Week 45:
Counterfeit Zeal
The present lethargy in the Church is almost unpardonable. The Jehovah's Witnesses have zeal. The Mormons claim they are gaining more people from the evangelicals than we are gaining from them. The cultists zealously persist in getting a hearing in the streets.
Saul of Tarsus had fanatical zeal. He threw men and women in prison and broke up their families, persecuting them from city to city. Miraculously God cleansed him, baptized him with fire, and made him a model zealot for His Kingdom.
It is not enough in these days of such vast worldliness in the Church to say that we are fundamental or uncompromising in "doctrine." We must be ablaze with Holy Spirit-born anger. ("Be angry, and yet do not sin" (Eph. 4:26). We must feel the hurt of God over the devil's domination of this age. We must apologize to the Almighty that we have turned to our own way, and have been more loyal to a man-made theology than to the exceedingly sober words of our Master. Like Paul, we must be able to say in His holy presence, "This one thing I do...." I bear a broken heart over the coldness in the Church (including my own!). True, the zealous man of God lives for one thing only: to please God. He is impervious to the opinions of others about his zeal. He cares not what it costs him to burn out for God. In sickness or in health, in poverty or in wealth, whether he is esteemed or despised, flattered or flattened, considered a fool or a philosopher, through evil report or good report, kisses or curses, he is set to do the will of God!
This man sees the Church today fouled with showmanship, bingo and bake sales, dances, tinsel and trivia, "holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power" (2 Tim. 3:5). He sees the ministers condoning divorce in high places. Maybe his minister is divorced and remarried himself.
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