Frankly, I get frustrated when I hear or read the statements of professing Christians, especially preachers, that indicates they are in love with the world system. I don’t despise the individuals, but I what I feel toward the sin of compromise borders on hatred. The reason is because I was once like that.

It came upon me gradually, over a period of years. When God convicted me, it began a battle with my flesh that lasted for several more years. With the last burst (or what I believe to be my last) of strength, I pressed through to full surrender. When I think of how close I came to being an oil-less Christian, routinely going about my duties, powerless and full of religion, I quake.

Therefore, when I witness preachers mixing godliness with worldliness as if there exists no line of demarcation, I am deeply saddened. I see pastors and evangelists doing this quite regularly. They are feeding crumbs and stones to the people who hunger for bread. It reminds me of a story I read long ago.

Francis Schaeffer had a conversation with a minister who had become cold in his spirit. I remember that the man told Schaeffer, “I went to the seminary, eager for and expecting bread, but when I graduated; all that it left me was a handful of pebbles.”

We need more than a occasional (and often brief) encounter with God to have bread in our sermons. If our idea of “walking in the Spirit” is gorging on a huge lunch, two football games, and then rushing to the church on Sunday night expecting to quickly make the transition from such gluttony to a pure vessel ready to impart God’s word with anointing, we need to repent. It does not matter how great our preaching skills are, or how glibly we can read our sermon, and how well the inflections of our voice can make it into a stirring delivery.

Further, it does not matter to how well we do the clergy strut, how clever we can move the emotions of people, and how much in demand that we are. If we do not have the passion and desire to spend time in deep prayer, we don’t have bread. If our spirits are full of NFL, NBA, NCAA, PGA, MLB and MMA, then we are certainly not full of GOD. As such, we are not fit to fill the pulpit and nothing we say from it will feed the hungry souls.

One of the worst things that can happen to a Christian is to sin or commit spiritual infidelity and not immediately suffer the consequences. One of the worst things that can happen to a preacher is to preach with a carnal spirit and believe that the souls being saved and healed are the results of his efforts. Let me be blunt here. Some (maybe most) of what we preachers witness are not the results of our preaching. Some of the results occur in spite of our preaching. God may be answering the prayers of some godly prayer warrior that attends that church or lives in that community. Evangelistic results may be the fruit of a godly pastor (not the evangelist) who has labored, sowed seed, and gone faithfully before God in intercession.

I exhort every pastor and evangelist. If we are going to be responsible for delivering God’s message to the people, let us make certain that we are proper vessels to deliver it. If we cannot stand against the encroaching allure of the world system, how can we expect the congregation to do so? It is time to be accountable for what God has made us responsible for. We have reached the point in history that requires us to be more than mere parsons that kisses the babies, visits hospitals, and lays out a rote sermons each Sunday. We need to hear a message from God and we need to be prepared to deliver it with the passion and anointing required to make it effective. We must give the people bread, not crumbs and stones.

It is time to rise to the demands of the last days. People need strong and godly leaders more than ever. If we are answering that call, it will require more than a casual and brief encounter with God to fill those shoes.

“But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified.” (1 Corinthians 9:27)

I frequently hear my fellow Christians complain, not without merit, about the sordid condition of Christianity. They want to roll back the calendar, but of course that’s impossible. Many of them believe that they can push the creeping apostasy back into its box by returning to the good old days when people were more engaged in church meetings and revivals. Oh, those were the days! I remember them well.

In the denomination I was ordained with, Cheryl and I were involved in many great revivals as evangelists. I remember conducting several 5-week revivals and they could have gone on longer. People shouted, praised God, many were saved, filled with the Holy Spirit, healed, and much more. Broken marriages, parent and child relationships, severed friendships, were put back together at an altar. As people got right with God, they got right with each other.

