For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. - Romans 1:16 (ESV)
The ebb and flow of heretical news coming out from the NAR apostate church is very unpredictable. It seems sometimes we cannot find something worth writing about that has not already been discussed a dozen times. Then other times it seems we are bombarded with smaller stories that deserve some attention but maybe not a full blown devotional. We usually scrape these stories up like gum off the pavement and consolidate them into a weekly special. This is one of those weeks that saw several stories that we should be aware of as followers of Christ who seek to discern. So let us reason once more together.
Let's start with a lesson to be learned from pastors who continue to fall from grace and the Purpose Driven Industrial Complex that tries to get them back to work as soon as possible. We have seen this over and over again. Ted Haggard, was caught having a decades long relationship with a male hooker who he liked to do crystal meth with while head of the National Association of Evangelicals. Yeah, he came back pretty quickly into church leadership again. Mark Driscoll stole $200,000 from tithes, cheated the NY Time Bestseller List, abused staff, and talked about his victims as a "pile of dead bodies under the Mars Hill Church bus" and then ran off in the dead of night to avoid church discipline. He of course was ushered back into the fold a short time later. Recently, we heard that Carl Lentz, who had multiple affairs including seducing the family babysitter to have sex in the bed he shared with his wife, is now back again. Maybe we ought to start listening to people who actually worked with these hirelings and swear to us they are unfit for ministry. Cause we were told that on all of them and James MacDonald as well.
MacDonald was once the darling of the evangelical world and in full disclosure I used to enjoy some of his writing through daily devotionals. Of course, I did not know behind the scenes he was an angry, abusive pastor with gambling problems, and accusations of financial abuse of the church as well. I only heard about that when he was caught on a hot mic wishing he could plant child pornography on a rival's computer. After being kicked out of his own church by elders who declared him unfit for ministry, MacDonald would soon try and make a comeback. To this day, I still get fundraising emails from him, but I did not want to fund whatever his next big bet would be on. Perhaps those who knew him best knew better than the rest of us though because MacDonald was arrested recently for allegedly attacking a 59-year-old woman over a minor traffic incident. The story says that MacDonald struck a car with his truck while trying to parallel park. The woman got out of the car to speak to him when he attacked her. Witnesses had to come to the woman's aid. James faces seven years in prison if convicted. Now, everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but this story sounds in line with who we now know James MacDonald to be. I only bring this story up because it is vitally important that we discern properly, who we are going to follow and listen to. The bible gives us qualifications for pastors for a reason. We ignore them at our own peril. Mark Driscoll, Ted Haggard and Carl Lentz are disqualified. James MacDonald is disqualified. So is Brian Houston before anyone gets any ideas. Mind you they were all disqualified for the false gospels they preached but the events surrounding each of them was God exposing them and sadly, many simply refuse to listen.
That brings us to sunny story number two, which exposes the unbiblical nature of how the apostate church pretends to be doing the Lord's work. For this we travel down to Oklahoma and ironically enough the church Carl Lentz has landed at recently, Transformation Church (TC) and Pastor Michael Todd. For their Easter service TC put on a play that was widely criticized for its luridness and unchristlike overtones. This included scenes of girls twerking on the altar, I mean stage. The production also contained many secular songs including one called "Die Young" by Ke$ha, which include these reverent lyrics commemorating the victory Jesus won for us on Calvary:
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young
We're gonna die young
