My wife and I were in the mall last Saturday, and like every year, the center of the mall is filled with kiosks during this time of year. One of our favorite is the game kiosk. This year you can get a 24 game, The Office with Steve Carrell, as well as old school stuff like Monopoly.

One game I had to do a double take when I saw it was "Your Best Life Now—the Game," based on Joel Osteen's best-seller. I was absolutely floored. So let me get this straight, all I have to do now is play a board game and I can get whatever I want? That's his theology, you know, "Name it and Claim it" word-of-faith garbage.

Well, I was tempted to pick up a copy for my good friend Scott Clark, but, alas!, someone beat me to it. Sorry, Scott, I looked forward to joining you for family game night.

As you know, I went to Southern California College (now, Vanguard University), the West Coast college of the Assemblies of God (AG). The AG is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. Let me take this opportunity to thank the Lord for using a dear servant to bring me out of the AG and into historic Christianity.

Typical of my experience at college and the church in which I youth pastored, was the so-called belief in the Bible, yet the utter lack of the Bible in any substantive way in worship, especially preaching. All it was, was topics, and stories, and illustrations, and applications...oh, and a few out-of-context Scripture texts laced througout.

Nothing has changed in the typical AG church, as this link shows a local AG (you may have seen their ads on tv here locally, "Something Real is Going On Here") pastor doing a series of sermons based on Carrie Underwood's (yes, the American Idol) hit song, "Jesus, Take the Wheel."

Pray that God would call out his people from their midst into true churches...

We believe, since this holy congregation is an assembly of those who are saved, and outside of it there is no salvation,1 that no person of whatsoever state or condition he may be, ought to withdraw from it, content to be by himself; but that all men are in duty bound to join and unite themselves with it...And that this may be more effectively observed, it is the duty of all believers, according to the Word of God, to separate themselves from all those who do not belong to the Church, and to join themselves to this congregation, wheresoever God has established it... (Belgic Confession, art. 28)

We believe that we ought diligently and circumspectly to discern from the Word of God which is the true Church, since all sects which are in the world assume to themselves the name of the Church. But we speak not here of hypocrites, who are mixed in the Church with the good, yet are not of the Church, though externally in it; but we say that the body and communion of the true Church must be distinguished from all sects that call themselves the Church. The marks by which the true Church is known as these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if it maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God... (Belgic Confession, art. 29)

Thanks to my parishioner, John Whitehouse, for this one...

You may have heard of this article or read it already, but it bears repeating. The November 15 issue of the Wall Street Journal had a feature article (I found it online here as a .pdf) on "pastors" who buy their sermons online, and preach them as their own. They even preach the personal anecdotes as their own! Even worse, one "church" has a sermon service as a "ministry." Take a wild guess as to how much they raked last year through this sincere, Spirit-led ministry? $1.7 million. Can you say, "Building committee fundraiser," anybody?

I, for one, am thankful for great preachers in the history of the church and for my colleagues to bounce ideas off of, but most of all for my education at Westminster Seminary California, which trained me to be "an expert in the Bible." Yeah, I know, dredging through Hebrew and Greek grammars, commentaries, etc, etc, all to craft a text into a sermon may not be sexy, but its faithful to the calling to be a minister of the Word.

Thank you, Wall Street Journal, for exposing these charlatans.