Memoirs of a Twentieth-Century Circuit Riding Preacher by Ruckman Dr. Peter S

Author:Ruckman, Dr. Peter S. [Ruckman, Dr. Peter S.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: BB Bookstore
Published: 2011-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Behind the Sacred Desk

Preaching to a “captive congregation” in a church building is not at all like preaching out by the “highways and hedges.” No pastor will ever really get a Biblical view of his ministry, as God sees it and knows it to be, until he has “faced off, one on one” with the people in the community in which he lives and has gone out on the streets of a large city where all of the hypocrites, backslidders, and Bible rejectors feel safe and confident in their “environment.” When they enter a Bible-believing church, they “come to the guard position” (an old bayonet drill cliché) immediately. They are prepared to hide or duck the message.

It would be reasonable to say that 90 percent of the graduates of any conservative or fundamental Bible School (college, seminary, or university) never get a true picture of America or Biblical Christianity in America during a ministerial lifetime. They live a lifetime in a world of illusions. The reason for this is that they keep a protective shell around them which shields them from the harshness of the unregenerate world system. Television and radio only aggravate this distorted picture. Rarely do any of these ministers ever comprehend what the world (the world system) really thinks about them, IF they are preaching “the whole counsel”: Matthew 23; John 8; Titus 1; Acts 17; Revelation 17; Mark 7; Matthew 25; Acts 20; Revelation 22; and 2 Thessalonians 2. Of course, we still know that many of them have a disturbed conscience about these matters, for this is evidenced by the way they keep retranslating the Bible every other year. (There have been more than one hundred translations in English put out since 1901.) In these “updated” revisions, we find, time after time, the apostate Conservative “making adjustments” to the world system so that it will NOT think badly of him. Cases are too numerous to mention, but in the work called The NIV, an Indepth Study in Apostasy, 1991, you will find over ninety listed.

In “respectable” Christian circles, where the “nice” Christians hibernate, it is “A MAN OF THE CLOTH,” not “evangelist.” It is “THE MINISTER,” not the “preacher.” It is the “REVEREND,” not the “Man of God.” It is “THE SACRED DESK,” not the pulpit.

In respectable Christianity, one “attends services”. he doesn’t “go to meetin.” No “nice” Christian is a “Bible thumper.” Rather, he is a “communicator” or a “motivator” or, at the worst, a “rapper.” He “raps” with his audience. There are no “camp meetins,” but only “Religious Emphasis Week” or “Spiritual Renewal Week,” etc.

I know all about these things. I’ve been out in the harvest fields for forty-three years, and I can spot a phony Fundamentalist fifty miles off, upwind, on a moonless night. Some of the greatest Christian celebrities in this country—who have managed to accumulate literally millions of dollars without losing their “testimony” with the press and the town fathers—are nothing but dry, hollow, graceless, mercenary humanists without a spiritual bone in their bodies from head to foot.

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