Welcome back to Defenders Voice. This is Dr.Paul. Thank you for joining us today. Defenders Voice is about defending the great truths of Christian faith against the challenges of our time. Please visit our web site http://www.doctor paul.org. I take your questions and answer them in the coming episodes. You can send your questions to info@doctorpaul.org. Please send any question you want me to answer to info@doctorpaul.org. Today’s question is Francis Chan’s call for unity. Is it biblical?
Francis Chan. Who is this Francis Chan? I heard him for the first time when he spoke with Ravi Zacharias in Atlanta. He is a Christian minister and writer. His parents were from Hong Kong. When I was a kid, I used to watch Jackie Chan movies. In India Jackie Chan was very famous. Chan must be a common name in Hong Kong. Francis Chan just returned from Hong Kong and already made sensational comments. ……You just came back. Can’t keep quiet for a few days? It shows some attention seeking behavior.
Francis graduated from Master’s Seminary presided by great John MacArthur. Then he started churches, as he became more popular, he started interdenominational outreach. In 2018 he was prayed over by multiple Catholic priests. Recently he spoke at a Catholic Conference. Mingling with Catholics for the sake of unity would horrify John MacArthur. Corrupting the gospel of Christ with Catholic paganism is not right.
He said, “I don’t know if it’s the pandemic or just getting away from America, but you come back and you realize, ‘Wow, every individual is super opinionated and super sure of themselves and they’re right and you’re wrong about everything,. “It’s this overwhelming flood of opinions that we have here in the West that you almost don’t realize it until you get out.”
Chan says Western Church is bad. I can see it from Hong Kong. Western Church? If you want unity, why are you saying Western Church and Eastern Church? There is only one body of Christ. Give some credit to the Western Church. You don’t have to bash it at every opportunity. In every nation, there are good churches and bad churches. You don’t have to make such sweeping statements. Pope Francis looks after the largest religious organization in the world. He would be more modest than Francis Chan. Such sweeping generalizations are unwarranted.
My dad once told me, “we should be thankful to the Churches in America because they sent us the missionaries to preach the gospel. If it were not for their generosity, we would never have heard about Jesus’. My dad had such appreciation for the churches in America. It is ok to say nice things about the Western Church once in a while.Mr. Chan does not have to condemn it in every interview. He is always whining and complaining about the Western Church. I think he should be more thankful.
Then Mr. Chan complained, there is no unity in the Western church. Now, unity is a tricky subject. I need to explain a lot of things here. There is professional unity. If you are doing a job, you need to have unity with other workers whether they are Christians or atheists or Muslims or Hindus. That unity is a good thing to get the job done.
You can have unity with your neighbors in your community to hold a yard sale. You need to have unity with your neighbors if you want to organize a baseball game in your community. That is good.
Then we have spiritual unity. God demands separation and unity. For the sake of truth we should separate from falsehoods. First comes truth and then comes unity. Spiritual unity should only be with those individuals who share the truth with you.
Spiritual unity should be based on truth, not love. Off course we should love all people. But in the name of love, you should not sacrifice truth. Mr.Chan wrote a book titled Crazy Love. Crazy Love? That is not an appropriate title for a Christian book. John MacArthur never gives such a title to one of his books. There is nothing crazy about Christian love. It is a serious matter. It is a somber subject. You need some decorum when you write a Christian book. Don’t cheapen it. Don’t use words like crazy that cheapens God’s love.
It seems to me that Mr.Chan has been making love as the foundation for unity. But I think truth should be the foundation for unity. We see Mr.Chan speaking along with Catholic bishops, prosperity preachers like Benny Hindu, and false teachers like Todd White. You should not associate with false teachers, prosperity preachers, Catholic bishops in the name of unity.
Over all, I have to say that Mr.Chan does not have discernment for Christian truth. So, His calls for unity are not biblical.
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