Transcription
God said something to his own people in Amos 5:21 that should disturb every churchgoer alive today. "I hate. I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies."
Hate, despise, take no delight. That is God speaking, not about a pagan temple, but about his own house, his own people, his own worship services. The God who invented worship looked at what his people had turned it into and said he hated it. That was not an Old Testament problem that the New Testament fixed. That was a pattern, and it is repeating right now in churches across the world in ways that most congregations have completely normalized. Today, we're naming seven of them.
The first thing happening in your church right now that God calls wickedness is worship that has become a performance rather than an offering. The lights are perfect, the sound is polished, the worship leader hits every note, and God is not moved by any of it because the hearts behind the production are not in it. Isaiah 29:13 records God's verdict on this type of worship. "This people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me." Lips that honor, hearts that are far. The worship sounds right, the worship looks right, and the God it is directed at knows the difference between a performance aimed at an audience and an offering aimed at him. John 4:24 gives the only standard of worship God accepts. "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." In spirit, not in production quality. In truth, not in emotional manipulation. The church that has invested more in its sound system than in the spiritual condition of the people operating it has confused the vehicle with the destination. God is not impressed by your worship set. He is looking past the stage lights directly into the hearts behind them, and lights cannot hide what he already sees.
The second thing happening in your church right now that God calls wickedness is preaching designed to make people feel good rather than preaching designed to make them holy. Second Timothy 4:3-4 predicted this with terrifying accuracy. "For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths." Itching ears, teachers accumulated to suit their own passions. This is not a warning about a future generation. This is a description of churches that exist right now. Churches where the sermons are carefully crafted to avoid anything that might make the congregation uncomfortable, where sin is never named, repentance is never required, and the cross is mentioned only as a symbol of love and never as a call to die. Ezekiel 13:10 gives God's verdict on the preachers who participate in this. "Because they have misled my people saying peace when there is no peace." Saying peace when there is no peace. The congregation leaves feeling encouraged, uplifted, and affirmed, and they are no closer to genuine repentance than when they walked in. The preacher has given them comfort instead of truth, applause instead of conviction, and a motivational speech instead of the word of God. And God calls it wickedness because the people who needed the truth received a substitute that left them feeling saved while remaining unchanged. A sermon that never makes you uncomfortable has never told you the truth. And a preacher who never offends anyone has never fully represented God.
The third thing happening in your church right now that God calls wickedness is the commercialization of the house of God. Turning the church into a revenue-generating enterprise where offerings are manipulated, products are sold from the pulpit, and financial gain has quietly become a driving motive behind decisions that should be driven entirely by the spirit of God. Jesus responded to this with the only recorded act of physical anger in his entire ministry. John 2:15-16 records him making a whip, driving out the merchants, and declaring, "Take these things away. Do not make my Father's house a house of trade." The only time Jesus made a weapon was against the people who turned the house of God into a marketplace.
1 Timothy 6:5 identifies the spiritual condition of leaders who use the church for financial gain. "People who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain." Imagining that godliness is a means of gain. The pastor who manipulates seed offerings, who pressures tithes with fear-based theology, who lives in luxury funded by the sacrificial giving of people who can barely afford their rent, has turned godliness into a business model. And Jesus did not debate that. He made a whip. The only time Jesus used a weapon was against people who turned his father's house into a business. If your church looks more like a corporation than a family, ask yourself who is really leading it.
The fourth thing happening in your church right now that God calls wickedness is the deliberate covering, excusing, and protecting of sin in church leadership to preserve the reputation of the institution. A pastor falls into sexual sin and the board covers it up. A leader is abusive to staff and the elders ask the staff to be more understanding. Financial corruption is discovered and the response is a quiet restructuring rather than public repentance. Revelation 2:20 records Jesus rebuking the church at Thyatira for exactly this pattern. "But I have this against you that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, in teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality. You tolerate." The sin was known, the leadership knew about it, and instead of confronting it, they tolerated it. And Jesus held the entire church accountable for the tolerance. 1 Corinthians 5:6 gives the principle that makes institutional covering of leadership sin so spiritually dangerous. "Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?" A little leaven. One leader's protected sin does not stay contained. It spreads into the culture of the entire church, normalizing compromise, rewarding silence, and teaching the congregation by example that reputation matters more than repentance. And God does not hold only the sinning leader accountable. He holds the institution that protected them accountable as well. A church that protects its reputation at the expense of the truth has already chosen which one it worships, and it is not God.
