Tag Archives: The Gospel

News

Police handcuff and arrest black pastor for preaching plain gospel message

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Four white Canadian police officers arrest black pastor
Four white policemen arrest black pastor for preaching the gospel

I try to stay informed about countries that are more advanced on the path of secular leftism, such as Canada and Venezuela. Canada is about 10 years ahead of us down the path of secular leftism. They legalized same-sex marriage 10 years before we did. They started persecuting Christian businesses 10 years before we did. And now they’re arresting Christian pastors.

Consider this article from the Christian Post:

Pastor David Lynn of Christ Forgiveness Ministries was arrested on June 4, 2019 for preaching the Gospel publicly in Toronto, Canada.  The neighborhood he was preaching in was Church-Wellesley Village. This neighborhood is known to be a place where many of the LGBTQ community in Toronto reside. His ministry is currently on an outdoor preaching tour throughout the 22 districts of Toronto. June 4, happened to be the day they scheduled for that district.

It is not uncommon for someone to think “open-air preaching” and “LGBTQ neighborhood” and immediately jump to thoughts of preachers condemning homosexuals to hell. However, Pastor Lynn’s preaching was some of the most loving and gracious preaching I have ever seen and heard. Which is why it is outrageous that he was arrested.

You can even watch the whole video here:

More:

The entire time of preaching was livestreamed via Facebook and can be found on YouTube. Throughout the video, it is surprising to see the reaction of those who were listening to Lynn’s preaching. The more love he poured out, the more hate and resistance he received. As anyone can see if they view the video, Pastor Lynn was respectful and kind throughout all of his time preaching. As he shared the Gospel, he also made statements like “We are here to tell you that we hate nobody.” He emphasized God’s love again and again.

He proceeded to ask those protesting him if they would be willing to tolerate him as a Christian. But those listening were unwilling to dialogue, and many asked him to leave the street corner.

Throughout the encounter he was very calm and collected, not entering into any disrespectful or condemnatory dialogue.

Canada does have hate speech laws. However, there is no way that his preaching could be deemed as hate-speech. Lynn stated while preaching, “Everyone is accepted….and that is what we preach as Christians.”

This pastor was very careful to avoid singling out any particular group as “sinful”. Instead, he said that everyone is sinful, and everyone needs forgiveness for their sin. That is the standard Christian view.

More:

In order to not make anyone listening feel singled out, he said “Jesus died for the sinner…. Every heterosexual has sin. Every homosexual has sin. Sin is when we violate the laws of God….” He did not target any particular group of people or single out homosexuality.

He was assaulted by the people who disagreed with him, but the police didn’t arrest them – they arrested him:

Though he was very loving throughout the entire encounter, tensions escalated, and people began to form a mob of protest around him. As he tried to walk away from the most adamant protesters, they crowded in on him and would not let him move. All throughout the encounter, as he tried to walk away from them, they pressed in on him and blocked him. At times, they even pressed their bodies against him, which in technicality is assault.

When the police arrived, rather than dealing with those that were assaulting Pastor Lynn, the police blamed Lynn for creating a disturbance of peace. Even upon his request to deal with those who had assaulted him, the police would not listen to him.

You can clearly see that in Canada, the police don’t care about basic human rights. Those policemen have been taught secular leftism. They don’t know anything about “human rights”. They only know that to keep their jobs, they must do as the secular leftists in power tell them. The laws are not based on morality. The laws are based on the need for the secular leftist elites to be able to do what they need to do without anyone disagreeing with them. The police aren’t the guardians of the moral law, they’re just hired muscle there to enforce the will of the secular left.

Rights like free speech and religious liberty DO NOT EXIST in Canada. Christians and conservatives have a duty to pay taxes to their secular left overlords, but they don’t have a right to disagree with their secular left overlords. They don’t have a right to live their lives as Christians, and run their families as Christians. If they try to act like Christians, then they wind up in front of a Human Rights Commission, or a criminal court, or in a jail cell.

And there is no freedom of the press in Canada. If a Canadian tries to expose any of the abuses of human rights to the public, the courts will send the police to their door to arrest them. You see, they want to suppress the human rights of those who disagree with them, but they don’t want anyone to know about it. They want people to believe that Canada is as free as the United States, so they don’t want reports about their heavy-handed totalitarianism to get out to the rest of the world. This suppression of the truth by force has always been the standard operating procedure of the secular left – in every country where they have seized power.

