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SBC CONGREGATION ASKS GOD TO BLESS HOMOSEXUAL UNIONS

[Distributed by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Copyright 1998. These articles cannot be stored on BBS or Internet sites and cannot be sold or placed by themselves or with other material in any electronic format for sale, but may be distributed for free by e-mail or by print. They must be left intact and nothing removed or changed, including these informational headers. This is a listing for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Our goal is not devotional but 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, give us your name, address, and the name of the church you are a member of, and request to be placed on the list. Please note that this is not a free service. We take up a quarterly offering to fund this ministry, and each subscriber is expected to participate. To unsubscribe or to submit a change of address, send your name and the request to fbns@wayoflife.org. This is not an automated list. Changes in the database often require two to four days to activate. Some of these articles are from O Timothy magazine. David W. Cloud, Editor. O Timothy is a monthly magazine in its 15th year of publication. Subscription is $20/yr.  Way of Life publishes many helpful books. The catalog is located at the web site -- http://www.wayoflife.org/. The End Times Apostasy Online Database is also located at this site.]

November 18, 1998 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - On November 15, 1998, the Wake Forest Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, voted to petition God to bless "all loving, committed, and exclusive relationships between two people." The statement represented a compromise between those in the congregation who desire to approve of same-sex ceremonies and those who are opposed to the same. The church's pastors, Richard Groves and female preacher Lynn Rhoades, told the press they believe the statement gives them the right to officiate at homosexual "ceremonies."

The church meets in the chapel at Wake Forest University, which is supported by funds from the Southern Baptist Convention-affiliated Baptist Convention of North Carolina.

I was in North Carolina when this story broke in the national news, so I drove to the university campus and visited the church on Wednesday afternoon, November 18, and talked with the church secretary. She told me that she does not believe the Bible forbids homosexual activity and there are members of the church who are openly practicing homosexuals. In fact, some of the deacons are homosexual. I asked her if they were repentant of their homosexuality, and she said no. She was not aware that Romans chapter 1 says same-sex relations are an abomination before God and are the product of a reprobate mind.

People in apostate churches and denominations often attempt to hide behind ecclesiastical politics. The members of a New Testament church are responsible to obey the Bible, which is the sole authority for faith and practice. The Bible plainly forbids homosexual activity, and the churches must therefore plainly forbid it. Any homosexual can be saved by the grace of God through trusting the shed blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse him from his sin, but he must acknowledge his actions as sinful and must repent of them. I told the secretary of Wake Forest Baptist Church that I used to be a thief and many other shameful things, but when I got saved I repented of those sins and I am no longer a thief, etc. That is what must happen with a homosexual who wants to be right with God. The Apostle Paul reminded the Corinthian church that some of them USED TO BE adulterers and homosexuals. "And such WERE some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God" (1 Cor. 6:10).

The members of Wake Forest Baptist Church are attempting to escape their responsibility to oppose sin by passing an obscurely worded statement which allows for contradictory interpretations. Those members who do not support homosexual unions can salve their conscience that the statement does not approve of these outright, while those members who do support homosexual unions find encouragement in the same statement. This is ecclesiastical politics, and it stinks to high heaven. The root problem with America is its cowardly preachers who allow such things to go on and who do not lift their voices plainly against sin and heresy.

The statement which was approved on November 15 by a vote of 90-33 says: "... though we cannot, as a church, bless any relationship, we do with joy petition God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, that He bless, insofar as it conforms to His will, any and all loving, committed, and exclusive relationships between two people."

This is an impossibly contradictory statement. In the Scriptures God has plainly made known His will in regard to sexuality. The only sexual relationship that God blesses is one man and one woman covenanted together in holy matrimony. Therefore it is impossible to pray for God to bless "any and all loving, committed, and exclusive relationships between two people."

"And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder" (Jesus Christ, Matthew 19:4-6).

