No Sleepwalking Allowed Series

Let me read to you about a recent event that occurred at Northpoint Church in Atlanta, Georgia, a church pastored by a former classmate of mine at Dallas Seminary by the name of Andy Stanley. The church consists of 40,000 people. This is from a story in a fall issue of World magazine.

“As attenders at a sold-out parenting conference at North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia, streamed out the doors into the parking lot, twin lines of blue-shirted volunteers cheered and held signs that read, “You are loved,” “You’ve got this!” and “You’re not alone.”

North Pont held the conference, called “Unconditional” at the end of September for “Parents, ministry leaders, and counselors who want to love and support the LGBTQ+ Community well. Attendees snapped up every available ticket weeks in advance, even though some cost well over $500. The event’s 14 speakers included Andy Stanley, North Point’s founder, and senior pastor, as well as two men, Justin Lee and Brian Neitzel, who are married to other men. Lee believes God blesses same-sex marriages and Neitzel co-founded Renovus, a nonprofit that aims to create “a world where no one has to choose between their faith and sexual orientation.”

Well, this is heresy. And a Dallas Seminary Graduate, Andy Stanley, who attended Dallas Seminary instead of any of the Southern Baptist's own seminaries even though his dad was the President of the Southern Baptist Convention because of the seminary’s stand on Biblical infallibility—even he has now caved to the culture, and compromised with the world, and is supporting and apparently teaching that you can be saved and be a practicing homosexual at the same time. Its’ unbiblical, and it’s a false gospel. This letter of Paul, in a time when homosexuality was rampant in the Roman Empire, addresses the this question of whether someone can be saved and practice homosexuality in I Corinthians 6:9-11: “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, no drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

In other words, the faith that saves is also the faith that repents, and if there is no repentance from gross sins like homosexuality and gender mutilation, there is no salvation, no forgiveness, no kingdom of God, and no heaven.

Risen King will never cave to the culture as long as I’m here. It will only happen over my dead body!

So, what would Paul say to the Evangelical Church in America today! Wake up, Stop sleepwalking. And stand firmly and courageously in your Biblical faith—the faith that was once for all delivered up for the saints in the New Testament, by the Apostles.

And so even as it has been true that a spiritual leader in Georgia can lead his entire huge congregation astray by his own compromise, so often it does come down to the convictions of the spiritual leaders, the shepherds whose job it is to lead and feed the flock.