Old E-Mail #2

This old mail was a rant to a good friend of mine concerning church growth strategies. This man is so patient for listening to all of these. We serve a mighty God. Our conversation this morning was not all bad, but we have been so beaten down by the failure which we see that we forget the victory He has won. I think the problem we encounter is that we judge God on the basis of the professing church. When everyone says ‘God is present here,’ or ‘we are spirit led here,’ or ‘revival is happening here’ and whatever else gets said, we assume what they are saying is true. If it is true then this god is pathetic. If all of our claims of how powerfully God is moving in our midst are true, then I want nothing to do with that god, because he is a god we have created. We invented him, and he is so weak. We have taken our works and called them his movements. The god of today’s evangelicalism is lame. At least Baal seemed to be able to help crops grow, this god cannot even make a man turn off his television for a minute or two. I assure you God is not pathetic, the problem is us. We are not what we claim to be, both as a church and as individuals. We claim to witness powerful workings of God, when really they are usually psychological manipulations of the flesh. I say this with extreme caution because the last thing I want to do is call what actually is a work of the spirit something else. If I say a genuine work of the Spirit is really a work of sinful flesh then I am coming very close to blaspheming the Holy Spirit, I certainly do not want to tread there. I say God is not pathetic because He does move powerfully in His children, he really does. Praying last night in the middle of that field, He met me there, yes the world crept in and I ran, but He met me there, I have no doubt. Seeing him change Kristin’s life direction against her will and desire, He is there. Changing all of my desires, putting this new heart in me, He is there. Taking the burden of this world off of my shoulders and giving me His burden, oh He is a mighty God, and He is mighty to save. Men and women of old, and even today give everything for Him in expectation of nothing in return, but give it all simply because He is worthy. We don’t care about a state of ‘nirvana’ or 72 virgins, or coming back as some cow or something. No! a thousand times no! God has put in His children a love and adoration for Him. We desire heaven because we have perfect fellowship with Him there, nothing else. We do not desire some heaven of our own creation where God is not present. This God of ours is mighty, and we need Him to break us, and to bring us as a congregation into His fold. As long as we can continue in our own power we will not seek Him, period end of story. Gary this is why that whole thing had me so mad, I am sick of it, seriously sick of it. I cannot do purpose driven, I cannot even do spirit led spirit fed, I just cannot, it is so cheap. IF GODS POWER WAS REALLY MANIFEST IN OUR CHURCH WE WOULD NOT HAVE TO LABEL IT!!! WE WOULD NOT NEED A CLICHÉ TO DESCRIBE IT!!! I was glancing through a magazine Kristin had from the Church about all these new tools and ministry ideas and so on and it makes me start to feel sick, literally. I get frustrated beyond words. It is everywhere, if I thought I could go elsewhere to other churches to avoid it I would leave in a heartbeat. Well this was a rant, I think you can see that it is love for God and His people that brings me to this point, at least I hope you see that. There are a lot of good things of God I want to discuss, but for now this is place where I am, and I am without power to change it, and praise God it is not my responsibility, but I am to be His willing instrument. I fear what would happen if God used me in a pulpit at xxxx or anywhere else that suffers our plague. I can see how Wesley got kicked out of so many churches. Well I hope I was not a total downer Thanks for listening Jay Miklovic

Old Email #1

Sent 02-20-2007

Just a quick thought on purity. While we are seeking to impart Christ’s will for sexual purity to the children and youth of our church, we must also seek our own purity. Seems obvious right? While we may not struggle so much as youth with sexual purity, our life is nonetheless to be a life of complete purity. Purity in the way we work, the way we talk, the way we interact with our friends, our spouse, our church, and so on.

Think about what all the things in the temple were overlaid with, was it not gold? No, it was pure gold. What about that old law about not having garments made of two different types of material? What is with that? These garments were supposed to be pure. You can go through tons of examples of purity in the Levitical laws and they show us the desires of God. The requirement of purity has not changed since Leviticus, do not fool yourself into thinking it has. The change from old to New Testament is how we become pure. This holy purity is a separation from all the things of this world that spot us. This purity is required and the Lord certainly deserves a holy and pure people.

“Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart…” Psalm 24.