However, at the same time all of that was occurring, there was an epidemic of church disputes. Many of them resulted in splits, open contention and strife that spilled out into communities. The fruit of some of the best revivals were destroyed by conflict. Pastors were driven out of their pastorates by church boards and their accomplices in the membership. Many of these churches were serial offenders. In every district, scores of churches were looking for a new pastor each month. The average tenure of a youth pastor was 6 months. It was all indicative of unhealthy churches and weak leadership in the denomination. In fact, if a pastor decided that he would stay and try to rid the church of the serial offenders, most leadership would not support him.

Maybe we should consider why it all went wrong in the first place. It began with a quest for numerical growth and social prominence. In spite of the many warnings, the leadership refused to look down the road at ramifications of what they were initiating. From every level of leadership, church growth was promoted. They handed out awards, exalted the pastors with the most numerical growth, while ignoring the fact that the methods used were not biblical. It was okay because after all, “behind every number, there is a soul.”

The quest for numerical growth became so powerful that it drowned out the calls to maintain the distinctives that brought the denomination into existence. Truth, anointing, conviction, and the moving of the Holy Spirit were marginalized to placate those who favored being dignified over being sanctified. The truth is that the denomination was being decimated from within by carnal church boards and pusillanimous denominational leaders too wary of crashing the numerical statistics to do want was right.

When the paradigm shift was complete and its ramifications reached critical mass, numerical growth replaced ministry as the motivating factor for pastoring and evangelicalism. This flung the door wide open for hirelings to rush in. It brought the called and anointed people of God into direct conflict with the ones who had submitted to their flesh. The hirelings were more than willing to take the reins of leadership and give everyone what they wanted. Spiritual, godly, pastors were rejected as too fanatical and dogmatic. The result was the decimation of a Movement by mollifying, rejecting, or ejecting every anointed pastor that refused to go along with the new wave. They certainly left no room for a prophet or a pastor with prophetic anointing. They wanted hirelings skilled in public relations. They wanted large buildings. They were fixated on bringing the denomination out of the gutter of what they viewed as ignorance and emotionalism and into the new age of tolerance, acceptance, compromise. Historical distinctives were and continue to be modified for seeker friendliness.

A significant number of pastors left the ministry during that period. Some of them were excommunicated for attempting to take sectional and district officials to task for their duplicity and weakness. The methods used by some of those leaders in retaliation were underhanded, merciless, and even diabolical. Their main weapon was the denominational tribunal. There was a lot of blood on the battlefield. Most of it was shed by the ones who claimed to be Spirit-filled vessels of God. To my knowledge, none of those leaders repented over their sins. They even forbade any other ministers to take the oil and wine and attempt to heal the ones they (the leaders) had crushed. Incredibly, some of these same individuals are still in leadership.

Did they really believe so much wounding of God’s anointed could occur without retribution from the One who sees every fallen tear? Are the ones now crying for revival so deceived as to believe that they can reverse consequential judgment and restore the desolate places with some emotionally charged meetings and human determination?

Thus, it needs to be clearly defined what is meant by bringing back the good old days. If that means simply to put things back to the order they were during the aforementioned period, I can tell you with all sincerity and certainty that it will not happen. Christianity can not simply go back to some point in the past that appears better than the apostasy of today. There must be willingness to go back much further than that.

When we need revival, going back halfway is not an option. We have to return to the day when we first realized that we were sinners in need of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Ministers and denominational leaders need to remember how it was before they became professionals, dependent on their positions for their livelihood, and before they became too callused to weep at the thought of breaking someone’s heart.

They need to pray and long for a revival of tenderness, of empathy with suffering people, and the realization that we all are nothing more than spit and dirt without God’s Spirit. If they’re going back, let them return to the days when they’d rather lose a church full of hypocrites than to wound or lose a godly man, instead of vice versa. They need to pray for broken and contrite spirits. Many of them may have forgotten the anointed and godly ones who were impugned and driven out, broken and rejected, but God has not forgotten. Forgetfulness is no excuse for the failure to right a wrong. The Holy Spirit is the Great Reminder as well as the One who convicts of sin.

