America's Sin In Forgetting God
By Evangelist Joseph T. Larsen
This article is from the July 1933 Moody Bible Institute Monthly
AMERICA'S greatest sin and the real cause of the present depression is forgetting God. That means failure to obey God, to listen to His Word, and to bring up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Godlessness leads to disregard for law, corruption in politics, fraud in educational and state life, and hypocrisy in the Church.
America has forgotten God! Its parents, youth and citizens as a whole - these have forgotten God. Even ministers, educators and church officials have forgotten God. True, millions of Christians have not yet forgotten God, but the whole tendency in state life, school life, commercial life, and even in religious circles, is to forget God.
Though there are fifty million church members in the nation and many more Christians who are not church members, yet there are about seventy million outside the churches, living as if there were no God or hereafter.
America's History Has Been Phenomenal
From the first there were many immigrants coming to America seeking religious liberty. In godly worship they settled our eastern shores, then moved westward, until they settled almost three million square miles of territory. They built cities, made marvelous inventions, improved everything possible, and now support approximately 124,000,000! For 157 years, God has been the God of this nation, piloting us safely through the pioneer periods, the five wars for freedom of oppressed peoples; and as a culmination, the people following the recent period of prosperity, have turned largely away from God! Then came the events which brought a general depression!
How Does America Forget God?
By largely banishing the Bible from schools and by misinterpreting it in universities, criticizing it in theological seminaries and colleges, and scoffing at it among the infidels and atheists of the nation. False cults numbering nearly ten million are sweeping the land with propaganda of denial, deceit and devilish doctrines. Atheists, modernists and communists have formed a deadly alliance against God, Christ, the Church, and the Bible. "But he that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shalt have them in derision."
Pleasure, newspapers, magazines, business and society have largely taken the pre-eminent place that God and Christian living ought to take. Crime gets the eye, not Christ! Society not salvation, business and not betterment of souls, money and not missions, earth and not Heaven is foremost in thinking. True, there are a few million Christians in America who still adore, worship and serve Him; but they are like salt in a rotting nation.
Judgment Is Coming
Ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, Medo-Persia, Assyria, and other empires all forgot God, and have been ruined and forgotten; but only until the judgment!
Oh, citizens of America! Will you ever learn a lesson from past history, from experienced adversity, from former judgments on the nations, that forgetting God does not pay? Can the professing Church of today continue to exist if she joins the world, praises the communists and denies God's divine rulership?
Macaulay, the English historian, writing nearly one hundred years ago, said of America, "She will be pillaged and looted in the twentieth century by vandals, and forces within her will cause her destruction." Indications prove him to be right, and unless something can be done by godly people to stem the tide of lawlessness, communism, modernism and immorality, she will go the way of the ancient nations. Will Christians, will governmental leaders, will its citizens awaken in time or too late?
What Will Cause America to Return to God?
Only a nation-wide revival of Christian teaching, the preaching of a crucified Christ, the return to the Bible, banishing communism, deposing false cult-teachings, baring worldly and sinful amusements, and all dangerous teachings in our public schools. God must find His rightful place in human hearts, the family altars must be restored, and the Church must cease pandering to worldly aspirations.
The prodigal son "came to himself," and America must come to herself. God's voice calls upon her to repent, confess her sins and return to the God of love and life. Mercy pleads with justice, grace pleads against judgment, truth opposes falsity, and wisdom foresees coming disaster, unless there is a change through national revival.
May God's faithful ones keep crying to God for a revival and "give him no rest" until He hear from Heaven with a mighty power as of old. Let us pay unceasingly, "Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee?" (Ps. 85:6)
http://www.biblebelievers.com/abell_cartoons/abell-042.jpgBy Evangelist Joseph T. Larsen
This article is from the July 1933 Moody Bible Institute Monthly
AMERICA'S greatest sin and the real cause of the present depression is forgetting God. That means failure to obey God, to listen to His Word, and to bring up our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Godlessness leads to disregard for law, corruption in politics, fraud in educational and state life, and hypocrisy in the Church.