The question we must ask ourselves is: Are we really serious about purity? If so, if we desire to teach the children and youth about sexual purity we to must place ourselves in the refiners fire that our dross may be removed, and we would be as pure gold. We must separate from television that glorifies violence, sex, love of money, and idol worship (we might as well just turn the TV off). We must separate ourselves from the conversations that tend toward lewd joking, lying, bragging, bitterness, and so on. We must drop our grudges, confess our sin, and repent toward holiness. God demands it, “without holiness no one will see the Lord”. Is our life spotted with impurities that we are well aware of? If we know we are impure in an area of our life, then we are being disobedient and must repent. If can live with our impurities and refuse to deal with them, then we cannot expect a move of God through this purity event or anywhere else in our life. God demands a holy people. A people that are repentant and broken when they sin, and a people that are not perfect, but are progressing in sanctification towards that ever distant perfection.

I just bring this up because we desire to bring pure water to cleanse a younger generation, but it will do little good if we try to bring that pure water yet contaminate it with our own filthy vessels.

Warmest Regards In Him,

Jay Miklovic

Abortion at the Altar

I survived partial birth abortion, and I remember it. Yes, it is true, I was in the womb and nearly developed, about to enter the world as a new child. At any point the pains of labor could have begun. My body had begun to turn, my head was facing down, I was entering the canal and the pain of being born was starting, when all of a sudden I felt nothing and I was yanked from the womb. I had shed no tears, I felt nothing, and yet I was faintly breathing. Fortunately for me, another doctor, a good physician entered into my room, and as I was being tossed into the trash with the rest of the aborted children he noticed that I still had breath in my lungs. He plucked me from the heap of death and placed me gently in an incubator, he helped me to breath, and nursed me to health. I have grown some since then, I still have birth defects from the whole procedure, and I am finally getting to the point where I can eat a little bit of solid food, though it takes a deal of searching to find anything palatable. The saddest thing of the whole process is that I can still remember seeing in that mass of partially born children many whose eyes were not completely dim, and whose breath had not entirely departed, and yet it appears that the clinic has no intention of reviving them. Will anyone stand with me against the heinous practice? Are there any doctors out there who still deliver children? After conception occurs, does a child have even slim chance of surviving delivery? “Except a man be born again…” Spiritual abortions like the one I described are occurring daily in churches across the globe. Spiritual children are being yanked from the womb before there lungs are developed, they are being pierced through before they ever come into the light, and what should break us the most is that they end up in everlasting darkness. Even you may have been aborted at an altar, and what you think is your new life may merely be the faint breathing of survival. Is this a sick illustration? It is not sick enough. It should be more offensive even than this, we must wake up. You may be an abortionist! To my shame I have performed a number of them myself. Let me explain the process: The Pains of Labor: At some point after a child of God is conceived they face a painful realization. I remember when this happened to me, I was 18 years old and had committed certain immoral acts, which had laden me with guilt. I had passed the threshold of my own perceived piety, the rushing realization that I was immoral, and moreover deserving of death was a reality. I knew full well that I needed the rebirth, at least I needed reconciled in someway to God, so that I would not be condemned. (Note: it had nothing to do with pleasing God, I just wanted to go to heaven.) The water breaking: We all have heard in