If you don’t want this for America, then you have to vote against the secular left, and do your part to persuade others not to vote for them.

Related Posts

News

Jordan Peterson tweets an article about the minimal facts approach to the resurrection

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Jordan Peterson is aware of the best case for the resurrection of Jesus - are you?
Dr. Jordan Peterson is aware of the best case for the resurrection – are you?

Wow.

Jordan Peterson is now known to be aware of the strongest case for the resurrection, because he’s tweeted about it. Let’s see what he tweeted and what’s in the article.

It’s this article, written by Dr. Gary Habermas, which was published at The Stream:

Not too long ago I listed six of these events in a dialogue with an agnostic New Testament scholar. I used the historical facts that 1) Jesus died by crucifixion, 2) his early followers had experiences a short time later that they thought were appearances of Jesus, 3) and as a result, they were transformed to the point of being willing to die for this message. Further, two former unbelievers 4) James the brother of Jesus and 5) Saul of Tarsus (later the apostle Paul) both similarly thought that they had seen the risen Jesus, as well; and 6) This Gospel message of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ began to be taught very soon after these events.

Some might be surprised to hear that the agnostic scholar with whom I was dialoguing not only agreed with the historical nature of these six events, without exceptions, but he even added that each one was very well-recognized.

How come?

Perhaps the chief reason for the widespread agreement comes from recent critical recognition that the New Testament contains dozens of brief snippets of information from the earliest church teaching — preserved from the first 20 years before the first canonical books were written. Scholars call these “creedal texts” or traditions. The best known of them is 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 which scholars agree originated no later than the early to mid-30s AD, or within just five years of the life of Christ. There is also 1 Corinthians 8:6 and 11:23-25, Romans 1:3-4, 10:9, and Philippians 2:6-11. That’s not all of them. Among the many others are Luke 24:34 and the Acts sermon summaries. These texts actually predate by many years the works in which they appear.

Another avenue comes from the regular use of different tools and rules used by historians and others to recognize the occurrence of past historical facts. These are often called the criteria of authenticity. Here are six of these that help explain how scholars come to this kind of agreement:

  1. Some events are established by the reliable testimonies from people who were close to or who even participated in the events.
  2. Sometimes the witnesses reported these things very soon afterwards, rather than waiting years to do so.
  3. On other occasions, these events are attested by two or even more independent sources.
  4. Sometimes, enemies who actually oppose the occurrences and would have preferred that they had not happened, might agree that they nonetheless did so.
  5. Or the accounts may be told in a way that is so embarrassing to those telling it, or to their loved ones or their cause, that the best explanation for them saying it is simply that it’s the truth.
  6. Another test preferred by some scholars is the result of an event fitting well with or exhibiting similarities to other occurrences that are known to have occurred (coherence).

There are other historical tools and rules as well, but these are among the best-known ones. Often, two or even several of these additional reasons are present and endorse the same event from different angles. Once in a while, the list of confirmatory reasons can get quite lengthy. In such cases, it becomes more and more difficult to deny the factual nature of the reports. So actually, agreement among dissimilar scholars can be fairly common.

If you’ve ever seen debates with atheist scholars like James Crossley, Bart Ehrman, Gerd Ludemann, etc., you know that they agree with some or all of these “minimal facts”.

Now, this post is about Jordan Peterson. How come he is tweeting this argument? Well, I think part of the reason is that Peterson is a brilliant scholar, and he’s going to find out about pretty much everything that he sets out to investigate. I have been told that the New Testament is an area of interest for him. I can’t help but believe that his recent dialog with the venerable Christian scholar William Lane Craig might have put him on the right track.

Here is that dialog, in case you missed it:

I would like all my readers to pray for Jordan Peterson. Ask God to do what God does best – putting people into a time and place where they can find out something about him that leads to a relationship with himself.

