long and never understand it. That is the frightful truth about many within the emerging church who have “divorced the old God and married the new,” to use the words of a follower of The Shack.
PROMOTING “HOMOSPIRITUALITY”
The following is excerpted from “Brian McLaren’s New Book, A New Kind of Christianity--Assaulting Truth with a Vengeance.” “The reader is cordially invited to join the author in a heretical assault upon God and the Bible. Indeed, as McLaren enthusiastically demonstrates, it is not possible to attack one without attacking the other.
McLaren tells us ‘something is trying to be born among those of us who follow Jesus Christ’ (pg. 13). In fact, writes McLaren, ‘what is trying to be born today echoes the Great Reformation in many ways’ (pg. 257). ... What does McLaren’s ‘reformation’ offer? An errant eschatology. A New Age ‘christ.’ The ascent of homospirituality into the temple. (2 Kings 23:7). All made possible, of course, through creative misinterpretation of God’s Word.
The author has brought us his Great Deformation, a theology that plays to the flesh even while being portrayed as a spiritual journey. One of the major themes in A New Kind of Christianity, homosexuality, cleverly defines Christians who speak out against the homosexual lifestyle as suffering from ‘fundasexuality’ (pg. 174-5). However, you are only a ‘fundasexualist’ if you speak out loudly against this sin. McLaren decrees, ‘The term does not apply to the quiet, pious, respectful fundamentalism of straightforward, sincere people, but rather to the organizing, angry, dominating fundamentalism that declares war on those who differ’ (pg. 174-5). In other words, when it comes to homosexuality, a good Christian is a silent Christian.
‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter’ (Isaiah 5:20). Make no mistake: McLaren and others are being used to facilitate homospirituality, which may even assume an elevated, even sacred, status.”
- FBIS FRIDAY CHURCH NEWS SERVICE
