Friday Church News Notes
Volume 22, Issue 39 - September 24, 2021
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.
David Yonggi Cho
DEATH OF DAVID YONGGI CHO (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - David Yonggi Cho, pastor emeritus of the Yoido Full Gospel Church of Seoul, died on September 14 at age 85. Cho, who was affiliated with the Assemblies of God, had a vast influence as the pastor of the church formerly billed as the world’s largest. He claimed that he received the call to preach directly from Jesus, who supposedly appeared to him dressed like a fireman (“Paul Yonggi Cho,” Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements). He preached prosperity as part of a “five-fold gospel”--the gospel of regeneration, the gospel of the fullness of the Holy Spirit, the gospel of divine healing, the gospel of blessing, and the gospel of the advent. Cho invented the heretical “Law of Incubation.” In his book The Fourth Dimension he described the steps of this “law”--first, make a clear-cut goal; second, create a precise mental picture of that goal; third, incubate it into reality by meditating on it; finally, speak it into existence. Cho admitted that he borrowed some of his teaching from Buddhist sects. In 2011, Cho was accused by 29 of the church’s elders of embezzling US $20 million. In February 2014, Cho was sentenced to three years in prison (suspended due to his age) for breach of trust and corruption and was ordered to pay a penalty of US $4.7 million (The Gospel Herald, Feb. 21, 2014). Dr. Peter Masters, senior pastor of the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, England, warns: “What has built the largest church in the world? The answer is, an idolatrous mixture of biblical teaching and pagan mind-techniques. God is deprived of His sovereignty in the believer’s affairs, and the authority of Scripture is replaced by the authority of supposedly direct messages from God and the product of the imagination. This is the kind of church which has moved hordes of impressionable Christian teachers the world over to jump on to the healing-prophesying bandwagon. We need to take very great care in these days” (The Healing Epidemic, “Occult Healing Builds World’s Largest Church,” first edition, 1988).
LUTHERAN DENOMINATION ORDAINS FIRST “TRANSGENDER” BISHOP (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “ELCA becomes first,” The Christian Post, Sept. 14, 2021: “The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has installed Rev. Megan Rohrer as the first openly transgender bishop to serve in the liberal mainline Protestant denomination’s history. For the next six years, Rev. Rohrer, 41, who identifies as both a male and female and uses the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them,’ will head the California-based ELCA Sierra Pacific Synod. In the role, Rohrer will oversee nearly 200 congregations in Northern California and northern Nevada. ... ‘My installation will celebrate all that is possible when we trust God to shepherd us forward,’ Rohrer said, according to The Associated Press. In the role, Rohrer promised to ‘love others and love what others love.’”
BISHOP OF LIVERPOOL CALLS FOR SAME-SEX “MARRIAGE” (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Bishop of Liverpool,” Christian News, UK, June 29, 2021: “Paul Bayes, the Bishop of Liverpool, has called for a gender-neutral marriage canon to be brought into law. Bishop Paul, 67, said the Church of England should recognise marriage between people of the same sex and allow such ceremonies to take place in church. He made the comments during the keynote speech on Saturday for the network Mosaic Anglicans, a church coalition focused on a range of issues, including race and sexuality. ... ‘I want to see an end to LGBTQ+ people hiding who they are for fear of being exposed to conversion therapy or to being forbidden to minister in churches. I want to see an end to the inquisition of ordinands about their private lives. I want to see all this before I die,’ he said. He added that same-sex love and the blessing of its expression had become his agenda as bishop.” (See also “Fifty Years of Anglican Liberalism,” www.wayoflife.org.)