The fifth thing happening in your church right now that God calls wickedness is something so common that most churches do not even recognize it as sin anymore. And that is showing favoritism to wealthy, influential, or well-connected members while neglecting, ignoring, or marginalizing the poor, the ordinary, and the unimpressive. James 2:1-4 addresses this with a specificity that most church leaders have never preached on. "If a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, 'You sit here in a good place,' while you say to the poor man, 'You stand over there or sit down at my feet.' Have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?" Judges with evil thoughts. That is what God calls the church that gives the wealthy donor a front-row seat in a leadership position while the single mother who can barely afford to tithe is invisible.
James 2:5 gives the divine perspective that reverses the entire value system of the favoritism-driven church. "Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?" God chose the poor, and the church that treats them as less important than the wealthy has inverted the value system of the kingdom it claims to represent. If your church treats the wealthy donor and the struggling single mother differently, it has already decided who it actually serves, and it is not the God who chose the poor to be rich in faith.
The sixth thing happening in your church right now that God calls wickedness is gossip dressed up in spiritual language and disguised as prayer requests, accountability, and pastoral concern. "I'm not gossiping. I'm just sharing so we can pray. I'm only telling you because I'm concerned about them. I heard something about brother so-and-so and I think the leadership should know." These are the phrases that give gossip a church membership badge, and they're destroying more people, more reputations, and more trust inside churches than almost any other single behavior. Proverbs 16:28 says, "A dishonest man spreads strife, and a whisperer separates close friends." A whisperer, not a shouter, not a public accuser, a whisperer, the person who says it quietly, privately, always to just one more person. Romans 1:29-30 lists gossip alongside murder, malice, and God-hating in a catalog of sins that Paul says deserve death, and most Christians have never even noticed it was on the list. It is not a small sin. It is not a personality flaw. It is listed beside murder, and the church that has normalized it under the cover of prayer and concern has normalized something God considers wicked enough to list alongside the worst sins a human being can commit. The moment you share someone's private struggle under the cover of a prayer request, you have stopped praying for them and started gossiping about them. God knows the difference, even if your small group does not.
The seventh thing happening in your church right now that God calls wickedness is the neglect of the poor, the widow, and the orphan. The three groups God specifically named as the measure of whether a community genuinely represents him or merely talks about him. James 1:27 gives the definition of genuine religion that most church mission statements have never quoted. "Religion that is pure and undefiled before the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." That is it. Orphans and widows, that is what God calls pure religion. Not conferences, not building programs, not social media followings. Orphans and widows. Isaiah 1:13-17 records God rejecting the entire worship system of Israel, their offerings, their incense, their assemblies, and giving one instruction for how to make their worship acceptable again. "Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause." The fatherless, the widow, justice, oppression. A church that has a state-of-the-art building and a worship budget in the hundreds of thousands while the widows in its own congregation eat alone and the orphans in its own city go unsponsored has inverted the priorities of the God whose name is on the sign outside. And God does not call that a budget problem. He calls it wickedness. God measures your church not by the quality of its stage, but how it treats the widow sitting in the back row. If she is invisible to you, your church has a problem that no building fund can fix.
Here is what I want you to understand. This video is not an attack on the church. I love the church. Jesus loves the church. He died for it. But loving something means being honest about what is wrong with it, not pretending everything is fine while it quietly rots from the inside. Every single thing on this list—the performative worship, the ear-tickling preaching, the commercialization, the protected sin, the equal favoritism, the gossip, and the neglect of the vulnerable—is happening right now in churches that genuinely believe they are honoring God. And the reason they believe it is that nobody has had the courage to say what Amos said, what Isaiah said, what Jesus said, and what James said: that God is not honored by activity that contradicts his character. He is grieved by it.
Revelation 2:5 gives the instruction that every church in this condition needs to hear and obey. "Remember therefore from where you have fallen. Repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place." The lampstand is the church's light, its witness, its purpose, its reason for existing. And Jesus said he will remove it if repentance does not come. The good news is that repentance is still available today for every church, for every leader, for every member who watched this and recognized something that needs to change. Repent. Return to the works you did at first: the genuine worship, the honest preaching, the generous care, the transparent leadership, the equal treatment, the guarded tongue, and the active love for the people God said matter most. Do that, and the lampstand stays, and the church becomes what it was always meant to be.
Subscribe to Faith Abounds Network right now and hit that notification bell. We release teachings like this one every single week. Share this video with your pastor, your church leaders, and every believer you know, because the church that is willing to hear hard truth is the church that is positioned to be healed by it. And leave a comment below. Tell me which of these seven things you have seen in your own church. God bless you, and I will see you in the next message.