At least prisoners get what's going on

Speaking at a Bible conference last month in Florida, Jordan reported being at a prison nearby where they had “a real bang up meeting.”

He said, “They let us have the chapel room that seats 229 and it was pretty much half full and they usually run around 40 people in the regular weekly class, but guys got out and invited other people.

“When we left, the warden said, ‘It was really quiet in there today.’ If you’ve ever been around prisoners, you know that when you get a group this big of prisoners they're talking among themselves. They don’t sit quietly often, and the fact that they sat attentively, listening, hopefully they were getting it. I talked for an hour and had a Q & A for an hour and they had really good questions.

“My next stop is in Sumter County at the Avon Park prison. There was a time when we would have said that the Grace Movement is growing faster in the prisons in Florida than anywhere in the country. Fortunately, that’s not true anymore. Not that it’s slowed down in the prisons, but it’s picked up around the world.

*****

“There’s a general consensus everywhere you go--there’s a real sense in people’s minds today that there’s something wrong with the church. I’ve always called it ‘kick ’em in the groin time’: ‘Gonna get ’em down and make it hurt.’

“That’s where most preachers are, especially those who are legalistic, denomination-oriented preachers who want to tell you what to do. They try to get you down and make you hurt, and if you hurt bad enough then you’ll do what they want you to do.

“But there’s come a point now in our culture in Western civilization where people are more and more conscious that there’s not just something wrong, there’s something wrong that no one honestly has an answer for. They’ve tried all the answers people have come up with and they haven’t worked and the problem’s just getting bigger, not better.

“Traditional mainline Christendom has become so divorced from reality, so apostate from the truth that Christianity is--they’ve become so unrelated to what life is really all about and to what the real world is--that they’re just passed over.

“When you watch Homer Simpson, his neighbor is an evangelical Christian, and what you’re seeing is the way the world looks at evangelicalism. It’s a satirical program that shows you how the world is looking at various issues.

“If you go out on the street today and you ask the average lost person about what does it mean to be an evangelical, their instant response is you’re a right-wing political nut and they identify you with social issues—abortion, gun control, Republicans, blah, blah, blah.

“Listen, the word ‘evangelical’ comes from the word ‘evangel,’ meaning the good news. Bible-believing people historically have been the people who preach the good news that Jesus Christ died for your sins, was buried and rose again and can give you eternal life if you trust Him.

“But the world doesn’t hear that because the evangelical church for the past 40 years hasn’t identified itself that way. They’ve identified themselves with political causes, where if you solved every single one of them you wouldn’t have solved the problems of the world. Do you know that?

“If you get somebody saved, you’ll solve the problems in their life. But you get them straightened out about all that other stuff and you won’t. I care about people’s never-dying immortal soul more than any of that other stuff. I really don’t care who gets your money, where you’re striving so to hang on to stuff you’re going to lose anyway and then you lose truth that’s going to last forever.”

(Editor’s note: I’ve been under the weather with various maladies for the last few days but getting better. Will post a new article tomorrow)