Blood Sport
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