Disrespectful, Unloving and Hateful Evangelism

We as Christians, having received the truth of God’s Word, the message of the Gospel of the Lord Christ Jesus that truly saves, cannot help but preach and share such good news to others. Such good news that we have received that brought us from spiritual death to spiritual life, as we are bid and commanded by Scripture itself to preach the Gospel, it pains me to say that even in our passion and our well-meaning desires to please God in service we have, in ignorance or plain apathy towards truth, conducted ourselves in the most Disrespectful, Unloving and Hateful manner in evangelism.

There are many a people out there who are involved in different religious world views, the majority of which are under Roman Catholicism, others including the Muslim faith, LDS, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Christ, and even the wide and fast spreading Evangelical Movement. How is it that in our evangelism we see it sufficient to come to people having been brought up in their respective religions to just bid them to come to Christianity with a simple “You need Jesus in your life”? We give no explanation towards the falsehoods of what they have believed.

Such is a great disrespect towards the person lost in Roman Catholicism. Such is a great disrespect towards the one lost in Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness, Islam, and any other Religious group we can think of.

To ignore the fundamental foundational differences we have with Rome for that matter. Not differences in opinion but black and white contradictory statements on what it means to be a Christian. When we ignore those things for the sake of some surface level religiosity, quick results and effective methods, I think we are showing tremendous disrespect for those people. From a godly perspective, the people who love the Roman Catholic people the most are the people willing to sacrifice and to take a stand that’s unpopular in our culture and say “you need to understand what the issues of the Bible are all about. And I doubt your priest has told you what justification really is in scripture because he probably doesn’t know.”

I am convinced that the gospel according to Rome would fall under the condemnation of the anathemas of the Apostle Paul in Galatians 1:6-9 [show] I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel-- not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. (ESV)
. If the book of Galatians is inspired scripture, and if the addition of one thing to faith in Christ puts you under the anathema of God and makes that Gospel a false gospel it cannot save, then I submit to you that the addition of a never ending mass cannot perfect anyone, sacramental forgiveness, the concept of purgatory, the concept of indulgences goes so far beyond that to say that Paul was right to anathematize the Judiazers, and that same addition we have done in masses of Christian evangelical denominations giving requirement for salvation through a prayer or a decision made clearly making God debtor to our actions thus adding to what the Lord Christ Jesus has already accomplished and yet we should hold hands with that “gospel” and say it’s Christian or simply brush it off as a non-issue is to speak an unthinkable contradiction.¹

What is it in us that causes us to go on in our Christian religiosity that after having grasped a certain level of spiritual maturity would go on in our lives and think ourselves and our methods good enough for service to God and our fellow man? What is it in us that blinds us from truly loving those who are lost and astray? What causes hundreds upon thousands of us Christian brethren today to simply turn a blind eye towards issues such as this?

We keep ourselves busy in our respective ministries thinking we have served correctly and believed correctly not realizing that fundamentally we are declaring ourselves perfectly learned and clear of tradition that we are above contradiction when in truth we are full of it. We have failed to realize that the majority of us Christian believers are becoming that same of which is spoken of in 2 Peter 3:16-17 [show] as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. (ESV)
being ignorant and unstable men.

That conistency and stability of Christian living is ignored among us. The pervasiveness of society, media and popular-culture creeping into the visible church, this is one of the casualties. Having our hearts caloused with all sorts of excuses in our indifference towards others and indifference towards truth. Our minds being shut down to continue in denial and refuse to repent and wake up from such deception. Our eyes and ears being clouded by this age. May the Lord have mercy upon our generation.

May we as Christians, by God’s grace, take up the Word of God in declaration of truth not with disregard of the lives of the souls we preach to but with consideration of it. We are not dealing with numbers or discipleship prospects. We are dealing with men and their souls.²

Footnotes

www.Aomin.org : James White’s various talks [↩]
Of course the most unloving thing is to preach a different Gospel altoghether that is lawless and brings no conviction of Sin towards repentance and faith in the Lord Christ Jesus [↩]

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March 7th, 2010 on Sunday at 6:58 am

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