Amen Amigo. You know what gets me down brother? Seeing a church that has sunk and backslid into nominalism. That is what is making me sad. Where is the Spirit, where the understanding of the gospel and ears to hear? Not many seem to have it anymore. So grateful the Lord led me out of churches and ministries to seek Him alone....that we might not receive of her plagues, because she has become a haunt of things that are not of Him.
A church can be seemingly alive to men but really God says it is dead.
Revelation 3:1
The Dead Church
“And to the angel of the church in Sardis write, ‘These things says He who has the seven Spirits of God and the seven stars: “I know your works, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.
With men, they don't understand anything at all as in spiritual truths, unless God reveals that to them by His Spirit.
I have been to churches or read their doctrines that seem to be alive on the outside, they are lively and active, but their doctrine is bad, so bad and rotten you can say they don't know God.
In such cases as is true always, not everyone in a dead church is dead. Same thing in secular society, we live here among the walking dead and are as lights in the Lord to a dead and dying people around us, who often times won't listen to what we say as they either think we are dumb or they have it all figured out. Truth's have to be revealed from God to someone personally as no one is taught to know the Lord. We do not teach men to know God.
The apostles noted this in 1 John 1
The ones who refused to listen to the apostle's doctrines were not of God.
4 You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.
5 They are of the world. Therefore they speak
as of the world, and the world hears them.
6 We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
In this New Covenant, God promises no one will teach anyone to know the LORD. For they will know HIM as HE writes the knowledge of Himself on their hearts. However, the false church indoctrinates it's members into their doctrines, line by line.
Hebrews 8
7 For if that first
covenant had been faultless, then no place would have been sought for a second. 8 Because finding fault with them, He says: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah— 9 not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they did not continue in My covenant, and I disregarded them, says the Lord. 10 For this
is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 11
None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. 12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins [
b]and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”
13 In that He says, “A new
covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. Now what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.
This is proven also in 1 John 1
25 And this is the promise that He has promised us—eternal life.
26 These things I have written to you concerning those who
try to [
a]deceive you.
27 But the anointing which you have received from Him abides in you, and you do not need that anyone teach you; but as the same anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true, and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, you [
a]will abide in Him.
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As far as those who are deceived, they fell on the stumbling stone which is Christ and are broken upon it and in the worst cases, the stone crushed them to powder.