some way shape or form that Jesus came to save us. After this initial guilt and desire for an undeserved heaven settles in the unborn child determines to turn to Jesus.This too happened in my life. I knew I need forgiveness, and I was told that Jesus was the only place to find it. The water broke, I was on my way to being a new child, I had seen my guilt, my need of a savior, I knew who the savior was, and I was going come to Him and receive my new life. I was about to be born again. The first gasp of air: The sinner will kneel at the altar in humility, knowing that they have done wrong, and knowing that they are in the proper place to put it right. I remember that gasp, the hope of new life. I was at an altar in Findlay OH, on my knees, praying a prayer, oh the blessed hope of life everlasting! The abortion: At the point when the nearly born again sinner needs nothing more than the clear concise gospel given to them, the preacher or layman reaches out with a generic almost gospel and slays the nearly converted with it. This I remember all to well, and have been reminded of it in my own church, on radio programs, here on Sermonaudio, and nearly everywhere professing Christianity goes. I heard a message that simply said ask Jesus into you heart and you will be born again. So I prayed the prayer, I asked him in, I rejoiced, shed a little alligator tear or two, and went on my carnal way. I was never faced with the first word of Jesus, I was never reached with the first word of John the Baptist, I was never greeted with that first word of the apostle Peter, or with the repeated message of the apostle Paul. I was aborted by a false gospel that mentioned nothing of repentance, nothing of new life, nothing of the death of the old man, nothing at all. I was not transformed, instead I was deformed. I had my conscience eased, without my heart being made new. I had my conscience crucified instead of the old man, what I had was not new life, just the same old death restructured a bit. The trash can: Most of these partial births end up in the can, surrounded by stained glass, and plush pews, imagining that they are reborn, yet never breathing the breath of new life. This is the part of the blog that may get me in trouble, but I have been there. I was in that can for over two years, and I have talked to people that have spent much of there life in that place, rotting and corrupting away in the same sin, and depravity they were in prior to praying their little prayer to let Jesus in.The trash can is not new life! The new life is victorious, there is repentance, there is a new understanding of God, and of self, there is a new desire to please Him, and deny self. There is power to overcome sin, there is freedom from habitual carnality, there is new life!! Yes we fall, but our life, if it is new is characterized by victory not defeat!!! The question we must ask ourselves is are we performing abortions so that we can line our pews with the carcasses of “almost Christians.” –A term used in one of Wesley’s Sermons. Or are we going to be the good physicians? Will we preach repentance and the unborn nearly converted soul feel the pains of birth so that they can be a viable child in the kingdom? Are we patient enough to let a child develop in the womb of there own conviction being nurtured by the placenta of their conscience, until they be delivered from that place by the whole gospel of redemption? Or will we continue to yank them out prematurely and hope that somehow they will learn to live in the trash can amongst the rest of the almost born? I know this was a real hard rant, and maybe the theology was poor, but at some point a few brave souls need to truly stand in the gap, cut through the emotional manipulations of big events, and purpose driven painless gospel presentations that mention nothing of repentance unto God. We need preachers that will cut to the heart as the apostle Peter did, those that will stand in the face of the religious establishment and endure the stones as Stephen did, those that will receive the assatination attempts as the apostle Paul did. Maybe then we will hear the healthy cry of the new born child crying out for repentance unto God.

