From: JGinder@aol.com Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2006 02:51:02 EST
Subject: "Gimme that Old Time Religion"
To: Christiang1@aol.com
What do you think the famous 18th century preacher, Jonathan Edwards, would think of suburban Chicago's Willow Creek Church, where every weekend some 17,000 congregants arrive in their Chevy Suburban's, and Cadillac Escalade's, to worship in the enormous brick-and-glass auditorium?
What would the man who penned the fire-and-brimstone sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" think of services that use "Drama, Multimedia, and Contemporary Music" to serve people checking out what it really means to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?
On the 300th anniversary of the great theologian's birth evangelical Mega-Churches dot the American landscape like the Wal-Marts, Home Depots, and other big-box stores that so many of them resemble.
But the sounds of "Praise the Lord" heard in Revival Meetings filled with emotion and tears, in cracker box churches, are but a memory of the religious past in these Mega-Churches, all having been given up as being ineffective today.
Old Time Religion's absolute belief in the inspiration, infallibility and authority of the Bible is disappearing. Many of our young people go away to infidel, worldly, agnostic schools of higher learning and return saying "You believe in that book?.... I've learned it's full of Aesop's fables, myths, and all kinds of things that are man-made and man-thought."
"My professor with a Ph.D. told me that first I was green scum, then I became a fish, then a fowl, then a marsupial, then a Homo Sapien" these students continue.
And what has happened to the belief in the infallible word of God as in times gone by?
To illustrate that there is a story of an old-time preacher's unyielding faith in Scripture, even after some mischievous boys glued some of his Bible's pages together.
The pastor thought he was reading about Noah's wife, and turning what he thought was the next page he read aloud, "And she was 50 cubits broad, 300 cubits long, made out of gopher wood and coated on the inside and out with pitch." The old preacher scratched his head, saying aloud, "Hmmmm, That's the first time I ever saw Noah's wife described like that in the Word of God, but if the Bible says it, I believe it!"
In closing, please travel back in time with me to a sunny spring day in rural America ......Imagine an opening in a grove of trees, logs split open for benches, a man way up front preaching.......Suddenly the man beside you stands, and then one over there, soon the whole throng of people stands, and they join hands and sing through tears....... "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me! .....I once was lost, but now I'm found,...... Was blind but now I see....... "
Think about that for a minute, would you....Wouldn't it be great to experience that brand of "Old Time Religion" in that kind of place, at that time in history, just once in your life?
May our Lord bless you, and your families this coming week, and may it be "Good Enough For You" too.
Jon (Jon Ginder, CEO)
GB-ND
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