Month: November 2025

               Today I am closing in on the last sermon dealing with Scribal Scammers. As we have noted, I expanded the teachings of Mark 12:38-40 to give us an overview of one of Satan’s most dastardly tricks. He perverts the scriptures and dresses them in Christian clothing to fool the unsuspecting with lies that condemn their souls to hell. I suffer the accusation at times of being too harsh or unloving, even relentless, in my attempts to squash these sources at their roots. This includes the breakdown of morality now more commonly accepted by those who call themselves Christian.

               I have often taught on the misnomer of Christian carnality. We excuse others with claims of carnality with the salvation of homosexuals as a lesser carnal variety. Those who lock into this falsehood contradict the scriptures clear claim of abject disobedience to God’s commands and the plain statements that such gross immorality causes God to surrender them up to a reprobate mind. They stand against the created order which is harmful and detrimental to the core issues of life and family. Certainly, salvation is not by our works, but there are also areas that God does not allow Christians to step beyond. To do so is to ruin the testimony of the church and entrench vile wickedness that sadly may be unrecoverable.

               I have seen churches accept this with the ostensible promise of help and correction. They attempt no such things but only serve to entrench the offenders with defenses claiming there is no help, or God made them this way, or whether not articulated, is a problem too big for God to solve. These reactions are all capitulations to Satan under the structure of the fallen, depraved mind. However, the wickedness of the heart is Christ’s expertise. If there is a failure to cleanse from any sin, the result can be nothing less than eternal hell. It is neither Christian nor logical to assume sin can remained unchecked. If so, the fallback position can only be that God tolerates sin, of which tolerance, is the buzzword excuse. God does not tolerate sin, has never tolerated it, and the most serious, unmatched denunciation of it and correction of it was the death of Christ on the cross. To deny Christ’s ability to remediate sin, is blasphemy of the most blatant heinous characterization of the perfect righteousness of Christ.

               This is a trade on the blood of Christ. It tramples and degrades Christ while soothing the rotten core of the human heart. Throughout scripture, two obvious superior sins were consistently untouchable by God—human sacrifice and homosexualism. God tolerated neither most notably speaking through the apostle Paul in the New Testament about the heinous nature of the sin. Paul had compassion for souls and worked to deliver them from their sins through the preaching of the gospel. Success is evident in 1 Corinthians 6, noting neither the sexually immoral nor those who practice homosexuality (among other sins) will inherit the kingdom of God. The practice is not of merely intentional active sex; it is the desire which is the antithesis of the holiness of Christ. Through belief of the gospel, Christ washed, sanctified, and justified them in the name of Christ and by the Holy Spirit. Paul’s compassion was not to leave these as they were and gloss over their sin to save feelings. These were not welcome into the congregation of believers without wholesale rejection of their sin and obedience to the Lordship of Christ. The worst we can do is turn our sympathetic eye towards them and gently pat their heads with a false promise we will help when the church has no intention of attempting an intervention with their sin. If you do not believe God will change these types and the choice is to live with it, there is nothing left but to die with it. Our greatest compassion is to tell the truth just as Jesus did.

Pastor V. Mark Smith

Only a few short years ago, we were in the throes of the COVID panic with an empty church and the pastor standing in the pulpit delivering Sunday morning sermons to a room inhabited by ghosts. This was no doubt the unhappiest time of my preaching career with all the emotion sucked out of the messages. Without immediate feedback from the congregation, I had to generate feelings I was not necessarily feeling. Looking at our church today the physical sickness from COVID no longer lingers, but the spiritual effects are still with us. Many are complacent about church service, many left for other parts of the country, and many simply no longer attend. I wonder about those who stay at home. What is a Christian’s substitute for hearing from God through the Bible’s approved method, the fellowship of the church and a pastor instructing God’s people through sermons from God’s word?

I do not sit at home with them, but I assume many are not completely divorced from their attempts to hear. Rather, they may have stuck with the easier medium for them—listening to TV preachers. We are a small church without ability to duplicate the musical intensity and the slick polish of a tightly scripted program. Much of what people hear on TV is meant to emotionally charge and never deliver the excitedly spoken promises.

We are currently in a series from Mark reflecting on Jesus’ scathing denunciation of false teachers and the hypocrisy inherent in their self-serving schemes. Every Sunday morning, living rooms hear a modern equivalent of the types of charlatans Jesus’ warns against. Christians are watching television programs intended to satisfy at least a modicum of their spiritual yearnings. The majority are not Christians at all but seek to satisfy a baser instinct which is the inherent knowledge of God without a relationship with God.

These people are ripe for the exploitation of TV preachers. They have no filter for deception, which is the bread and butter of these ministries. Preachers easily manipulate especially when their listeners are sick and poor and hear that God never intended for them to live this way. God’s intentions are always for healthy feel-good people with hordes of cash on hand and a good place to spend it. Their assurance lies in transferring their small funds into the TV preacher’s coffers who will make sure God hears their requests and responds.

My limited space allows only enough to tell you attendance at your church is meant to focus on God not you. Our focus is to worship God and not lavish ourselves with wealth, power, and position we think we deserve. Rather than false promises connected to sending your money away to fund the preacher’s airplanes, mansions, and fleet of luxury cars, you get to see where every dollar goes and personally enjoy participating in the operation of the ministry you support. You are part of it and the amount of enjoyment you receive from it is directly proportional to the energy you put into it. The difference between us and them is the presence of the Holy Spirit and as Paul wrote, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

The audience for this article does not rate on the same scale as the TV preacher reaches. Eventually, it will make it to our website where it has greater potential. Hopefully, some of the duped will see it and return to true New Testament Christianity which requires the personal fellowship of God’s people. I only ask those who see it now to consider, who does your religious life center on, you or God?

