Saturday, August 9, 2008

Does any of this sound familiar?

General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said this:

The chief danger of the twentieth century will be religion without the Holy Spirit. Christianity, the chief danger, but Christianity without Christ.

In 1787, Gibbon the noted historian completed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Here’s the way he accounted for the fall of the Roman empire.

The rapid increase of divorce

The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home

The mad craze for pleasure and sports

Sports becoming every year more exciting and more brutal

The building of gigantic armaments when the real enemy was within…in the decadence of the people.

The decay of religion. Faith fading into mere form. Ritual instead of reality. Language instead of life. Losing touch with life…becoming impotent to warn or guide the people.

2 Timothy 3

1BUT UNDERSTAND this, that in the last days will come (set in) perilous times of great stress and trouble [hard to deal with and hard to bear].

2For people will be lovers of self and [utterly] self-centered, lovers of money and aroused by an inordinate [greedy] desire for wealth, proud and arrogant and contemptuous boasters. They will be abusive (blasphemous, scoffing), disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy and profane.

3[They will be] without natural [human] affection (callous and inhuman), relentless (admitting of no truce or appeasement); [they will be] slanderers (false accusers, troublemakers), intemperate and loose in morals and conduct, uncontrolled and fierce, haters of good.

4[They will be] treacherous [betrayers], rash, [and] inflated with self-conceit. [They will be] lovers of sensual pleasures and vain amusements more than and rather than lovers of God.

5For [although] they hold a form of piety (true religion), they deny and reject and are strangers to the power of it [their conduct belies the genuineness of their profession]. Avoid [all] such people [turn away from them].

In other words, these folks may be in church on Sunday enjoying an empty religion with all the pious language intended to make it valid, but empty of substance. A hollow mockery of the real thing. Noise, lots of it, but little knowledge of God.

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