America has forgotten God! Its parents, youth and citizens as a whole - these have forgotten God. Even ministers, educators and church officials have forgotten God. True, millions of Christians have not yet forgotten God, but the whole tendency in state life, school life, commercial life, and even in religious circles, is to forget God.
Though there are fifty million church members in the nation and many more Christians who are not church members, yet there are about seventy million outside the churches, living as if there were no God or hereafter.
America's History Has Been Phenomenal
From the first there were many immigrants coming to America seeking religious liberty. In godly worship they settled our eastern shores, then moved westward, until they settled almost three million square miles of territory. They built cities, made marvelous inventions, improved everything possible, and now support approximately 124,000,000! For 157 years, God has been the God of this nation, piloting us safely through the pioneer periods, the five wars for freedom of oppressed peoples; and as a culmination, the people following the recent period of prosperity, have turned largely away from God! Then came the events which brought a general depression!
How Does America Forget God?
By largely banishing the Bible from schools and by misinterpreting it in universities, criticizing it in theological seminaries and colleges, and scoffing at it among the infidels and atheists of the nation. False cults numbering nearly ten million are sweeping the land with propaganda of denial, deceit and devilish doctrines. Atheists, modernists and communists have formed a deadly alliance against God, Christ, the Church, and the Bible. "But he that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shalt have them in derision."
Pleasure, newspapers, magazines, business and society have largely taken the pre-eminent place that God and Christian living ought to take. Crime gets the eye, not Christ! Society not salvation, business and not betterment of souls, money and not missions, earth and not Heaven is foremost in thinking. True, there are a few million Christians in America who still adore, worship and serve Him; but they are like salt in a rotting nation.
Judgment Is Coming
Ancient Babylon, Greece, Rome, Medo-Persia, Assyria, and other empires all forgot God, and have been ruined and forgotten; but only until the judgment!
Oh, citizens of America! Will you ever learn a lesson from past history, from experienced adversity, from former judgments on the nations, that forgetting God does not pay? Can the professing Church of today continue to exist if she joins the world, praises the communists and denies God's divine rulership?
Macaulay, the English historian, writing nearly one hundred years ago, said of America, "She will be pillaged and looted in the twentieth century by vandals, and forces within her will cause her destruction." Indications prove him to be right, and unless something can be done by godly people to stem the tide of lawlessness, communism, modernism and immorality, she will go the way of the ancient nations. Will Christians, will governmental leaders, will its citizens awaken in time or too late?
What Will Cause America to Return to God?
Only a nation-wide revival of Christian teaching, the preaching of a crucified Christ, the return to the Bible, banishing communism, deposing false cult-teachings, baring worldly and sinful amusements, and all dangerous teachings in our public schools. God must find His rightful place in human hearts, the family altars must be restored, and the Church must cease pandering to worldly aspirations.
The prodigal son "came to himself," and America must come to herself. God's voice calls upon her to repent, confess her sins and return to the God of love and life. Mercy pleads with justice, grace pleads against judgment, truth opposes falsity, and wisdom foresees coming disaster, unless there is a change through national revival.
May God's faithful ones keep crying to God for a revival and "give him no rest" until He hear from Heaven with a mighty power as of old. Let us pay unceasingly, "Wilt thou not revive us again, that thy people may rejoice in thee?" (Ps. 85:6)
Amish homeowners: Religion trumps building codes
TOWN OF FRANKLIN, Wis. – Daniel Borntreger's home looks like hundreds of other Wisconsin farmhouses: two-story A-frame, porch, clothes on the line.
But his home could cost him thousands of dollars in fines. Borntreger, an Amish farmer, built the house himself according to Amish tradition — but without a building permit.
