Pastor William Agbeti, Daily Jot ministry partner in Ghana, West Africa, wrote this prophetic warning and exhortation for the Church in America: The body of Christ is in crisis as reflected by the universal church’s current state of lethargy! Lethargy may be defined as “lack of divine power and passion.” Lethargy is also as “a pathological state of sleepiness or deep unresponsiveness and inactivity” to and in issues affecting mankind. Take the sad case of the body of Christ in America, a country considered in recent years past as the beacon of truth, home of democracy, the last post of hope and the bastion of revivalism! Today, it is a pale, miserable shadow of itself and this is representative of the global situation in Christendom.
What we in Africa see happening to the church in America is two-fold: First, false teachers who are “wolves in sheep skins” have broken and entered into our ranks. Many Christians receive, even embrace, false teachings. Many of these false teachings are based on scriptures taken out of context to build, project and buttress personal opinions. Some are replacement theologies to please men and build cults. Others are wrong teachings from zealous men without knowledge, these being half-baked Christian leaders without any solid foundational training, who use bits and pieces of scripture, here and there, to weave a labyrinth of lies to further personal agendas. Of course, there are also those who have genuine zeal to teach, but teach wrong doctrines because they teach without knowledge! All this has greatly harmed the body of Christ, leaving the majority of the brethren in a state of stupor; not knowing what to do or who to believe!
Secondly, the pulpits of the false teachers and leaders have become open platforms that orchestrate embarrassing public theatrical programs witnessed and shunned by the world, leading to mass avoidance of the church and an unprecedented loss of souls to the world. Both of these occurrences constitute and are caused by one and the same problem–false teachings and false teachers! Can the situation be salvaged? Yes, when Christ eventually comes the second time and even now there is an answer. The answer is both found in the Old Testament and re-echoed in the New Testament: 1 Chronicles 12.32: “And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their commandment.”
Acts 17:11 says, “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” What America and the world needs now are men that scripturally understand the times, and know what to do about what’s going on, so everyone will listen to them! This is because we seem to be in a period of famine of the Word. God seemingly is no longer speaking to us. Would you be “a child of Issachar”, “a citizen of Berea” and “a man with zeal and knowledge” to help salvage the situation? All it takes are few hundreds of men, a remnant of true believers, to disrupt the world! Join this move. You can make a difference!