Pastor V. Mark Smith

               I state the obvious when I say most, if not all of us, remember the campaign for the presidential election in 2024. As usual, the rhetoric that permeated every speech, every pundit’s comments, and the newscasters’ predictions was how this election stood far beyond any election in the past as to its impact on the American future. Republicans claimed President Biden was too old and too mentally unstable to lead our country anywhere but into disaster. This, of course, assuming he was truly in charge of his own administration. His vice-president only compounded problems. Democrats claimed democracy hung in the balance and that former president Trump would complete his first term attempt to destroy democracy as we know it and instill himself a tyrannical despot.

               Amid this political debacle, the political fight drew in Christians whom pastors told from their pulpits they must vote Republican because an opposite vote threatened the survival of Christianity. Wrong voting would continue and accelerate the headlong plunge of our morality into the abyss of hell. After what I have just written, please rest assured I do not intend this article as a political post to affirm or deny the claims of either party. It is not my debate. My interest is to steer us away from the panic that often drives Christian churches to think that what happens in our government threatens to destroy the church or in the right twist to enable our success. Viewed this way, too many Christians believe political issues are the most pressing upon Christians today. We should focus on these because the outcome will make or break us.

               An article I read last month prompted a small part of these comments. I paraphrase the question asked: “Are there principles in the issues we face today that are similar to the problems dealt with by the church throughout history?” I believe none can deny that political opposition has long been a subject of preacher’s sermons. The apostles dealt with it by mostly telling us to leave the government alone and let it leave us alone as much as possible. Let governmental leaders stay in their sphere and we will stay in ours. Neither Jesus, Paul, nor any apostle told us to panic because of anything the government does. Nor did they tell the church to pursue the government to insist upon our rights.

               How much Christians should involve themselves in government is a matter of debate. I know there are ambitious zealots on one side and the weak-kneed intimidated on the other. Somewhere in the middle of this is where I think we should be. In no case should we fear because either a Democrat or Republican holds the presidential office. If God is not frightened by how this will affect His people, neither should we be afraid. Persecution fills history books, but we are faithfully here still persevering and waiting for Christ to come.

               An excellent idea for Christians in this country is to examine the past hundreds of years and whether those dark times stamped out the church or caused it to thrive. We should also look to Christians around the world to see if the problems of America are in any way the cause of anxieties and/or insecurities as if Christianity is in danger by what happens here. Christianity around the world and throughout the centuries has fought on the same battlefields we do today. The scriptures tell us nothing less than complete victory is what we can expect. Still, there is a level of healthy debate since we are also American citizens with the right to criticize and correct our government. We applaud Christians who are on the right side of moral debates. The church must speak to morality, but general political warfare is not our business.

Pastor V. Mark Smith

               Today’s topic is vital and one that concerns us all. This is no doubt the principal issue of religion which makes it detrimental to the wellbeing and destiny of every soul. The question is authority—who has authority to order and govern us? There are many sublevels to this question but always there will be an ultimate authority who gathers all lesser authorities under one headship of governance. As Christians, we have no arguments about who holds this position. The ultimate authority is God our Creator who by virtue of His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, claims this authority for Himself. No entity grants this right; He claims it because of His self-existence.

               While we will not argue who is the supreme authority, we often argue about nearly every other authority above us. I am unable to discuss these many others, but I would like to take a moment to discuss one. This is the authority of the church, an authority granted by the founder of the church, the Lord Jesus Christ. The operation of the church and the internal authorities of the church derive their motions from the head. In Matthew 28:19-20, Jesus said: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” This is the authorization for new churches and our protocol for operation—doing all things Christ commanded.

               After the gospel accounts, the rest of the New Testament is a manual of church information, whether of history, procedures of operation, doctrinal clarifications, or instructions for personal interactions. The church passes these through to new converts by the authority given to pastors and deacons who are the leadership of the church. The membership of the church must recognize this authority and submit to it for good order and thus proper growth in sanctification. At the same time, the Bible, our rule book, prevents church leadership from self-exaltation. Any proper act of leadership does not originate with the pastor but with the ultimate authority who is Christ.

               In the past year, I have dealt with three different families who objected to pastoral and church authority by refusing to abide by sanctification directives as taught in God’s word. Since I am the one who has church authority to teach against these activities, I bear the blame as if I claim inherent authority for these positions. Rejection of these teachings is not rejection of me but rejection of the order of authority that is higher than mine. Circling back to the beginning of this article, this authority is Jesus Christ who is God. If rejection is because I overstepped my authority or misinterpreted the doctrinal basis of my teachings, there is a route of proper determination. This does not rest in the individual, but in the body of Christ. If we do not function this way, chaos rules not Christ.

               The Lord blessed me with the calling to the pastorate of Berean Baptist Church. I am thankful for more than two decades of confidence placed in me by the membership. As well as I can decide, I have not changed in these many years. I uphold the same doctrines and the same Statement of Faith I started with. There is no excuse for anyone not to have the lengthy history of where we have been, thus a reasonable expectation of where we are going. The path we gladly choose is one of surrender to the Higher Authority, not to ourselves.

 Pastor V. Mark Smith