Pastor Joel Osteen on Homosexuality and Sin

January 25th, 2011

Here is a teaser for an upcoming interview for Wednesday 26 January 2011 that appeared on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight blog today.

Piers Morgan sits down with author and pastor Joel Osteen, and his wife Victoria Osteen.

What is interesting, is Osteen has apparently ben coaxed by Piers to call homosexuality a sin. Something Osteen has been reluctant to outright declare.

Joel Osteen, once again provided a national stage, seems to have missed a golden opportunity! I say seem, only because in TV anything can be edited… but consider the following exchange between Morgan and Osteen on the topic of homosexuality:

MORGAN: Say a friend of mine like Elton John watching this at home, who with his partner – a civil partner, David Furnish – have just had a surrogate child which was born on Christmas day. They’re going to be pretty angry what they hear. They’re going to think who are you to call them a sinner.

J. OSTEEN: Yes.

MORGAN: But why are they sinners in your eyes?

J. OSTEEN: Well, it’s strictly back to what the scripture says. I mean, I can’t grab one part and say God wants you to be blessed and live an abundant life, and not grab the other part that says, you know what? You know, live that kind of life. So it comes back to the scripture. I’m not the judge. You know, God didn’t tell me to go around judging everybody.

Osteen chose to be backed into a corner by a question from Morgan. A simple grasp of doctrine and theology would have prompted me to immediately say this back to Morgan.

ME: Piers, I believe that Elton John is a sinner. And yes, I believe his partner is a sinner, too. In fact, I KNOW it! It is not judgment or condemnation but fact.

I also know something else… I know that you, Piers, are a sinner! I know that I, too, am a sinner! The bible declares so in Romans 3:23. In Romans 3:10 it says, there is none righteous.

Homosexuality is a sin, yes. So is lying, stealing, lusting… heck even going shopping is really coveting. Yep, you got it, coveting is a sin.

But… given this predicament, What do we, as sinners, do?

That is where the good news enters. Romans 5:8-9 declares that Christ died for us and that through Him we are saved from God’s wrath. We must repent.

John 3:16-18 makes it very clear. I don’t judge you, nor do I condemn you or any other person. Your own sin does that. WE must believe on Who He is, and what He did and move from condemnation to salvation.

And John 3:36 tells us He that has the Son has life, and he who does not, the wrath of God abides on him.

Come on Pastor Joel… study to show yourself approved. (2 Timothy 2:15)

And Piers… Is not calling Joel a judge then putting you in the same supposed predicament you would like to hang on Joel?

I mean really… How can you JUDGE HIM?

One word to describe the Piers’ dudgeon! Hypocrisy! Yeah, I judged!

I have a hang up…

January 8th, 2011

Some of my friends wonder why I am so hung up on the creative work of God, rather than talking about grace and the fact that He saved us from our sins.

The fact is God reveals himself a little bite at a time. If you cannot get past the fact that this universe was created by God, you could not care less that he died for your sin. If God did not create this universe, if in fact their is no God required to explain why we exist, why should you believe that you have any sin that would offend a righteous God that does not exist in the first place.

Our entire culture is inundated with propaganda aimed at convincing people that evolution is a proven scientific fact. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The evidence that the universe was designed is overwhelming. The media loves to ridicule people of faith. They call it “blind faith”, all the while conforming to the consensus view that there is nothing besides the natural universe. Science used to be a search for a true view of how things work.

Today, the scientific view is focused on finding a completely naturalistic explanation for everything. People in the scientific community are shunned or even fired if they do not toe the line of naturalism. Every now and then someone says something like “it almost appears to have been designed…” but then they start with the fancy footwork and back away form that statement. If the founder of Scientific American was alive today and writing, his own magazine would not publish his work. Because he believed in a creator.

Scientists have a for years clung to the “fact” that the speed of light was a constant. Twenty years ago Barry Setterfield and Trevor Norman tried to publish research that showed that the speed is light is slowing down. They were almost published but the publisher found out they believed in a creator and pulled the paper. For years they tried to get their views published and examined by their peers. Nada. Zip.

Curiously, twenty years after they tried to publish, scientists that are not tainted with the odious smell of “blind faith” are publishing papers saying the speed of light is slowing. Do any of these scientists have the class to give Setterfield and Norman any citations for earlier work? Nada. Zip.

