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About Jesus - Steve Sweetman Return
To The Fundamentals At
the turn of the 20th century a group of Christian leaders gathered to
draft papers on the fundamentals of the Christian faith that was later
published in a book. This
was meant to fight the intrusion of liberalism into the church over the
previous decades. These
Christian leaders became known as Fundamentalists because they stood for
the fundamental beliefs of our Christian faith.
Most of the Evangelical world embraced this fundamentalist
stance. In
the 1970's I began to notice that the term Fundamentalist was taking on
a negative connotation. They
were called 'Fighting Fundies'; a derogatory term to denote the
unmovable stance they took on the basic truths of Scripture.
Now, in 2016, the term Fundamentalist has taken on an extreme
negative connotation. Fundamentalists
are seen as being bigoted and intolerant, far removed from what the term
fundamentalist once represented. Some
statistics show that more than 60% of Americans who view themselves as
Evangelicals no longer believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only
way to God. That flies in
the face of the fundamental truths of Scripture.
Once you begin to ridicule the Fundamentalists and the truths
they upheld, you soon depart from the fundamentals of Biblical
Christianity. I'm
reminded of how angry Jesus was with the Laodicean community of
believers (Revelation 3). He
was ready to vomit them out of His mouth because of their
self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-promoting, and wealthy existence.
If you read the text carefully you will note that Jesus had no
desire to save that community of believers.
His invitation was to individuals within the community to return
to Him and dine. History
shows us that Jesus did in fact vomit that church out of His mouth.
I'd suggest that our so-called Evangelical church is standing on
shaky grounds. The call goes
out to repent and return to the fundamentals of the faith; to the Lord
Jesus Christ, Himself, or else fall to the same fate at the Laodicean
church.
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