for the ‘Evangelical Lutheran Church’ with the following verse on the board outside:
Ephesians 2 v 8 (NIV)
‘For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast’
I came out of the service that day, angry and unfed. The church was full of people who all thought they heard a word from God, They had actually heard an anti-Christian message that led them away from the true path to salvation.
What effect does this have?: Appearances can be deceptive and misleading. There are so many dangerous, mixed up, muddled messages. These watered down positions make the message of salvation less urgent and make the punishment less scary. If hell and judgment exist at all ‘man’ would like to put a PG-13 rating on it at worst and even then there must be a way out.
CONCLUSION
The pressure to water down the message of Christianity has been there since Jesus began his ministry, and so it continues. ‘There is no hell’, ‘God is love and would not send anybody there even if there was such a place’, ‘Even if there is a hell it is reserved for the Hitler’s and Pol Pot’s of this world’, ‘There is no coming judgement’, ‘There is no urgency’, ‘Death is nothing’. Unfortunately none of these positions can be backed up by Scripture. This is ‘man’ asserting what he would like the truth to be, not man submitting to what an almighty God has revealed to us in His Word.
Very few people nowadays want to be seriously challenged about their beliefs. In fact rather than defend the right to free speech for Christians who try to tell others what the bible really