I could go into a discussion about how other “constants”, like the fine structure constant, alpha, has been suspected of changing. How String theory says that the universe is actually composed of ten or more dimensions, only four of which we can actually sense and measure.  How length, time, energy, everything, come in packages of  a minimum size. How if something is smaller than that size it loses “locality” and becomes everywhere at once. Read “Inconstant Constants” (Scientific American, June 2005) for your self. They conclude that this universe is just a “shadow of a much larger reality”.  Really? The bible has been saying that all along.

Bishop Paley, around 100 years ago, had an argument that anyone could look at his watch and know that it was designed, could not designed that the hand that carried the watch was much more complex and had to be designed as well. His detractors replied that this argument only applied if living organisms were in fact machines. 100 years of microbiology and other research have shown that in fact living cells are machines composed of millions of intricately arranged atoms. Bishop Paley wins, evolution loses.

Don’t take my word for it. Don’t take your teacher’s word for it either. Investigate for yourself. Find out how bankrupt the religion of evolution is for yourself. Then taste God and see how delightful he is. If you can get past the first hurdle of truth, God will give you some more truth.

Question from a friend

December 4th, 2010

A friend asked me what I thought of this statement:

Would you agree with this? I believe there are three “baptisms.” One, baptism of the soul into the body of Christ which happens at salvation; second, being physical in the flesh, by water after salvation; and the third (this one I hate using the word baptism for, some call it baptism of the Spirit) when the Spirit breathes into your spirit for works.

Let us look at baptism first of all. Originally, the word baptism had nothing to do with water or God. If you had some cloth that you wanted to be another color, you took it to the local baptist who would dye it for you, changing the identity of the cloth. Eventually baptism came to be a statement of identity with a certain creed or movement. This is why Jesus was baptized at the start of his ministry. Not to show his repentance from sin, but to identify with the repentant souls that were trying to follow God and get closer to him.

At the beginning of your salvation, when you ask Jesus to forgive your sins and be your lord, Jesus does indeed baptize you into the Church, the ecclesia, the body of Christ, the called out ones. Your identity is changed as he writes your name in the Lamb’s Book of Life. At the same time, as a pledge or seal, the Holy Spirit indwells you, just as it did Jesus, to empower you to walk like Jesus. This justification, this beginning of your salvation, is truly a baptism.

Your justification (first baptism) is usually followed in short order by a physical baptism. This is a public statement of identification with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, what my friend calls the second baptism. See Acts 8:26 – 40 “See, [here is] water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?”

The third baptism he calls “when the Spirit breathes into your spirit for works.” Before someone shouts “Legalism!”, the works he refers to are like the works that James refers to in his letter, the same type of works that the writer of Hebrews referred to in Hebrews 11. These are works that occurred as the Spirit moved believers, as a demonstration of their faith.

This “third baptism” is a process called sanctification, the present tense expression of salvation. Make no mistake: Jesus has fully justified you before the father. Nothing you can do can help or improve that. This baptism occurs as you move out of the way and let the floodlight of the Holy Spirit shine out of your heart. You could say the third baptism is where Jesus identifies himself with you, in that you become a conduit he can flow through to bless the world.

This sanctification is a choice to die to yourself. Jesus said “If any [man] will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” Matt 16:24 . In John 12:24 Jesus said “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Paul said “I die daily” in 1 Cor 15:31 If these three statements do not qualify as baptism, nothing does.

It is through dying to self that we allow Jesus to shine out from us and do the works which we were ordained to do from before the creation. If we try to do these works by our own power they will get messed up. Jesus has to do them through us if they are to count toward our rewards.

The big question is how do we allow this baptism to occur? We can see this in the life of Jesus. He had two things in his life that we do not have as much as we need. He had an immense knowledge of the word of God, the bible. He always referred to scripture, he thought in scripture. We can have this if we follow the command he gave through Paul in Romans 12:2 “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what [is] that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Again he said in Eph 5:26 “That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word”

Bathe yourself in scripture. Download the bible as mp3′s and just play it all the time. Get music that sets scripture to music, especially the Psalms. Get expositional bible studies on your mp3 player and just stuff them in your ears before bed. That way when you wake up in the middle of the night you have something to do as you fall back to sleep. I do this every night; you cannot imagine the dreams that come from this. If you want to grow a lot in a short time, let the Word of God wash the world out of your brain.

The other thing Jesus had in his life that we could have just like him is a dedication to prayer to and worship of the Father. Just think about it: Jesus was fully God, yet he was always getting up early to pray, staying up late to pray. If Jesus needed to “pray without ceasing”, how much more do we need to spend time praying? God is delighted when we talk to him, think about him, meditate on his word and pray it back to him. We were created for his pleasure, so please him by turning off the TV and spending time with him.

