Renew The Church! – website and Blog

Creation of a Holy Church, yet Corruption Within

The Father sent the Son, in His divinity, to take upon Himself a human nature, and enter the fallen human race on earth as Redeemer and Savior through a human mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary.  After His years on earth culminating in His sacrificial human death on a Cross, His Resurrection from the dead and His ascension back into heaven, He sent the Holy Spirit to be with and in His faithful followers on earth, creating the Church, initiating the Church Age in human history.

In the Church Age, the saving Presence of God among men has continued what Jesus began, in a “millennium” lasting over two thousand years of faithful evangelization, witness, preaching and baptizing souls into His Life, His Truth, His Love.

Not all of the work of evangelization by the Church, however, has been faithful.  In this present era of sowing seeds of Gospel Truth and growing holiness among men on earth, God has held back the power of evil: satan and his band of demons have been limited – restricted.  They could still throw stumbling blocks in the paths of the faithful – they could still wreak havoc, confuse and tempt souls away from God and into a life of spiritual contradictions, self-indulgence, sin and even spiritual death.  But their evil was limited.  And God continued to be present among us in the world, offering holy grace to resist the empty promises and lies of the evil one, and helping the faithful to remain true to the path of growing life in Christ.

Not all, however, did remain faithful; and not all repented and returned when they did fall away.  Some members of the Holy Church did not resist temptations.  Some churches did not begin or remain pure beacons of divine light and holy truth.  Some did not fully embrace the enduring and eternal love of God, nor did they fully reject the carnal love of this world and the things of this world.  Some churches, and members, instead sought to have both God and the world.  They sought the approval and eternal promises of God, while continuing in the carnal pleasures and material ambitions of this passing world.  They sought the impossible: to serve both God and Mammon when the Lord says it cannot be done:

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. (Mt 6:24)

Thus some members, and some parishes, became confused and confusing, misled and misleading in their witness to others of Christ.  Some unknowingly, and some knowingly, became false – teachers of error.  The churches were all commanded “Go and make disciples,” but compromised carnal witnesses and false teachers make misled disciples – whether innocently or intentionally.   The name and the title “Christian” thus became counterfeited, and its very meaning confused in the world, with some holding the title “Christian” authentically, heroically, beautifully, fruitfully – while others holding it falsely, superficially, lukewarm, careless and barren of the fruit God sent us to yield.

Many have been confused if not led astray by false teachers of a counterfeit Christianity! Woe to the false teachers who have done this!  The very name of “Christian” has been dishonored in the world by those taking His name in vain!  Those who entered the sheepfold not through the Gate of Christ Jesus, but by sneaking over the wall in the night, cloaking himself falsely in the sheepskin cloak of a believer, learning the language and vocabulary of a Christian, and passing himself off as one of us, all the while being not one of us but a wolf seeking his own advantage and pleasures – these of the enemy have infiltrated the churches of God with corruption, lies and deceit!  Though they be laymen or clergy, even deacons, priests, bishops, or popes, they are of the enemy of souls who are called to repent and be saved!

Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung round his neck and he were thrown into the sea. (Mar 9:42)

Light in God’s Word

Knowing such corruption would happen, God gave to the Apostle John holy divine revelations, showing to him things that were and things that were to come upon the earth, because of the contradictions and mixtures to come among us, through the sinfulness in us.  God would continue to work for true holiness in the Church even through her contradictions, falls and recoveries, and even in the presence of Judases of faithlessness. Concerning churches that were or that would be lacking in fidelity, or would fall from obedience to the true Gospel, Jesus says in the book of Revelation to the churches:

• Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent. (Rev 2:5)
•  Repent then. If not, I will come to you soon and war against them with the sword of my mouth. (Rev 2:16)
•  I gave [the Jezebel among you] time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her immorality.  Behold, I will throw her on a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her I will throw into great tribulation, unless they repent of her doings….(Rev 2:21-22)
• Remember then what you received and heard; keep that, and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you. (Rev 3:3)
• Those whom I love, I reprove and chasten; so be zealous and repent. (Rev 3:19)

As the era of the Church would draw near to its close, God’s restrictions and limitations on evil would be loosened.  Satan would soon be released, permitting a time of final and great tribulation for the Church.  Then would be released upon the world great trials, sufferings, hardships, pandemics and plagues, so that men (in or outside of the Church) might be awakened to the contempt being shown to God in their disbelief – whether disbelief of the truth of the Gospel as they had heard it, or rejection of the natural revealed truths of God manifest in the creation, given for all to see.  And being awakened to their dishonoring of God, whether intentional or unintentional, culpable or not, they might repent and seek Him earnestly, in sincerity and wholeness of heart, and finding Him, come into saving faith and holy life.