If we want God’s Spirit to return upon our churches and denominations, there will have to be repentance over what was done to grieve the Holy Spirit and caused Him to depart. Current leaders will have to pour out the oil and wine, heal the broken hearts. They will have to vow and purpose never to allow lust for prominence, for acceptance by intellectuals, for large buildings with all the trappings of Churchianity, to cloud their minds. They need to reject the professionalism that hardens hearts as stone. Shouting, dancing, high energy music, and emotionally charged preaching, is not going to make that happen. Only when we lay prostrate, broken, and sincerely repentant on our faces before God will such a revival occur.

God declares in Isaiah 57:15, ““I dwell in the high and holy place, With him who has a contrite and humble spirit, To revive the spirit of the humble, And to revive the heart of the contrite ones.”

He says in Isaiah 66:2, “But on this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, And who trembles at My word.”

Someone might protest, “But I didn’t commit those sins, so why should I have to repent?” Neither did Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Daniel, but they repented just the same. Are we any better than them?

Upon being questioned about his viagra prescription being found in the home of an accused rapist, Al Sharpton declared, “I am ‘unembarrassable’.” I have not read or heard anyone’s response to that statement. I believe a Christian response is necessary because Sharpton claims to be a Reverend.

The definition of reverend is, “worthy of reverence.” It is not a title to be applied loosely, and I refuse to have it applied to me. However, many professing Christians revere Sharpton because they believe his race-baiting and extortion of businesses and large corporations is accomplishing something worthwhile and necessary. However, Christ Jesus the Lord declared that we would know a tree (and a wolf in sheep’s clothing) by its fruit. A good tree does not produce bad fruit and a bad tree cannot produce good fruit.

Al Sharpton is a bad tree, and a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and every other biblical acronym that describes diabolical individuals posing as instruments of God. His fruit is bad because it cannot be otherwise in his “unembarrassable” condition. Fresh water cannot flow from a bitter fountain. Consider that one of the things the Lord hates is an individual that sows discord among the people. (Proverbs 6:19)

Clearly, Al Sharpton is by his own words a reprobate. One who is “unembarrassable” is someone who has a seared conscience. Such an individual cannot be convicted by the Holy Spirit. He cannot feel empathy, sympathy, compassion, or any of the necessary emotions that emanates from godliness. If he could, then he would be “embarrassable.” Further, an “unembarrassable” person does not have the slightest impetus to abstain from sin or the fleshly lusts that war against the soul.

Contrary to what Sharpton and like-minded individuals believe, “unembarrassable” is not a position of strength, It is not a good quality. Instead it is the ramifications of long-term disregard of Holy Spirit conviction. Eventually one conscience becomes seared or callused. The individual will systematically reject morals and become a god unto themselves.

Embarrassment is characteristic of a mind that is sensitive to the Holy Spirit. It is a necessary quality for godliness. It is the early warning signal that we have committed an improper deed, said something improper, or otherwise grieved the Holy Spirit.

God created everyone with the propensity to be embarrassed. In order to eliminate that trait, one has to reject every other component of godliness. Love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, must all be suppressed or completely rejected to become unembarrassable.

Philippians 3:18-20 depicts a reprobated individual. One distinction mentioned describes that they are “unembarrassable.” They glory in their shame. In other words, they embrace what would normally shame a godly person. They are not embarrassed by ungodliness, but regard it as a quality to be admired.

In 2 Timothy 3, the Apostle Paul describes the characteristics of a reprobated individual. They are; “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power.” It sounds like a character assessment of an “unembarrassable” person.

No true Christian should support the “unembarrassable” Al Sharpton. Anyone who supports him or gains benefit from his activity is a partaker of his sin. Further, supporters are susceptible to sharing the spirit that possesses Sharpton.

It was inevitable that we would enter a final period, that millions of professing Christians would be lured by diabolical people into an intense world-wide fog of deception. Following individuals such as the “unembarrassable” Al Sharpton will guarantee one a place in the great and final deception.