Indeed, truth is under siege and there is a consequence to our ideas. So often we think that ideas come out of ivory towers and scholars debate them but we fail to realize that ideas have consequences.

 

If you don’t think ideas have consequences, just think back to October 1917. The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin; he was campaigning on the promise of change, and he led his Bolshevik party to victory promising that change would come. He was convinced that redistribution of wealth would draw heaven down to earth and so the Bolshevik bureaucrats in Moscow began printing money. They began seizing church assets and began confiscating private property. They nationalized Russian banks, factories, and farms. They provided a system of socialized medicine; in fact, in 1918 Lenin introduced a cradle to grave healthcare system that utterly bankrupted the Soviet economy.

 

We would think that the utter failure and devastation that ensued in the wake of Lenin’s failed socialist experiment would have precluded any other government from following the same fool hardy foot trend, but it didn’t, and all you had to do was think back to another October. This was in 194., Mao Tse Tung established the People’s Republic of China, and he began a similar socialist experiment. It was called the “Great Leap Forward”. Well ideas have consequences and the Chinese economy was ultimately devastated, 20 million or more died of starvation; 20 million more died in reeducation camps.

 

So many more examples could be given, but the truth is, ideas have consequences, and it’s not just true in geo-political circumstances. It’s true within the Christian faith. When I say, “Truth Under Siege,” it is because I want people to recognize that the Christian church needs to undergo paradigm changes.

 

Millions, and I mean literally millions, within the Christian faith have been sucked into Word of Faith Churches. Some have paid the ultimate price of the ideas being communicated by popular prophecy pundits. One woman believed that words could create reality, and thus denied the symptoms of cancer paid the ultimate price with her life. Ideas have consequences. Or think of the person that buys into the Faith movement’s view of faith and becomes disillusioned and falls out of the back door of a church into the Kingdom of the Cults, maybe sipping cyanide.

 

Cyanide sounds kind of Draconian; but think about a person who ends up in a Christ-less eternity because a Word of Faith teacher dragged Christ’s name through the mud. We don’t have to think any further than Luke 16 where a rich man experiences torment. He wants to go back and warn his five brothers so that they do not come to a place like this apart from the goodness and grace of God for all eternity. Think sipping cyanide is bad? Imagine forever, forever, forever being separated from the grace of God.

 

We do what we do at the Christian Research Institute because ideas have consequences. For your gift to our ongoing work, I’d like you to get a copy of message I delivered in Los Angeles earlier this year, entitled Truth Under Siege. You can get this at our Website of www.equip.org or by calling us 1-888-7000-0274.