Friday Church News Notes
Volume 19, Issue 3 - January 19, 2018
Graphical Edition
The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, though this does not imply an endorsement.
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William D. McKissic, Sr.

SOUTHERN BAPTIST PASTOR WINS AZUSA AWARD (Friday Church News Notes, January 19, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Southern Baptist pastor William Dwight McKissic, Sr., has been awarded the annual William Seymour Award for 2018. The award is named for the pastor of the so-called Azusa Street Revival of 1906 that is typically credited as the birth of Pentecostalism. The award is to be presented in April at the Azusafest celebration that will feature “a prophetic conference” with “Apostles” Ron and Tyda Harvey. If McKissic actually accepts this award, it will demonstrate either grave ignorance or apostasy. Azusa was a heretical, nutty stew! The services were characterized by confusion, contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture: dancing, jumping, falling, trances, spirit slaying, gibberish “tongues,” jerking, shaking, hysteria, animal noises, “holy laughter,” “spiritual muteness,” etc. The seekers would be “seized with a strange spell and commence a gibberish of sounds.” “At times men would fall all over the house, like an army slain on the battle field...” (Larry Martin, The Life and Ministry of William J. Seymour, p. 179). There was no order of service, and usually no one was leading. People sang out at the same time but “with completely different syllables, rhythms, and melodies” (Ted Olsen, “American Pentecost,” Christian History, Issue 58, 1998). “Whoever was anointed with the message would stand and deliver it. It might be a man, woman, or child” (Martin, p. 186). At times the meetings would become so rowdy that the police were called. One man shook so violently under Seymour’s ministry that an ambulance was called. When the man who was shaking told the doctor, “Don’t touch me, this is the power of God,” the doctor wisely replied, “If that is the power of God it is giving you a devil of a shaking” (Martin, p. 306). Seymour claimed that physical healing is guaranteed in Christ’s atonement and taught the people to cry out to God and demand “the baptism of the Holy Ghost and divine healing” (Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, p. 99). But Seymour died at age fifty-two, and before his death he was described as “worn, tired, and decrepit” (John Matthews, Speaking in Tongues, 1925, p. 14). That doesn’t sound like divine healing to me! In truth, the poor man’s life and death reflected the same unscriptural confusion that reigned in his services. No wonder G. Campbell Morgan called Azusa Street “the last vomit of Satan.” (For more about the history and doctrine of Pentecostalism, see The Pentecostal-Charismatic Movements, available from Way of Life Literature, www.wayoflife.org.)

MUSLIM SCHOLAR QUOTES THE QURAN SAYING THAT GOD GAVE THE LAND TO ISRAEL (Friday Church News Notes, January 19, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “The Quran Says That Allah Gave the Land of Israel to the Jews,” Shaykh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, templemount.org. Palazzi is the secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly and the Khalifah of the Qadiri Sufi Order in Europe. “The Qur'an recognizes the Land of Israel as the heritage of the Jews and it explains that, before the Last Judgment, Jews will return to dwell there. This prophecy has already been fulfilled. ... Viewing the Jewish return to Israel as a Western invasion and Zionists as recent colonizers is new. It has no basis in authentic Islamic faith. ... Such a false transformation of Islam was in fact made by the late Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini. He is the one person most responsible, both morally and materially, for the repeated Arab defeats in their conflict with the Jews in Israel. Husseni not only incited Arabs against Jews. He also encouraged the torture and murder of all Arabs who correctly understood that Arab cooperation with Jews was a precious opportunity for the development of the Land of Israel. Husseini ended his woeful life by putting his perverted religious teachings at the service of the evil and pagan Nazis. ... After Husseini came Jamal al-Din 'Abd al-Nasser. Nasser based his policy on Pan-Arabism, hatred and contempt for Jews, and an alliance with the atheistic Soviet Union. Nasser’s terrible choices were critical factors in maintaining Arab backwardness. ... Both the Jewish and Islamic Scriptures teach that God, through His chosen servant Moses, decided to free the offspring of Jacob from slavery in Egypt and to constitute them as heirs of the Promised Land. ... The Qur’an relates the words by which Moses ordered the Israelites to conquer the Land: ‘And [remember] when Moses said to his people: O my people, call in remembrance the favour of God unto you, when he produced prophets among you, made you kings, and gave to you what He had not given to any other among the peoples. O my people, enter the Holy Land which God has assigned unto you, and turn not back ignominiously, for then will ye be overthrown, to your own ruin.’ [Qur’an 5:20-21] Moreover--and those who try to use Islam as a weapon against Israel always conveniently ignore this point--the Holy Qur’an explicitly refers to the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel before the Last Judgment, where it says: ‘And thereafter We [Allah] said to the Children of Israel: Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.’ [Qur’an 17:104] Therefore, from an Islamic point of view, there is NO fundamental reason which prohibits Muslims from recognizing Israel as a friendly State.”

