You are a good person!

The exclamation above was the climatic horse manure I heard in a worship service this past weekend. After the singing there was the offering time which was introduced by the following phrase "your seed determines the harvest." I don't have enough time to get into that one. But if I hadn't been with family I would have left at the very moment. Not surprisingly it got worse. There was a guest speaker. You know the ones...they travel around the country with a pocketful of sermonettes, plenty of stale but occasionally funny jokes, and enough amen'ing to conjure up images of tent revivals gone wild.

So without getting into a major spill turned novel just let me give a quick overview of the "sermon." He talked about three verses of scriptures for a total length of maybe 15 mintues if we give him the benefit of the doubt. I highly doubt he exposited each verse for an average of 5 minutes, but like I said we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Did he ever get to the main points of these passages? Did he explain the passages? Did he "preach" on them in the context of surrounding passages or even the Bible at large? As Spurgeon would say, did he make a bee line straight to the cross and grace of Jesus? The answer to all of these questions would be a big honkin' NO SIR! The question I asked my mom on the way home as we discussed the service was "Would you consider what you just heard a message preached from God's word or a talk given from that guy's heart?" The answer was obvious. But this was not the worst part...

At the end of this guy's "sermon" he began to prophesy over a few of the people who came forward. If you have never seen something like that here is an example. Well maybe it wasn't quite like that. Here is a better example. Just imagine a bunch of country white people instead of a black congregation. If you watched the second clip you heard the speaker promising blessings to everyone in that building. Why do people do this? Why do men who claim to preach the Word of God speak where the Word does not? At least he did not say that those people were good people.

This is what was the last straw for me this weekend. After all the promising of blessings whether financial or emotional, freedom from addiction, promises of leadership in the church, he told more than a handful of people "you're a good person you really are." "You're not a bad person don't let the enemy lie to you. The devil is a liar." And seemingly I was the only one in the whole building who had a problem with this. How can a preacher tell people the exact opposite of what Scripture teaches? How can it be so acceptable to coddle so much to people's emotions and self-esteem that we don't tell them the truth.

Do we love people or not? If so let's tell the truth. We are not good people. None of us are. Christians are not good people. None of them are. That is why we need a savior. That is why we continually need the Saviour. Because just as the Apostle says there is nothing good in us that is in ourselves. These kinds of statements burn me up to no end. I've tried to be patient and understanding but I cannot. And quite frankly if the Lord doesn't move me I will not. Ever.

This is the end of the rant.