TheSimpleAnswers.com

This is an article which, no matter who you are, is almost sure to offend you. The reason is that the answer strikes at the very heart of your comfort zone, and threatens to rock the foundation of all that you believe in. But… oh well. Deal with it.

See, today, the church stinks. Oh, I don’t care if you go to Living, or United, or if you follow Fred or Ted or Flurry or, for that matter, if you go to a Baptist, Methodist, or a Pentecostal church. The church stinks. It’s dirty. In every way imaginable to describe it or measure it, it is just filthy.

Oh, your church isn’t? Ok, well, here are a few tests:

1. How many people presently attending your congregation are known to be committing adultery, or have within the past year?
2. How many people attend your congregation who break the sabbath (even only once in awhile)?
3. How many scandals and obvious mis-managements of people, sins, or funds, involve the minister or the higher-ups in your church?
4. How many of the “diseases of Egypt” (Exodus 15:26) has God placed upon your church and its ministry? Such as Cancer, Tumors, Heart Disease - all of which Archaeologists have shown were rampant in Ancient Egypt at the time of the Exodus?
5. How many Bona-fide answers to prayer does your church get? (Note that by answers to prayer, I mean an actual ANSWER, not a person who was prayed for, went to the hospital, had an organ transplant, and survived? An ANSWER is a person who was prayed for and was HEALED). And how many people on your church’s prayer list continue in misery or simply up and die, instead of God answering?
6. How many people in your church have even read their entire Bible ONCE? (a task that only requires 45 minutes a day for 4 months to complete, and yet people who have been in your church for 40 years have never done it… have they?)
7. How many people go to your church and discuss GOD, and how many people go there and discuss operations, jobs, illnesses, who’s-sleeping-with-who, sports, celebrities, and how much money some famous person makes?
8. How many people could even name the ten commandments - much less name them in order?
9. How many people know for certain that there is no book of Hezekiah without checking?
10. Does your church want your committed obedience to it (and your tithes!), in spite of the flaws I’ve already mentioned here, plus hundreds of others too varied and numerous to mention, and neither the ministry nor the membership show the slightest interest in changing?

If you can’t give your church an honest, whole-hearted, before-God ten-of-ten in that test, your church is dirty. And there are literally HUNDREDS of other things I could mention that are wrong with the church today. And those are the problems in a GOOD church today! I’m not talking about places that are blatantly soft-on-sin and allow all sorts of sins in their memberships in the name of “love”, and the places that don’t even pay lip-service to the law!

But… you’ve GOT to go to church SOMEWHERE!

And no matter what I tell someone about their church, and no matter who I tell, this is ALWAYS the answer I get! It seems that even a bad church is better than no church. Well… let’s see if that’s what the Bible says, or what YOUR CHURCH, indeed, EVERY CHURCH WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE! Read the rest of this entry »

Are you afraid of snakes? Spiders? Sharks? Tornadoes, germs, lightning, thieves, bats? WHY?? Don’t you know that you are in CHARGE of them all? That God GAVE them to you??

Let’s get this straight right now. YOU ARE KING! They are all YOURS, to do with as you see fit! Unless… well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

Genesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

From the beginning, God made Adam KING! Lord over ALL the earth, and everything that moved, crawled or wriggled upon it! Do you understand what that means? They have no power over you! None whatsoever! Unless… but I get ahead of myself. I want this point firmly established before I get into that! … Read the rest of this entry »

WHY are YOU here? How can YOU help - and what is it that you are supposed to be DOING anyway??

Mark 1:17 And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.

Everyone knows this scripture. But do you know what it MEANS? In detail? What does a fisher do, exactly?

He puts a lure down. Something the fish want. He doesn’t catch every fish in the sea on his lure. Only those that are interested in what he has to offer. Some days, the fish just don’t bite. Other days, they do. But he is still fishing the same way, with the same bait. Remember this analogy, we will come back to it later.

When you tell people that they are wrong, and need to REPENT, the vast majority will simply hate you for telling them, justify themselves in their own minds, and go their own way. These are the fish who didn’t take the bait.

On the other hand, some few will be interested, and nibble - and so you give them answers to their questions, until they either join the masses who rejected the truth, or repent. Ultimately, of these who are interested, some take the bait and remain true to it.

You might call these groups Called, Chosen, and Faithful if you like. The name isn’t important to us at the moment, only YOUR PART in helping to haul in the fish.

To show exactly what I mean, I’m going to quote two verses, where very similar things were spoken, and show the different reaction of the people… Read the rest of this entry »

Was Paul a saint? I don’t mean in the Biblical sense of the word saint, but more in the Catholic and Protestant sense of the word. See we are trained to picture the men of the Bible as supermen; people who were above our weaknesses, superior to us; untouchable.And while we may academically admit that they were men like us - as the Bible clearly records Paul saying “We also are men of like passions with you” (Acts 14:15) - still, it’s hard to realize that if they are on a pedestal, it is because they earned it. And that they had the same faults, the same temptations, and above all the same self-doubt, as we do.

If we don’t realize that they were like us, then we have no hope of attaining to their level. So today, I am going to prove that Paul was not a saint in the current religious sense; that he was a flawed human whose example should be followed only where he himself followed Christ.

1 Corinthians 11:1 Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.

God is honest about His heroes. He records history in the Bible, both flattering and unflattering incidents. Most historians trying to prove a point would have left out the story about David and Bathsheba - David himself would probably have preferred it were left out - but God included it, because we needed to know that great men make mistakes too, and are punished for it.

God didn’t need to mention that Abraham had weak faith and lied about his wife being his sister - well, half-lied since she was a half-sister - but God did. And Abraham did it twice, once after his conversion! (Genesis 12:13-19, 20:2-12) Even then the fear of his life prompted Abraham, father of the faithful, to lie to save his own hide!

And God didn’t have to record that Peter, who opened the gospel to the gentiles, was sinning and shunning the gentiles in order to favor the Jews (Galatians 2:11). The point is, God’s heroes were men; men subject to all the same weaknesses and stupidities that we are. But this article is about Paul… Read the rest of this entry »

1. THY WILL BE DONE?

You should NEVER pray “Thy will be done” - it totally ROBS your prayer of it’s power!

The first objection most people raise is “Well, in Luke 11:2 Christ TELLS us to pray “Thy will be done”!” But read the exact quote and see for yourself if that’s what He said to do!

Luke 11:2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.

“Thy will be done” is NOT an isolated phrase - it is part of a sentence! Christ was not saying “I want bread, I want forgiveness, I want delivered from evil, but NOT MY WILL, but THY WILL be done”! He was talking about something TOTALLY different! He was saying “I pray for the time when YOUR KINGDOM is here, WHEN your will SHALL be done AS IT IS DONE IN HEAVEN”!

Do you really think God NEEDS your permission to do His will? Remember, His will IS WHAT IS ALREADY BEING DONE! Read the rest of this entry »