Islam Anxious to Fill a Void Left by a Dying European Christian Faith!
March 14, 2006
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
I read an interesting article last month by Dale Hurd, CBN News Sr.
Reporter. The article was titled “Europe Forsakes Christianity for Islam?” Hav ing been stationed
in Europe and the Middle East in the fifties and sixties, and observing the deterioration of Christianity that occurred just during that period, plus the changes I noted on numerous visits in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, I was not surprised at his findings.
Islam is anxious to fill the void left behind by a dying Christian Faith in Europe. Jesus started the spread of the Christian faith across Europe by what he taught in Israel for more than three years after he was baptized and became head of the first church made up of his disciples.
His local churches multiplied across all of southeastern, central, and western Europe through many centuries, and then they began to die. Today their spiritual decline has led to a European continent filled with gigantic church buildings of great antiquity, but these huge edifices do not contain great numbers of the masses, and are ever declining in the
numbers of spiritual worshippers inside them. They do not exhibit the spiritual zeal and intensity of the first local churches in Europe, and are filled with a cold sense
of rigid formality and beautiful costumes that do not reflect what lives inside them.
Jesus called out and organized the first New Testament Church during his earthly ministry of more than three years. Its initial composition consisted of 11 men who had repented of their sins and one who had not, but all 12 had been baptized by John the Baptist. The simplistic teachings of Christ had been presented to them as they traveled with him.
After the Lord’s resurrection from the dead, local churches began to be formed, northward into Syria, then Turkey, then Greece, then Rome, then France and, during many centuries, around the earth.
II Corinthians 11:3 – But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
For all practical purposes, his simplistic teachings, and spreading local churches, have now been replaced by a European continent blanketed with huge edifices of worship that most Europeans fail to enter except maybe once or twice a year at Christmas and Easter, and a majority never darken the door of any church building at any time.
The few that do attend are elderly, and many of them come as a habit, rather than as a time of joy and opportunity.
The younger generation, in general, does not only attend church, but is antireligious for the most part.
France is perhaps the worst in Europe regarding church attendance, where only five percent go to church on a weekly basis and only ten percent think religion is very important. Across the rest of Europe only about 21 percent think religion is very important.
The weakness of the Christian faith in Europe has not been able to deal with the tremendous influx of Muslims from Africa and the Middle East. But they have viewed the intensity of fanatical religious Islamic fever displayed by the burnings of countless vehicles during the riots of Europe that began in France. And they have felt the sting of Islamic tenacity in the violent protests against cartoons of Muhammad, which appeared first in the Danish press. Europe is afraid of its own shadow, and turning to the God of their forefathers to deliver them from their fears does not even cross their carnal minds. Europe is not converting Islam to Christianity – Islam is converting Europeans to Islam.
There is a question that Jesus asked openly, not because he did not know the answer, but because he wanted mankind to know how it would be on this earth when he returned.
Luke 18:7,8 – And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them
? [8] I tell you that he will avenge them speedily.
Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, SHALL HE FIND (THE) FAITH ON THE EARTH?
He indicated there would be pitifully few men and women following the same teachings he delivered to his first church. I believe Europe is now in that faithless state he implied.
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