When We Remake God in Our Own Image We Lose Him Entirely

When We Remake God in Our Own Image We Lose Him Entirely

America is not, on the whole, an atheist nation. Polling still shows large majorities professing belief in some kind of higher power. What it has become, however, is something arguably more dangerous than secularism — a culture that has refashioned God into a flattering reflection of itself, a deity so manageable, so endlessly affirming, and so reliably silent on inconvenient subjects that He can no longer command reverence from anyone. The question worth asking is whether such a god is even worth the prayers being directed at him. That is precisely the question pastor and author Adam B. Dooley puts to his readers in a striking new essay at The Christian Post, titled “Are we inventing a fake God? Why reverence is dying.” Dooley revives a warning from the late theologian R.C. Sproul, who observed before his death in 2017 that the most urgent spiritual need of the age is for people to rediscover who God actually is. Nearly a decade later, the diagnosis has only sharpened. Few in the modern West openly reject God. Far more are content to invent a new one. Read More: https://www.blessed.report/p/when-we-remake-god-in-our-own-image

The Evolutionary Worldview Keeps Crumbling Under Revelations of Science

The evolutionary narrative that has dominated Western institutions for generations is facing yet another serious challenge. Recent scientific reports continue to uncover evidence that aligns more closely with the straightforward timeline of Scripture than with the deep-time assumptions required for Darwinian evolution. Far from being an outdated religious text, the Bible’s account of creation, the Fall, and the global Flood stands up remarkably well under honest scientific scrutiny. Read More: https://www.blessed.report/p/the-evolutionary-worldview-keeps

The Megachurch Built a Generation That Couldn't Find God in It

For thirty years, the dominant American church-growth strategy assumed that the way to reach the next generation was to make Christianity feel less like Christianity. Lower the lights. Lose the hymnal. Trade the pulpit for a barstool. Replace the cross on the wall with a tasteful abstract panel. Preach in jeans. Quote movies more than Moses. Make Sunday morning feel like a TED talk, a concert, and a coffee shop fused into one experience the unchurched would not find threatening. It worked, by the only metrics that strategy was designed to measure. The buildings got bigger. The parking lots got bigger. The brand got bigger. A generation of pastors became national figures. A generation of churchgoers became consumers of religious content. Read More: https://discern.tv/the-megachurch-built-a-generation-that-couldnt-find-god-in-it/

Antinomianism and Legalism Are the Same Disease Wearing Different Clothes

Somewhere along the way, much of American Christianity quietly traded the cross for a coupon. The cross calls a man to die; a coupon merely entitles him to a discount. And in too many pulpits and pews today, the gospel has been reduced to little more than a heavenly fee waiver — a one-time transaction that grants permanent immunity from God’s law and lifelong exemption from anyone, including God Himself, telling the believer how to live. This is the diagnosis Pastor Wilson Van Hooser offers in a recent essay at Gospel Reformation Network titled Antinomianism: The New Pharisaism. His thesis is provocative because it is precise. The old enemy of grace was the Pharisee, the man who added rules to Scripture and trusted his own performance for salvation. The new enemy of grace, Van Hooser argues, looks like the opposite — a lawless, anti-authority, do-what-thou-wilt religion — but is in fact the same disease wearing different clothes. The Pharisee and the antinomian end up at the same place. Both are running from Christ. They just take different exits. Read More: https://www.blessed.report/p/antinomianism-and-legalism-are-the

The Fulfillment of Matthew 24 Is Proof That Jesus Is the True Messiah

What if the most quoted prophecy passage in modern evangelical end-times teaching… was never actually about the end times at all? What if Jesus, sitting on the Mount of Olives with His disciples two thousand years ago, was answering a question we've forgotten He was asked — and the answer came true within the lifetime of the men sitting in front of Him? I want to be careful with you right out of the gate, because what we're about to walk through is going to sound, to some ears, like we're throwing out biblical prophecy. We're not. Most of the Bible's prophetic material — the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, the new heavens and the new earth — is still ahead of us. We are not preterists in any general sense. We believe the second coming is future, literal, and bodily. We believe the dead will be raised. We believe Christ will judge the living and the dead. But Matthew 24, and its parallels in Mark 13 and Luke 21, are a different situation. And the more carefully you read those chapters, the more obvious it becomes that Jesus was talking about something that happened in the lifetime of the people standing in front of Him. He said so. Plainly. And it did happen. Plainly. And the recognition that it happened isn't a loss for the faith — it's a gift to it. Because the fulfillment of those words in the year 70 was one of the single greatest pieces of evidence the early church had that Jesus was who He said He was. He told them the temple would fall. He told them when. He told them the signs to watch for. And it all came true, exactly as He said it would, in front of witnesses. That's not a problem for our faith. That's fuel for it. Read More: https://discern.tv/the-fulfillment-of-matthew-24-is-proof-that-jesus-is-the-true-messiah/ Blessed Report: https://www.blessed.report/