If we are going to be effective soldiers for Jesus, we have to be firm on the basics: Get into the Word, spend time in prayer, fellowship with other believers and get good teaching. If you are not doing these things on a regular basis, you have no business getting in Satan's face — you'll be shredded. But if you are doing those, then add your spiritual combat gear (Ephesians 6.10-18) and apologetics training books, videos, lectures, audios or whatever. And remember, the whole thing is not only about being strong in the Lord and growing in faith ourselves, but to be able to present the gospel. You do care that people are dying without Christ and spending eternity in Hell, yes?
The first part of the basics, getting into the Word, is vital.
Do you believe the Word of God? Or is the Bible something that you do not consider all that important? If that is the case, I urge you to check yourself and see if you are truly saved. You cannot expect to be an effective witness if you do not believe the Bible.
When it comes to peripheral matters, there is room for variation, accommodation and disagreement. Unfortunately, too many Christians have sold out their convications at the foundation of the foundation, which is Genesis. Christians made concessions by saying that Genesis is not historical, but allegorical and get bad theology, such as:
The first part of the basics, getting into the Word, is vital.
Do you believe the Word of God? Or is the Bible something that you do not consider all that important? If that is the case, I urge you to check yourself and see if you are truly saved. You cannot expect to be an effective witness if you do not believe the Bible.
When it comes to peripheral matters, there is room for variation, accommodation and disagreement. Unfortunately, too many Christians have sold out their convications at the foundation of the foundation, which is Genesis. Christians made concessions by saying that Genesis is not historical, but allegorical and get bad theology, such as:
- Theistic evolution. God used evolution to create man, but this trade-off creates more theological difficulties than it solves (Mark 10.6-8, 1 Cor. 15.45)
- The "Gap Theory", where there are millions or billions of years between the first two verses of the Bible.
- "Progressive Creation", where God stepped in ever few million years and made adjustments.
- Local Flood. (Compromiser Hugh Ross says that Noah's Flood was "worldwide, but not global", an amazing bit of semantic tap dancing.) This raises some serious difficulties in dealing with other verses in the New Testament (2 Peter 3.5-7, Luke 17.26-27).
- Further accommodations because the foundation has been negated.
I have said before that when we are weak regarding Genesis, then it leads to a domino effect of further compromise, all the way through the Bible. But I learned that dominoes can knock over bigger dominoes than themselves, transferring energy. In a kind of theological physics, the transfer is not of kinetic and potential energies, but of spiritual power. When we gave way on the essentials back in Genesis, the chain reaction gets bigger and bigger, and we can become willing to cop out on pretty much anything.
Think compromising (this Dutch piece is about 1 min. 38 sec.):
It turns out that big things happen, and God's people are sitting there slack-jawed, wondering what happened and hoping that maybe somehow God will swoop down and fix things that they should have handled from the beginning.
Here is the latest big issue with which we are confronted.
Suddenly, a small minority of homosexuals is gaining political power. Atheists, political leftists and others who hate God's Word and his servants are using this "issue" against us. Suddenly, we are expected to say that "gay is okay", and waive not only our convictions, but redefine marriage itself as it has lasted for thousands of years. Here is an excellent article on how compromise on Genesis has led to Christians being taken by surprise and pretty well overpowered by worldly forces when it comes to so-called "gay marriage".
Globally, there is a debate about what marriage is, and whether we should, or even can, redefine it to include unions between two men, or between two women. Many make this into a civil rights issue, saying that to deny the right to marry to two people who love each other is deeply and fundamentally unjust. To complicate matters, many people have friends and family who identify as homosexual, so this becomes a personal issue for a significant portion of the population. Even more complex is the existence of church leaders supporting gay marriage, even professing evangelical ones.I hope you will finish reading "Gay ‘marriage’ and the consistent outcome of Genesis compromise", here.