Post by pitbull on Jan 28, 2007 5:48:32 GMT -5
FRIDAY CHURCH NEWS NOTES
January 26, 2007
Distributed by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 2001.
These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites or sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal in this particular aspect of our ministry is not devotional but is TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.
The following is another installment of the Friday Church News Notes designed especially for use in churches. It is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.
DOOMSDAY CLOCK MOVED CLOSER TO MIDNIGHT (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock was moved ahead on January 17 to five minutes to midnight. The Clock, a creation of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago symbolizing the potential of world destruction from nuclear war, was first set at seven minutes to midnight in 1947. The latest move of the Clock’s hand stems from the threat of a renewed nuclear arms race and the “dire challenge” of “climate change.” The Bulletin is a newsletter which was founded in 1945 by former Manhattan Project physicists concerned about the possibility of nuclear war and has grown into an organization focused generally on manmade threats to human civilization. The makers of the Doomsday Clock are right to be concerned about the future of this world, but it will not end by any manner that they envision. For all of the intellectual brilliance represented among the scientists associated with this Bulletin (contributors have included Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun) they don’t know as much about the future of this world as the humblest Bible believer. This present world will definitely end in fiery destruction, but it will not be a nuclear holocaust or global warming; it will be the hand of Almighty God who will destroy this wicked world to make way for a new one wherein dwelleth righteousness. “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:10-13).
BONO SAYS JESUS AND MOHAMMED ARE BOTH TRUE (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Bono, frontman for the popular rock band U2, is held up as an idol by many Christians. But while he does make a profession of faith in Christ, he doesn’t have a biblical testimony, doesn’t attend church with any regularity, and has lived the worldly rock & roll lifestyle to the hilt. He is the ultimate “cool Christian,” but is he really a Christian? Recently I read the book “Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas” (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), which contains an interview with a music reporter that extended over a long period of time. Nowhere in this 337-page book does Bono give a scriptural testimony of having been born again, without which Jesus said no man can see the kingdom of heaven. He says that he believes Jesus is the Messiah and that He died on the cross for his sins and that he is holding out for grace, but the Pope says that much. Bono’s “grace” is a grace that does not result in radical conversion and a new way of life; it is a grace without repentance. Nowhere does he warn his myriads of listeners to turn to Christ before it is too late and before they pass out of this life into eternal hell. In fact, the only thing he says about heaven or hell is that both are on earth. “I think, rather like Hell, Heaven is on Earth. That’s my prayer ... that’s where Heaven for me is...” (Bono on Bono, p. 254). It sounds like Bono has been listening more to John Lennon than the Bible, and in fact he says that when he was 11 years old he listened to Lennon’s album Imagine and it “really got under my skin, the blood of it” (p. 246). On this album Lennon sang, “Imagine there is no heaven above and no hell below.” As for church, Bono says that the older he gets the more comfort he finds in Roman Catholicism. “Let’s not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. ... murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows, the colors of Catholicism--purple mauve, yellow, red--the burning incense. My friend Gavin Friday says Catholicism is the glam-rock of religion” (p. 201). Though he speaks positively of Romanism, Bono has nothing good to say about “fundamentalism,” falsely claiming that it is a denial that God is love (p. 167) and calling it vile names (p. 147). He praises singers who have produced some of the filthiest music, such as Prince and Mick Jagger, insinuating that they are good people who are only making innocent art (pp. 153, 156). He says his favorite lyric in a song is Kris Kristofferson’s immoral “Help Me Make It through the Night” (p. 129). He admits that U2’s music is “sexual” and even pretends that “erotic love can turn into something much higher,” admitting that he seems “to segue very easily between the two” (p. 120). The truth is that Bono’s Christianity is a heretical mixture of Bible (the smallest part) and rock & roll philosophy (the largest part). He is a study in contradictions. On one hand he says that Jesus is the Messiah who died on the cross for man’s sins, while on the other hand making statements by his mouth and lifestyle that blatantly deny the Jesus of the Bible. In fact, he says that Jesus and Mohammed are both true. At U2’s Madison Square Garden concert in 2005 Bono led the crowd in the chant “Jesus, Jew, Mohammed--all true. Jesus, Jew, Mohammed--all true” Tara Cobble, who attended the concert, testified that this chant destroyed her ill-placed devotion to Bono. “He repeated the words like a mantra. Was Bono, my supposed brother in Christ, preaching some kind of universalism? As I looked around, I saw all the people standing and chanting with him--it was disgusting ... When he stated that lie so boldly, it devastated me. It was, without question, the most disturbing experience of my life; I felt like I’d been covered in bile. The reality is that Bono held too high a place in my heart. And I don’t think I’m alone there. I’ve wrongly held him up as the heroic ideal--the cool representative for Christianity; he may have been my ÔChristian idol’, but he was my idol nonetheless” (Tara Leigh Cobble, “How to Dismantle an Idolized Bono,” Relevant magazine, Dec. 19, 2005). We appreciate her candor, but from a biblical standpoint there is no such thing as a cool representative of Christianity. If a man takes the Bible seriously, all of it, he will not be cool by any worldly standard! In fact, he will be some sort of despised fundamentalist!
