Looking For Fellowship? Be Careful!

Ephesians 5:11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.

1 John 4:1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

Looking for fellowship and like-minded believers I found a bible study in the retirement community where I am living. In attendance there were about six elderly ladies, two gentlemen, another fellow about my age, and two who were in their fifties, the leader and his wife. Everybody was very cordial and they welcomed me to the group. They were studying the book of John and at the time I joined the group they were nearing the end of their study.

I attended about six sessions and things went well. I didn't hear anything that sent my Holy Ghost alarm off. They were very sweet and loving and showed a desire to learn God's word.

We didn't meet during the two weeks of Christmas and New Year's. When we started back up I noticed the group had almost tripled in size. The leader announced that the new people were "Snow Birds" who had come down for the winter.

We were reading Acts. In a nutshell, we were reading about how the Holy Spirit was falling on believers, the church was being persecuted and the believers were being scattered, and the Gospel was being spread throughout the land.

Our sessions usually ran about an hour. We were in the Word for about half an hour when one of the new people, a woman, started speaking about how things were changing in society. And about how mean people had become. She said that the church doors needed to be opened to bring these people in because no matter how bad that person is, there is some good in them. (Red Alert! Red Alert! Alarm Bells Ringing!)

Then it seemed like everybody was clamoring to talk at the same time. (Alarm, Alarm) Not about Acts, but about how they felt about things going on in our culture and society. (Alarm Bells) One gentleman started accusing the Zionist Jews of owning all the news media, and that they controlled everything. (More Alarms Going Off) The bible study leader started talking about politics and the "founding fathers" and how this is a Christian nation and there is no separation between church and state. (Major Alarm Bells!)

I managed to interject one sentence in the melee, something to the effect of, "Well, we just read about how the early believers were persecuted and fled to other areas and the Gospel of Christ was spread." His reply to me was, "Well, I fought for this country, and I'm not about to go anywhere." (This is when the Lord spoke to my spirit and told me to not say anything more.)

There were more things said. I just can't remember everything. But I do know that the spirit in that room was not the Holy Spirit.

It was a total distraction from the study of God's word. They spent at least 20 minutes talking about politics and the things going on in the culture and the world that had nothing to do with the studying of God's word and applying it to our lives. And it was just so sad because the elderly ladies of the original group just sat there with dazed looks on their faces.

After listening to Steve's study Friday night, 1/9/09, Unholy Alliances, I felt that message was meant for me. If you would like to hear it, you can by going to http://www.apostasywatch.com and click on What's New. The title of the message is Unholy Alliances