Our situation is not yet hopeless, but it is quickly approaching that point.

Oh?   I’m supposed to be preaching “Positive Mental Attitude”?

Funny…That is NOT what God told me to preach.  I was instructed, as was every other preacher who was actually commissioned by God, to preach His Scriptural truths, not what man wants to hear. (Unless that man actually desires to hear from God.)

If you do not like it, then you may call “1-800- TELL GOD” and see what that gets you.

(Be forewarned: you might not like His response, but He is God; you ain’t.)

J.C. Ryle listed seven characteristics of the messengers during the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century:

1. They taught the supremacy of Holy Scripture.
2. They preached the total corruption of human nature.
3. They taught that Christ’s death upon the cross was the only satisfaction for man’s sin.
4. They preached the doctrine of justification by faith.
5. They taught the universal necessity of heart conversion and new creation by the Holy Spirit.
6. They spoke of God’s eternal hatred against sin and of God’s love for sinners.
7. They preached that there was an inseparable connection between true faith and personal holiness.  They never allowed for a moment that any church membership or religious profession was the least bit of proof of a man being a Christian if he lived an ungodly life.

These awakeners continually cried, “No fruit, no grace.”

We must learn that God is holy.  If we are to experience the manifest presence of God’s glory; we must repent.  When Isaiah saw the glory of God in the Temple, he was driven to brokenness, confession, and repentance.  Too many in the West desire to know the manifest love of God without the manifest holiness of God.  We have lost the message of true repentance.  Now the church in the West is the sleeping Giant.  Alarms have been sounded but there seems to be no great or even general awakening; if it doesn’t begin soon the giant may die in its sleep.

Let us pray

—Pastor Ward Clinton