Mark Twain said, India is the ultimate travel destination. Like so much of the world, I have traveled through India several times, beyond description. I was in Amristar, India, cradle of the Sikhs, location of the Gold Temple. Civilization has not caught up with this remote village. Because of political problems, few enter the temple but the officials wanted me to experience it. Located in a lake, you walk across a bridge to the temple, where Monks are exploring great stacks of manuscripts. Around the edges of the enclave, buildings where large vessels were preparing food for the many pilgrims, Sikhs from around the world, their turbans, sabers, bracelets, distinct apparel.
Two writers from a well known magazine were there, attempting to get into Afghanistan to photograph the standing Buddhas at Banyan. They had bribed a pilot and asked me to go with them, a free trip. Even then, political turmoil impossible to get into Afghanistan. The Hindu Kush mountains are beyond compare in the Himalayas. In the side of a large mountain, chiseled, standing Buddhas, which the Al Qaeda have now destroyed. So tall, to photograph them you must go completely across the valley. Little change since Rudyard Kipling described the Khyber pass. (and the first time I was there a camel train went through the pass just as it had 2000 years ago) you hear nothing but Muslim calls to worship, and see nothing but poverty-stricken people riding on donkeys. In viewing religious relics throughout the world, whether the Taj Mahal at Agra or the temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Egypt, one is confounded to think of the commitment of mortals in time and treasury to a false religion. Just think how long it took and how dangerous it was for artisans to chisel these over 400 foot tall standing Buddhas at Banyan. The Islamic terrorists are attempting to destroy the Christian church in all of the over 40 Muslim countries aided and abetted by the anti-Christian power brokers in America. The Coptic Christians are being killed and run out of Egypt, same in Iraq, same in Syria, same in Hamas-controlled West Bank. Christians in most Muslim countries are fleeing to Canada and Australia. When I was in Nigeria, I found Pentecostals frightened. I encountered Christians in China, underground church. Christianity has always grown when persecuted. Today, there are more Christians in China than the population of the United States, over 300 million in a country of that plus one billion people.
From daily news headlines, one thinks, how can America continue with such perversion-dishonesty-apathy on every hand. Throughout the world, Africa, Balkans, Asia, there are continuous efforts toward ethnic-cleansing. Are we on the fringes of such in America? The effort to secularize America started in my lifetime. (1963, prayer and Bibles removed from schools; 1973, abortion rights; 1993, new world order) The world, the flesh, the devil... the tares... have invaded the churches, the denominations. It is not just lesbian Bishops, ordained gay preachers in the pulpit, but comfortable-satisfied “so-called” Christians on the pews. Many, now, just get up and walk out of services when the pastor is just performing. The Christian has the need for “the meat” of God's Word, not just something to please the ears. (2 Tim 4:3, Heb., 5:12)
A local church member had moved to another city, now seeking a new church home. At one, the preacher so far astray, she got up and left the service, went to the activities building to get her child from ”children's church”. “Children's church” was set up like a night club, rock-religious music, smoke machine, twittering lights, and children sitting around tables drinking punch. Sean Varner, pollster states that 60% of all children reared in Christian homes, after going to college, leave the church. We note that most churches have become a sea of gray hair.
I cannot understand why, on most electronic programs of ministry (radio and television)(the speaker must confess that he has “been saved” from a life of addiction-drugs, alcohol, sexual perversion. Why does the preacher or anyone else hit bottom before looking up? Even the old, rural church, built by my ancestors, and where I was so committed, I never hear anything from them except when having pizza and pool parties. In most churches, the baptistry and communion tables are little used. The pastors trousers are worn at the seat not at the knees... congregation diabetic from excessive pulpit sugar. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit. (Jer. 17:8)
Even in time of drought, those with roots near a river of the nourishing water from the fountain of God will continue to stay green-alive and producing fruit.
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