C.H. SPURGEON AND 1 TIMOTHY 2:4 (Friday Church News Notes, January 19, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Ti. 2:4). C.H. Spurgeon called himself a Calvinist, and we have no doubt that he was, but he was his own kind of Calvinist. He was disliked by the stronger Calvinists of his day because he called on all men to be saved. (See the book Spurgeon vs. the Hyper-Calvinism by Iain Murray.) Spurgeon interpreted 1 Timothy 2:4 literally and didn’t try to explain it by Calvinist theology. He preached, “Shall we try to put another meaning into the text than that which it fairly bears? I say not. You must, most of you, be acquainted with the general method in which our older Calvinistic friends deal with this text. ‘All men,’ say they, ‘that is, some men’; ‘All men,’ say they, ‘that is, some of all sorts of men.’ The Holy Ghost by the apostle has written ‘all men,’ and unquestionably he means all men. ... I was reading just now the exposition of a very able doctor who explains the text so as to explain it away; he applies grammatical gunpowder to it, and explodes it by way of expounding it. ... My love of consistency with my own doctrinal views is not great enough to allow me knowingly to alter a single text of Scripture. I would sooner a hundred times over appear to be inconsistent with myself than be inconsistent with the word of God. ... God forbid that I should cut or shape, even in the least degree, any divine expression. So runs the text, and so we must read it, ‘God our Savior; who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth’” (C.H. Spurgeon, “Salvation by Knowing the Truth,” Park Street and Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit). The Metropolitan Tabernacle during Charles Spurgeon’s day was a mighty evangelistic enterprise. Thousands were saved with changed lives as evidence (as documented in Wonders of Grace: Original testimonies of converts during Spurgeon’s early years). The church operated 27 Sunday Schools and Ragged Schools, with some 600 teachers ministering to over 8,000 children.

THE 10,000 RULE AND STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE (Friday Church News Notes, January 19, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - God’s people should always be striving for excellence. The born again child of God is a son of the King of kings. He has been spiritually translated into the kingdom of Christ (Col. 1:13). He is a king and priest and will reign with Christ forever (Re. 5:10). He is instructed to “approve things that are excellent” (Php. 1:10). Like Daniel, he is indwelt with God’s Spirit of excellent wisdom (Da. 5:14; 1 Jo. 2:20), and he possesses God’s excellent counsels in Scripture (Pr. 22:20). He is exhorted to “do all to the glory of God” (1 Co. 10:31) and to “do it heartily” (Col. 3:23). David appointed Levite musicians who would excel in the temple (1 Ch. 15:21). These were not men who prefaced sabbath worship with the words, “Folks, we didn’t have time to practice this week, but you pray for us.” No! How much more should New Testament priests seek to excel in the church, which is Christ’s very body and bride! In his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell proposed that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve an expert level of performance. The theory was loosely based on a 1993 study of violinists at a music academy in Berlin, but in a 2016 book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson, one of the authors of the 1993 study, says that Gladwell overly simplified the lessons. For one, 10,000 hours is not even half of the practice time required to achieve a world class expert level of performance. Second, practice itself isn’t enough. It has to be “deliberate practice which involves constantly pushing oneself beyond one’s comfort zone, following training activities designed by an expert to develop specific abilities, and using feedback to identify weaknesses and work on them.” Ericsson and co-author Robert Pool summarize the results of their research on a practical level as follows: “In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement ... BUT YOU HAVE ONLY SCRATCHED THE SURFACE. YOU CAN KEEP GOING AND GOING AND GOING, GETTING BETTER AND BETTER AND BETTER. How much you improve is up to you.” If the world cares about striving for excellence and studies how to do it, how much more should God’s people? Pastors should be striving for excellence in Bible study and sermon preparation and prayer and discipling and every other aspect of the ministry. Bible teachers should be striving for excellence by studying both the Bible and the art of teaching. Song leaders and musicians should be striving for excellence by studying music and learning new hymns and improving in every way. Ambassadors for Christ should be striving for excellence in evangelism, studying the business of the gospel, learning, improving. “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men” (Colossians 3:23).

CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14).

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Distributed by Way of Life Literature., publisher of Bible Study Materials and reports for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Established in 1974, Way of Life Literature is a fundamental Baptist preaching and publishing ministry based in Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. Brother Cloud lives in South Asia where he has been a church planting missionary since 1979. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY (REPORTS AND FRIDAY NEWS) IS NOT DEVOTIONAL. IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.

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The Way of Life Literature preaching and publishing ministry is based at Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. A mail stop is maintained in Port Huron, Michigan.

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