We also pointed out that, given that we will all be judged at the end of our lives – both believers and unbelievers, it is important that all Christians should be both aware of and actively contributing to God’s rather than Satan’s agenda.

When it comes to seeking to find God’s will for our lives, it has been said that good is an enemy of the best. Satan and his forces in the spiritual realm work primarily through deception. So, for Christians, the danger of pursuing an agenda that is not God’s does not come so much from a temptation to pursue a course of action that is blatantly evil and ungodly as much as from being tricked into pursuing one that seems commendable enough in itself, yet is simply not God’s.

In this context, it is important to be aware the existence of (and able distinguish between) the true and the false church and their respective agendas – because both may seem equally good at first sight.

Just as God’s love compels Him to want a man or woman to be reconciled with Him, free from the bondage of sin, and a beneficiary of His generosity into eternity, Satan’s hatred compels him to want to prevent this. He has two means of doing this – one for those who don’t know anything about the Christian Gospel and its claims, and the other for those who already do:

1.       He can keep people completely in the dark about the very existence of the true Gospel.

2.     He can offer a false version of the real thing, and ensnare people in this instead to their present and eternal detriment.

The beauty, for Satan, of the second alternative is twofold: for those who have never actually been born again into a living relationship with God, it can cause them to stop looking for the real thing – in the mistaken belief that they have found this already; and, for those who have it, can clog up their spiritual life and service for God with all sorts of diversion and hindrance.

From the moment that Jesus and the New Testament writers established the real Gospel and the real church, Satan set about creating a counterfeit church and belief system that used Christian language but that actually taught and practised something quite different. This emerged in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, which now has its headquarters and governing apparatus in The Vatican in Rome, with ‘branch offices’ throughout the world. Other so-called churches with different names, like the Orthodox and Anglican Churches, are modelled – in much of their official teaching and practise – on this false church.

What, then, are the hallmarks of the false Christian church?

There are many, and these will be the subject of a series of articles on this site, in which we will compare what the false church believes and practises with what the Bible teaches. But the main thing that distinguishes the false from the true church is the idea that the Christian life is founded on a series of rituals performed by a professional body of religious men or women, and is centred on a Holy building or ‘church’.

As we go along, it is important to remember that what happens in the visible, physical realm is controlled by what is going on in the unseen realm of good and evil spirits. (See our article: Why a Clear Understanding of the Unseen Spiritual World Is So Important ) If, as you read, you become conscious that, in your own life, you have been subscribing to one or other wrong belief or practise of the false church, and you want to be free of it, then it is important to repent of it, to renounce it, and to command the spirits behind it to leave you.

This advice article is related to: True and false churches. True and false christianity. Deception in the end times. Counterfeit christianity.

There is a widespread view – based largely on Jesus’ brief dialogue with a section of the Jewish religious elite in Matthew 19 – that Christians are never allowed to end a marriage unless there has been adultery by the other party.

But why, for example, should a person be allowed to instantly end their marriage following one act of unfaithfulness by their spouse, and yet not in the face of perhaps decades of physical or emotional neglect, cruelty, abuse, and violence, which can be much more disrespectful, hurtful, damaging, and even life-threatening than an isolated act of adultery?

Quite apart from a lack of logic and moral common-sense, this view is completely un-biblical when the whole of the teaching in the Old and New Testaments on this subject is taken properly into account, and when Matthew 19 – both the question Jesus was asked and His reply – are properly understood.

Further articles will address this subject. But let’s first break the back of the error that is taught on this subject by going straight to this famous dialogue of Jesus’ with some Pharisees.

First, it is important to be clear just what question Jesus was being asked?

He was being asked: is it OK to divorce a person for just any old reason – no matter how trivial? (Verse 4)

He was not being asked: are there any circumstances at all under which divorce is allowed?

The background to His being asked this question was that a school of thought had arisen among one section of Jewish Rabbis (the Hillelites) that the some words in the Old Testament allowed something they called ‘any cause’ divorce – that is divorce for, literally, just any old cause.

Naturally enough, Jesus’ answer to the question was : no, a marriage is a much weightier relationship than this. Both entering and leaving has major implications, which should be taken seriously. So you cannot divorce for just any old cause. Furthermore, He says, if you do this and re-marry (or if you marry someone who has only been through an invalid divorce like this), you actually commit adultery – because you are still married to your first spouse (or are marrying someone who is still married to their former spouse) in God’s eyes.

