The Worldwide Church of God Section of this Website Expanding Now to 10 Articles and One Large Subsection on Agape

Six new articles have just gone up, one titled The Sabbath and Hospitality,  another titled Are You In A New Wineskin or An Old Brittle Wineskin? as well as new ones have also just gone up titled How Does Jesus Want Us To Observe His Sabbath Day?', 'We're the Salt & Light of the World, and the Fishers of Men,' 'How To Give A Connective Expository Sermon,'  and an article submitted by a guest-author, Arthur Suckling, a pastor in the United Church of God, who wrote the article 'The Great Divide.'  All can be viewed by logging onto the Worldwide Church of God section whose link is below.  All Sabbath/Holy Day observing Christians will want to read those new articles.  They take a real hard look at where we've been in the past, and where Jesus in Scripture indicates he wants us to go now.  All of them are a bit controversial for us Sabbath-keeping Church of God folks, but so is the Word of God, from which they are strongly based.  Check them out by logging onto the Worldwide Church of God link below: 

http://www.unityinchrist.com/wwcofg/wwcofgod.html

These articles highlight areas we as Sabbath-keeping Christians really need to grow in spiritually.  All the articles in this expanded Worldwide Church of God section focus on where we've been and where we need to go, or in one instance, what we should avoid (i.e. Arianism).  Jesus' desire is to show us off to the world, but he can't do that if we continue to hide under the various rocks we've gotten used to hiding under, such rocks as Exclusivism, Pharisaism (legalism), Arianism, lack of God's agape-love, just to name a few. 

This post if filed under "church unity."  Be sure to click on that "label" at the bottom of this post and see how this post fits in with the rest under that label heading.  There is a very interesting pattern that is developing here.  A year ago, my whole intention was to continue building up the expository transcripts going through the Gospel of Luke.  The Lord sort of brought me on a year-long detour and inspired me to create the articles in the Worldwide Church of God section, one after the other.  So click on that label "church unity"  under this post, and see if you can see a pattern or theme the Lord has been influencing me to write on.

New Minor Prophets commentary

New Minor Prophets Commentary now available--Jesus Christ calls for unity within the Body of Christ!

I have just uploaded a new commentary of the Minor Prophets (Hosea through Malachi) for this website. It is in the Prophecy section of the site. Be sure to check it out. Some very, very important nuggets of prophetic truth are contained in the Minor Prophets. I discovered one of those nuggets in Zephaniah 2:1-3. I discovered imbedded within Zephaniah a message from the pre-incarnate Christ to the Church, Body of Christ, for us believers in Jesus who would find ourselves living just before the Tribulation. Considering how the Body of Christ is composed of a bunch of bickering, squabbling denominations and individual churches, this is quite an amazing message for the Body of Christ. Since 1995, for example, the Sabbath-keeping Worldwide Church of God has divided into 375 separate, often times, bickering individual denominations. The amazing thing is that they all more or less believe the same as each other doctrinally. In many instances (but not always) it is their leadership who are responsible for the divisions within this part of the Body of Christ. Click on the title of this blog and scroll to Zephaniah 2:1-3 to read this amazing message from the pre-incarnate Jesus Christ to us right now. Now since Jesus gave this message, I would guess Jesus will help bring this unity to pass. Personally, I cannot see how it can occur without his bringing it to pass. But the leadership within the various denominations will have to be cooperative to Jesus' command here. And it is an emphatic command, repeated twice within the same verse. It can't be ecumenical unity either, the type unity the "liberal" dead and dying denominations so often attempt to unify by. Jesus may just use persecution to slam all of us together into one semi-cohesive unit. There are various forms of unity as well, such as unity of purpose, we may become all unified in supporting the proclamation of the Gospel, unified in our support of the non-denominational organizations that proclaim the Gospel to the world. Who knows, though? I don't know how Jesus is going to bring unity about, to help us fulfill his emphatic command for us. Knowing the opposition found within the various parts of the Body of Christ, I'm just as curious as to how Jesus is going to bring unity about as you are. It is kind of interesting I would discover the very verses that proclaim the theme of this website, "UNITYINCHRIST.COM", which continues to operate on an extreme shoestring. But isn't that the way God does things sometimes, starts out really, really small, like that tiny little cloud Elijah's servant saw forming out over the ocean, which turned into a giant flooding rainstorm? Be sure to read that Zephaniah 2:1-3 file, and mull over, meditate on Jesus' message for the Church, the Body of Christ.

Question for ex-Worldwide Church of God members

If you are an ex-Worldwide Church of God member, I have a very good article written about the Worldwide Church of God, which may help put our "Worldwide" experience into proper perspective, and it gives a few helpful suggestions as to where we need to be headed in our spiritual journey right now. The Worldwide Church of God section of this website also helps answer some vital questions about unity within this part of the Body of Christ raised by Jesus Christ in Zephaniah 2:1-3. To log onto the Worldwide Church of God section, click on:

http://www.unityinchrist.com/wwcofg/wwcofgod.html

For another interesting piece that covers some aspects of unity in the Body of Christ, log onto:

