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For more information click the link below: http://roarnomore.blogspot.com/2010/09/church-hitler-and-glenn-beck.html American Christianity You may be wondering, what all this has to do with Glenn Beck and the Restoring Honor rally? The answer is, "everything." Listen to the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjack wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. . . . In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. . . . Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner . . . it is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. No let me ask you, "What kind of grace is Glenn Beck selling?" Don't get me wrong, I agree with much of what Glenn Beck says about politics, and I'm not in anyway saying he's Hitler. Nevertheless, he is both offering and revealing something damning that has already taken place in our churches. Russell D. Moore ties everything together with this statement from His syndicated blog. Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah. Moore goes on to say, Any “revival” that is possible without the Lord Jesus Christ is a “revival” of a different kind of spirit than the Spirit of Christ (1 John 4:1-3). . . The answer isn’t a narrowing sectarianism, retreating further and further into our enclaves. The answer includes local churches that preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and disciple their congregations to know the difference between the Kingdom of God and the latest political whim. I second one of Moore's opening lines. "It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck." Francis Schaeffer repudiated the pietistic compartmentalized version of Christianity that plagued the church of the Nazis and plagues ours today. The church must be involved in the political process as salt and light, but it must not compromise the fact that it is the church. In America we have both extremes. We have the hundreds of evangelical leaders- including the entire upper echelon at Liberty University- who have decided to look for revival from an ecumenical Mormon, and then we have the churches that stay completely out of the political process. One side says, "We're willing to compromise in order to be salt," in which case they loose their saltiness, and the other affirms, "We're not willing to compromise anything, you can't have your salt." Either way the salt is never truly injected into the culture. We have bought into cheap grace in America. Doctrine doesn't matter anymore. What matters is a "personal relationship," which saves me from hell, society be damned! What we need is a yellow Gadsden Flag (i.e. the "Don't Tread on Me" flag) which instead of a snake in the background, pictures the Holy Scriptures. If we compromise on the Gospel for the sake of politics, how are we any different than the "German Christians?" We're simply "American Christians," and in that order. We have bought into a right wing type of fascism where the military and our exceptionalism come before the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I fear we will follow in the footsteps of Germany, only time will tell. All it takes is a "conservative" to rally the churches into a frenzy over something of temporal importance. Christ said it best in Matthew 6:20-21. "but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Where's the heart of American Christianity. Is it with the Gospel or Glenn Beck? Does it resemble Germany 1933 or Rome 35 A.D.? More importantly, where's your heart?
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