Analysis of American Christianity Today - Psychology

How many times have you sat in a meeting of some sort where the preacher repeats the same words over and over again and you end up repeating them, and by the end everyone is in a frenzy and all fired up? You walk out and think, oh what a move of God that was, and 2 hours later you are in the same sinful state as you were before the meeting. Was it a move of God? Can you encounter God personally and remain unchanged? I have been to baseball, and football games and seen frenzies induced from words on a scoreboard, "Clap clap clap... Louder Louder Louder... Charge..." and so on. Was that a move of God? Of course not, it was manipulation, and most of our preaching is much the same.

Churches are built upon this principle, create an event, stir some emotions, and then convince the people that because it happened in a church setting it is somehow a move of God. Many movement have sprung from this. Look at the promise keepers, I am not calling that group heretical, but they are deeply steeped in this psychological manipulation method. I have heard so many men come back and talk about what a move of God it was, and how they encountered God in that stadium and yet that deep passion and zeal dies a week or so later. Did God move? Was their a real encounter with God? When these men come down from that mountain top experience do they enter the congregation blazing with the holiness of God? When Moses came down from Sinai the congregation could not even look at him, he had to veil his face.

I will continue later...

Analysis of American Christianity - Television

“Be ye holy therefore as I am holy.” “Be ye perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect.” “Woe unto them that call good evil and evil good.” “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” I was dropping my cousin off at his house and I walked inside and sat down, they were watching TV. What I saw terrified me. There was a divorced couple lying on a hospital bed together stuck in the act of intercourse and unable to separate themselves. The doctors were instructing them to gyrate in a certain manner in order to separate themselves, and the man appeared to be at the point of orgasm. At this point I had seen enough and had to get up and leave. The only reason I mention this is because this occurred on what could be the most popular show on television right now, ‘Gray’s Anatomy’. This was my first encounter with this show, but I imagine that this is fairly normal, and it will hopefully be my last encounter with it. This does not make me all that angry, but it breaks my heart into a million pieces. So many of us in the Church do not live in the fullness of Christ because we are not strangers in this land, we are not pilgrims heading to a heavenly country. We have full citizenship here on earth, and we only hope to transfer that citizenship at death. Let this no longer be, let our citizenship be in heaven, and let us find no pleasure in the things of this world. The ‘church’ in America today is so blind to holiness and the righteousness of God that even shows like ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ are consumed by her without thought. Even worse than the fact the church can watch this, is the fact that I am sure that some publisher is most likely developing some sort of Sunday school curriculum that is based off of this show. Come on, the only attraction to these shows is the immorality which they contain. I have heard so many professing Christians discussing Gray’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and every other vile show, when I think the show that most suits them might very well be ‘Lost’ (note sarcasm). Have we no concept of the righteousness of God? Do we even know Him? If the Holy Spirit actually dwelt in us would we not be grieved by these shows, would we not be convicted by the Spirit and have our consciences smitten when we watched them? We the church take a different approach, instead of saying ‘touch not the unclean thing’, we consume iniquity like it is water and then turn around and say ‘We are engaging the culture’. I think if we actually obeyed Christ we would be ‘enraging the culture’. Note the fate of all but one of the first apostles. We are so hypocritical, all of us, I certainly am not exempt. We say things like ‘We need the Ten Commandments back in government and the schools.” We do not even have them in our own house. We say keep the commandments, and then we watch ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ and take pleasure in adultery. We watch sports and participate in idol worship. We watch CSI and take pleasure in Murder. We watch MTV and take pleasure in the dishonoring of parents, we take pleasure in the NFL’s Sabbath breaking, come on! We break every commandment just with our television, let alone the rest of our lives. I hear a lot of arguments saying that TV is just recreation and diversion. Why would we want to have a diversion from Holiness, from Christ? I do not understand, diversion is what we are striving to eliminate in our lives… right? We have a God that is love; we should turn our TVs off and revel in His amazing love. We are polluting our souls with filth, and we do not even know it! Sports, TV, Radio, all these things are killing us, and putting spots on the bride. I will stop for now. We must be broken over this, let us pray for revival, our God is so ready to grant righteousness unto us, let us long for that and not bask in the iniquity the world is feeding us through our television set.

Analysis of American Christianity Intro

The next twelve posts will be a criticism of modern American Christendom. This is born out of prayer and out of genuine concern which was born out of that prayer and will be presented, Lord willing, in a very matter of fact way. This should come as a warning, an encouragement, a wake up call, and a humbling acknowledgement of the truth about the professing church today. What these posts will not be is some angry tirade or rant born out of the flesh; instead it will be an honest and open evaluation of where we are at as the church in America. I will warn this; I do not think there will be that many good things to say about professing Christendom as a whole, if you are browsing for something fuzzy to make you feel good you may not want to continue on. On the other hand there are certainly many individuals, and congregations that are healthy and are abiding in Christ, these posts are not intending to say that everything is amiss. The individual can discern whether or not these posts are talk about them and their church. My only request is that everyone, including myself, be honest and introspective about this, before they jump on the ‘your right modern Christendom is so wrong’ bandwagon. I say this; each one of us in someway or another represents some part of the problem, and we must not exclude ourselves from the criticism that will be made here.

Hopefully the Lord will be pleased and we will be blessed by these posts over the next few months.

I hope to finish this before the year is out, but it is tough to tell whether or not that will happen.

