We have to labor to make our calling and election certain. We have to work out our salvation with fear and tremblingùwith fear and trembling! Why with fear and trembling? Because of the deceitfulness of sin that can trick us and bring us down to spiritual darkness.

We have a wrong gospel going forth in America. It does not recognize the severity of God. The believers in numerous instances are the merest babies in spiritual matters. They are waiting for a nonexistent "rapture." The age of moral horrors is upon us and the babies will not be able to stand. They have never learned to walk with God.

The believers sit in the church service listening to the Super Bowl on their transistor receivers. This is discipleship? This is Christianity? This is salvation?

It is not! It is a shameful and embarrassing fleshly religion that needs to be overhauled. The statistics tell us that more Christians have been martyred in the twentieth century than in the nineteen preceding centuries put together. Christians are being tortured today by the Muslims and the Communists. China is known to be persecuting Christians.

Yet the "believers" are sitting in the service listening to the Super Bowl. Why aren't their pastors outraged? Why do they permit such things? Can't we hear the screams of our brothers in the Sudan, in Vietnam, in China, in Peru? What has happened to us in America?

Do not believe for one minute that God does not know or care.

In America we have not only the material wealth but the spiritual wealth also. We have the gifts and ministries of the Spirit. We have the high praises of God while in some of the other countries for the believers to even raise their hands or clap their hands is a giant step forward in worship.

We are rich and increased with goods all right. God has given us all these blessings for one reasonùthat we might go to the ends of the earth and strengthen the elect in every nation.

Many Americans indeed are giving their lives to bring Christ to those who have so little. But far, far too many of us are involved in making money, following our hobbies, worrying about the Super Bowl (on Sunday yet!).

Are the pastors outraged? Are they warning their flocks to redeem the time?

Did the many fine Christian people in Atlanta do anything about the idolatrous opening of the Olympics while the figure of the goddess (or whatever it was) called to the spirits from the four winds? I felt bad seeing the children taking part in that pagan celebration. I hope none of them were church kids.

Perhaps the pastors in Atlanta really did take this problem to heart. You expect this sort of demonic revelry in Southern California where we are, but not in the Bible Belt. How could such an abomination take place in a city that must certainly be filled with Baptist and Pentecostal people?

A few years ago we had the idolatrous worship surrounding the Statue of Libertyùthe goddess of democracy as the Chinese rightly called it. We don't even understand the difference between democracy and the Kingdom of God, between the rectifying of social problems and the rectifying of spiritual problems, between the pursuit of human happiness and the pursuit of God's righteousness.

To be continued.