And Excellent Summary of Our Position on the Topics Covered:

We believe the “The 9Marks” below to be an excellent summary of our position on the topics covered:

1.  Expositional Preaching
This is preaching which expounds what Scripture says in a particular passage, carefully explaining its meaning and applying it to the congregation. It is a commitment to hearing God’s Word and to recovering the centrality of it in our worship.

2.  Biblical Theology
Paul charges Titus to “teach what is in accord with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). Our concern should be not only with how we are taught, but with what we are taught. Biblical theology is a commitment to know the God of the Bible as He has revealed Himself in Scripture.

3.  Biblical Understanding of the Good News
The gospel is the heart of Christianity.  But the good news is not that God wants to meet people’s felt needs or help them develop a healthier self-image. We have sinfully rebelled against our Creator and Judge.  Yet He has graciously sent His Son to die the death we deserved for our sin, and He has credited Christ’s acquittal to those who repent of their sins and believe in Jesus’ death and resurrection. That is the good news.

4.  Biblical Understanding of Conversion
The spiritual change each person needs is so radical, so near the root of us, that only God can do it. We need God to convert us. Conversion need not be an emotionally heated experience, but it must evidence itself in godly fruit if it is to be what the Bible regards as a true conversion.

5.  Biblical Understanding of Evangelism
How someone shares the gospel is closely related to how he understands the gospel. To present it as an additive that gives non-Christians something they naturally want (i.e. joy or peace) is to present a half-truth, which elicits false conversions. The whole truth is that our deepest need is spiritual life, and that new life only comes by repenting of our sins and believing in Jesus. We present the gospel openly, and leave the converting to God.

6.  Biblical Understanding of Membership
Membership should reflect a living commitment to a local church in attendance, giving, prayer and service; otherwise it is meaningless, worthless, and even dangerous. We should not allow people to keep their membership in our churches for sentimental reasons or lack of attention. To be a member is knowingly to be traveling together as aliens and strangers in this world as we head to our heavenly home.

7.  Biblical Church Discipline
Church discipline gives parameters to church membership. The idea seems negative to people today – “didn’t our Lord forbid judging?” But if we cannot say how a Christian should not live, how can we say how he or she should live? Each local church actually has a biblical responsibility to judge the life and teaching of its leaders, and even of its members, particularly insofar as either could compromise the church’s witness to the gospel.

8.  Promotion of Christian Discipleship and Growth
A pervasive concern with church growth exists today – not simply with growing numbers, but with growing members. Though many Christians measure other things, the only certain observable sign of growth is a life of increasing holiness, rooted in Christian self-denial. These concepts are nearly extinct in the modern church. Recovering true discipleship for today would build the church and promote a clearer witness to the world.

9.  Biblical Understanding of Leadership
What eighteenth-century Baptists and Presbyterians often agreed upon was that there should be a plurality of elders in each local church. This plurality of elders is not only biblical, but practical — it has the immense benefit of rounding out the pastor’s gifts to ensure the proper shepherding of God’s church.

God’s Word

When it comes to making comments about what we think about the President of the US we have no problem, but when comments are made about what we think about a religious group we get upset.

View Points Opposing the Strange Fire Conference

 

To be able to see both sides of a debate you need to see them.  And there are a lot of opposing viewpoints on the movement.

One that gives a lot of information about the view point here

The Strange Fire conference has set off fireworks around the globe, and there appears to be no letting up (just Google Strange Fire).  I began hearing about John MacArthur’s book Strange Fire a few months ago, and last week a conference by the same name attracted several thousand attendees.  Here is how the conference was promoted: (link)

For the last hundred years, the charismatic movement has been offering a strange fire of sorts to the third Person of the Godhead—the Holy Spirit. And evangelical churches have chosen to be silent or indifferent on the matter. This hasn’t served the church or the Spirit of the church with honor.

So what should be our response?

Strange Fire is a conference that will set forth what the Bible really says about the Holy Spirit, and how that squares with the charismatic movement. We’re going to address in a biblical, straightforward manner what many today see as a peripheral issue. On the contrary, your view of the Holy Spirit influences your relationship with God, your personal holiness, and your commitment to the church and evangelism.

Speakers at the Strange Fire conference included John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul, Conrad Mbewe, Steve Lawson, Phil Johnson, and others.  We have mentioned Mbewe before — you may recall that he is often referred to as “the African Spurgeon”.