As we bathe in the third baptism we become more conformed to Jesus’ image, get further from the power of sin, walk in more wonderful works, shine forth Jesus for the whole world to see, become more pleasing to him, get more ready for the time when he comes back for us so he can finish history and return to reign on the earth for 1000 years. Are you ready for his return? Are you identified with Jesus, baptized with him?

Surrender All

November 14th, 2010

Is there any hope for this generation?

September 12th, 2010

As I observe the people of this generation, I truly wonder if there is any hope for them. After spending twelve years in our government schools, the graduates have been taught self esteem, an expectation of entitlement, relative values and pornographic sexuality. This is all to be expected because the main thing taught by this culture is that they evolved by random chance from miscellaneous chemicals dissolved in sea water. At the same time they are encouraged to believe in either no god whatsoever or a pan-theistic earth goddess paganism.

This is a tragedy. The result of this “education” is a generation of people that do not understand that there is absolute truth. Even though it is so easy to see that this universe was designed for life (the anthropic principle), that there have been catastrophes that reshaped the earth (the fall, the flood), they still have chosen to believe the lie that God does not exist. They are sinners that need to be redeemed, eternal souls that are choosing to spend eternity outside of the presence of God.

The biggest part of the lie is the government and media relentlessly denying one sentence: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Gen. 1:1) Every chance they get, in every documentary or news story, they casually mention that evolution is a proven scientific fact. If you cannot get past the first sentence of the message God sent, you have no reason to believe that he has the authority to set up and enforce rules. If you do not have to believe in a creator you definitely have no need to believe in the need for a redeemer.

Part two is this: if you make it past the lie of evolution your total lack of training in critical thinking, logic, mathematics, history or anything else that used to make up education makes it possible for you to be a Bart Simpson like under achiever with little or no effort on your part. If you manage to find out that you are a sinner you then have about a 90% chance of ending up in a church that does not tell you about how to be redeemed, does not teach you basic biblical doctrines that will cause you to grow closer to God. Instead you will probably be entertained with  great music, fantastic broadway quality productions, highly organized programs that  help you do good things for society or the environment, anything but the blood of Jesus.

Fortunately, anything is possible for God. God does not desire for anyone to go to hell. He can talk directly to your spirit, get the truth to you. All you have to do is receive that truth and act on it. The deck is stacked against you, but keep an open mind.

9-11 Do you remember?

September 10th, 2010

 

Take a few minutes to watch the video. Remind yourself of that day. Remember those who were murdered. Remember those heroes who risked their lives to save others.

Remember where you were. What you were doing. Remember the feelings you felt. Mourn… use the whole day.

But on the next day, resolve to never let it happen again. Resolve to not remain complacent. Remember, there is a God in heaven and He knows your name.

He also knows the condition of your heart. In fact He knew that BEFORE He created everything. There is nothing that shocks Him.

And then may I ask… are you saved?

If you died tonight, do you KNOW if you would go to heaven?

Perhaps today would be that day! You can know!

Justified by the Precious Blood

August 30th, 2010

 

Oh, the precious blood
that flowed from Mercy’s side,
Washed away my sin,
When Christ my Savior died.

Oh the precious blood
of Christ the crucified,
speaks for me before your throne
where I stand justified.

It is interesting how we spend much time justifying sin. We like to think the little white lies we tell are okay because they are justifiable. We also may believe it okay to steal food when we are starving.

We know that lying and stealing are wrong. However, we want to be justified. If then we long for this justification, how is it obtained?

Do we bring out a scale and weigh the perceived good and bad, and then make a decision?

If so, and we proceed with “justified” sin, is it still not sin?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that we all have to work for justification. However, we know that we need it. Romans 3:20 tells us that if we try to be good enough to always do the right thing, it will not be good enough!

As the lyric in the song above… if we have put our faith in Jesus, we ALREADY are justified! It is by Jesus’ blood alone. It testifies to God the Father as we stand before His throne.

Hey, don’t believe me! Read it here in Romans 5:9.

We cannot justify ourselves, yet it is there readily available for all! Abundant enough that all can, in Christ, stand before the throne of a holy God! (Romans 4:5)

Oh, it is precious blood indeed!