At the same time as rejecting this kind of divorce (for just any trivial reason), both here (by reference to the Law of Moses) and in Matthew 5:31-32 Jesus affirms divorces which are for proper causes (which we shall see in a later article are essentially persistent and serious beaches of the marriage contract) and which are effected with the proper written formalities to give both parties (and especially the wife) certainty about their status.

There are two different Greek words that are translated as divorce in the New Testament. One means to verbally put someone away (apoluo). The other means to divorce someone by giving them a proper written certificate of divorce (apostasion).

What Jesus condemns in Matthew is only a verbal putting away (‘apoluo’ is the word used to translate what He says), and for a trivial reason. He does not rule out divorces for good reason that are properly documented.

The Bible shows us that God has the following priorities where marriages are concerned:

1. That they should start as, and should continue to be, relationships of the highest quality possible between two human beings.

2. That they should provide places of love, freedom, and security – where there is scope to rectify the mistakes that result from human fallibility.

3. That allowance should be made in them for human complexity and fallibility – including a way out where resolution is simply not possible.

4. That there should be protection from unloving, unreasonable, unfair or dishonest behaviour, both during their currency and where it becomes necessary for them to be brought to an end.

In articles that follow we will see these priorities set out in scripture. But nowhere in the Bible is an intention that marriages should become unending and irksome prisons to be found.

It will take time to cover all aspects of this particular subject. So, if you – or others you know – are currently faced with real-life situations that mean you have a pressing need to make decisions based on authoritative, comprehensive, and biblical teaching, you may like to look at the following further reading:

The Bible Says: Divorce and Remarriage Is NOT Adultery
by Dr. Stephen E. Jones
[This booklet can be read free online at: www.gods-kingdom-ministries.org]

Divorce by Frank Retief

Divorce and Remarriage in the Church by David Instone-Brewer

This advice article is related to: Christian advice on divorce. Christian advice on remarriage. Christian advice on grounds for divorce. Christian advice on the Bible and divorce. Christian advice on can christians divorce.

When we become Christians we become children of the same Heavenly Dad, and we acquire new brothers and sisters – some older, and some younger (Ephesians 3:14-15).

We are given one another for true relationship, and for the enjoyment and support that this can and should bring.

Being church should be as natural and everyday – and as rewarding and challenging – as being a natural family.

This is why, in the New Testament, the first followers of Jesus did church in homes – the natural place to live out relationship.

Aquila and Priscilla, together with the church [that meets] in their house, send you their hearty greetings in the Lord. (1 Corinthians 16:19)

Give my greetings to the brethren at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the assembly (the church) which meets in her house. (Colossians 4:15)

..to Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier [in the Christian warfare], and to the church [assembly that meets] in your house: grace be to all of you.. (Philemon 2-3)

Christian fellowship was never intended by its inventor to be artificial, ritualistic, and relationally shallow, or to take place under the supervision of religious professionals. Yet this is the model that has been at the heart of our being church for hundreds of years. There is little that is less natural and relational than the pre-prepared pattern of a church service, or less biblical.

We were meant to come together repeatedly as family under one Heavenly Father – all participating, and all ministering to Him and bringing something of Him to one another from our different personalities, giftings, and life-experience, and so all growing together both as individuals and in knowledge and love of one another. In fact, there is not one prescribed ritual at the heart of biblical fellowshipping.

Instead, however, the classic experience of coming together as church has been one of a few active experts leading a largely silent and passive majority. In his book Houses That Change The World, Wolfgang Simson describes the heavily contrived and artificial institutional way of being church in the following unanswerable terms:

The image of much contemporary Christianity could be summarised as holy people coming regularly to a holy place on a holy day at a holy hour to participate in a holy ritual led by a holy man dressed in holy clothes for a holy fee. Since this regular performance-orientated enterprise called ‘worship service’ requires a lot of organisational talent and administrative bureaucracy, formalised and institutionalised patterns developed quickly into rigid traditions. Statistically, a traditional one- or two-hour ‘worship service’ is very resource-hungry but produces very little fruit in terms of discipling people, i.e. in changing their lives. Economically, it is a ‘high input, low output’ structure. Traditionally, the desire to worship ‘in the right way’ has led to much denominationalism, confessionalism, and nominalism. This not only ignores the fact that Christians are called to worship ‘in spirit and in truth’, rather than in cathedrals holding songbooks. It also ignores the fact that most of life is informal, and so too is Christianity as ‘the Way of Life’. Do we need to change from being powerful actors and start acting powerfully? Do we also need to stop bringing people to church, and start bringing church to the people?

