Has the Sunday morning worship in some churches become an exclusively predictable feel-good entertainment experience?
what happens in "some churches" is by no means representative of Christianity in a country as diverse as the United States. No two chuches are identical, even if they are in the same organization or are the same size.
Do many services begin with good music
Should they begin with bad music?
and a brief feel-good scripture passage
Most churches that do Scripture readings follow a lectionary. Those aren't "feel-good."
followed with a honey-coated three point feel-good fluff sermon, catered by the preacher, that is totally devoid of the anti-God issues that we face in our lives, community and nation as a body of Bible believing Christians?
Impossible to define. "Devoid of the anti-God issues" may indeed mean (and probably does) that the preacher simply doesn't adddress the writer's pet causes. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with eloquence nor "three-point" sermons. Structure and eloquence should be valued, not belittled.
If Americans respected God today, as they should, they wouldn’t distance themselves from God’s word.
And they do this how?
They wouldn’t be using their tax dollars to pay teachers to indoctrinate their children into Darwin’s atheistic evolution rather then God as Creator.
So now it comes to brass tacks - the writer's pet issue is evolution. Never mind that Darwin has nothing to say for or against atheism, but only predicts that life changes over time - a fact that has been quantifiably observed. There are no small number of Christians - including the late John Paul II - who saw no contradiction between Christianity and evolution. St. Augustine forcefully argued that the creation narratives in Gen. 1-2 were allegorical, not literal. Who are you, and who am I, if St. Augustine couldn't figure this all out, to presume that we have our stuff all together? Arrogance.
Many Christians fail to understand or recognize the new disrespect towards their religious beliefs by vocal atheistic groups. As we stare directly into the sinister eyes of the face of evil, which fully intends to totally destroy our faith, our Godly values and the Godly traditional soul of our nation...
Oh, please. It's neither new nor especially sinister. Atheism is no more strident nor threatening than it ever was. Nor is atheism our biggest threat as Christians - secular post-modernism is.
we do not owe this darkness any civility.
Oh, really?
6 Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
- Col. 4:6
And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.
- 2Ti. 2:24-25
Satan is quickening, expanding and politicizing his agenda in order to melt down his manifest godless ideology into his new godless culture for his new godless nation....
I respectfully disagree. I went and grabbed my copy of "Holy and Reverend Is His Name", and decided to give those reading this topic a feel for the flavor of the sermons.
Here's a whole paragraph from the first sermon in the series, titled "Holy and Reverend Is His Name", with Psalm 111 as the reading:
"Political and social pressures are brought to bear upon American Christians nowadays to accept the gods of all world religions as their adherents migrate to our country and become our next-door neighbors. I said it in another program recently, but under the present circumstances (January 2000 -- ed.) it can't be said too often: the things we esteem most highly are the unique, the one-of-a-kind. Thus to esteem God as just one of many gods is to reduce Him to the status of the ordinary. When that happens, it can no longer be said, "Holy and reverend is His name," because He is no longer that. It isn't any wonder that we reveal such a low estimate of God in our personal, religious and social lives. It isn't any wonder he has such a remote and insignificant and non-essential role with us."
Mack Lyon is a sound gospel preacher. I've been fortunate enough to hear him preach in person twice. He's a very kindly individual who gently argues for Jesus. It is well worth your time to watch his program, IMO. It's available through a sizable network of broadcast TV stations, online with streaming video, and also on satellite TV Sunday mornings.
Just to clarify, I disagree with the statement, "This rant is utterly devoid of content."
The content is how some churches operate under the premise that Christianity is some sort of big "bless-me club"; as the Bible shows, God doesn't quite work that way.
But I own that I cannot see ... evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.
-- Charles Darwin,
I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.
-- Charles Darwin, Descent of Man p. 612
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
--H L Mencken, Minority Report (1956)
,The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
-- H L Mencken, in American Mercury (March, 1930)
Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million.
Just some fun quotes.
-- Mark Twain
This is an exhortation by an angry preacher. He's angry because of the immorality and by a church that he sees declining. He believes that these are the reasons his nation is doing so poorly.
This is his prescription for what ails us.
I have a different take on it altogether.
I do believe that western culture is more Jezebel than Hezekiah like. The ills of the culture are many, but the most offensive are sex, death, corruption, and faithlessness.
It strikes me that there is a point-of-no-return on certain pathways. The only remedy is the Jeremiah remedy...preaching that judgment is coming and waiting for God to act.
"Where iniquity doth abound, grace doth much more abound"; however, "My Spirit shall not always strive with man."
I don't think human plans and activity can turn this around. It's going to have to be direct intervention in some form. Either a refreshing or a day of the Lord.
Personally, I'm betting on another depression-like period.