RICK WARREN JOINS CHUCK COLSON IN A NEW VIDEO PRESENTATION (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Southern Baptist pastor Rick Warren of Purpose Driven Life fame has joined Chuck Colson in a new video presentation entitled “Wide Angle: Framing Your Worldview.” The two “tackle some of the key issues of our day: truth vs. relativism, creationism vs. Darwinism, tolerance, terrorism, etc.” Chuck Colson is one of the most radical ecumenists of our generation. He is the founder of Prison Fellowship, of which more than 70% of the chaplains are Roman Catholic. In his foreword to Roman Catholic Keith Fournier’s dangerous book entitled Evangelical Catholics, Colson said, “But at root those who are called of God, whether Catholic or Protestant, are part of the same Body. ... It’s high time that all of us who are Christians come together regardless of the difference of our confessions and our traditions.” In his book The Body, Colson wrote, “The body of Christ, in all its diversity, is created with Baptist feet, Charismatic hands, and Catholic ears--all with their eyes on Jesus.” On March 29, 1994, Colson joined Catholic priest Richard John NeuhausÊand other Protestants and Roman Catholics as originators of a statement called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” The document stated: “We together, Evangelicals and Catholics, confess our sins against the unity that Christ intends for all his disciples.” After meeting Pope John Paul II in 1995, Colson described him as a friend of Christian orthodoxy. What blindness! The only orthodoxy the late Pope stood for was the heretical orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism. Pope John Paul II had “Totally Yours” in Latin embroidered on his papal robes, testifying of his complete devotion not to Jesus Christ but to Mary! A large M was inscribed on the Pope’s coffin. When is the allegedly biblically conservative Southern Baptist Convention going to rise up and demand that Rick Warren leave the denomination? I would like to see it, but I am not holding my breath. Ê
CASUAL SEX IS A CON: WOMEN JUST AREN’T LIKE MEN (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The title of an article in The Sunday Times of London for January 14 was “Casual Sex Is a Con: Women Just Aren’t like Men.” It was written by Dawn Eden, a rock music historian and former “groupie” who lived the immoral rock & roll lifestyle and the feminist philosophy to the hilt and was left feeling that she had been cheated out of something very precious. Note the following excerpts: “The Sixties generation thought everything should be free. But only a few decades later the hippies were selling water at rock festivals for $5 a bottle. But for me the price of “free love” was even higher. I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had--and I had more than my fair share--far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect. And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead. I am 37, and like millions of other girls, was born into a world which encouraged young women to explore their sexuality. It was almost presented to us as a feminist act. ... Whatever [feminist Germaine] Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy--that a woman can [have casual sex] like a man--and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies. ... Our culture--both in the media via programmes such as Sex and the City and in everyday interactions--relentlessly puts forth the idea that lust is a way station on the road to love. It isn’t. ... The misguided, hedonistic philosophy which urges young women into this kind of behaviour harms both men and women; but it is particularly damaging to women, as it pressures them to subvert their deepest emotional desires. The champions of the sexual revolution are cynical. They know in their tin hearts that casual sex doesn’t make women happy. That’s why they feel the need continually to promote it.”
MERCY’S DAY WILL SOON BE GONE (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from H.A. Ironside’s commentary on Revelation: “I would remind my hearers that time for us is flying by quickly. If any of you is unsaved, it is well for you to remember that mercy’s day is quickly gone. Gospel light already seems to be vanishing from the earth; the darkening apostasy is making rapid strides; a famine for hearing the Word of the Lord will soon be here. Oh, that now, in this day of grace, men would heed the testimony of the Scripture of truth, receive the virgin-born Son of God as Saviour and Lord, and spurn the lies of every Antichrist.”
CONCLUSION: Friends in Christ, do not be discouraged by any of this. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. These things remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the coming of the Lord. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ day by day? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14).
January 26, 2007
Distributed by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 2001.
These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites or sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal in this particular aspect of our ministry is not devotional but is TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.
The following is another installment of the Friday Church News Notes designed especially for use in churches. It is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.