As a result of growing discontent on the part of spirit-filled believers at being relegated to being little more than an audience in the church building, some compromises and accommodations have been made: members of congregations have been invited (one or two at a time) to participate in leading these set-piece services, and Home Groups have been set up to cater for the absence of meaningful relating in Sunday services.

However, this is like trying to squeeze good fruit from a bad tree. The bad tree needs to be uprooted entirely, and a good tree – founded only on what the New Testament teaches – needs to be planted.

We will look, in later articles, at just how unbiblical and anti-growth the core elements of institutional church life really are – professional ‘pastors’, the church building, the order of worship, the sermon, pre-planned worship, and Holy Communion. Really, because of this, there is no justification for these. So we believe that the time has now come to make meeting in homes and relating in the natural, fully participatory, relational, one-anothering, New Testament way the heart of being church, and to relegate the ministry meeting (where specialist leaders and teachers come specifically to impart their knowledge and gifting in a particular area to an audience of others with an interest in this) to a second, though important, place in the true church’s life.

This advice article is related to: Christian advice on living. Christian advice on fellowshipping. Christian advice on being church. Christian advice on New Testament church. Christian advice on meeting as church.

We know [positively] that…the whole world [around us] is under the power of the evil one. (1 John 5:19 Amp.)

The evil one is Satan. He is a spirit, and he has an army of spirits that do his bidding and follow his agenda – which is to control and bind people in this world for ill. Ranged against him are God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and the angels, whose agenda is to set people free and work for good in their lives. In both of the physical and spiritual worlds there is, therefore, a continuing war between between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

Followers of Jesus are, by definition, enlisted as fighters in God’s army in this war. We have changed sides. And since this war is primarily a spiritual one, our battle needs also to be primarily a spiritual one.

For we are not wrestling with flesh and blood [contending only with physical opponents], but against the despotisms, against the powers, against [the master spirits who are] the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spirit forces of wickedness in the heavenly (supernatural) sphere. (Ephesians 6:12 Amp.)

Whether we like it or not, this war is constant and close at hand. As followers of Jesus on this earth, and until He returns to it, we live in enemy territory, surrounded by actively hostile forces. So the Bible tells us to live and act accordingly:

Be well balanced (temperate, sober of mind), be vigilant and cautious at all times; for that enemy of yours, the devil, roams around like a lion roaring [in fierce hunger], seeking someone to seize upon and devour. (1 Peter 5:8 Amp)

Again, since the forces and beings in the unseen spiritual world control those in the seen physical one, the battle that most needs focussing on and winning is the spiritual one.

The most important thing that Jesus accomplished for us as a human by His life, death, and resurrection was a victory over the spirit forces of evil in the unseen realm. He did this on behalf of all humans, and this victory, and the means to achieve it, have been available to mankind ever since. It first enables us to become His followers, and then to get completely free of the control of enemy spirits from inside and outside of ourselves.

We all start out – mostly unknowingly – controlled by Satan and his spirits in our minds and bodies. For us to even become open to receiving the truth that enables us to decide to become followers of Jesus there has to be a measure of weakening of the spirits that control our minds and blind us to receiving basic saving truth from God.

For the god of this world has blinded the unbelievers’ minds [that they should not discern the truth], preventing them from seeing the illuminating light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ (the Messiah), Who is the Image and Likeness of God. (2 Corinthians 4:4)

However, even after we have been born again into full relationship with God, there can still remain elements of blinding and binding by Satan’s spirits that need to be removed. Freedom from every last one of these does not come automatically. But the good news is that we have been given all we need to enable us to obtain this. Once we do, then the force that controls our lives will be that of the Holy Spirit, and that alone.

