When so-called Christian publishers began to bow
to the almighty dollar and publish self-help
books and self-improvement books with the mantra,
be your best you, they played a central
part in the elevation of man.
When the churches of the land began to
elevate man by teaching humanism, giving out messages
on self-empowerment, they began to do away
with the bible by saying man is too
precious to be damned in hell.
God would not so destroy the works of
his hands.
Man is too good to be destroyed in
fire.
And when this occurred, this philosophy that the
popular gospel handed out today, which is man
-centered, and when it gained prominence in the
land, that salvation is accomplished for the happiness
of man.
Man is a king, not God.
And as the church elevated man, at the
same time it lowered God.
For you cannot elevate one, friends, without the
lowering of the other.
So slowly, but surely, as the years progressed,
so did our beliefs about man and God.
By doing this, we accomplished the dilution of
the gospel, and no longer taught that man
is utterly corrupt in his natural condition.
That man is wretched, blind, dead, miserable.
This is how man in his natural state
is described from the book of Job.
How much more abominable and filthy is man,
which drinks iniquity like water.
That's what the bible says about man.
But we preachers today have given man a
bath, and cleaned him up with soap and
water.
We say it's not so bad after all,
at least not so bad to be sent
to hell.
For when we elevated man, we threw out
preaching against sin, and we began to cease
calling men sinners, but rather we referred to
them only as the unchurched.
Then we elevated man to such a degree
that man no longer needed to repent to
be saved, because he was never really that
bad in the first place.
When you elevate man, you have to throw
the gospel away, and replace it with one
not found in my bible.
So in our weak and debased evangelism, we
ask men and women, hoarded in sin, only
to believe and be baptized, join our churches,
and we'll pat them on the back, and
call them Christians.
But we don't realize what we've done in
the elevation of man is a debasing of
God, and taking sides with the devil against
God, and all things holy.
In the process of elevating man, we have
turned our churches into mortuaries, embalmed our congregations,
and hold funeral rites every Sunday morning in
a tribute to the elevated nature of man.
We believe God won't punish sin, yet ever
send a person to hell for punishment of
sin.
We change God into an idol of our
own imagination.
As the church elevated man, she lowered God,
and placed him on man's level, debasing God,
and diluting the gospel of God.
And at this time, the church lost both
her authority from God, and her influence upon
society, displacing her moral compass years ago.
Heaven help us all.