Transcription
God loves the church. That is not in question. But loving something does not mean approving of everything it does. And there are things happening inside churches right now. Things that have been normalized, celebrated, and even defended with scripture that God has not changed his mind about. The word he uses in his word for some of these things is not mistake. It is not weakness. The word he uses is abomination.
Today we are going to look at seven of them. Not to attack the church, but to protect it. Because the most loving thing a watchman can do is tell the truth. Stay with me.
The first thing churches do that God calls an abomination is turning the house of God into a commercial enterprise where the primary focus of ministry has quietly shifted from the glory of God and the salvation of souls to the generation of income, the building of a brand and the accumulation of financial power under the covering of religious language. John 2:13-16 records one of the most physically dramatic moments in the entire ministry of Jesus. He walked into the temple courts, saw merchants selling animals and money changers operating tables of exchange. And he made a whip of cords and drove them all out, overturning their tables, scattering their coins, and declaring, "Take these things away. Do not make my father's house a house of trade." This was not a gentle rebuke. This was righteous fury. The son of God physically clearing out what did not belong in the presence of his father.
Now, this is not a teaching against churches receiving offerings or paying their pastors. 1 Corinthians 9:14 clearly establishes that those who preach the gospel should make their living from the gospel. Tithing, giving, and financial support of ministry are all biblical and important. The problem is something different. It is the church that has been restructured around revenue. Where the decisions about what is preached, what is taught, and who is welcomed are driven not by the word of God in the leading of the Holy Spirit, but by what will generate the largest financial return. It is the church where the gospel has become a product. The congregation has become a customer base and the pastor has become a CEO whose primary accountability is to the bottom line rather than to the God who called him.
Malachi 3:5 records God pronouncing judgment on those who exploit people. In the context is the religious leadership of Israel who were using the structures of worship to extract from people rather than genuinely serve them. First Timothy 6:5 warns about people who suppose that godliness is a means of gain. And Paul identifies that attitude as a corruption of the mind that has been robbed of the truth. When a church is more concerned with your financial contribution than your spiritual transformation. When the pressure to give feels more consistent than the invitation to encounter God. When financial campaigns are more prominent than calls to genuine repentance and prayer, something has gone deeply wrong. And God who sees past every religious covering to the true motivation underneath is not impressed by the size of the building that was built with it.
The second thing churches do that God calls an abomination is preaching a gospel that has been deliberately edited to remove the call to genuine repentance. A smooth, comfortable, crowd-pleasing message that tells people God loves them and has a wonderful plan for their life without ever telling them that sin has separated them from that God and that genuine turning away from that sin is a non-negotiable part of coming back to him. Proverbs 17:15 says, "He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord." When a preacher stands behind a pulpit and delivers a message that effectively justifies people in their sin that tells them God accepts them exactly as they are with no expectation of change, no confrontation of what the Bible clearly identifies as sin and no call to the repentance that scripture places at the very heart of the gospel. That preacher is doing something God calls an abomination, regardless of how large the congregation is or how good the sermon felt.
2 Timothy 4:3-4 describes this pattern with a precision that feels written for the present moment. 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. The congregation that wants to feel good rather than be transformed. The preacher who discovers that certain messages grow the crowd and certain messages shrink it, and who quietly, gradually adjusts their content to serve the crowd's appetite rather than their soul's genuine need. This is not just poor theology. It is spiritual negligence of the most serious kind. Because a doctor who tells a sick patient they are healthy in order to avoid a difficult conversation has not been kind, they have been cruel. And a preacher who removes repentance from the gospel has not made it more loving. They have made it lethal.
The third thing churches do that God calls an abomination is tolerating and even celebrating proud, arrogant, divisive leadership. Pastors and church leaders whose ministries are built more on personal charisma, personal empire, and personal glory than on genuine servant-hearted submission to God and genuine love for the people they were called to serve. Proverbs 6:16-19 lists seven things that are an abomination to the Lord. And two of them speak directly to this. A proud look and one who sows discord among brothers. Both of these are characteristics that have become alarmingly common in church leadership culture. Leaders who present themselves as uniquely anointed, uniquely elevated, and uniquely beyond the accountability that applies to ordinary believers, and who create division, competition, and strife between churches, between ministries, and between believers as a byproduct of their need to be supreme.