Evangelist Bible Teacher Winston Hall

Rivers of Joy Baptist Church

Rivers of Joy Baptist Church People Pastor Evangelist

Rivers of Joy Baptist Church

Evangelist Winston Hall from Rogersville, TN 2013

Photos in 2013

Strange Fire – Is There a Baby in the Bathwater? – Phil Johnson

Having listening and seeing via Live Stream the Strange Fire conferences last week. Thanks to Mike Riccardi who was go good at writing about this conference. I am going to reprint the material he had and I did a lot of extra research on what Phil Johnson had said

I think I will take three days or more to post this in sections

Strange Fire
As you might expect, when we announced that we were holding a conference to coincide with the release of a new book about the charismatic movement, most of the feedback from our charismatic friends was sharply critical. Some of it was bitterly acrimonious. Criticisms came mostly in the form of blogposts, tweets, editorials in charismatic magazines, and other public slapdowns—all before anyone had even read the book!

But to my charismatic friends, I say: Welcome to the discussion. I am truly grateful for the feedback we have received, and we look forward to the wave of responses that we know are still yet to come.
One of the most widely-read critiques regarding the Strange Fire conference came from Michael Brown, who posted a series of articles online at the Charisma Magazine website. Michael was particularly distressed about John MacArthur’s suggestion that certain charismatic hijinks are blasphemous.

John MacArthur is of course responding to the common charismatic complaint that any critique of charismatic phenomena runs a serious risk of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. One of the main points John makes in his book is this: To attribute works of the flesh or works of the devil to the Holy Spirit actually denigrates the Spirit of God rather than exalting Him, and that is obviously a kind of blasphemy.

Michael Brown thinks that assessment is much too harsh. Apparently, in Michael’s view, every conceivable kind of blasphemy that involves the Holy Spirit is an unpardonable transgression. Here’s a quote from Michael Brown: “If [John MacArthur’s] charges are true, this means that many leaders in the charismatic movement have committed the unpardonable sin and are therefore hell-bound.”

That, of course, is not what John MacArthur says, and it’s not what we believe. Matthew 12:31 says, “Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven.” The definite article there is significant. We don’t believe that every careless, ignorant, or accidental sin against the third member of the Trinity is automatically unforgivable. Jesus was responding to one specific kind of blasphemy so deliberate and hard-hearted that no one would ever repent from it anyway. Notice what our Lord actually says: “every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people”—except this one very specific sin. That’s a lavish promise of full pardon and cleansing to anyone and everyone who repents. The singular exception is just one category of hard-hearted haters of Christ. He was speaking about the Pharisees who had just called him satanic. They knew who he was and tried to turn people away from him anyway. Their sin was a deliberate, final, whole-hearted, irreversible rejection of Christ, sealed with a blasphemy that was totally willful, from hearts that had already seen, understood, and known the truth about Christ and His glory—but spurned him anyway.

(I preached a 3-part series on the unpardonable sin, and you can download it for free online if you want to know our position on that.) But the point here is that it is indeed sinful—blasphemous—to invoke the Holy Spirit’s name to justify foolish doctrines, fleshly behavior, or false prophecy. And that ought to be evident. That is the definition of blasphemy.

In fact, we are sounding this alarm about charismatic chicanery precisely in order to call our charismatic friends to repent of the besetting sin of their movement—namely, the sin of attributing to the Holy Spirit words He has not spoken and things He has not done.
Now, it is obvious (or it ought to be) that the visible church today is overrun with people who are speaking messages in God’s name that God has not authorized. They proclaim false prophecies. They claim divine authority for dreams and visions that God never gave. They bind burdens on people that God never intended. And they teach strange precepts and doctrines that have no basis whatsoever in Scripture. That is a vast problem, worldwide in the church.
The charismatic movement is a bottomless well of errors such as those. We would argue that the primary conduit through which the vast majority of troublesome doctrines and practices are coming into the church today is the broad road of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement. (I think that fact is self-evident. If you doubt it, I invite you to try to offer statistical evidence to refute it.)
Michael Brown and the Brownsville Revival

(I have added this research:  Note link   http://www.equip.org/articles/the-counterfeit-revival-part-three/
CRI Home / Charismatic/Pentecostal Christian Articles / The Counterfeit Revival (Part Three)
The Counterfeit Revival (Part Three)  2009
Article ID: DP244-3
By: Hank Hanegraaff
Summary

• While promoters of the Pensacola Outpouring allege nearly two million participants to date, an examination of the revival reveals its serious distortions of biblical Christianity, concluding the movement is simply the latest outbreak in a long history of Counterfeit Revival. Characterized by an overemphasis on subjective experience in opposition to objective tests for truth, nonbiblical spiritual practices, Scripture twisting, and false and exaggerated claims, the Pensacola Outpouring threatens countless believers and depicts to the world a tainted stripe of Christianity. In post-Christian times as these, evangelicals more than ever need to return to the basic teachings and practices of the historic, biblical Christian faith.