His case is among at least 18 legal actions brought against Amish residents in Wisconsin and New York in the past year and a half for building without proper permits, according to court records, attorneys and advocates for the Amish.
The cases have sparked local debates about where religion ends and government begins. Amish advocates — the Amish religion precludes them from defending themselves physically or legally — argue the Amish belief that they must live apart from the world trumps local regulations.
"The permit itself might not be so bad, but to change your lifestyle to have to get one, that's against our convictions," Borntreger said as he sat in his kitchen with his wife, Ruth.
But local authorities say the Amish must obey the law.
"They just go ahead and don't listen to any of the laws that are affecting anybody else. It's quite a problem when you got people next door required to get permits and the Amish don't have to get them," said Gary Olson, a county supervisor in central Wisconsin's Jackson County, where Borntreger lives.
The Amish emigrated from central Europe to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. Also known as the "Plain People," the Amish believe they must live a simple, nonviolent life. Many reject electricity, indoor plumbing and cars.
In Pennsylvania, home to a large Amish population, more liberal-leaning congregations have lobbied successfully for exemptions in the state building code, including permission to forego electricity and quality-graded lumber, said Frank Howe, chairman of the board of supervisors in Leacok township in Lancaster County.
Officials try to keep the Amish informed about what they can and can't do, and most conform, Howe said. He didn't believe his board had ever taken an Amish resident to court over building violations.
"You try to work with both sides," Howe said. "(We tell them) this is what we need you to do so everyone can go home and relax."
The Amish population has nearly doubled in the U.S. over the last 15 years, growing to 227,000 this year, according to estimates from Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. As the Amish look for new farmland, conservative congregations have migrated into states that haven't seen them before, said Karen Johnson-Weiner, an Amish expert at the State University of New York at Potsdam.
That sets up conflict between building officials with little experience dealing with their beliefs and conservative Amish who aren't familiar with the codes or don't want to compromise, Johnson-Weiner said.
Municipal attorneys in Hammond, a town of about 300 people in upstate New York, cited Joseph Swartzentruber and Henry Mast in August for building houses without a permit. That case is pending. Hammond attorney Fred Paddock declined to comment.
In Morristown, a town of about 450 people just north of Hammond, town attorney Andrew Silver has brought 13 actions against the Amish for not abiding by building codes. They're pending, too.
Silver declined comment except to say the town is treating the Amish as it would any homeowner who violates building codes.
In Wisconsin, authorities in Black River Falls, a city of 3,600 people about 130 miles northwest of Madison, have filed at least four cases against area Amish involving permit violations.
One action ended in April when a judge fined Samuel S. Stoltzfus $9,450 for building a house and driveway without permits. In July the same judge levied a $10,600 fine against Daniel Borntreger. Another pending action accuses Samuel F. Stolzfus of building two houses without permits.
Stoltzfus believed signing a permit would amount to lying because he wouldn't follow parts of the code that violate his religion, said Robert Greene, an attorney with the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, which has intervened in his case.
Custom-built homes are allowed in Wisconsin as long as the plans meet code standards, but apparently the Amish don't understand that, said Paul Millis, the attorney suing the Amish in Jackson County. The Town of Albion, where Samuel F. Stolzfus lives, waived a requirement that permits be signed so the Amish could avoid violating their religious beliefs, but they still won't comply, he said.
Attorneys acting on behalf of the Amish argue they have a constitutional right to religious freedom. They don't have to conform to building regulations that require them to use architectural drawings, smoke detectors, quality-graded lumber and inspections, Steve Ballan, an assistant public defender assigned to the Amish in Morristown wrote in court documents.
"They should be allowed to practice their religion and their religious traditions without interference from the government," he said in an interview.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has taken up the Amish's cause in Hammond, plans to file a federal lawsuit in New York in the next few weeks arguing that.
The Amish advocates have a strong argument, said University of Michigan law professor Douglas Laycock.
