More Bad News For My Morning Commute

As I mentioned before, my morning commute is long and I use the time to learn the word of God via the radio, however when I discovered that the teachings of Ronald L. Dart were horrifically unbiblical I had to find a new source for listening. 

So I switched back to a local Calvary Church station, however at 5:00 AM their teacher is Levi Lusko. To be honest Levi grates on me, his constant, nonstop pop-culture references and unending attempts to be funny and 'relevant' (for me at least) diminish God's word. I understand that he's trying to reach out to younger Christians, but survey after survey after survey shows that churches pretending to be "relevant" is one of the main things that are driving kids away from the church. Our kids are smart, they know they're being pandered to and "relevance" is merely a ploy to keep the hipster goats in the pews, our kids want the real thing, the pure Gospel, two testaments, both barrels.  

My attempts to ignore the non-stop one liners and Lusko's attempts to move the Book of Ester from bronze age Persia to New Age America was slightly successful, but the laugh-track yuks Lusko was eliciting from the congregation really got annoying 10 minutes into the sermons. Rather than feeling fulfilled, educated, and closer to God because I learned from His word I felt unclean and empty because I felt that His word was being taken away from me. And then, as if to remind me that He gifted me with a modicum of discernment, the Holy Spirit tossed me a grenade. 

The first blow was yesterday's sermon (Of course it could have been recorded a couple of years ago, it's hard to tell on early morning radio) when Lusko openly and unashamedly quoted from Eugene Peterson's The Message satire of the Bible. As I've written before, The Message is not a Bible translation, it is one man's opinion of how the Bible should read. The Message is not a Christian message; picture a sheep opening its mouth and howling at the moon, you really should get the hint that it's not a sheep's message.

Next blow came in todays sermon when an ad for Lusko's ministries announced that Lusko will be working with Rick Warren at Resurgence 2. Now, Rick Warren may be a very nice person, I don't know him but I do know Matthew 7:16, and Warren's fruit is a heretical mess.

And lastly, when I looked up Lusko's church in Kalispell MT, it's called Skull Church. Maybe it's just me, but I was immediately creeped out. Lusko claims that it was named for "The Place of the Skull" where Jesus was brutally executed. I can see a semi-whitty link between Skull Church and Calvary Church, as Calvary is an anglicized version of the word Golgotha which means Place of the Skull. However whitty as this word game may be, words mean things. 

When I consider the use of the skull image for anything to do with the church it just feels wrong. Maybe it's me, but maybe it's the Holy Spirit. The skull is universally considered a symbol of death. Jesus isn't about death, Jesus is about LIFE. There's already skull imagery associated with a church:

This is the Priest's Crucifix, note the skull and crossbones. It's said to symbolize life over death, but how do you symbolize life over death when your symbol of life is showing Jesus being tortured to death? I may be wrong but I'd much rather be safe than sorry and I try to stay far away from anything I'll be sorry about later, and these revelations coming 1-2-3 on top of each other means the Holy Spirit is telling me to steer clear of this radio program and church. 

Maybe Levi Lusko is ok for you, I don't know, it's a possibility. In my case I believe the Holy Spirit is pushing me away from him which means I'm looking again for some proper Gospel for my morning drive to work. Oh well, if some of the farther out stations have nothing for my oh-dark-hundred commute I still have the Grace To You iPhone app to listen to... but what am I going to do for the ride home?!?