Repentance Series (9 of 9) Concluding Remarks

Repentance is nearly lost in the professing church today, there are certain pockets of repentant believers who are the true Church, but by and large we live in a pagan America that has labeled herself Christian. Our churches are full of social ‘Christians’ who have no desire for repentance, no desire to die to themselves and rise with Christ, and no passion for our Lord. We have gotten to the point where patriotism is considered synonymous with Christianity and faith is defined by one’s stand on certain social issues. We live with a ‘church’ that has no definition of the term ‘Christian’ or ‘unity’, yet we preach nothing but ‘Christian unity’. The problem is not the ‘liberals’, it is not the ‘fundamentalists’, the problem is neither Calvinism nor Arminianism, the problem is you and me. We have had countless opportunities to call people to repentance, to plead with them to divorce the world and be married to Christ, yet we have let innumerable opportunities pass. We have desired to move up in the ‘church’ world, when our message of repentance would make us outcasts in Christendom. We, yes even we, fundamentalists who know God have gotten drunk on numbers, and have let pragmatism creep into our conscience. I personally have sat back after a youth event and believed it was successful based on the turnout; yet in hindsight realize that it was likely void of God’s power. I have been discouraged by meetings of various groups that were smaller than expected even though God moved powerfully in them. This type of attitude is pragmatism, and needs to be repented of, and despised by us. We must never find satisfaction in ‘playing church’!!! We must find no solace in numbers. We must find no pleasure in public perception. We must only find peace in our Triune God, and His work alone. We can have no satisfaction until He has worked repentance in us, and is working repentance in those around us. Without repentance the professing church is dead! It is nothing more than another sect of people marching to eternal destruction. Oh, that we would just be the salt of the earth, that we would not lose our savor. That we would be Holy and all together different from the world around us, that we would be a strange group of people that others look onto with wonder. Repent! Repent! Repent! Come on! Let us be wholly dissatisfied with the state of the professing church today, let us first ourselves repent, and then let us care for the professing church, let us urge and prod and plead repentance, let us preach His words that Christendom may be cleansed, and that the bride may be spotless. REPENT!!!

Repentance Series (8 of 9) Preaching Repentance

Mark 6:12 And they went out, and preached that men should repent.

Act 2:38 Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

Rev 3:19 As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.

Mar 2:17 When Jesus heard [it], he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

The command of Christ is repent! In the book of revelation He tells His Church to repent! (Notice that His final words are not go make disciples!) We are to go make disciples, but before we will ever accomplish anything for the kingdom we must repent. Moreover before we can expect anyone else to accomplish something for the kingdom they must repent. All great revival preaching has always centered around repentance! Repentance is one of those words that we are afraid to use around the “un-churched” (I despise that word), however no matter how you cut it, repentance is the first thing we are called to preach to them. We have come to a point in modern Christendom where people are saying that everyone is somewhere along some spiritual journey and maybe someday they will mature unto repentance. Nonsense! If there is no repentance then what they are on is an unspiritual journey into eternal death yet they will go there pretending to be Christians. Come on, do we not know that we are the bride of Christ! That we have our backs to the world! Or are we united to the world in some social club we call Christendom?

We must preach repentance. If we do not our congregations will continue to look more and more like the world around them. Look at the ‘Purpose Driven Life’ gospel, notice that all the churches that have used it ‘successfully’ look more like the world then when they started. They now have huge buildings packed with all the latest amenities from flat panel TVs, to coffee bars, even hair salons. What is going on? Is this bad or good? Well the logic is to make ‘church’ appealing to the world, and preaching repentance certainly does not fit that goal. Have you noticed how corporations have used ‘The Purpose Driven Life’ everyone uses it, tons of people have read it, or are reading it, and you never hear anything bad about it. The world loves it!! Do you know why? It is because never once in its whole explanation of Christianity, and its whole model for Christian community does it ever mention repentance. So long as you leave repentance out of the picture the worldly ‘church’ will thrive. Yet include in every message for one year at least something about repentance and most churches built on these new models would be about half the size or less than they are now. On the bright side there would be more Christians in them. We have tied our hands, our congregations are going through what is about the same as the dot-com craze on the stock market, the congregation has become much larger than the Church. None of these modern congregations have the unction to begin to preach hard on repentance because the numbers would certainly drop and this would be considered failure. In truth we keep inflating our churches with worldly business models that produce apparent numerical success, while the Church of Jesus Christ dwindles away. Eventually God will burst this bubble and those who are His will recognize it as revival, and the rest will bemoan the dwindling sizes of their congregations.

Jesus preached Repent, Peter preached repent, John the Baptist preached repent, all the great preachers of our past, Edwards, Wesley, Spurgeon, Brainerd, Whitfield, and so on all preached repent. We preach make disciples to people who have never embraced the cost of discipleship, which is repentance.

Leonard Ravenhill said, “The world does not need a new definition of Christianity, it needs a new demonstration of Christianity.”

Well that was a rant, more than an explanation or teaching, and I apologize for not really developing any points. Pages and pages could be written on this but I will stop here. I already have my next series in mind so hopefully tomorrow I will conclude this one.