The government must show a strong reason why regulations outweigh religious freedoms, he said. Building officials argue permits and codes ensure structural safety, but Amish homes aren't falling down, he said.
"People aren't getting hurt," he said.
TOWN OF FRANKLIN, Wis. – Daniel Borntreger's home looks like hundreds of other Wisconsin farmhouses: two-story A-frame, porch, clothes on the line.
But his home could cost him thousands of dollars in fines. Borntreger, an Amish farmer, built the house himself according to Amish tradition — but without a building permit.
His case is among at least 18 legal actions brought against Amish residents in Wisconsin and New York in the past year and a half for building without proper permits, according to court records, attorneys and advocates for the Amish.
The cases have sparked local debates about where religion ends and government begins. Amish advocates — the Amish religion precludes them from defending themselves physically or legally — argue the Amish belief that they must live apart from the world trumps local regulations.
"The permit itself might not be so bad, but to change your lifestyle to have to get one, that's against our convictions," Borntreger said as he sat in his kitchen with his wife, Ruth.
But local authorities say the Amish must obey the law.
"They just go ahead and don't listen to any of the laws that are affecting anybody else. It's quite a problem when you got people next door required to get permits and the Amish don't have to get them," said Gary Olson, a county supervisor in central Wisconsin's Jackson County, where Borntreger lives.
The Amish emigrated from central Europe to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s. Also known as the "Plain People," the Amish believe they must live a simple, nonviolent life. Many reject electricity, indoor plumbing and cars.
In Pennsylvania, home to a large Amish population, more liberal-leaning congregations have lobbied successfully for exemptions in the state building code, including permission to forego electricity and quality-graded lumber, said Frank Howe, chairman of the board of supervisors in Leacok township in Lancaster County.
Officials try to keep the Amish informed about what they can and can't do, and most conform, Howe said. He didn't believe his board had ever taken an Amish resident to court over building violations.
"You try to work with both sides," Howe said. "(We tell them) this is what we need you to do so everyone can go home and relax."
The Amish population has nearly doubled in the U.S. over the last 15 years, growing to 227,000 this year, according to estimates from Elizabethtown College's Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. As the Amish look for new farmland, conservative congregations have migrated into states that haven't seen them before, said Karen Johnson-Weiner, an Amish expert at the State University of New York at Potsdam.
That sets up conflict between building officials with little experience dealing with their beliefs and conservative Amish who aren't familiar with the codes or don't want to compromise, Johnson-Weiner said.
Municipal attorneys in Hammond, a town of about 300 people in upstate New York, cited Joseph Swartzentruber and Henry Mast in August for building houses without a permit. That case is pending. Hammond attorney Fred Paddock declined to comment.
In Morristown, a town of about 450 people just north of Hammond, town attorney Andrew Silver has brought 13 actions against the Amish for not abiding by building codes. They're pending, too.
Silver declined comment except to say the town is treating the Amish as it would any homeowner who violates building codes.
In Wisconsin, authorities in Black River Falls, a city of 3,600 people about 130 miles northwest of Madison, have filed at least four cases against area Amish involving permit violations.
One action ended in April when a judge fined Samuel S. Stoltzfus $9,450 for building a house and driveway without permits. In July the same judge levied a $10,600 fine against Daniel Borntreger. Another pending action accuses Samuel F. Stolzfus of building two houses without permits.
Stoltzfus believed signing a permit would amount to lying because he wouldn't follow parts of the code that violate his religion, said Robert Greene, an attorney with the National Committee for Amish Religious Freedom, which has intervened in his case.
Custom-built homes are allowed in Wisconsin as long as the plans meet code standards, but apparently the Amish don't understand that, said Paul Millis, the attorney suing the Amish in Jackson County. The Town of Albion, where Samuel F. Stolzfus lives, waived a requirement that permits be signed so the Amish could avoid violating their religious beliefs, but they still won't comply, he said.