Sadly, even then, as Revelation reveals, even after the chastisements of these trials, tribulations and plagues rightfully due to men living in contempt of God – whether in or outside of the Church – even then they would not repent:

The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot either see or hear or walk; nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their immorality or their thefts. (Rev. 9:20-21)

Thus instead of humbling these lovers of self and of the things of this world, whether inside the walls of the church or outside, His chastisements were rejected and their hearts only hardened further against Him. Rather than awakening them to true justice and rightful consequences of their acts, the people only grew in bitterness and obsession with their own pleasures, preferences and desire.  

Yet once more God again would reach out to them.  His will and His ways remain true and firm: His ways are life, apart from Him is only death.  He is the way, and the truth, and the life.  He would once more send chastisements – but more intense – into this rebellious world, that all who stumble in darkness of soul might repent, and awaken to seek light and truth, justice and righteousness in Him.  He sends punishments to them, that all who are apart from Him might see their own emptiness and futile pride, in contrast to His eternal power and glory. Oh that all might repent of their sins, as Jesus cried out to them in His first coming; and in the truth of humility, they might return in wholeness of heart to Him.

The result, in Revelation, of this third movement of grace from God?  Still they would not bend, they would not bow, they would not repent, they would not return, but even worse:

… they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues, and they did not repent and give him glory. … men gnawed their tongues in anguish and cursed the God of heaven for their pain and sores, and did not repent of their deeds. (Rev 16:9 – 11)

What Will We Do, People of America

Much of America – much of the world – is in open, arrogant, militant, violent rejection of God, His eternal moral Law, His faithful people, His Truth.  To replace God in their darkened hearts, they have only the poverty of their own opinions, wishes, conjectures and biased conclusions.  Instead of His wisdom and Truth, they have their desires: for power, for pleasure, for the interior exultation and social exaltation of Self.  The horrible consequence of their rejection of Truth, is their interior embrace of the Lie – and any lie, eventually, that promotes the ultimate Lie that there is no God.  They come to believe the Lie!

The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.
Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. (2 Thes 2:9-12)

And so now, we have embedded among us, a culture “of death” as St. John Paul II called it – a pervasive subculture that is an anti-culture because it is hate-filled and violent to the point of murder, indeed, it is suicidal.  It is an anti-church within the Church; it is an anti-culture within the culture; it is an anti-humanity within humanity.  It is a parasite, a cancer; there is not life, nor light, nor love in it.  It has no viability, because it is of hell, and is self-driven to hell and destruction.  It hates God and all that is of God, because it is of satan.  When released for his last explosive run against God’s creation, there will be great destruction.  Those days will be numbered, but intense, and many will suffer greatly.  But the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the Immaculate Heart of His Mother Mary, will conquer.

In such a dark trial, the People of God are called to follow their Master, Jesus, even to His Cross.  That is, we are to be obedient heroically, not counting the cost, looking only to the promise of God’s holy rewards for those faithful to Him.

We, People of God, must be True to the Truth.  And we must repent of any half-heartedness, any lukewarmness, any mediocrity, any minimalism within us, in the matters pertaining to life in Jesus Christ.  This our repentance.  We must find what defines us in Holy Scripture – read and heard and lived as God’s Word to us personally.  Seek the reality of His Life, His Presence in the sacraments of His Church.  Seek Him in prayer!  Seek Him not merely in favors and mercies that we beg of Him, but seek Him – Him! – in the communion of prayer where He awaits us, within, in silence and peace.

Pray, bear witness, seek holiness, and call for repentance!  Call for an end to the insanity that seeks to dominate the world in the Great Lie.  Seeing God’s love, and His desire that none should perish, we must sound His call to a lost culture of death to turn back – turn away from death and to life.  Not to mere consumer-fed existence but to Life – His eternal and divine Life – that is the promise to His children created in His image and likeness, for fellowship with Him and with one another, eternally.