I am an evangelical. So let me for the moment confine my remarks to fellow evangelicals. If you are a non-evangelical, but want to read on, hopefully you will benefit from this as well. I wish here to simply offer an indictment on the evangelical church.
Let me first say that there are many fine evangelical Christians doing many fine things for Christ and his kingdom. There are many unsung heroes in the Body of Christ who are faithfully serving Christ and working their tails off for the Kingdom of God.
They will get their reward and I applaud them. But can I tell you a sober truth: they are in the minority. They are amongst the few and far between. They do not represent the majority of evangelical Christians today. They are, sadly, the exception to the rule.
And in one sense this should not surprise us. As both Scripture and church history testify, it is always a remnant that God uses. The majority seldom seems keen to obey and serve God. So it is almost always a small handful that actually takes the Lordship of Christ seriously and gets the job done.
Jesus spent a lot of time challenging the religious community of his day. He even spent large hunks of time pronouncing woes on the religious leaders of his day. Whole chapters of the gospels are devoted to this. See for example Matthew 23 and Luke 11.
If Jesus came to our comfortable, pampered, lazy, mollycoddled, apathetic, worldly, selfish, compromised and lukewarm evangelical churches today, he would have plenty of woes to deliver. He would be astonished at how we have wasted two thousand years of our Christian heritage.
He would be amazed at how far we are removed from New Testament Christianity. He would be amazed at how dead and cold and hard our hearts have become. He would be amazed at how much we have compromised the gospel, watered down the truth, and made our bed with the world.
Indeed, one is reminded of Luke 18:8: “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” One could so easily hear him saying something like this today:
-Woe to you evangelicals, for you are awash in material abundance while people throughout the world are starving and lacking in basic necessities.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for I have given you so much (Bibles, teaching, seminars, conferences, books, etc) yet you are so spiritually impoverished.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for all around you the world is in degradation, corruption and desperation, yet you refuse to speak out or get involved.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for I have entrusted you with the sacred gospel to proclaim, yet you keep it to yourselves.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for millions of my most precious ones – the unborn – are slaughtered every year yet you will do nothing to rescue them from the slaughter.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for you pride yourselves in your biblical knowledge, yet you won’t even apply it to your own lives.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for you have rejected my prophets, spurned my watchmen, and chastised my servants who warn of danger to come.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for you are paralysed by the fear of man, political correctness, and not wanting to offend anyone.
-Woe to you evangelicals, for you have become steeped in apathy, indifference and lack of concern.
Just consider that last woe for example. This may be the most apathetic generation of evangelical Christians on record. Nothing seems to move us, nothing seems to stir us up, nothing seems to motivate us. Let me offer just one example of this.
Years ago I wrote about the sex pervert Kinsey, and his horrific sexual experiments on children. This in part is what I said:
“In Table 34 of his Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), Kinsey sought to show that the youngest of children could be sexually active. He said that even ‘the youngest males, as young as 5 months in age, are capable of such repeated reactions [orgasms]’ In the table, four-year-old boys, for example, were sexually stimulated for 24 uninterrupted hours. A five month baby is said to have produced 3 orgasms in an unspecified amount of time.
“An eleven month baby is reported to have had 14 orgasms in 38 minutes. The book also examines some of the reactions to such ‘experimentation.’ These ranged from ‘extreme tension with violent convulsion … gasping, eyes staring … mouth distorted, sometimes with tongue protruding … whole body or parts of it spasmodically twitching … groaning, sobbing, or more violent cries … more or less frenzied movements … extreme trembling, collapse, loss of color, and sometimes fainting … of subject.’ These reactions, recorded with cold, clinical precision, are nothing less than descriptions of criminal child abuse.
“Remarkably, however, the study of the reactions concludes by noting that the subject ‘will fight away from the partner and may make violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive definite pleasure from the situation.’ Does that sound like pleasure? It sounds like child sexual assault of the worst kind. And as one paediatrician noted, ‘these children had to be held down or subject to strapping down, otherwise they would not respond willingly.’ Thus it is amazing that Hollywood should come out with this hagiography on Kinsey.”
This alone should shock and motivate any person – whether or not Christian – to action. Yet this was first documented by people like Judith Reisman in her important 1990 book, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud. Why was there no outcry about these revelations? Where were the Christians who should have been speaking out about this?
Why do we not seem to give a rip about anything except our own personal comfort, ease and wellbeing? Just what will it take to shock us out of our apathy and carelessness? Sure, some brave souls, like Reisman, Michael L. Brown, Jack Sonnemann, and a few others, have been warning us for years about these very things.
But where is the evangelical church? As I have documented in my last two articles – and in my new book – paedophilia is on the rise all over the Western world. Just as homosexual activists managed to convince us that their “sexual orientation” is legitimate and should be publically promoted and endorsed, now the paedophiles are calling for the very same thing.
Where is the outrage over all this? Why don’t evangelicals give a rip about any of this? Do we not care one bit about our own children? Are we so spiritually dead and morally numb that we cannot rouse ourselves to action here? When will the evangelical church become de-iced and thawed out?
If Jesus were here today he would likely say to the evangelical church: Woe to you, for you care nothing about the things I care about. Your heart is not broken over what my heart is broken about. Because you are lukewarm, you do not deserve to bear my name. I will cast you out of my presence.
Woe to you evangelicals.
https://billmuehlenberg.com/2005/01/15/kinsey-con-job/
[1180 words]