Attorneys acting on behalf of the Amish argue they have a constitutional right to religious freedom. They don't have to conform to building regulations that require them to use architectural drawings, smoke detectors, quality-graded lumber and inspections, Steve Ballan, an assistant public defender assigned to the Amish in Morristown wrote in court documents.
"They should be allowed to practice their religion and their religious traditions without interference from the government," he said in an interview.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which has taken up the Amish's cause in Hammond, plans to file a federal lawsuit in New York in the next few weeks arguing that.
The Amish advocates have a strong argument, said University of Michigan law professor Douglas Laycock.
The government must show a strong reason why regulations outweigh religious freedoms, he said. Building officials argue permits and codes ensure structural safety, but Amish homes aren't falling down, he said.
"People aren't getting hurt," he said.
I remember a story about how badtimes will bring out the "Church" in even the rich people.
The sudden crush of worshipers packing the small evangelical Shelter Rock Church in Manhasset, N.Y. — a Long Island hamlet of yacht clubs and hedge fund managers — forced the pastor to set up an overflow room with closed-circuit TV and 100 folding chairs, which have been filled for six Sundays straight.
In Seattle, the Mars Hill Church, one of the fastest-growing evangelical churches in the country, grew to 7,000 members this fall, up 1,000 in a year. At the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J., prayer requests have doubled — almost all of them aimed at getting or keeping jobs.
Like evangelical churches around the country, the three churches have enjoyed steady growth over the last decade. But since September, pastors nationwide say they have seen such a burst of new interest that they find themselves contending with powerful conflicting emotions — deep empathy and quiet excitement — as they re-encounter an old piece of religious lore:
Bad times are good for evangelical churches.
“It’s a wonderful time, a great evangelistic opportunity for us,” said the Rev. A. R. Bernard, founder and senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York’s largest evangelical congregation, where regulars are arriving earlier to get a seat. “When people are shaken to the core, it can open doors.”
Nationwide, congregations large and small are presenting programs of practical advice for people in fiscal straits — from a homegrown series on “Financial Peace” at a Midtown Manhattan church called the Journey, to the “Good Sense” program developed at the 20,000-member Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., and now offered at churches all over the country.
Many ministers have for the moment jettisoned standard sermons on marriage and the Beatitudes to preach instead about the theological meaning of the downturn.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who moved much of their door-to-door evangelizing to the night shift 10 years ago because so few people were home during the day, returned to daylight witnessing this year. “People are out of work, and they are answering the door,” said a spokesman, J. R. Brown.
Mr. Bernard plans to start 100 prayer groups next year, using a model conceived by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, to “foster spiritual dialogue in these times” in small gatherings around the city.
A recent spot check of some large Roman Catholic parishes and mainline Protestant churches around the nation indicated attendance increases there, too. But they were nowhere near as striking as those reported by congregations describing themselves as evangelical, a term generally applied to churches that stress the literal authority of Scripture and the importance of personal conversion, or being “born again.”
Part of the evangelicals’ new excitement is rooted in a communal belief that the big Christian revivals of the 19th century, known as the second and third Great Awakenings, were touched off by economic panics. Historians of religion do not buy it, but the notion “has always lived in the lore of evangelism,” said Tony Carnes, a sociologist who studies religion.
A study last year may lend some credence to the legend. In “Praying for Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Religiosity in the United States,” David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University, looked at long-established trend lines showing the growth of evangelical congregations and the decline of mainline churches and found a more telling detail: During each recession cycle between 1968 and 2004, the rate of growth in evangelical churches jumped by 50 percent. By comparison, mainline Protestant churches continued their decline during recessions, though a bit more slowly.
The little-noticed study began receiving attention from some preachers in September, when the stock market began its free fall. With the swelling attendance they were seeing, and a sense that worldwide calamities come along only once in an evangelist’s lifetime, the study has encouraged some to think big.