THE COVID VACCINE AND THE ABORTION ISSUE (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - I hate abortion and speak against it frequently and forcefully, and I do not believe that taking a Covid vaccine is participating in abortion or supporting abortion. “While immortalized cell lines began with fetal cells, they no longer contain fetal body parts, and no fetal tissue remains. No cells remain from the original fetal tissue” (“Covid-19 raises concern,” Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Dec. 15, 2020). “Those individual cells from the 1970s and 1980s have since multiplied into many new cells over the past four or five decades, creating the fetal cell lines I mentioned above. Current fetal cell lines are thousands of generations removed from the original fetal tissue. They do not contain any tissue from a fetus” (Nebraska Medicine, Aug. 18, 2021). “Any vaccine that relies on these historic cell lines will not require nor solicit new abortions” (North Dakota Health, Apr. 20, 2021). “It is true that decades ago, scientists decided to use fetal tissue to start the cell lines we use to test drugs today. However, the description of ongoing modern fetal tissue harvesting to create vaccines is dishonest sensationalism” (Nebraska Medicine, Ibid.).
THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH THE HMS COMFORT (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from the new Way of Life Commentary Series, The Thessalonian Epistles, scheduled for publication soon: “Paul prays that God will ‘comfort your hearts’ (2 Th. 2:16-17). As we saw in the introduction, comfort is a major theme of the Thessalonian epistles (1 Th. 2:11; 3:2; 4:18; 5:11, 14; 2 Th. 2:16, 17). In this present life, there is a great need for comfort, because of the effects of sin, the groaning and travailing of the fallen world (Ge. 3:17; Job 5:7; Ro. 8:22-23), tribulation and persecution (1 Th. 3:4; 2 Ti. 3:12), the weakness of the soul (Ps. 42:5, 6, 11; 43:5; 119:83), chastening (2 Co. 2:7), the care of the churches (2 Co. 7:6-7, 13; Php. 2:19), and sickness and death (Joh. 11:19). This is a painful, troublesome, comfortless world, but there is great comfort in the gospel. The Father is the God of all comfort (2 Co. 1:3) who comforts us in all our tribulation (2 Co. 1:4) and comforts those that are cast down (2 Co. 7:6). Christ is the comforting Saviour (Mt. 9:22; Mr. 10:49; Lu. 8:48; Joh. 14:18). The Holy Spirit is the Comforter sent by the Father and the Son (Joh. 15:26; Ac. 9:31). The believer can always find comfort in his Saviour God, and that is where we must seek our comfort above all. Our hope must not be in man. God is the Rock in which we can hide. God has provided comfort by the Scriptures (Ro. 15:4), by preaching and testifying (1 Co. 14:3, 31), by pastoral ministry (1 Th. 2:11), by prayer (Col. 2:2; 2 Th. 2:17), by fellowship (1 Th. 5:11). The New Testament church is God’s appointed institution of comfort. It is the place of comfort for the saints, and it proclaims comfort to the world by the gospel. The United States operates two hospital aid ships, one named the USNS Mercy and the other the USNS Comfort. These massive ships (each a 1000-bed floating hospital with 10 operating rooms, four intensive care wards, an emergency room, full medical labs, the latest technology) travel the world providing aid for the needy, particularly in times of natural disasters. In 2015, the USNS Comfort provided care for more than 120,000 patients (including 1,200 surgeries) in 11 countries in the Caribbean and South and Central America. The United States learned the concept of comfort from God’s Word. Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome had no comfort ships! What a beautiful picture of the church of Jesus Christ! The church is the HMS Comfort. (Historically, HMS is a British nomenclature for Her Majesty’s Ship, but the church is His Majesty’s Ship.) The world seeks comfort apart from God and the things of God, through friendships, romance, religion, alcohol and drugs, movies and music, psychology and yoga and fantasy, but the comfort of this world is vain and temporal. For those without the Saviour, there is zero comfort in the next life, not even a drop of water. Abraham said to the rich man in hell, ‘now he [Lazarus the poor man] is comforted, and thou art tormented’ (Lu. 16:25). Comfort must be sought from the God of comfort before it is too late.”