You Thought I was One Like Yourself

August 25th, 2010

Psalm 50:16-21 “But to the wicked God says: “What right have you to recite my statutes or take my covenant on your lips? For you hate discipline, and you cast my words behind you. If you see a thief, you are pleased with him, land you keep company with adulterers. “You give your mouth free rein for evil, and your tongue frames deceit. You sit and speak against your brother; you slander your own mother’s son. These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.”

How careful are we in our perception of Who God is?

Do we make Him out to be like us, or do we conform ourselves to Who He is?

These are interesting questions. To some extent, we are all guilty of the charges in these verses. What I find haunting and curious is the penultimate sentence. God’s longsuffering is extended to those who do not repent.

Yet, He is not like us. He is holy, and as such He requires us to be holy and sinless. He knows that we cannot, however, the charge is still laid at our feet, and we must bear the consequences.

Unless, in His love for us, He has provided a way in which we can stand before Him blameless!

It is Jesus, His Son Who bore the consequences some 2,000 years ago. He was put to death, and rose again the third day in triumph over death. Those that put their faith in Him, like putting on a parachute… have His righteousness and holiness imputed to them, making them acceptable to stand before a Holy God.

Romans 3:23-25 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.”

Stephen Hawking: Abandon the Earth

August 9th, 2010

Stephen Hawking in Abandon the Earth says…

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years,”

Yessirree… I will almost say it will be darn near impossible! We can both agree this, however, the particulars of the cause and solution are very different.

My outlook is taken from yet future events as they are recorded in the books of Daniel and the book of the Revelation. In these, is written a detailed description of coming events in a future time of great tribulation on Earth. It was also spoken of by Jesus, at length, in Matthew 13. It will be terrible to behold, let alone live through.

The escape, though, will not be on space ships… it will be a call by Jesus Himself!

You want to make sure you can hear the escape call? Check out this from Wretched Radio.

The Danger of Sincrety

July 3rd, 2010

Today, many are given to this air of reconciliation. Political apologists would have you believe it is centrism or really, being moderate or better, progressive, somewhere between the political extremes of liberalism and conservatism. The real essence of the problem, is that capitalism without morality tends to the anarchy of lust and greed. This is dangerous enough, having liberty requires exercising self-discipline and responsibility. They call it the Third Way. The Third Way is sincrety, simply stated, trying to unite two irreconcilable things. These irreconcilable things are not what they would have you believe, let me explain.

As a society we are encourage to forget God. In so doing we have driven morality out of our schools, our homes, our entertainment and even our government. In return, there is a lack of self-control (Galatians 5:22-23) and personal responsibility, lawlessness grows. Consequently, this requires more of an external control and temperance, usually in the form of government.

This governmental control attempts to dictate morality and communal behavioral standards that apply to institutions and individuals alike. As personal self-control wanes, the reigns of government control must become tighter. This is the tipping the other end of the scale, and the centralized, command-and-control tyrannies of socialism, communism and Marxism. This type of government become dangerous because morality is rooted in the heart of the individual by God and is exercised in relationship to and knowledge of God. When the individual forgets God, and his responsibility to God, and the government then has to dictate morality, it becomes the arbiter of morality, deciding what is right and what is wrong. This is extremely dangerous.

The genius of our founding fathers, was finding a middle ground between these two extemes of anarchy and tyranny. One where the morality of the individual was recognized as God given. And with that personal morality, came sovereignty. This sovereignty required liberty, such that came from God and the government could not take away! They established a ance of power in governmental structure and prohibited the government from infringement on individual rights. This form of government recognized that sovereignty is bestowed upon the individual and not the government!

In the history of the world, this had not been done. As most governments place sovereignty in a person or particular group of rulers, not so in the United States.

The Third Way is not some reconciliation between partisan political extremes, but it is a way to reconcile these two forms of sovereignty. One that requires the individual to cede his control to that of another, transferring sovereignty to the government. Eventually, the government will be the arbiter of freedom, providing the individual with choices. This is just another version of the lie… the one Satan told in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3:1-7. In essence, he took the freedom Eve had to eat of every tree of the garden, and gave her choices; she could remain as she was, or she could be like God.

Look around, we see it everywhere… corporations are bad, yet they pay our wages. Government is good, yet it dips its hand in your pocket to steal your sweat. Becoming a parasite on government largess is good, working hard to provide for your family is not.

Marriage is seen as a restrictive covenant, not as to only benefit the furtherance of a society through procreation. But its very essence must be bended and twisted to satisfy individual whims of indulgence, relegating the ability of marriage as the primary vehicle to sustain society to obscurity. Eventually, that very society shall end up on the refuse heap of history. (That can be the only logical conclusion!)

