Get a Real Job! (Reprise)

Get a Real Job! (Reprise)

I am republishing this post from very early on in my blogging career in 2005. This is done to keep pressing into the timeless truths expressed in Malachi and to show that the danger of false teachers and neglectful leaders exists just as much today as it did then. It also serves as a reminder of the purpose and flavor of this blog, which have not substantially changed in 4 years.

I've been blogging for a few weeks now. So far as I can tell the only visitors that have been to the site are one person marketing something and one person acknowledging something I said when I visited his site.

Blogging wisdom says that sites must be promoted via various means. The objective is to have as high a readership as possible. To make one's mark; to have one's say; to be noticed; to tell one's story based on that narrative fragment of the post modern world that I might share with other people out there. I don't give a fig about any of that.

I would absolutely hate the idea of looking for groupies who could cheer me on with supportive platitudes cultivated and received as a form of self-validation. I will not deliberately promote this site in that way. It's not about the site, nor is it about recognition for myself. I am simply speaking into God's universe through the internet the timeless Truth about His Son. It is about the adoration of His attributes. It is about saying what even many churches refuse to say. There are so many wishy-washy, ill taught, tentative, lukewarm and falsely professing Christians in the world that the original message is all but buried under the detritus of a self-serving age - an age that has invented its own God by picking bits out of the Bible.

These are perilous times for true believers. The church has been inundated by the world because it invited the world into the Body. CGM, CCM, Open Theism, Post-modernism and the EC are only the latest onslaught. Before that it was rationalism and Charismatism and Word/Faith-ism, Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare-ism, New Apostolic Reformationism - the list is absolutely endless. Some of these "ism's" appeal to people's emotions and some to their intellects. All of them, in so doing, appeal to the flesh.

After you watch people long enough falling hook line and sinker for deceptive lies it is not necessary to examine with a fine-toothed comb every detail of the latest heretical teaching. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck that's enough to call it a duck. Endless debate, argument, accusation, rhetoric and even apologetics is a waste of breath. If they receive not the love of the truth then why spend that breath on them. Move on to those who will hear. Perhaps that will make them jealous, and some will be saved. Who knows?

Let me be frank (well, more frank!) If people purporting to be Christian leaders complicate or alter the message in any way - and they refuse to hear words of rebuke or reproof - then we ought to move along and turn them over to Satan. If they stand between God and the people in such a way that the view of God is obscured, or so that it is they who are seen and not the Lord - then admonish them and move on. If Benny Hinn insists on being unaccountable for money raised through spurious healing campaigns then rebuke him and move on. Don't let him become the focus. Christ and His gospel is the focus.

If Brian McLaren insists on waffling about the sinfulness of h@mos3xuality then rebuke him and move on. Don't get hung up for years in a debate about what is so clearly and unequivocally mandated as sin. If people won't agree with what is plainly taught and historically accepted as true then move on. They probably aren't true Christians at all, but mere professors who have added to their sins the perversion of the truth and the hardening of their own hearts. Shake the dust off and move along. Put your energy into taking the gospel to hearts that have been prepared by God.

This probably scares some people who have "emerged" from the abuses of the wrong sort of Fundamentalism. I saw people like that at a Church of Christ seminar a couple of years ago, buying wholesale into postmodern obfuscations of truth as a reaction to the bad experiences of Fundie upbringings. They called themselves "recovering fundamentalists". It was a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Taking your ball and going home. Jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The truth is that if you are not a fundamentalist then you aren't a Christian. Is that offensive? Too bad! It's true. You just need to distinguish between the sort of Fundamentalism that describes the abusive behaviour of some people, and a belief in the fundamentals of the faith. There is a huge difference. The fundamentals have not changed in 2,000 years. They don't need to. There is no new Truth. There is nothing that can add to the completed revelation of God.

If you do not hold to the plenary inspiration of the Bible you are anathema. If you do not hold to One God existing in the three Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit you are anathema. If you give way to the need to "reinvent the story" or to detract from or add to the Word of God you are anthema. If you deny the virgin birth, the absolute sovereignty of God or the deity of Christ you are anathema. If you deny the doctrine of original sin or the hypostatic union of man and God in Christ you are anathema. I could go on, but you get the point. Believe what you want, but don't deny any of the fundamentals and still call yourself a Christian. Call yourself what you are - either an apostate or a heretic. And if you are a leader don't publicly question the fundamentals of the faith or you will show yourself to be a wolf.

The fundamentals of the faith ought to be beyond any question amongst all professors of Christianity. People who do question them need help - and if they refuse help then they are at best apostate and at worst false Christians. Admittedly, we all need to examine ourselves to see if we are (truly) in the faith. (2Corithians 13:5) Many of us will have a lack of clarity or even times of doubt about one or other of the fundamentals. I don't get all bent out of shape when this temporarily happens to me or to other sheep. But I do get mightily exercised when so-called "Christian" authors, pastors, seminarians or apologists express their own doubts in public and then start feeding those doubts to the sheep instead of feeding them Christ.

If you can't stick with the faith once for all delivered to the saints then get a real job and stop troubling God's people!