CONTINENT-WIDE ROCK LAYERS (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, Aug. 31, 2021: “One of the common objections that we face as creationists is when deep-time advocates ask us to prove that there really was a worldwide Flood. The problem is not that there is no evidence, but that deep-time geologists approach the overwhelming evidence with a deep-seated bias that prevents them from seeing the big picture. For example, they will focus on sedimentary rock, maintaining that it took millions of years to be laid down. Low in the Grand Canyon is a sedimentary layer known as the Tapeats Sandstone. This is part of a bigger sequence called the Sauk Megasequence. Equivalent layers cover most of the continental USA. At the base of this sequence, we find boulders and sand beds. These would usually be assumed to be deposited by storms and floods. Yet, we have the same features over the entire continent. Clearly, a continent-wide catastrophe placed these features there. And a catastrophe covering a continent would really have had to be a global catastrophe – the Flood of Genesis 6 through 8. A higher layer in the Grand Canyon is called the Redwall Limestone. Similar limestone deposits are found all over North America with the same fossils in them. Though they may have different names, they appear to be the same sequence. Indeed, the same limestone strata, with the same fossils, can be found over the ocean in England! Deep-time geology does not explain these evidences. But they are consistent with what God told us in the Bible. Author: Paul F. Taylor. Ref: Snelling, A.A. (2008), Transcontinental Rock Layers, answersingenesis.org.”
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).
LUTHERAN DENOMINATION ORDAINS FIRST “TRANSGENDER” BISHOP (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “ELCA becomes first,” The Christian Post, Sept. 14, 2021: “The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has installed Rev. Megan Rohrer as the first openly transgender bishop to serve in the liberal mainline Protestant denomination’s history. For the next six years, Rev. Rohrer, 41, who identifies as both a male and female and uses the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them,’ will head the California-based ELCA Sierra Pacific Synod. In the role, Rohrer will oversee nearly 200 congregations in Northern California and northern Nevada. ... ‘My installation will celebrate all that is possible when we trust God to shepherd us forward,’ Rohrer said, according to The Associated Press. In the role, Rohrer promised to ‘love others and love what others love.’”
BISHOP OF LIVERPOOL CALLS FOR SAME-SEX “MARRIAGE” (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Bishop of Liverpool,” Christian News, UK, June 29, 2021: “Paul Bayes, the Bishop of Liverpool, has called for a gender-neutral marriage canon to be brought into law. Bishop Paul, 67, said the Church of England should recognise marriage between people of the same sex and allow such ceremonies to take place in church. He made the comments during the keynote speech on Saturday for the network Mosaic Anglicans, a church coalition focused on a range of issues, including race and sexuality. ... ‘I want to see an end to LGBTQ+ people hiding who they are for fear of being exposed to conversion therapy or to being forbidden to minister in churches. I want to see an end to the inquisition of ordinands about their private lives. I want to see all this before I die,’ he said. He added that same-sex love and the blessing of its expression had become his agenda as bishop.” (See also “Fifty Years of Anglican Liberalism,” www.wayoflife.org.)
THE COVID VACCINE AND THE ABORTION ISSUE (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - I hate abortion and speak against it frequently and forcefully, and I do not believe that taking a Covid vaccine is participating in abortion or supporting abortion. “While immortalized cell lines began with fetal cells, they no longer contain fetal body parts, and no fetal tissue remains. No cells remain from the original fetal tissue” (“Covid-19 raises concern,” Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Dec. 15, 2020). “Those individual cells from the 1970s and 1980s have since multiplied into many new cells over the past four or five decades, creating the fetal cell lines I mentioned above. Current fetal cell lines are thousands of generations removed from the original fetal tissue. They do not contain any tissue from a fetus” (Nebraska Medicine, Aug. 18, 2021). “Any vaccine that relies on these historic cell lines will not require nor solicit new abortions” (North Dakota Health, Apr. 20, 2021). “It is true that decades ago, scientists decided to use fetal tissue to start the cell lines we use to test drugs today. However, the description of ongoing modern fetal tissue harvesting to create vaccines is dishonest sensationalism” (Nebraska Medicine, Ibid.).