If you want a place to start, read Acts 17:24-26 and then ask God to engineer Jordan Peterson’s life in such a way that he finds the answers to his questions from the people he meets and situations he finds himself in. God is a master architect and a brilliant general.  Looking back on my life, I can clearly see how carefully he led me to know things about him, and then to know him. We just have to ask God to do what he does for Jordan Peterson. Asking is free. It might be a good idea to pray for wisdom for Dr. Peterson, as well.

Commentary

Pastor Mark Driscoll explains reality of sin, the centrality of Jesus Christ

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Bible study that hits the spot
Bible study that hits the spot

Mark Driscoll has a series he does called “Best Sermon Ever”, where he invites other pastors to give their sermons. But today’s sermon really is the Best Sermon Ever, but it’s given by Mark Driscoll (sent to me by super-Wife McKenzie). I asked McKenzie to send me the best sermon she had ever heard, and now it’s the best sermon that I have ever heard.

As always, when dealing with Mark Driscoll, we note that he does not hold women accountable to the Bible on moral issues, but instead deflects responsibility for the bad decisions of women to men, often to non-Christian men who don’t even have objective morality . Nevertheless, I agree with him 99.9% of the time, and I think you will agree when you listen to the sermon that this man has a gift for preaching. I could not find a single thing wrong with this sermon, I give it a score of 12 billion out of 10.

This is the link to his web site that has the sermon, the audio and the full transcript. The title of the sermon is “The Father of a Murdered Son”.

This is a Youtube video that someone uploaded: (audio only)

Here is the beginning of the sermon:

Luke 20:9–18, “The Father of a Murdered Son.”

“And he,” that is Jesus, “began to tell the people this parable,” which is a small story that tells a big truth. “A man planted a vineyard and let it out to tenants and went into another country for a long while. When the time came, he sent a servant to the tenants, so that they would give him some of the fruit of the vineyard. But the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. And he sent another servant. But they also beat and treated him shamefully, and sent him away empty-handed. And he sent yet a third. This one also they wounded and cast out. Then the owner of the vineyard said, ‘What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.’

“But when the tenants saw him, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Let us kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours.’ And they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him.”

Jesus here is on his way to Jerusalem. He is days from his crucifixion. He is going to be murdered in a brutal and bloody way. And as he’s approaching the cross and the crowds have gathered around him, he wants us to see human history and our lives individually from the perspective of God.

And this is very important because we live in a day where this is not encouraged. This is actually discouraged. We live in a day in which we want to see our lives and history from our perspective according to our own sinful desires and our own selfish pursuits, which can then even lead us to the point of questioning, is there a God? Or if there is a God, questioning the goodness of God. Is there a God? Does he care? Is he involved? Does he love us? And then we put ourselves in the position of judging God.

And then some of us can even go to the Scriptures and say, “I don’t think God should ever get angry. He should never judge anyone. That whole issue of hell seems highly unnecessarily and over-reactionary. Perhaps, that was primitive teaching from a former day, thankfully we’ve evolved beyond that.” And it’s because we are the guilty looking at the judge and wanting to replace our position with his that we might judge him.

WHO DOES EACH CHARACTER IN THE PARABLE REPRESENT?

Jesus here wants for us to have an opportunity, in as much as we’re able, with a three-pound, fallen brain and sinful proclivity and self-interest to put a hat on and to look at things, not from our perspective, but from God’s perspective, to see our lives as God sees them, to see human history as God sees it. Now we’re not God, so we have a limited capacity to do this. But in telling this parable, Jesus is trying to open our understanding to what it is like for God to deal with you and me and us. And he does so in the form of a parable.

For us to extract significant meaning from the parable, it requires that we go through, look at each of the characters and ask, to whom does that refer?

I can’t really excerpt this sermon. You simply must listen to all of it.

If you are anything like me, this sermon is going to hold you accountable about whether you are doing everything you can to tell non-Christians about Jesus, and why his actions are the most important events ever to occur in history. I listened to it and I immediately sat down and wrote an 1100 word essay to very special woman about my life, and how I would like to be more faithful as a Christian in service to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In particular, I thought of my co-workers who are Muslim, Hindu and Jewish, and how important it is for me to let them know that they can ask me about the story of Jesus and that I will tell them the gospel. It made me think about how much I would like my non-Christian co-workers to hear the gospel, and understand who Jesus claimed to be, and the significance of his actions.