"The success and growth of the New Age Movement is a direct result of the church's inability to fulfill the ministry of Christ."
This is an age of spiritual disillusionment. Once isolated religions, cults and individual beliefs, are now available via the information highway, wiring our living room sanctuary to the far corners of a divergent planet. Because of this, we are discovering thousands of new and conflicting ways of looking at ourselves and the universe resulting in a loss of spiritual identity, and for many, a loss of faith.
In this new age of technology and science, we will see things our forefathers could only dream of. Yet no matter how entertaining and cool, Ipads, 3D movies and the latest design in toaster ovens are, they cannot feed the spiritual part of us. In fact, cramming our lives with things serves only to increase emptiness and the feeling of lost identity. In response, people are spending millions of dollars on phone-in psychics and on-line fortune tellers seeking spiritual meaning and direction in a wired world.
So why is the church not in the forefront of all this spiritual need? Why are we, not the New Age Movement, in the forefront of alternative health and nutrition? Somehow we have the misguided notion that health, holistic medicine, nutrition, fasting for physical healing, and environmental issues are evil because they have been embraced by the New Age Movement. Yet we must ask an even more sobering question. Why is the New Age Movement in the forefront of these fields?
When the church becomes ineffective in an area of Christ's ministry, it creates a spiritual vacuum. Satan gladly fills that vacuum, not because of His concern for health, but to set up legal authority in peoples' lives. It's the oldest trick in the book—create a major crisis, then as a knight in shining armor—rescue the world from the crisis. When the Antichrist comes onto the scene, he will be politically correct, ecologically and health conscious. He will bring world peace, religious unity, and feed the hungry. He will come as an Angel of Light. In all the problems he has spawned within society, he will present himself as being the solution.
Millions of people all over the world are looking to the New Age Movement for spiritual direction, acceptance and love. Many have come out of organized religion, dismayed and discouraged. Religion could not soothe the spiritual need in their soul. The New Age Movement would make them feel like part of a family. The success and growth of the New Age Movement is a direct result of the church's inability to fulfill the ministry of Christ. Jesus touched the leper, the social outcast. He healed the brokenhearted with words of love, hope and acceptance, unlike the Pharisees who would only point, judge and cloister themselves behind the garb of religiosity.
Look Out For The Bogyman
Books have been written by Christian leaders warning of the New Age Movement’s seductive teaching. We are told not to associate with such evil people for fear that we may become deceived. Fear is worn like a shield of protection, causing us to become completely ineffective in letting the love of Christ shine to a spiritually hungry people. Is our faith so fragile that we must hide behind church doors where we feel comfortable in familiar surroundings? Jesus says go into all the world, not run away from it. The rampant growth of the New Age Movement in North America is the offspring of our own spiritual apathy. Instead of judging people from the New Age Movement, we are to fearlessly reach out with the love and truth of Jesus and touch their lives.
". . . when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"
Luke 18: 8
Christians are called to be a moral lighthouse on the foggy ocean of world thinking. Yet having been given the Word of God, possessed with all the fullness of the Holy Spirit and free from the sin nature, so many suffer in darkness, building belief systems and lifestyles out of an abundance of defective materials, amply provided by a fallen world.
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