DOOMSDAY CLOCK MOVED CLOSER TO MIDNIGHT (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock was moved ahead on January 17 to five minutes to midnight. The Clock, a creation of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago symbolizing the potential of world destruction from nuclear war, was first set at seven minutes to midnight in 1947. The latest move of the Clock’s hand stems from the threat of a renewed nuclear arms race and the “dire challenge” of “climate change.” The Bulletin is a newsletter which was founded in 1945 by former Manhattan Project physicists concerned about the possibility of nuclear war and has grown into an organization focused generally on manmade threats to human civilization. The makers of the Doomsday Clock are right to be concerned about the future of this world, but it will not end by any manner that they envision. For all of the intellectual brilliance represented among the scientists associated with this Bulletin (contributors have included Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun) they don’t know as much about the future of this world as the humblest Bible believer. This present world will definitely end in fiery destruction, but it will not be a nuclear holocaust or global warming; it will be the hand of Almighty God who will destroy this wicked world to make way for a new one wherein dwelleth righteousness. “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Peter 3:10-13).
BONO SAYS JESUS AND MOHAMMED ARE BOTH TRUE (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Bono, frontman for the popular rock band U2, is held up as an idol by many Christians. But while he does make a profession of faith in Christ, he doesn’t have a biblical testimony, doesn’t attend church with any regularity, and has lived the worldly rock & roll lifestyle to the hilt. He is the ultimate “cool Christian,” but is he really a Christian? Recently I read the book “Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas” (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), which contains an interview with a music reporter that extended over a long period of time. Nowhere in this 337-page book does Bono give a scriptural testimony of having been born again, without which Jesus said no man can see the kingdom of heaven. He says that he believes Jesus is the Messiah and that He died on the cross for his sins and that he is holding out for grace, but the Pope says that much. Bono’s “grace” is a grace that does not result in radical conversion and a new way of life; it is a grace without repentance. Nowhere does he warn his myriads of listeners to turn to Christ before it is too late and before they pass out of this life into eternal hell. In fact, the only thing he says about heaven or hell is that both are on earth. “I think, rather like Hell, Heaven is on Earth. That’s my prayer ... that’s where Heaven for me is...” (Bono on Bono, p. 254). It sounds like Bono has been listening more to John Lennon than the Bible, and in fact he says that when he was 11 years old he listened to Lennon’s album Imagine and it “really got under my skin, the blood of it” (p. 246). On this album Lennon sang, “Imagine there is no heaven above and no hell below.” As for church, Bono says that the older he gets the more comfort he finds in Roman Catholicism. “Let’s not get too hard on the Holy Roman Church here. The Church has its problems, but the older I get, the more comfort I find there. ... murmuring prayers, stories told in stained-glass windows, the colors of Catholicism--purple mauve, yellow, red--the burning incense. My friend Gavin Friday says Catholicism is the glam-rock of religion” (p. 201). Though he speaks positively of Romanism, Bono has nothing good to say about “fundamentalism,” falsely claiming that it is a denial that God is love (p. 167) and calling it vile names (p. 147). He praises singers who have produced some of the filthiest music, such as Prince and Mick Jagger, insinuating that they are good people who are only making innocent art (pp. 153, 156). He says his favorite lyric in a song is Kris Kristofferson’s immoral “Help Me Make It through the Night” (p. 129). He admits that U2’s music is “sexual” and even pretends that “erotic love can turn into something much higher,” admitting that he seems “to segue very easily between the two” (p. 120). The truth is that Bono’s Christianity is a heretical mixture of Bible (the smallest part) and rock & roll philosophy (the largest part). He is a study in contradictions. On one hand he says that Jesus is the Messiah who died on the cross for man’s sins, while on the other hand making statements by his mouth and lifestyle that blatantly deny the Jesus of the Bible. In fact, he says that Jesus and Mohammed are both true. At U2’s Madison Square Garden concert in 2005 Bono led the crowd in the chant “Jesus, Jew, Mohammed--all true. Jesus, Jew, Mohammed--all true” Tara Cobble, who attended the concert, testified that this chant destroyed her ill-placed devotion to Bono. “He repeated the words like a mantra. Was Bono, my supposed brother in Christ, preaching some kind of universalism? As I looked around, I saw all the people standing and chanting with him--it was disgusting ... When he stated that lie so boldly, it devastated me. It was, without question, the most disturbing experience of my life; I felt like I’d been covered in bile. The reality is that Bono held too high a place in my heart. And I don’t think I’m alone there. I’ve wrongly held him up as the heroic ideal--the cool representative for Christianity; he may have been my ÔChristian idol’, but he was my idol nonetheless” (Tara Leigh Cobble, “How to Dismantle an Idolized Bono,” Relevant magazine, Dec. 19, 2005). We appreciate her candor, but from a biblical standpoint there is no such thing as a cool representative of Christianity. If a man takes the Bible seriously, all of it, he will not be cool by any worldly standard! In fact, he will be some sort of despised fundamentalist!