Jesus addressed the pride problem in church leadership directly and repeatedly in Matthew 23:11-12. He said, "The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." The entire culture of spiritual celebrity, the leader who travels with an entourage, who cannot be approached without going through layers of gatekeepers, who speaks about their anointing more than about Christ, who builds a following that is loyal to them personally rather than to the Jesus they claim to represent is the precise opposite of the servant leadership model that Jesus modeled and commanded. 1 Peter 5:3 instructs elders not to lord it over those entrusted to their care, but to be examples to the flock. The word lord it over is the Greek word katakaro, to exercise dominion, to dominate, to control. That spirit in church leadership does not just grieve the Holy Spirit. It creates the conditions under which spiritual abuse, manipulation, and the exploitation of vulnerable believers becomes inevitable. And the division that proud leadership sows is taken with equal seriousness by God. Romans 16:17 commands believers to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught and avoid them. The leader who speaks disparagingly of other ministries from the pulpit, who creates an us versus them culture that isolates their congregation from the broader body of Christ, who uses their platform to tear down rather than build up, is sowing precisely the discord that Proverbs 6 identifies as an abomination. The church was designed to be a community of unity, of mutual honor, and of shared purpose. Every leader who tears at that unity for the sake of their own elevation is working against the very thing Jesus prayed for in John 17:21, that they all may be one.
The fourth thing churches do that God calls an abomination is operating with financial dishonesty. Misrepresenting how funds are used, making false promises to donors about what their giving will produce, and using deceptive fundraising practices that exploit the faith and generosity of sincere believers for personal gain. Proverbs 11:1 says, "A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight." The image of a false balance, scales that have been secretly rigged to misrepresent the true measure of a transaction, is the Old Testament picture of financial deception. And God does not grade financial dishonesty differently when it happens inside a church building or under a religious banner. He calls it what it is, regardless of the context in which it occurs.
The specific form this takes in many churches today is the manipulative use of giving promises. The guarantee that if you give a certain amount, God will return it to you multiplied in financial blessing. This is not the biblical teaching on generosity and sowing. This is the distortion of those teachings into a transactional system where giving becomes less about worship and obedience and more about a financial investment strategy with God as the guaranteed return. 2 Peter 2:3 says of false teachers, "and in their greed they will exploit you with false words." The word exploit means to make merchandise of, to treat people as raw material to be processed for personal gain. When a church uses manufactured urgency, emotional manipulation, and false spiritual promises to extract money from people who are genuinely trying to honor God with their finances, that is not ministry. That is exploitation wearing a religious costume.
Acts 5:1-11 records the story of Ananias and Sapphira, a couple in the early church who sold a piece of land and secretly kept back part of the proceeds while presenting it to the apostles as the full amount. The judgment that fell on them was immediate and severe, not because they kept some of the money, but because they lied about it. They brought deception into the house of God. And Peter's words to Ananias in verse four establish the principle. "You have not lied to men but to God." Financial dishonesty in the church is not a governance issue or an accounting problem. It is a direct offense against the God whose house it is, and he sees every transaction, every misrepresentation, and every dollar that was taken in his name and used for purposes that have nothing to do with his kingdom.
The fifth thing churches do that God calls an abomination is silencing, marginalizing, and attacking the voices of genuine prophets, genuine teachers, and genuine men and women of God who carry a word that challenges the comfort, the culture, or the leadership structure of the church. Throughout the entire history of Israel in the Old Testament, the pattern is tragically consistent. The prophets God sent to call his people back to truth were not welcomed. They were rejected, persecuted, imprisoned, and killed. Jesus addressed this pattern directly in Matthew 23:37. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who were sent to it." And in Matthew 5:12, he told his disciples that the persecution of genuine prophets was not new. "For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."
In the modern church, the silencing of genuine truthtellers rarely takes the form of physical persecution. It takes the form of character assassination, attacking the person rather than engaging with the message they carry. It takes the form of institutional pressure, using the authority structures of the church to marginalize anyone whose message creates discomfort for leadership. It takes the form of theological gatekeeping, dismissing genuine biblical conviction as divisive, negative, or unloving simply because it confronts what needs to be confronted. Jeremiah 20:9 captures the anguish of a true prophet who tried to stop speaking and found he could not. "There is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot." A genuine word from God burns. It cannot be permanently suppressed. And the church that suppresses it does not silence God. It only silences itself.
1 Thessalonians 5:19-20 commands believers, "Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies." The word despise means to treat as worthless, to dismiss with contempt. A church culture that has learned to dismiss every uncomfortable word, every genuine rebuke, every message that does not fit the preferred narrative of leadership as irrelevant, divisive or spiritually immature has not created a healthy environment. It has created a spiritually dangerous one because it has shut the door to the very correction that God sends through human voices to keep his people on the right path. Proverbs 29:18 says, "Where there is no prophetic vision, the people cast off restraint." A church without genuine prophetic voice is not a protected church. It is an unguided one.
