Seduction: A Primer for Persecution

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Stories abound of those believers who have survived and been strengthened in their faith during the persecution they suffered in communist countries only to have their walk with the Lord devastated after they escaped to the West. They could endure persecution but they could not resist seduction.

Or what if even without your preaching or protesting it simply becomes known that you are one of those biblical Christians who is intolerant toward other religions, who rejects evolution, who won't go along with psychology, who is anti-abortion, anti-genetic manipulation, and anti-euthanasia; that you view homosexuality as a sin rather than an alternative lifestyle, and that you are against gay rights and gay marriage? Furthermore, you seem to be out of touch with the acceptable morality of the day (marriage now being statistically a minority as a practice in the U.S.) by having a "problem" with cohabitation, and it's been said that you believe sexual abstinence should be practiced outside of marriage. You are suspicious about the alarm over "global warming." It's become known that you support Israel against the alleged right of the Palestinians to be restored to the land they believe is theirs. How will such a person be dealt with in Christendom--as well as by the world that champions everything that a believer opposes? The dark clouds of persecution appear to be gathering over the church in the U.S.; signs indicate that the seats of the "coliseum" are beginning to fill with a widely diverse audience (see TBC 1/11) that, at least in a figurative sense, has "a taste for the blood" of those who reject their programs and teachings on the basis of sound biblical doctrine.

You can read all of it here- The Berean Call- July 1

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Pride is ever the cause of the trouble, and there is nothing that so hurts the natural man's pride as the cross of Christ.

   How does the cross do that? What has happened that there should ever have been a cross? It is because we are failures, because we are sinners, because we are lost.

   The Christian is not a good man. He is a vile wretch who has been saved by the grace of God.

It is impossible to know the true God in His splendor without seeing ourselves as very small indeed. There is no surer way to lose one's inflated sense of self-importance.