THE NEW TESTAMENT CHURCH THE HMS COMFORT (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from the new Way of Life Commentary Series, The Thessalonian Epistles, scheduled for publication soon: “Paul prays that God will ‘comfort your hearts’ (2 Th. 2:16-17). As we saw in the introduction, comfort is a major theme of the Thessalonian epistles (1 Th. 2:11; 3:2; 4:18; 5:11, 14; 2 Th. 2:16, 17). In this present life, there is a great need for comfort, because of the effects of sin, the groaning and travailing of the fallen world (Ge. 3:17; Job 5:7; Ro. 8:22-23), tribulation and persecution (1 Th. 3:4; 2 Ti. 3:12), the weakness of the soul (Ps. 42:5, 6, 11; 43:5; 119:83), chastening (2 Co. 2:7), the care of the churches (2 Co. 7:6-7, 13; Php. 2:19), and sickness and death (Joh. 11:19). This is a painful, troublesome, comfortless world, but there is great comfort in the gospel. The Father is the God of all comfort (2 Co. 1:3) who comforts us in all our tribulation (2 Co. 1:4) and comforts those that are cast down (2 Co. 7:6). Christ is the comforting Saviour (Mt. 9:22; Mr. 10:49; Lu. 8:48; Joh. 14:18). The Holy Spirit is the Comforter sent by the Father and the Son (Joh. 15:26; Ac. 9:31). The believer can always find comfort in his Saviour God, and that is where we must seek our comfort above all. Our hope must not be in man. God is the Rock in which we can hide. God has provided comfort by the Scriptures (Ro. 15:4), by preaching and testifying (1 Co. 14:3, 31), by pastoral ministry (1 Th. 2:11), by prayer (Col. 2:2; 2 Th. 2:17), by fellowship (1 Th. 5:11). The New Testament church is God’s appointed institution of comfort. It is the place of comfort for the saints, and it proclaims comfort to the world by the gospel. The United States operates two hospital aid ships, one named the USNS Mercy and the other the USNS Comfort. These massive ships (each a 1000-bed floating hospital with 10 operating rooms, four intensive care wards, an emergency room, full medical labs, the latest technology) travel the world providing aid for the needy, particularly in times of natural disasters. In 2015, the USNS Comfort provided care for more than 120,000 patients (including 1,200 surgeries) in 11 countries in the Caribbean and South and Central America. The United States learned the concept of comfort from God’s Word. Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome had no comfort ships! What a beautiful picture of the church of Jesus Christ! The church is the HMS Comfort. (Historically, HMS is a British nomenclature for Her Majesty’s Ship, but the church is His Majesty’s Ship.) The world seeks comfort apart from God and the things of God, through friendships, romance, religion, alcohol and drugs, movies and music, psychology and yoga and fantasy, but the comfort of this world is vain and temporal. For those without the Saviour, there is zero comfort in the next life, not even a drop of water. Abraham said to the rich man in hell, ‘now he [Lazarus the poor man] is comforted, and thou art tormented’ (Lu. 16:25). Comfort must be sought from the God of comfort before it is too late.”
CONTINENT-WIDE ROCK LAYERS (Friday Church News Notes, September 24, 2021, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, Aug. 31, 2021: “One of the common objections that we face as creationists is when deep-time advocates ask us to prove that there really was a worldwide Flood. The problem is not that there is no evidence, but that deep-time geologists approach the overwhelming evidence with a deep-seated bias that prevents them from seeing the big picture. For example, they will focus on sedimentary rock, maintaining that it took millions of years to be laid down. Low in the Grand Canyon is a sedimentary layer known as the Tapeats Sandstone. This is part of a bigger sequence called the Sauk Megasequence. Equivalent layers cover most of the continental USA. At the base of this sequence, we find boulders and sand beds. These would usually be assumed to be deposited by storms and floods. Yet, we have the same features over the entire continent. Clearly, a continent-wide catastrophe placed these features there. And a catastrophe covering a continent would really have had to be a global catastrophe – the Flood of Genesis 6 through 8. A higher layer in the Grand Canyon is called the Redwall Limestone. Similar limestone deposits are found all over North America with the same fossils in them. Though they may have different names, they appear to be the same sequence. Indeed, the same limestone strata, with the same fossils, can be found over the ocean in England! Deep-time geology does not explain these evidences. But they are consistent with what God told us in the Bible. Author: Paul F. Taylor. Ref: Snelling, A.A. (2008), Transcontinental Rock Layers, answersingenesis.org.”
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.
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
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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