CORRESPONDENCE WITH A PROMISE KEEPER ENTHUSIAST

CORRESPONDENCE WITH A PROMISE KEEPER ENTHUSIAST

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature's Fundamental Baptist News Service. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites without permission from the author. Any articles which are redistributed by e-mail must be left intact and nothing must be removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our primary purpose is to provide information to assist preachers in the protection of the churches in this apostate hour. If you desire to receive this type of material on a regular basis, e-mail us, tell us who you are and where you are located, and request to be placed on the list. Also include your postal address and the name of the church of which you are a member. Please note that we take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry. Some of these articles are from the "Digging in the Walls" section of O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 14th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr. The Way of Life web site is http://www.wayoflife.org. The End Times Apostasy Online Database is located at this web site.]

October 13, 1997 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - I have received a number of letters in recent days from Promise Keepers supporters who have been stirred up by the events in Washington D.C. The following is a sample:

E-MAIL FROM A PK SUPPORTER: "What is your problem, brother? Did you or did you not see what happened Saturday in DC? 1500 men from my home, Charleston, drove for 10 hours, arriving at the mall at 6:30 a.m., joining nearly 2,000,000 others to pray, humble themselves before God and seek His face, for their wives, their children, their friends, their enemies, their churches, their country and the lost. I am a music minister in a local church here, and 3 of my band members went. [Note from Bro. Cloud: We do not know where the figure 2,000,000 came from and we doubt its accuracy; neither Promise Keepers nor the Washington D.C. park authorities attempted to estimate the number of men who gathered for the PK rally. The Associated Press noted there were roughly 100,000 fewer riders on the Metro subway system during the Promise Keepers rally as compared with those who rode it during Louis Farrakhan's 'Million Man March' in October 1995. Farrakhan's crowd was estimated at four hundred thousand by the park service.] They got back to town at 6:30 am on Sunday and were at church at 8:30 to serve the Lord with their gifts and talents. There was a humility about them that I did not see before they left. They said that they had learned a great deal about being a servant and the importance of the covering of the local church. Never in the history of the world have that many Christian men converged at one time, in one place to pray. It was an unprecedented spiritual event with great spiritual significance. The opposition from NOW [National Organization for Women] and gay and lesbian organizations is a sign that it was a divine appointment. Why must good Christian men like you and Phil Arms use your platform and ministry to join the opposition? I don't understand."

REPLY FROM BRO. CLOUD: "Hello, --------. Glad to hear you benefited from the PK gathering. I believe many men have had some spiritual benefit from various Promise Keepers activities. I have never said there is no spiritual benefit or that no one is being saved. My wife was saved through the ministry of Billy Graham 32 years ago, and I praise the Lord for that; but it does not mean that I will ignore things he has done to confuse the Gospel in the minds of multitudes, things such as sending thousands of his converts back to Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant churches. I praise the Lord for every soul who has been genuinely born again through the preaching of the true Gospel, regardless of the errors connected with it. That does not mean that I ignore the error. To do so would be to disobey the Bible (1 Thess. 5:21; 1 Tim. 1:3; 2 Timothy 4:2-4; Jude 3) and would be to ignore the pattern set for us by the Apostles (Gal. 2:11-14).

"When I examine Promise Keepers, I do so not merely with its current activities in mind; I consider the ‘big picture,’ the long-range influence of Promise Keepers; and I believe, in the final analysis, because of its goal of breaking down denominational walls and its radical inclusiveness, it will be one of the most effective instruments in the building a false one-world ‘church.’ You say you don't understand how we can be opposed to PK. That is a strange statement. There are 80 articles at my web site containing at least 350 pages documenting our concerns about Promise Keepers. By separate e-mail I am sending one that I hope you will pay attention to in particular. It is titled 'The Roman Catholic-Promise Keepers Connection.' You also referred to Phil Arms' book Promise Keepers Another Trojan Horse (1997, Shiloh Publishers, P.O. Box 770, Alief, TX 77411; 800 829-9673). Arms, pastor of Houston Church in Houston, Texas, spent 15 years as a Southern Baptist evangelist conducting city and area-wide crusades and speaking to hundreds of thousands of students on high school and college campuses. He has a daily radio and weekly television ministry. He presents 414 pages of information to document his concerns about Promise Keepers. In the face of this extensive documentation, how can you possibly say you don't understand why men are opposed to Promise Keepers? It can only be that you have not read the material or that you have read it indifferently with a preconceived mindset or that you do not have the spiritual discernment to understand what is being said (Heb. 5:12-14). It has been said, and rightly so, that no man is more blind than he who WILL not see. I trust this does not apply to you.

"You say, ‘The opposition from NOW [National Organization for Women] and gay and lesbian organizations is a sign that it was a divine appointment.’ That is not sound reasoning. Feminist and homosexual organizations are opposed to hundreds of things which are not divinely appointed. The National Organization for Women is opposed to Rush Limbaugh. He does not claim to be a born again Christian and he makes a mockery of many biblical things by his cursing and ribaldry, yet, by your reasoning, his radio talk show is by divine appointment. The National Organization for Women has also opposed the U.S. National Catholic Bishops Conference and the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon). By your reasoning, those organizations must therefore be divinely appointed. The standard by which we can discern if something is divinely appointed is not how some radical feminist group views it, but what the Bible says about it."