With all heads bowed and with all eyes closed?

One of the most commonly heard alter calls within Christianity begins with the words “With all heads bowed and with all eyes closed,” sometimes with the addition of, “and with no one looking around.”

Seriously!? Why are we modeling both to the unsaved and to our own Christian congregations that salvation is something to be embarrassed about? Embarrassment is about shame. Is receiving salvation something to be ashamed of?

Do we really want to model to people who are about to put their faith in Christ for the first time that receiving salvation is an embarrassment? And an embarrassment before a congregation full of people who have already received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior!? Is this an appropriate way to model the ‘good news” of the gospel to the unsaved?

Isn’t this being done with the intention of helping people who are about to take their first faith-filled step into Christianity to feel more “comfortable”? If so, perhaps we need to remember that Jesus was also a bit “uncomfortable” while he was being publicly crucified to death on the cross to deliver us from the shame of our sins.

Perhaps what we ought to be doing when we make these alter calls is to announce that there is no actual shame whatsoever in receiving Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior instead of modeling to them that we “understand” that they may be too embarrassed before men to do so.

Luke 9:6 Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

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Humanists and Human Nature

By Dr. David Reagan – All humanists regardless of their political or theological labels are agreed that the source of evil in the world is external to man. They view evil as rooted in the corruption of society. They believe that the solution to all man’s problems can be found in societal reform.

Take, as an example their attitude toward crime. They believe society is the root cause of crime. All we have to do to eliminate crime, they argue, is to provide people with a guaranteed job that will supply them with sufficient income so that they will be able to live in a suburb.

But such reforms do not transform the basic nature of people. In the ghetto a man will pay $25 for a prostitute. In the suburb he will chase his neighbor’s wife. In the ghetto he will throw a rock through a window and steal a TV set. In the suburb, he will put on his three-piece suit, drive to the office, manipulate the computer and embezzle a million dollars.

You do not change people’s basic nature by changing their environment. Changing their environment simply converts them into more sophisticated sinners.

The humanists view is absolutely contrary to Scripture. The word of God teaches that the source of evil is rooted within man’s fallen nature, and that it is man, and not society, which needs to be changed. (Genesis 8:21 Jeremiah 17:9 – 10 Mark 7:20 – 23)

Difficult to think of Jesus as your friend?

John 15:15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

It can be difficult to think of Jesus as our friend when we are so aware of our weaknesses and personal insecurities. But God’s friendship with us is not based in any of our successes or failures. It is sourced in His infinite capacity to love. A.W. Tozer says, “We do God more honor by believing what He has said about Himself than by hiding in self-conscious humility among the trees of the garden.”

From Temptation to Power

The temptations that Jesus faced in the desert (Luke 4:1-14) are the same kinds of temptation that we are being continuously enticed by in the world today.

The temptations Jesus endured were hedonism, egoism, and materialism.  

Materialism is a personal attitude which attaches importance to acquiring and consuming material goods (kingdoms, wealth).

Egoism is the belief that individuals should focus primarily on doing what is in their self-interest.

Hedonism is a school of thought that argues that our personal pleasure and happiness should be the most important aspect of our life.

When Jesus returned from the 40 days of fasting and resisting temptation in the desert, he is said to have returned in the power of the Spirit. Overcoming these temptations may be an important key for us today in regard to ministering in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Luke 4:14-19 ¹⁴ Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. ¹⁵ He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

¹⁶ He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
¹⁹     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Imagine

Imagine a church where the primary focus was simply welcoming, worshiping, and dwelling in the presence of God. Rather than trying to excel at all the other things that churches are involved in nowadays, this church would unapologetically focus on welcoming and inviting the presence of the living God.

Primarily a place of worship, this church would be a fellowship of believers focusing on the adoration of the great Adonai. A place of free flowing praise and prayer and prophecy and testimony as momentarily inspired by the Spirit of God. A place of spiritual rest and recharge.

Imagine a gathering of believers who would not seek to be all things to all people, striving endlessly to meet the wants and desires and agendas of people, but instead, a church whose primary focus was to unpretentiously welcome the freely flowing presence and direction of the Holy Spirit.

Can you imagine?

Did you know…

Interactive social media algorithms are developed basically by tracing your web history. In other words, everything you are doing on the web is traced and developed into an algorithm which then specializes in presenting you with product advertisements and even political views that you typically WANT to see. Because these algorithms always steer you toward what you WANT to see rather than what you may NEED to see, they diminish the amount of exposure we have to other peoples points of view and balanced opinions.

 

For heavy social media users, this tends to increase polarization between people with different points of view. Each side is seeing mostly stories that support their own beliefs and typically this causes people to feel better about their own views while distancing them from the reality of the world around them.

 

Thus, we are being continuously manipulated on social media and at corporate websites into a manageable herd mentality via behind the scenes, profit and politically motivated digital machinery.

 

This is what happens to a society when the Almighty Dollar is more important to people than the Almighty God. 

The Light of the Glory of God

In chapter 21 of the book of Revelation we are told that all light within the new Jerusalem will be supplied by the Glory of God and the Lamb will be its lamp and there will no longer be any night within the city.

^{Rev 22:23} The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

All spiritual light comes from the glory of God because the glory of God is sourced in the holiness of God. The holiness of God produces the glory of God which is the light that shines in the darkness.

It is the glory of our holy God that shines into the darkness of men’s souls to bring light to them. Christ is the lamp from which this light is brought forth.

In these darkest of times, it is the glory of God that will reveal what is hidden in darkness and it is the glory of God that will illuminate the Way that we are to go.

Within the radiance of the brilliance of the glory of the Lord the blind will see and the lame will walk. And in this I mean the body of Christ, for surely we are the blind when we have turned away from the light and we are the lame when we do not walk by the Spirit.

The Spirit said to me, “When the glory of the Lord rests upon a place, that place will be known as a Glory House. When the glory of God lifts from that place it will still be known as a Glory House because the glory of the Lord was there.”

Let us pray that the glory of the Lord will be with us that there will no longer be any night in our houses of worship and in the places where we dwell.