Come Down, Lord!

* The following was preached in 2016.  I have cleaned it up for readability, but otherwise you will find it as it was first preached. Coming back to Canada I had noticed a difference.  Christians here were not the same. There was a lethargy about them.  A kind of indifference to the things of God.  Some of the ugliness of sin was cleaned up, but they did not seem all that interested in God. For years this bothered me. I had been taught that all a person had to do was ask Jesus into their heart; and all these people were saying that they had done that, and yet something was missing.   And I wondered what it was. I will never forget the day I read about a massive study conducted in America which had found that statistically speaking evangelical Christians lived no differently than non-Christians.  No difference at all!  I felt sick to my stomach; and yet I wasn’t surprised.  This was exactly what I had been seeing and what had troubled me. ...

  * I have heard some say that I have changed .  They mean by that that I am not preaching and teaching what I used to, that my emphases have changed, my convictions have changed, my leadership has changed.  In fact, it hasn't .  Anyone can go back and listen to the sermons preached at Faith even 8 years ago, and they will find I was saying the same things then.  Actually, I used to grieve over the fact that people seemed to be hearing without hearing.  I suspect that with the onset of the pandemic and the legal implications of what I was teaching that suddenly congregants who weren't hearing began to hear.  And that is why they have become unhappy under the preaching, because they are hearing now with ears that hear!  And now it isn't just theoretical but profoundly practical. The following is a sermon preached in December of 2013.  I have not updated it except to highlight in bold portions particularly relevant now.       Rom...

  Dear brothers and sisters, I offer you this short word of exhortation to stir up most holy affections and thought in you, in us as I reflect out loud on the Scripture and our times. I pray it will be received in the spirit in which it has been written, from a brother among brothers, with love that is free from malice.    There is something burning on my heart I want to share with you, compelled by love for God and you all. When coronavirus (Covid-19) was officially declared a pandemic in March 2020 everything changed around the globe. We were gripped with fear and mandated to stay home, stay away (social distance), and stay safe and clean for the good of all. We never imagined our democratic government to invoke the war time act and override political and legal due process for a virus. Nevertheless, many Canadians embraced this in good faith believing it to be in the nation’s best interest. What was quite eerie though was the wholesale buy in of everyone from government...