This sincrety can be non-sensical , as in the claim that carbon-dioxide is a pollutant, when it is necessary for plants to grow and thrive.

Oftentimes it is subtle, as when we are told pregnancy is not always a human carrying another individual human being. Instead we are asked to believe it is really a lump of tissue, or worse, a parasite! We know, without the benefit of science it is another INDIVIDUAL human being.

The problem with sincrety, is the same as Paul asked in 1 Corinthians 5:6 “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?”

Think about it, we let a little error cloud our thought processes, will the preponderance of right thinking win out, or will that little bit of error, pollute all of our thinking?

The battle for control of the church has begun… the weapon of choice is SINCRETY! It is even predicted by John in Revelation 3:15-16, Jesus is speaking and says of the church of Laodicea “‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

Is this not a warning from the Savior Himself to be very wary about coupling irreconcilable things?

Why do we accept Yoga in the Christian church?

Yoga at best is against Christianity. It is a system of works based on merging with God. Though some of the language sounds the same, it is a system of works. The poses in Yoga are meant to teach the body how to die! Just peering at the five basic truths of Yoga is enough to make me run!

Why do we accept the peace sign in the Christian Church?

Take the time to find out why. It is not simply a symbol to bring about peace, but is being used to sincretize all of society. It has many different stories of its creation. However, some every citation couples some nefarious meaning to it. One cites its creation to a group with communist and Marxist sympathies. Regardless, it is a symbol of rebellion… and we attempt to reconcile it with our Christianity. That is precisely what it was used for in the 1960s, to rebel against the church and society Curiously, it is accepted and adored by many Christians today!

Why do we celebrate movies like Harry Potter and New Moon in the Christian Church?

They are really good moral stories, but that evil stuff is thrown in just for fun. Come on, incantations and vampires, are not true, yes, but some are carried away unawares. I mean seriously, we are to take character lessons from Edward (a vampire) and proclaim his testimony?

Is Jesus Christ not good enough?

And most dangerous of all, why do we accept the emergent church movement in the Christian Church?

With its focus on the here and now, social justice and sustainability… this is the near end-game of seduction. As Christians, we are encouraged to pray for God’s kingdom to come… it will be a Earthly kingdom, yes. However, it is not our home, or even our hope. Our hope is eternal, as it is written in Revelation 22:14 “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates.”

There is a war being waged… it is spiritual. It is being waged for individual hearts! It is both overt and subtle, through using subterfuge and Hegelian dialectic it reaches deep into the church snaring elders and pastors. The powers-that-be may just be useful pawns, however they serve the father of lies. He is hard at work, knowing as we, that his time is fleeting. These leaders are moving us to the place we are warned to stay away from… medicority. Jesus Himself warned us of His reaction to mediocrity in Revelation 3:16… “I will spit you out of my mouth.”

I would even point to a hint of this prediction in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, recorded in the Daniel 2:31-45. The image Nebuchadnezzar saw in his sleep was impressive… and it is easily explained by Daniel with revelation from God.

The image is sort of “timeline” of world empires, with the gold head representing the Babylonian empire. Each empire deteriorates, as is evident in its movement from the more prominent position of the head on the body and composition of better materials. As each succesive empire appears, it occupies a less prominent place in the body and the material is of slightly inferior value and density. We find ourselves somewhere close to the feet and toes of the statue… the toes being the final empire. Here is where it is stated in Daniel 2:41-43 as follows:

And as you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom, but some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle. As you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay.

Here you see sincrety described in the form of iron mixing with clay… but they do not hold together, because iron does not mix with clay.

Christian be wary of everything you are taught… even from your own church leaders. As is written in 1 John 4:1-6:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

Christian… you can be taught another Jesus. The enemy is working out the last pieces of his dominion. This is his lie, dominion theology taught by the emergent church, to realize Utopia in the here and now. He is using the language of the Christian to lure away captives unaware. Words like justice, hope, kingdom, conversion and salvation arer being used to connect concepts that are biblical with a concepts that are extra-biblical and prideful.

The emergent church is calling for “conversions that can change lives, neighborhoods and this world,” that is meant for the community. It is a gospel of communitariansim (better communism,) and relativism. It is not the true Gospel of the shocking individual recognition of personal sin that leads to responsibility, repentance and service to a holy and loving God through salvation in Jesus Christ.

So let’s be clear: sincretism… in other words is oxy-moronic!