Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Some obstacles to getting the churches, let alone America, to repent, let alone pray down a revival.

There are Christian leaders now calling for repentance by Christians for the sake of America, because the nation is clearly under judgment by God.   There is also the occasional expression of hope that we might still have revival.  Both these concerns occupy me a great deal, and I think both are crucially important.  The church has to repent if we have any hope of saving America at all, and revival is still possible, I haven't given up on it completely.  Both require of us a great commitment of time and dedication.  All that is true.

But when I make a mental list of how far wrong the nation has gone, and the churches as well, what we need to repent of, I lose heart.  For one thing, when I realize that some of the people calling for this kind of commitment are connected with the charismatic movement I get really discouraged.  It's not that there aren't genuine believers in that movement, but the movement itself is something we need to repent of because it promotes false doctrine, false experiences, false Christianity.

One leader I appreciate and would normally trust for his spiritual insight, David Ravenhill, is treating a dream by Rick Joyner as prophetic and something we need to take seriously.  Joyner had a dream about Islamic State militants crossing our borders and murdering people.  But it is at least naïve to believe anything Rick Joyner says.  All you have to do is watch one of his "services" at his Morningstar church on You Tube to know that there is absolutely nothing Christian about his church, it is pure paganism and any spiritual phenomena experienced in such a context can only be satanic. 

Islamic militants invading America is a real possibility with or without Joyner's dream, in fact there are no doubt many sleeper Islamist cells that have already been here for years or decades. In fact it wouldn't make sense for jihadis NOT to be crossing our unprotected borders; they hate us, why wouldn't they be coming in to try to destroy us?   We do not need Joyner's dreams to tell us such things, and it may be that his specific dream is false anyway, if we wait around to find out.  That ought to show him up as a false prophet but charismatics are known for ignoring such obvious proofs against their doctrine.

If we want to save America one of the things we need to do is denounce the apostate movements within the Church such as the Charismatic Movement and certainly particular representatives of it.  When the wolf is the one preaching repentance how are we going to make his nature known so that the Church can be rid of him?

Second, we need to denounce the Antichrist Roman papacy and make it clear that there is nothing Christian about that "church" either, but the people who recognize this are few and far between, and the Charismatic Movement is one huge arena where Romanism is treated as Christian.

If you're going to pray for the salvation of the nation, start with denouncing those apostate elements within the church. 

Then you can move on to denouncing all the "liberal" churches that deny the full sufficiency of scripture, that compromise the first chapters of Genesis in favor of embracing evolution, or that deny the judgments of God against homosexuality.  We need to pray in great numbers against these things or all we will do is contribute to the One World False Church that is rapidly taking form, and contribute even more to the sinking of America under God's hand of judgment.

What good could it possibly do to have a revival with such elements within the public presentation of the Christian Church?  Whatever revival we could get under such circumstances would be counterfeit, like all the so-called revivals we've had through the Charismatic Movement over the last few decades, such as The Toronto Blessing, the Brownsville "revival," the Lakeland fiasco, and something going on in Redding California.  There are gigantic phony "revivals" in other parts of the world too, such as Africa, all based on the counterfeit Christianity of the Charismatic Movement.  Reinhard Bonnke is one of the perpetrators,  No, he is not a Christian.

The possibility of enough people with such a perspective on the situation coming together with the right motives and the will to act is pretty remote.  Perhaps if at least a few of us get the point and pray and tell the truth about these things we can accomplish something, but pushing back God's judgment?  Experiencing a genuine Revival?  Very very remote possibilities indeed.  I'm not giving up but the tide is running the other direction and the commitment needed to counter it is pretty daunting.  Never doubt God's ability though if He wants to bring this about.