The sixth thing churches do that God calls an abomination is showing partiality. Treating wealthy, influential, or socially prominent members with preferential honor and access, while the poor, the struggling, and the ordinary are treated as secondary citizens of the kingdom. James 2:1-4 addresses this with uncomfortable directness. "My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For 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?" Evil thoughts. James does not call this a social preference or a cultural tendency. He calls it evil. And Proverbs 24:23 states plainly, "Partiality in judging is not good."
The church was designed by God to be the one community on earth where the distinctions that the world uses to separate and rank people—wealth, status, education, social connection, physical appearance—have no power. Galatians 3:28 declares, "There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus." The ground is level at the foot of the cross. Every person who walks through the doors of a church carries the same infinite value before God because every person was made in his image and every person was purchased by the same blood. The church that reserves its best seats, its most attentive care, and its most enthusiastic welcome for people with money and influence, while treating the poor and the struggling as burdens rather than as brothers and sisters has forgotten what it is and whose it is.
The seventh thing churches do that God calls an abomination is worship that has been turned into a performance. A carefully produced, aesthetically impressive, emotionally engineered experience that is designed to move the congregation rather than to genuinely honor God. Isaiah 29:13 records God's heartbreak over exactly this kind of worship. "This people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me. And their fear of me is a commandment taught by men." Lip worship. Worship that reaches the ceiling but never reaches heaven because it originates not in genuine encounter with the living God but in the desire to create a certain atmosphere, to maintain a certain reputation, or to produce a certain emotional response in the people watching.
Amos 5:21-23 contains one of the most startling statements in all of scripture. God speaking directly about the worship of Israel and saying, "I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. In the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs. To the melody of your harps, I will not listen." God calling worship noise. God refusing to look at offerings. God saying he hates the religious gatherings of his own people. Not because worship itself displeases him. He inhabits the praises of his people (Psalm 22:3). But because this worship had become disconnected from genuine obedience, genuine justice, and genuine heart surrender. The production was excellent. The hearts were absent.
John 4:23-24 records Jesus telling the Samaritan woman what genuine worship looks like. "But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." Spirit and truth both together. Worship that is genuine in its heart motivation, rising from a spirit that is truly surrendered to God, and worship that is truthful in its content, grounded in the actual reality of who God is and what he has done. The church that pursues the feeling of worship without the foundation of obedience, that invests more in the production of worship than in the formation of worshippers, that mistakes emotional response for genuine encounter, has built something that looks like worship from the outside, but that God who looks at the heart does not receive.
As such, we have walked through seven things that churches do that God calls abomination: treating the house of God like a business, preaching a gospel without repentance, proud and divisive leadership, financial dishonesty, silencing genuine prophetic voices, showing favoritism based on wealth, and worship performed for people rather than offered to God.
And I want to say something important before we close. This teaching is not an attack on the church. The church is the body of Christ. It is the community he died to create, the family he called us into, and the vehicle he chose to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth. The church matters to God more than we can understand. And it is precisely because it matters so much that these things need to be named clearly and honestly.
Ezekiel 3:17 gives the sobering responsibility of every person who carries God's word. "Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me." A watchman does not stand on the wall to terrify the city. He stands there to protect it, to see what is coming before it arrives and to sound the alarm while there is still time to respond. That is the spirit in which this message was delivered today. Not condemnation, not superiority, not the satisfaction of finding fault, but the genuine pastoral, biblically grounded desire to see the church of Jesus Christ become what he died to make it: holy, genuine, truthful, and fully surrendered to the God whose name it bears.
If you are part of a church where some of these things are happening, the answer is not to immediately leave and isolate yourself from Christian community. The answer is first to pray for your leaders, for your church, and for genuine reformation. The answer is to examine your own participation in these patterns honestly before God. And if after genuine prayer and honest effort, the church continues in a direction that is clearly contrary to scripture, then Proverbs 4:14-15 gives wisdom that applies. "Do not enter the path of the wicked and do not walk in the way of the evil. Avoid it. Do not go on it. Turn away from it and pass on." God always has a place of genuine worship and genuine community for his people. Do not stop seeking it.
If this message has been meaningful to you today, please subscribe to Faith Ablaze Network right now and hit that notification bell. We are committed to delivering this kind of honest, biblically grounded teaching every single week. Share this video with someone who loves the church enough to want it to be better, because that is exactly the spirit this message was written in. And leave a comment below. Tell me which of these seven things you have personally witnessed in a church setting. Your honesty in the comments builds a community of people who are serious about genuine faith. God bless you and I will see you in the next.