Saturday, May 31, 2008

The book of Revelations tells us that God hates the deeds of the Nicolaitans. And Proverbs tells us that one of the things that God hates is "...And one who sows discord among brethren."

I found a site on the internet for people who had been hurt by churches. I am only being fair when I state that in some cases, it appears to me that the church was trying to do the right thing. But in other cases, people told about joining a group that was extremely friendly. Later, if some of the family wanted to leave, the group would try to turn other family members against them. The groups taught disobedience to various Biblical commands for children to honor and obey their parents, and for husbands and wives to love and honor each other.

Some time ago, my wife and I left a good church that had been seized by a small group of people. A couple of weeks later, my wife was amazed to get a phone call from two of the leaders. They told her that God was going to judge me, and they wanted to warn her. Later, members of the church urged my wife to rebel against me and return to the church without my permission.

The problem here is that my wife is a Godly Christian. She was disgusted at their efforts, and she already knew that their seizure of the church was not part of God's will. We're currently engaged in helping to start a successful church, and both of us are active and blessed in our ministries there.

And the two leaders who called my wife? After the church had gone from 120 to 30 in one year, the other leaders kicked them out of leadership.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems you keep being led to good churches with bad leaders where you are persecuted. There must be an awful lot of those out there.

Anonymous said...

My anonymous friend makes a valid point. In 38 years of independent Baptist churches, I had two serious persecutions while I was in college and three minor ones in the Baptist church here in Mexico. The overwhelming majority of the people I worked with were Godly and friendly.

As a Christian school teacher, however, I received a lot of persecution, and all of it was for the same reason: someone didn't want their child to have to obey the rules.