“I found it very exciting, and I called up that fellow to tell him so,” said the Rev. Don MacKintosh, a Seventh Day Adventist televangelist in California who contacted Dr. Beckworth a few weeks ago after hearing word of his paper from another preacher. “We need to leverage this moment, because every Christian revival in this country’s history has come off a period of rampant greed and fear. That’s what we’re in today — the time of fear and greed.”
Frank O’Neill, 54, a manager who lost his job at Morgan Stanley this year, said the “humbling experience” of unemployment made him cast about for a more personal relationship with God than he was able to find in the Catholicism of his youth. In joining the Shelter Rock Church on Long Island, he said, he found a deeper sense of “God’s authority over everything — I feel him walking with me.”
The sense of historic moment is underscored especially for evangelicals in New York who celebrated the 150th anniversary last year of the Fulton Street Prayer Revival, one of the major religious resurgences in America. Also known as the Businessmen’s Revival, it started during the Panic of 1857 with a noon prayer meeting among traders and financiers in Manhattan’s financial district.
Over the next few years, it led to tens of thousands of conversions in the United States, and inspired the volunteerism movement behind the founding of the Salvation Army, said the Rev. McKenzie Pier, president of the New York City Leadership Center, an evangelical pastors’ group that marked the anniversary with a three-day conference at the Hilton New York. “The conditions of the Businessmen’s Revival bear great similarities to what’s going on today,” he said. “People are losing a lot of money.”
But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective.
For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. ”We have the greatest product on earth,” said the Rev. Steve Tomlinson, senior pastor of the Shelter Rock Church.
Dr. Beckworth, a macroeconomist, posited another theory: though expanding demographically since becoming the nation’s largest religious group in the 1990s, evangelicals as a whole still tend to be less affluent than members of mainline churches, and therefore depend on their church communities more during tough times, for material as well as spiritual support. In good times, he said, they are more likely to work on Sundays, which may explain a slower rate of growth among evangelical churches in nonrecession years.
Msgr. Thomas McSweeney, who writes columns for Catholic publications and appears on MSNBC as a religion consultant, said the growth is fed by evangelicals’ flexibility: “Their tradition allows them to do things from the pulpit we don’t do — like ‘Hey! I need somebody to take Mrs. McSweeney to the doctor on Tuesday,’ or ‘We need volunteers at the soup kitchen tomorrow.’ ”
In a cascading financial crisis, he said, a pastor can discard a sermon prescribed by the liturgical calendar and directly address the anxiety in the air. “I know a lot of you are feeling pain today,” he said, as if speaking from the pulpit. “And we’re going to do something about that.”
But a recession also means fewer dollars in the collection basket.
Few evangelical churches have endowments to compare with the older mainline Protestant congregations.
“We are at the front end of a $10 million building program,” said the Rev. Terry Smith, pastor of the Life Christian Church in West Orange, N.J. “Am I worried about that? Yes. But right now, I’m more worried about my congregation.” A husband and wife, he said, were both fired the same day from Goldman Sachs; another man inherited the workload of four co-workers who were let go, and expects to be the next to leave. “Having the conversations I’m having,” Mr. Smith said, “it’s hard to think about anything else.”
At the Shelter Rock Church, many newcomers have been invited by members who knew they had recently lost jobs. On a recent Sunday, new faces included a hedge fund manager and an investment banker, both laid off, who were friends of Steve Leondis, a cheerful business executive who has been a church member for four years. The two newcomers, both Catholics, declined to be interviewed, but Mr. Leondis said they agreed to attend Shelter Rock to hear Mr. Tomlinson’s sermon series, “Faith in Unstable Times.”
“They wanted something that pertained to them,” he said, “some comfort that pertained to their situations.”
Mr. Tomlinson and his staff in Manhasset and at a satellite church in nearby Syosset have recently discussed hiring an executive pastor to take over administrative work, so they can spend more time pastoring.
“There are a lot of walking wounded in this town,” he said.
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