Acts20.com

this Sunday morning, what would be their reaction to your church? The worship? What would they preach and how well do you think their message would be received?Hmmmmm, makes you think

I’m not saying I agree with everything that the early leaders espoused, because I do not, but they would likely say “excuse me, can you tell me where the Holiness church is? The sign out front says ‘Church of God’ but they must be meeting someplace else”.They would probably run out of the building at the first screaming guitar solo.If they stuck around they would preach on salvation and sanctification.Their message would not be received at all. They would never be invited back, that is a fact.Other than these few things, they wouldn’t have much to say.Yes, I know....ouch “Hell will be filled with people that didn’t cuss, didn’t drink, and may even have been baptized. Why? Because none of those things makes someone a Christian.”

I think if they traveled into the future they would abhor our worldliness and rightly so. Of course they would be confronted with their own problems with separating conviction from culture. In a similar vein, many of us would be shocked if we traveled back in time to the first century. We would be shocked to learn there were church members who drank wine and owned slaves. The book of Acts and the early church is often touted as the ideal model for church. But a cursory reading of the NT will reveal that the early church had the same problems we do: Idolatry, drunkenness, fornication, covetousness, division, gossip, false teachers, church bullies.

But we shouldn't be if we studied our Bibles