Christianity in today’s world

Okay, lastly, just a few thoughts about Christianity.

We believe that Jesus is the answer! Amen! Jesus come! He’s coming back again.

There’s a tremendous attack upon that faith all over the world today. There’s open persecution in China, churches being pulled down, prevented from preaching any kind of Gospel.

Tremendous persecution of Christians in Muslim countries. Nigeria in particular has seen a massive increase in persecution, pastors being just killed and hacked to death in the most brutal and terrible ways by Islamic fundamentalists, spreading right over much of central Africa.

And, of course, in the Middle East and in Afghanistan, in Iran, we see this very brutal Islamic regimes in place in which, if you’re a Christian, you’re in trouble.

We see, even here, in the Western world, increasing anti-Christianity dominating our education system, infiltrating our media as well as much of the institutional church.

It is increasingly difficult to speak out against things like homosexuality and transsexuality. If you do that, you might be accused of performing a hate crime.

We’ve got this ‘woke’ ideology which is extremely anti-Christian and extremely repressive and intolerant of anybody who holds marginal views which are slightly different to the mainstream views.

You’ve even got J.K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter books, now being cast out by the woke establishment because she said that only women have a cervix.

In other words, only women are women; you can’t change from being a woman to a man.

So, she’s now being accused of being transphobic and they’re not letting her speak.

I mean, there are things which are so absurd and yet, they’re part of our culture today.

And if you understand it, it’s anti-Christian, it’s making it illegal really to stand up for what is true and what is given by God.

But men are men and women are women, they don’t change. And the one relationship which God sanctions is the relationship between a man and a woman in marriage. Not between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. But you can’t say that nowadays.

And we have the church which has largely capitulated. Much of the mainstream church, in my opinion, just speaks out religious clichés most of the time. It speaks about ‘love, love, love,’ but not about the fact that God is also going to judge sin and that the Second Coming of Jesus has something to do with the judgment of the world for its sins.

You may have noticed this week there has been a lot of stuff about archbishop Desmond Tutu. Desmond Tutu who died this week began his career in Golders Green at Saint Alban the Martyr and St. Michael’s Church of England by the Golders Green bus station where he was a curate.

Do you know that? There you are!

I agree with Desmond Tutu’s campaign against Apartheid. I agree with the fact that, after Apartheid, he stood for reconciliation, not for violence and so on.

I’m totally with him on the anti-racist, and totally with him against Apartheid. But did you know that Desmond Tutu is a universalist? He denied the Gospel totally.

I had some contact with him, not personally but through a situation when I was leading the Messianic Testimony.

We had a brother called Rod Mechanic, who was an Anglican. He was an ordained Anglican vicar. He was living in Cape Town, and he was working under Desmond Tutu who was his Bishop.

Apart from being an Anglican vicar, he was also running a very successful Messianic congregation called Beit Ariel. He’s a Jewish believer and as he was running Beit Ariel, a number of Jewish people were getting saved.

The Jewish community then went to Tutu and said ‘We’re going to support you in Europe (this is before the fall of Apartheid). We’ll support you in your anti-Apartheid struggle, but you’ve got to do something about this Rod Mechanic because he’s upsetting us by bringing Jews to Jesus.’

So Tutu summoned Rob Mechanic into his office and said – apparently, Rod told me, Tutu spoke to him quite nicely, he was not nasty, but he said – ‘I’m sorry you have to stop what you’re doing with the Jewish community or uh if you want to stay in the company, that’s what you’ve got to do you’ll stop it.’

So, Rod said, ‘Well, I’m going to carry on with my missionary work with the Jewish people.’ And he joined Messianic Testimony when I was the director there and continued with it.

That tells you something about Desmond Tutu’s view on evangelism for example. And this is a statement he made:

He told the World Council of Churches’ leaders that ‘they have to transcend Christian boundaries’ because, after all, ‘God is not a Christian’.

According to Tutu, this act of Jesus Christ set in motion a unity that knows no boundaries. In fact, although Christ is the one who initiates this unity, allegiance to Christ is apparently not a necessary prerequisite for entering this unity.

Now, what the unity is, I’m not sure. Whether it’s God or whether it’s the uniting of the human race.

So, joining Christ, being a disciple of Jesus Christ is not necessary to be part of this unity?

Okay, if you are a Christian minister, you should say that you need to believe in Jesus. Yes?

He went on to say that ‘Jesus, it appears, was quite serious when He said that God was our Father’ that

So, everybody’s saved, everyone’s in this ‘divine embrace’, and God has no enemies.

Does God have no enemies? What about Satan? And what about the people who are persecuting Christians?

Tutu went on to say,

suggesting that unity of the human family is dependent upon the unity of the church.

The unity of the church is in large degree dependent upon the unity of the World Council of Churches. A united church is no optional extra. United churches are indispensable for the salvation of God’s world.

That means all churches, Catholic to Pentecostal, whatever, they all have to unite in one church to unite the human family as the first step towards uniting not just the church but also all religions.

Can you see where this is coming to? All religions must be equal; all people must be equal.

Of course, it’s not just Tutu saying this. This is, If you listen to most of the high up religious leaders, basically, their message, including the Pope.

In fact, the Pope has been making steps to unite with Islam. He had a meeting with Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam who is the spiritual leader of the Sunny world and vowed to cooperate and consolidate the growing ties between Rome and Islam.

He said both leaders discussed the religious, humanitarian, and moral issues that haunt the world today, the challenges posed by the changes and the events in the global scene.

They discussed that the real role that religious leaders and scholars have should be to reduce the intensity of war and division experienced by different regions in the world, to confront extremism, and continue cooperation. They started recently which produced a historic document: The Human Fraternity

Document announced at Abu Dhabi in 2019.

So, they appealed in it to unite the teachings of religions in order to save the world from extremism division and tyranny.

The answer to the problems of the world, therefore, is to unite all the religions.

Do you think that’s going to work? No.

Of course, they made no reference to the fact that Islamic extremists are persecuting killing Christians and suppressing the Christian faith all over the world.

But, you see here that coming together of a world religious system which is supported by the mainstream political line, and the coming together ultimately as shown Revelation chapter 17, the woman riding the beast.

You have universalism being implemented through this process. You close down biblical churches; you demonstrate hostility towards evangelism (the Pope has said specifically that he’s against what he calls  ‘proselytism’, which means ‘preaching the Gospel to people of other faiths or of no faith at all’.

He’s in favour of what he calls ‘evangelization’, which means ‘doing some good works in the name of Jesus’.

Therefore, you mustn’t preach the Gospel to people of other faiths.

So, if someone like J. turns up here, we have to tell him: ‘J., you’re a nice guy but you’re born a Muslim. Go back to the mosque, don’t come here because that’s where you belong as a Muslim.’

Should we tell that to J?

No way! Because J. has made the right decision and come out of Islam, and come to believe in Jesus.

Because in Islam there’s no salvation, there’s only salvation in Jesus Christ.

As you see what’s happening, you can see that there’s this kind of (how can you describe it?) ‘getting everyone together on the sinking ship’. They’re all going to come together on the sinking ship, but the ships are going to sink.

What we must do is get people off the sinking ship onto the lifeboat which is Jesus.

And there’s only one way they’re going to be saved: that’s by repenting and believing the Gospel and getting off the sinking ship of this world onto faith in Jesus Christ.

These are some things which are happening now. Now, I wish I could reverse them, I wish I could stop them from happening and bring about a good new world order in which everyone believes in Jesus, and we’re all saved.

That is going to happen, but not through me and not through you, not through the church, it is going to happen through Jesus coming back again.