Why the Church Matters

 

Hey everyone!

You guys have been posting some great stuff on this blog and I want to thank you. I read all of them, and I love it when you are ministering to each other. That’s what it’s all about.

This Sunday at Harvest, I will continue my series on the book of Acts, and I will be speaking on “Secrets of the Early Church.” It will be webcast live at 7:45, 9:45, and 11:45 A.M, Pacific Time. It will also be archived for future viewing. To watch click here.

In this time when so many are quick to ether criticize or attempt to reinvent the Church, I thought it would be good to go back to “the original Greek,” so to speak. So I will be looking at the Church of the Book of Acts that turned its world upside down.

But there are hypocrites in the Church!

Sometimes people will say, “The reason I don’t go to church is because there are too many hypocrites!” Guess what? There were hypocrites in the first-century Church too, as we will see. They had rivalries, heresies, and some pretty radical immorality. There was even a hypocrite among Jesus’ handpicked disciples.

To help us understand this, Jesus told them a parable about tares and wheat that grow side by side (see Matthew 13:24-30). The two look exactly the same, until the time the tare actually uproots the wheat.

Satan has his “tares,” or fakes, out there, so we need to just be aware of it. Wherever there is the genuine, there will be the counterfeit.

Satan would love you to see a few of those counterfeits and say, “That’s it, I’m not going to church anymore. Too many hypocrites!”

So, let’s not let him prevail. Let’s all pray that God will help each of us to be a consistent witness and representative of Him to a watching world.

A couple of other things…

I have an article on the importance of prayer posted at WorldNetDaily. It’s called “Prayer: Your First (or Last) Resort.”

Here is our long-form weekend devotion as well.

God bless you all, and as Billy Graham always used to say at the end of his crusade telecasts, “And be sure to go to church on Sunday!”

Greg