If you want to find out more about how to apply this victory to your own life and then to the lives of others, we recommend this book: Christian Set Yourself Free by Graham and Shirley Powell. You can order this here:  www.grahampowell.ca

The benefits of complete freedom from the hold of Satan’s spirits are threefold:

1. We will have inwardly happier, healthier, more peace-filled lives of our own.

2. We will be better able to see and hear what God and His forces are doing, and what He wants us to do together with them.

3. We will be better able to see and hear what Satan and his forces are doing, and so to fight the fight against them – using all the weapons made available to us.

This effectively means that there is an epidemic of this condition in our society. The prevailing belief amongst the secular medical and psychological experts – and one that has therefore been echoed by many celebrity sufferers – is that a person can never entirely uproot this condition from their make-up, but merely learn how to control and ameliorate it.

This has not been my experience. If you click on the About ChristianAdvice.com > Authors page (above), you can read my story, and find out how I defeated severe depression in my own life once and for all over 30 years ago.

This advice article is related to: Can depression be defeated. Ways to beat depression. Overcoming depression. Curing depression permanently. Healing depression. How to beat depression. Christian depression help.

The word of God tells us that in the days before Jesus comes back to reign on earth there is going to be a vast ‘shaking’ across the whole world. This ‘shaking’ will be God’s final attempt to get man’s attention.

God has said through his prophetic word: “Yet once more…I will shake all nations..” (Haggai 2:6-7)

In Hebrews this is explained further: Now this expression, Yet once more, indicates the final removal and transformation of all [that can be] shaken – that is, of that which has been created – in order that what cannot be shaken may remain and continue. (Hebrews 12:27)

If we want to be prepared for this ‘shaking’ – both to survive it and to thrive in it (to ‘keep calm’ and be ‘blessed’, as the words of Psalm 94 quoted above put it) we need answers to two questions:

1. What is going to be shaken?

and

2. What cannot be shaken?

The short answer to the first question is: everything that can be possibly be shaken.

The short answer to the second is: a human life in so far as it is built on the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and in His rhema words.

In the articles that follow, we will be looking – one by one – at the different areas of life, and at how the Bible tells us we should live them. In this way we will set out a guide for secure living in these End Times.

But here, by way of a guide as to where not to look for safety, is a brief list of the things that can and will be shaken to destruction before Jesus returns:

1. Individual lives not built on the teachings of Jesus. These can be shaken by thwarted hopes, job loss, poverty, illness, and death outside relationship with God.

2. Relationships not built on the teachings of Jesus. These can be shaken by all manner of conflict and by separation.

3. Marriages and families not built on the teachings of Jesus. As for 2. above, these can be shaken by all manner of conflict and by separation.

4. Institutions – such as governments, banks, businesses, and medical and religious institutions – not built on the teachings of Jesus.

5. Physical structures – made by God and by man. Thus the very earth we stand on, and the very buildings we live and work in, can and will be shaken (Revelation 6:12-14 and Isaiah 30:25)

All of these things can and will be shaken, so we should not rely on any of them for security and fruitfulness in these End Times.

Related to this article: safety in the end times; safety in the last days; security in the end times; security in the last days.

Each of us who knows Jesus already was born again into good works that have been prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10). Some are timeless – like leading others to Jesus. Others relate especially to the time we live in and to God’s agenda for that time. There is much guidance on both in the Bible.

The Bible teaches us that during the End Times – the period leading up to the Second Coming of Jesus – there will be great hardship on this earth, especially for followers of Jesus, and that the deeds required of us in these times will require special wisdom, strength, and courage, and that there will be special pitfalls to avoid if we are to reach the finishing line and win the victor’s prize (1 Corinthians 9:24 and Revelation 21:8). So – for the sake of both our own immediate safety and survival, and our eternal fruitfulness – we need to make sure that we know God’s special agenda for those times and fit in with this and not, unwittingly, with some other agenda, however worthy that may seem.

Good is an enemy of the best. So, if we do not make every effort to distinguish first of all between the plans of God and the good ideas of man for these times, we may find that many of our efforts have simply been wasted time (1 Corinthians 3:11-15).

In the articles in this category that follow, we will be looking at the signs and events that show us that we are in the End Times, and, in the category on Christian Living, at what God’s agenda for His people for these times is.

Your comments and questions are most welcome as we go along.

Related to this article: end times teaching; end of the world; the second coming

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