http://www.unityinchrist.com/corinthians/1st%20Corinthians.htm

The Plain Truth About The Worldwide Church of God

My Israeli webhost just posted my article (recently researched and written) about what brought about the demise of the Worldwide Church of God as a Sabbatarian Church of God. Although painful for some to read, it was written because many if not most ex-Worldwide Church of God members do not realize why God allowed the Worldwide Church of God to be destroyed. Obviously this is true because the major splinter denominations which split off of WCG in 1995 still continue to make the very same mistakes and treat people the same way WCG did. Why? Because no one has really taught them why God was so displeased with the WCG and why he destroyed the WCG. We all tend to think that a man (or two of them) destroyed the Worldwide Church of God (and they certainly had a good hand in it), but it was really God who allowed them to do it, because he didn't like what he saw or what leadership within the Worldwide Church of God had been doing to those under them. This article was written because there is a need to know for those poor exWCG members who had to go through all of this. There is a need to know because the mistakes that led to the demise of the Worldwide Church of God continue to be made. If that weren't true, there would be no need to write and publish this article, and doing so would be worse than gossip. But this article has redeeming value because it not only names the sins, but points a way out of them, for those who are willing to listen. Click on the title to this blog to take you to the article. By the way, I was a loyal member of the Worldwide Church of God from April of 1970 to around 1996-7, having contributed multiple tens of thousands of dollars in tithes and offerings to God through the WCG. Most longtime WCG members, like me, were truly financial investors in the WCG in that sense, and I would say because of our time and money "invested", we all have the right to know the plain truth about what really happened and why. In spite of the errors (which were in the nature of the hierarchal non-Biblical governmental structure of the Worldwide Church of God), Mr. Armstrong did lay a good foundation doctrinally for Sabbath-keeping Churches of God. But like all foundations, buildings must be built upon them. Right now that foundation sits there, with nothing built upon it. Have you ever seen people (usually ones in the country, out in the woods) who don't have sufficient funds to build their house right away, so they build their foundation, cover over the top of it and live in it until they have the funds to build the house? That is about what we have in the various Sabbath-keeping Churches of God right now. What is it God would have us build on that foundation we were given, and what would God have us avoid in building materials? Check out the upper nav bar buttons on the Worldwide Church of God section for some really good answers to those two timely questions.

Was the Church really like that? Happy Birthday, Body of Christ!

Hi everyone, the Church's (Body of Christ's) birthday is on the day of Pentecost, May 23rd, 2010 this year. Few realize what the history of that early Church was really like. I have a full-length history research paper on the subject, showing what the early Body of Christ was like. I have just updated part III of that research paper, expanding it from a short piece about Constantine, to one that shows the birth and development of the Catholic Church, whose beginnings go as far back as 96AD with their first "Bishop of Rome", Pope Clement. It's an interesting piece, because this history, taken from Paul Johnson's "A History of Christianity" shows how the hierarchal structure of church government slowly but steadily took over that 'universal' church, much to it's own detriment. This hierarchal church government structure in the Church in Rome allowed an 'old boy' network to develop and exist which allowed a high level of corruption to exist in that developing church. The updated section of this early church history article can be found on this link:

http://www.unityinchrist.com/history2/earlychurch3.htm

To log on that link above, just click on the above main title of this blog ("Was the Church Really Like That?"). So be sure to check that link out. The next question that begs asking is: 'Was this the structure to be found within the early Church of God in Jerusalem, or the churches of God that the apostle's Paul and John planted in Corinth and Asia Minor?' The answer: 'No, it was not.' Their congregations, as best as can be determined by searching the Epistles, were semi-autonomous, all coming under the gentle guidance and oversight of the apostles (Paul and John in Asia Minor and Gentile areas, Peter in Judea). Jerusalem up until 70AD was the central HQ church, but church governmental ties to this 'Mother Church' were very loose. General funds and tithes, except for occasional poor offerings sent to Jerusalem, were kept within each congregation, and obviously assisted in local evangelism, which helped grow these congregations. Pastors were chosen by local church members within each congregation, because it was these very same local members who would best know if the one they were choosing to be their pastor met the guidelines laid out by Paul in 1st Timothy 3:1-7. The word "bishop" found in that passage really meant "overseer" or "pastor" at the time Paul penned 1st Timothy. Compare this with the information found on the above link. Sadly, not only the Catholic Church followed this damaging hierarchal structure for church governance, but the Church of England and many Reformation churches followed it as well. Of recent, even some Sabbatarian Church of God denominations have followed it, much to their own hurt. They should look back to how the early Sabbatarian Churches of God in Rhode Island and New Jersey chose their pastors. In the early 1700s the tiny congregation of a Church of God was forming up in Piscataway, New Jersey. The members of this tiny congregation chose one of their own members, an Edward Dunham. They then sent him north to Newport, Rhode Island to have hands laid on him (his formal ordination), and then he was sent back to pastor the congregation that had chosen him (I would strongly suspect they chose him based on Paul's instructions in 1st Timothy 3:1-7). To see what the early Church was like in the 1st through 4th centuries AD, log onto and read:

http://www.unityinchrist.com/history2/index3.htm

Does Jesus want to see the Body of Christ unified, as they were that first Pentecost?

For the answer to that, log onto and read the link below and scroll to the section on Zephaniah 2:1-3:

http://www.unityinchrist.com/prophets/Zephaniah/Zephaniah1.htm

Be sure to log onto and read those links, you will find them most enlightening, maybe disturbing for some, as it's a paradigm-breaker. Happy Birthday Body of Christ, or Happy Pentecost, (and Happy Shevuot to our Messianic Jewish brothers in Yeshua)!