The president of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina told the press that the statement MIGHT result in the church's expulsion from the convention. Perhaps this will occur, but why has the convention not cut its ties with this church long ago, since it has unrepentant homosexuals as members and deacons and since its pastors are modernists who deny the infallibility of the Bible? Wake Forest Baptist Church's pastor Richard Groves, in a sermon preached November 15, said the prophet Isaiah DID NOT write Isaiah 65. He said:

"OK, I know his name wasn't Isaiah. He was an unknown contemporary of Haggai, whose work we considered last week, a prophet who was called to speak a word from God to the people after they returned from their fifty year exile in Babylon. And it was his misfortune to get a real sloppy editor who somehow tacked his book on to the end of another book, one that we associate with the great prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, who lived a couple of centuries earlier. The result is that the author who wrote some of the most important passages in the Hebrew Bible, so far as a Christian understanding of Jesus is concerned (the suffering servant image, for example), is now completely unknown to us" (Richard Groves, "Living Toward the Future: Isaiah 65:17-25," Wake Forest Baptist Church, Nov. 15, 1998).

This pastor doubtless learned this heresy at Southern Baptist theological institutions. The book of Isaiah itself professes to be the product of the historical prophet Isaiah. If Isaiah did not write the book, it is a deception and the Jews who promoted it as the writing of Isaiah were deceivers. Further, to claim that the prophet Isaiah did not write the book of Isaiah is to make Jesus Christ and the Apostles into liars. Jesus often quoted from the book and said it was written by Isaiah--not by some unknown group of men (Jn. 12:38-41). In Jn. 12:38-41 Christ quoted from both major sections of the book and said both were written by the same Isaiah. Every time Christ and the Apostles quoted from Isaiah, they did so with the understanding that the book was written by the historical prophet (Mt. 3:3; 4:14; 8:17; 12:17; 13:14; 15:7; Mk. 7:6; Lk. 3:4; 4:17; Jn. 1:23; 12:38,39,41; Acts 8:28,30; 28:25; Rom. 9:27,29; 10:16,20; 15:12). This completely destroys the modernistic idea that Isaiah was the product of more than one writer. The choice is obvious: Will we believe the Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles, or will we believe the modern critic?

The "god" of the modernist is so puny that he cannot keep men from corrupting the Scriptures. Their "god" stands by helplessly as "sloppy editors" hack together portions of the Bible. The Bible believer's God is not so impotent. Not only did He give us His infallible Word in the Scriptures so that every word of the Bible is the word of God, but He preserved that Word through the centuries so that we have it today.

The pastor of Wake Forest Baptist Church also said that Isaiah's prophecy was merely a dream after the fashion of those dreamed by the United Nations.

"It's a dream, you say. The world isn't like that, never has been like that, and never will be like that. Of course, it's a dream. Isaiah dreamed as inspired people in every age dream. In her poem 'A Brave and Startling Truth,' which she read on the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations, Maya Angelou also dreamed of a future. ... Of course, it's a dream, but we are shaped by our dreams of the future, and we shape the future according to the way we dream it will be" (Richard Groves, ibid.).

This Southern Baptist pastor thinks the Bible is inspired merely like the dreams of pagan United Nations world planners. What wickedness.

The sad fact is that there are hundreds of congregations affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention which are filled with theological modernism and immorality, and those who say that the Southern Baptist Convention is becoming more fundamentalist, more committed to the Bible, are either lying or are very ignorant. At very best, the conservative leaders of the SBC are compromising New Evangelicals. They say they care about the truth, but they refuse to separate from those who are destroying the truth. Sadly, large numbers of independent Baptist pastors are in the same camp. They are tolerant of sin and error, more concerned about how to increase their numbers than how to be faithful to God, build worldly music programs to entice worldly crowds, promote easy-believism rather than the supernatural new birth, and avoid controversial topics even if their people could benefit spiritually from such topics.

See "When Was the Southern Baptist Convention Delivered from Liberalism?"