RICK WARREN JOINS CHUCK COLSON IN A NEW VIDEO PRESENTATION (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Southern Baptist pastor Rick Warren of Purpose Driven Life fame has joined Chuck Colson in a new video presentation entitled “Wide Angle: Framing Your Worldview.” The two “tackle some of the key issues of our day: truth vs. relativism, creationism vs. Darwinism, tolerance, terrorism, etc.” Chuck Colson is one of the most radical ecumenists of our generation. He is the founder of Prison Fellowship, of which more than 70% of the chaplains are Roman Catholic. In his foreword to Roman Catholic Keith Fournier’s dangerous book entitled Evangelical Catholics, Colson said, “But at root those who are called of God, whether Catholic or Protestant, are part of the same Body. ... It’s high time that all of us who are Christians come together regardless of the difference of our confessions and our traditions.” In his book The Body, Colson wrote, “The body of Christ, in all its diversity, is created with Baptist feet, Charismatic hands, and Catholic ears--all with their eyes on Jesus.” On March 29, 1994, Colson joined Catholic priest Richard John NeuhausÊand other Protestants and Roman Catholics as originators of a statement called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.” The document stated: “We together, Evangelicals and Catholics, confess our sins against the unity that Christ intends for all his disciples.” After meeting Pope John Paul II in 1995, Colson described him as a friend of Christian orthodoxy. What blindness! The only orthodoxy the late Pope stood for was the heretical orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism. Pope John Paul II had “Totally Yours” in Latin embroidered on his papal robes, testifying of his complete devotion not to Jesus Christ but to Mary! A large M was inscribed on the Pope’s coffin. When is the allegedly biblically conservative Southern Baptist Convention going to rise up and demand that Rick Warren leave the denomination? I would like to see it, but I am not holding my breath. Ê
CASUAL SEX IS A CON: WOMEN JUST AREN’T LIKE MEN (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The title of an article in The Sunday Times of London for January 14 was “Casual Sex Is a Con: Women Just Aren’t like Men.” It was written by Dawn Eden, a rock music historian and former “groupie” who lived the immoral rock & roll lifestyle and the feminist philosophy to the hilt and was left feeling that she had been cheated out of something very precious. Note the following excerpts: “The Sixties generation thought everything should be free. But only a few decades later the hippies were selling water at rock festivals for $5 a bottle. But for me the price of “free love” was even higher. I sacrificed what should have been the best years of my life for the black lie of free love. All the sex I ever had--and I had more than my fair share--far from bringing me the lasting relationship I sought, only made marriage a more distant prospect. And I am not alone. Count me among the dissatisfied daughters of the sexual revolution, a new counterculture of women who are realising that casual sex is a con and are choosing to remain chaste instead. I am 37, and like millions of other girls, was born into a world which encouraged young women to explore their sexuality. It was almost presented to us as a feminist act. ... Whatever [feminist Germaine] Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy--that a woman can [have casual sex] like a man--and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies. ... Our culture--both in the media via programmes such as Sex and the City and in everyday interactions--relentlessly puts forth the idea that lust is a way station on the road to love. It isn’t. ... The misguided, hedonistic philosophy which urges young women into this kind of behaviour harms both men and women; but it is particularly damaging to women, as it pressures them to subvert their deepest emotional desires. The champions of the sexual revolution are cynical. They know in their tin hearts that casual sex doesn’t make women happy. That’s why they feel the need continually to promote it.”
MERCY’S DAY WILL SOON BE GONE (Friday Church News Notes, January 26, 2007, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from H.A. Ironside’s commentary on Revelation: “I would remind my hearers that time for us is flying by quickly. If any of you is unsaved, it is well for you to remember that mercy’s day is quickly gone. Gospel light already seems to be vanishing from the earth; the darkening apostasy is making rapid strides; a famine for hearing the Word of the Lord will soon be here. Oh, that now, in this day of grace, men would heed the testimony of the Scripture of truth, receive the virgin-born Son of God as Saviour and Lord, and spurn the lies of every Antichrist.”
CONCLUSION: Friends in Christ, do not be discouraged by any of this. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. These things remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the coming of the Lord. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ day by day? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14).