Loving the Darkness

 

Let no man deceive you with vain words;

for because of these things cometh the Wrath of God

upon the Children of Disobedience.

Be not ye therefore partakers of them.

For ye were sometimes darkness,

but now are ye light in the Lord:

walk as children of light:

(For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth;)

Proving what is acceptable unto the Lord.

And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness,

but rather reprove them.

For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.

But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light:

for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.

Wherefore, he saith, Awake thou that sleepest;

and arise from the dead,

and Christ shall give the light.

                                                                                                Ephesians 5: 6-14

 

            I have come to believe that in my lifetime we have come to a place where not only does the world love darkness, but a great many of those in the church, who are supposed to be of the light love darkness equally well. Some of those who are in the church, in fact, may be greater lovers of darkness than many of their counterparts in the world. This ought not to be, but those who believe we are living in the Last Days, and that those days would be characterized by a great falling away, as the Scripture teaches, should not be surprised.

            Vance Havner, preached a great sermon called “Getting Used to the Dark” In it he told how he and a friend had gone to a dimly lit restaurant to eat. Over time they began to get used to the dark establishment. It was then his friend observed it was funny how we can get used to the dark. I am afraid that the ease with which we get used to the darkness of this world has no humor in it at all. The Bible observed that men love darkness rather than light, and this generation is determined to give proof to that passage of Scripture like none that has gone before. Truly we live in a day when men love darkness rather than light, and when this situation occurs in the church it is doubly shameful.

            It is the works of darkness that is going to bring the Wrath of God down on this world, and in no time of human history has the works of darkness been performed with such thoroughness in every category as in the one we now live in. And these works of darkness have long been ignored and overlooked in the church for the cause of convenience. But today, many who are in the churches, yes in the pulpits as well, are no longer overlooking the things of sin, they are actually promoting the works of darkness. They are deceiving people with vain words, and at the same time making themselves partakers with the workers of darkness as well. Some who hear me say this will be offended with me because their conscience will be stricken. But if they were to be approached with the truth of how they have become partakers of darkness through compromise they would deny that this is what they have done at all.

            I believe that the situation we now see happening in the world and in the church, is one where people are turning to, endorsing and enjoying the works of darkness. And it is because we are coming down to the end of the Church Age. Satan is about to be given free rein and that soon coming time will be utterly dominated by the Prince of Evil and the powers of darkness. In a great many church congregations, and perhaps some entire denominations, when the Lord Jesus Christ calls His saints to meet Him in the air, the function and performance of their church routine will not be affected at all! Some of you might be amazed by that statement and some will be appalled and angered. If you find yourself angered by what I say I suggest that you examine yourself to see what your relationship with the Lord really is.

            Recently we saw the release of a movie by Mel Gibson titled “The Passion of the Christ” I went into a movie theater for the first time since the movie “The Late Great Planet Earth” was released just to see it. I saw some of the things many of my brethren in Christ were criticizing in it, and they were right in their criticisms. But at the same time I rejoiced in what the movie did accomplish, because I rejoiced that no matter what the motive for the movie was, Christ was preached. At the same time in some of the churches we saw sodomites getting married, kissing each other in public like a bride and groom, and some of these were priests. Given a choice between the two, I would take the movie over what was going on in those churches. What would have been better would have been for some good solid Bible believing man to have produced the Passion. He would have had to be a man that had access to the distribution resources Mel Gibson had. And, for no church to have condoned the sodomite actions we saw in the news, and those connected with churches, that were part of that abomination, to have been turned out of those churches. Had those things occurred we still would not have been living in a perfect world by any means, but we would have been living in a world less willing to embrace darkness than is the case with the one we do live in.

            Looking at what is going on in the world, we would be foolish to be expecting the world to be living as children of the light, that is living the way you would expect saved people to live. But what troubles me the more greatly is that we have people who are part of the churches that are living as children of darkness rather than light. In other words, they are living the way you expect lost people to live. I find people in the churches having sex before they marry, some are even pregnant at the time they say their vows; I find people in the church having affairs with someone other than who they are married to; I find men who have been Ministers of the Gospel for many years doing these things, and some of these preachers who would not think of doing these things themselves, trying to condone the actions of others, either their own children or sometimes church members who have done such vile actions. They will stand in the pulpits and condemn homosexual marriage and be right and overlook the fornication that is going on in their own congregations and sometimes in their own families and then they are wrong.

