There was a family who lived in Melbourne who attended a Pentecostal Church. This was in the 1950s when they preached the Word and were strong against any kind of sinfulness.
We know, for example, that in the 1960s, Thomas Foster set up his CRC in Richmond. In those days, Pentecostals were using the King James Bible, and the Pure Cambridge Edition was in common use. The family that I am referring to actually had PCEs.
However, in the 1960s, there were massive attacks happening on Christianity through the Social Revolution, and the consequential Left-wing inspired attacks on the death penalty in Victoria, the Vietnam war in Australia and so on.
A young man growing up in that environment, in the family I am referring to, with Christians who actually had good beliefs, yet was seduced by the world, turned to sinfulness, promoted human rights and eventually became an atheist.
This young man went from Christianity to error in the following steps:
1. Embraced human rights activism/social revolution causes
2. Rejected the authority of the State
3. Turned to liberal theology
4. Embraced homosexuality
5. Believed evolution
6. Became an atheist
This is important to see in several ways. First, to see how temptation works as a seed by degrees.
The next point is one which contradicts some creationists, who say that basically evolution is the cause of many of today’s evils. At one time people did not believe in evolution, and did evil. As this man’s life illustrates, believing evolution only came at the end, it was actually accepting various errors about “causes” that first seduced him.
I doubt this young man had ever made a true profession of faith, but sort of was, like most, believing on his parents’ coattails.
I say this, because I was 14 when I was born again, and that was a decision independent to my own parents’ views. Evidentially, this young man at age 14 was essentially “converted” to the Left, and that seed of rebellion went the whole way to its full fruit.
This young man accepted a religion of the universal declaration of the human rights, because this is where the “power” of infidelity is based, in a human-based authority about human-derived freedoms.
So how is it that a good Christian family, who were filled with the Spirit, used the King James Bible, and spoke strongly against sins, yet brought up a son who rebelled entirely against this?
There’s a lot of children who have been abandoning the faith since the 1960s, and while the Church and families can be blamed for that, we also need to understand that in the world, the spirit of error has become very strong.
In those days Pentecostals viewed movies and television as evil. And in time, when they got a TV set, they would strongly restrict how much television the children could see. Often, young people who grow up feeling repressed would rebel. This was because Christians no long saw their religion as powerful, but rather thought that cutting off from the world would ensure purity and preservation of God’s tiny remnant.
While censorship and caution are commendable, the defeatist mentality and legalism were not right.
A truly born again person should not have internal longing for sin and carnality. The solution, therefore, would be to convert the children. This would require knowledgeable parents to instruct their children in the Lord. Sadly, the parents often were not knowledgeable, and this all the way back through the generations.
So then, the true solution would be a level of Christian education so that people who know the truth would be able to educate their children properly.
The most important spiritual movement we can ever see is where normal people are educated so as to educate their children properly.
Pr 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Heb 8:11 And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.
