In Acts 20:28-31, the Apostle Paul gave the elders of the church at Ephesus this solemn warning and charge: “Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his blood. I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them. Therefore, be alert, remembering that for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears.”
As a pastor, I’m acutely aware of the threats Christians face in the world today – worldliness, wokeness, racism, liberalism, Marxism, socialism, and, of course, man’s never-ending battle with sexual immorality. However, as the Apostle Paul indicated in the verses above, the greatest threat against Christianity is not those “isms” from without, but rather from the fierce wolves, cunningly dressed in “sheep-clothing,” who lure the spiritually weak into believing their false doctrines; even the doctrine of demons. Jesus made that abundantly clear in His letters to five of the seven churches in Asia Minor.
- The church in Ephesus had left its first love for the Lord.
- The church in Pergamum was situated right by “Satan’s throne,” and some of its members had succumbed to the teachings of Balaam.
- The church in Thyatira had embraced the teaching of Jezebel, and some of the members were compromising with the sexual immorality of the culture.
- The church in Sardis suffered from “dead orthodoxy,” going through the motions of worship without a personal encounter with God.
- The Laodicean church looked great externally, but Jesus said they were spiritually naked.
Beloved, a spiritually anemic church, cannot serve as society’s conscience, and that well describes the American church today—baptized but biblically illiterate, loud but lost, busy but barren. We’ve got churches packed with people who don’t know the God they claim to worship, don’t fear the Word they never read, and don’t feel the absence of a Spirit they never knew was there. This is the “commercial church” of our day, and it’s growing!
However, within this ever-increasing evil world, and despite the apathy and outright apostasy of the majority of today’s Christians, the Lord Jesus is still actively building His Church, and, having read the final chapters of the Book of Revelation, we can be assured that even the “gates of hell will not prevail against it!”
Pastor Wayne