            One of the things about compromise is that it is just like getting acclimated to dim lighting conditions. Once you set yourself to compromise you can stand more and more compromise, and less and less truth. Just like when you move into the dark, bright lights is suddenly overwhelming. The longer you dwell in the darkness, the more you can stand darker and darker conditions. But there is one dark condition no man can stand. That is the darkness and blackness in the depths of hell that is reserved for not just the angels that did not keep their first estate but also for the false professors and preachers whose deeds are evil.

            Some people have in recent times proclaimed that some groups were turning away from the deeds of darkness and moving back toward the light of God’s Word and being a light in the world. Concerning these proclamations, I have my doubts;

I will talk about Baptists first because I am one. But the Southern Baptists proclaimed after years of fighting that they had won their seminaries back from the liberals. But then they went on to pay millions of dollars for the production of the Holman Christian Standard Bible that duplicated the doctrinal errors common to all the modern so-called Bibles produced in recent times. They had not moved away from the deeds of darkness and back toward the light. They had moved away from paying the New International Version copyright fees to charging others copyright fees for their own corrupt perversion of the Scripture.

The Southern Baptists left the Baptist World Alliance, not because their deeds are evil. The BWC has been a hotbed of sin and ecumenism for years. They left because the Baptist World Alliance brought into its fold the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which is a liberal breakaway from the Southern Baptists. If they had wanted to be on the right side in their relationships they would have broken with the BWC a long, long time ago. The denomination is not moving away from darkness, it is inventing its own brand of darkness and compromise to maintain its own entity.

Neither is the Georgia Baptist Convention, a subsidiary of the SBC moving forward in loving the light. They have continued to tolerate Dr. Godsey of Mercer University in their midst, and even gave the school he heads more power and money since the Georgia Baptist membership considered whether to expel him for the book he wrote that denied the fundamentals of the faith. The Executive Director, Dr. White, of the Georgia Baptists, runs over to the apostate seminary Godsey’s ilk founded to insult Georgia Baptists and the God of the Bible and have fellowship with them at every opportunity. White publishes a regular column that is supposed to come from his heart but we see where his heart is because of who he associates with and supports. He has not been moving Georgia Baptists toward the light but has been having fellowship with darkness. Where is he going to lead people seeing he loves the darkness?

            I know the Church of England has not moved away from darkness. I was a pastor in Germany when they ordained a man who did not believe in the reality of Satan. Since then Satan, who so many of them seem not to believe in, has had a field day in the Church of England as well as the country it is the State Church of. Most recently they chose for their Archbishop a man, who just prior to becoming the leader of the denomination, was made an Honorary Druid. Druidism is a form of pagan witchcraft in case you did not know, that in modern times is also tied to the sin of Masonry. The Bible tells us to have no fellowship with the works of darkness. But the man they chose as their leader was well defined as a person who loves the darkness. Recently he has endorsed a new version of the Bible that promotes fornication and suggested that the Church of England might need outside mediation in their struggles over homosexuality. They could do with some inside help had the leadership in England not already rejected the Lord Jesus Christ and the King James Bible given to us by godly men in that same country less than four hundred years ago. But they have learned to love the darkness.

            The Bible says it is a shame even to speak of those things, which are done of them in secret, but don’t you feel a little bit dirtied when speaking of the things people are now doing openly? I do! The depths of our present day human depravity is too vile for the words of our language to describe, and we would rather not have to. But we have to address the sinful state of people who have moved from light to darkness, let alone those who have been dwelling in darkness all along. We have moved beyond the bounds of what was once considered mere moral corruption into a new world where evil seems to have become distilled into some kind of essence of the impure, the weird, and the uncanny; a demonic driven blend of unmitigated evil that boggles the mind. One thing Vance Havner once said about the age is far truer than when he spoke about the “demonic combinations and concoctions of iniquity never heard of a generation ago.” He said “This putrefaction of the carcass of civilization awaiting the vultures of judgment is not confined to Skid Row; it shows up in the top brackets of society.” Today a lot of the swine feed off the moral, and it is the swine who are clothed in the purples and fine linen of clerical garb. But many of the depraved serve people gathered at the trough of their empty teachings who love the darkness and would rather feed on swill than taste the pure milk of the word. May God have mercy on this generation when He judges it.

            This past week I have done some reading on the World Council of Churches and the United Religions Initiative, both of which are working in the same vein toward building a one-world religion for the service of the person called the False Prophet. He is the one who will appear and serve the Man of Sin called Antichrist. These organizations were built off the tithes of the unwary, who did not guard their denominations and demand loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ from their leadership. Some people who should know better are still involved with these heathens and pagans. They have forgotten, if they ever knew the words of the Bible, which say “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” The way these things got so strong is because Christians, not unbelievers, got too much acclimated to darkness. I think it is fair to say that some people had even learned to love the darkness along the way.

            It occurred to me that Dr. Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Anglican Church, might be thinking of turning to one of the institutions like the World Council of Churches or the United Religions Initiative to mediate the problems of the Church of England. Since these groups love and promote heathenism, paganism, and homosexuality, and are well acquainted with all manner of perversions we could well forecast with the accuracy of the prophets of old what the outcome would be. But having once begun to have fellowship with the workers of darkness there is no end without repentance and I do not see that in the future of those who have sold themselves to sin on such a massive scale.

            Today we are being brainwashed by the media. Twenty or so years ago, when preaching such a message I would have said we were being slowly brainwashed. But now, whether you are listening to news or watching television, the amount of sin and misleading information you are being exposed to comes in such volume and with such force it is like a hurricane blowing gale strength winds across a sandy beach. We are being pummeled and bombarded in such a way that has never occurred before with the message that evil is good and what the Bible calls an abomination we should seek to understand and tolerate. And, if a ray of sanity should interject itself into the message it should be condemned out of hand as being part of a phobia that we might need psychiatric treatment to overcome. Sodom and Gomorrah is tolerated in the living rooms of America along with fornication, violence and yes, even bestiality. People are getting used to it and tolerating it. They are so acclimated to it that they tolerate it in their art, literature, music, and language. The great majority of the human race is so busy learning to love the darkness that they do not realize what is happening to them and their children.

            Most people are going into the coming dark night without so much as a whimper. Federal judges and politicians in the United States like those in other western nations are making unjust and immoral laws without the consent of the governed and most people in these countries avoid any feelings of concern as long as they can continue to dwell in the pleasures of sin for a season. The lawmakers succumb to the immoral terrorists of political correctness, who are promoting a godless brand of immoral equal rights and freedoms that exclude the righteous judgment of God upon their acts. There is a movement afoot to force all morality away from the life of the nations and condemns those who stand for right as being prudes and religious fanatics. One person likened the behavior of these people buying into Satan’s agenda as resembling “child molesters placed in charge of day care centers.” In this case, the centers are the nations and peoples of the western world. This could not have happened if it had not been that too many of the people who should be following the precepts of God in their lives had not learned to love the dark.

            In Romans chapter one, beginning with verse sixteen and going to the end of the chapter, are the verses I have used many times to preach on the devolution of man. It describes in detail how men get worse and worse accommodating the very things the world and people in the church are embracing now. The last verse of the chapter mentions those who have pleasure in those that do those vile things. The condition of the situation is their remains no excuse for those who have pleasure in these things, those that love the darkness.

            God has not called us to live in darkness or to love the darkness of sin. He has called us to live in light and love the light of His word and His love. We must do one or the other. There is no middle ground. God is calling for a people to come out from among those who would compromise with the world today and live separated to Him. That is going to be all the harder as the day of His return approaches. Many preachers have said that they would not stand against this or that sin in their church, saying they would rather pick their battles. The result of this has been that they have stood for nothing and the battle has passed them by. Many Christians have done the same thing by what they would allow in their lives. What will you allow or disallow in your life? Will you love the darkness or walk in the Light of Christ? 

            Christians, whatever their calling in the Lord, have a calling to holiness. Will you heed that call or will you learn to love the darkness?