Thousands of Christian pastors across North America on Sunday warned their congregations about a new movement that includes a law that blatantly describes biblical morality as a “myth.”
The fight is over Bill C-4, adopted by Canadian lawmakers with little discussion recently. It establishes a legal ban on “conversation therapy.”
That has been made a derogatory term but LGBT activists, but it actually encompasses a wide range of counseling options that people used to have to deal with unwanted same-sex feelings.
Therapists sometimes are able to uncover childhood or other trauma that has triggered a path into alternative sexual lifestyle choices.
The law, which took effect only days ago, prompted an initiative by Liberty Coalition Canada that was promoted by prominent Los Angeles Christian leader John MacArthur – and more than 4,000 Christian pastors publicly protested the law, according to Fox News.
The fast-tracked Canadian law openly defies biblical history and teaching, denouncing those teachings as a “myth,” and imposing a potential five-year jail sentence for failing to align counseling events with the politically correct LGBT agenda.
“MacArthur told Fox News that he believes widespread sexual immorality is evidence of divine judgment on a culture and predicted increased efforts to silence those who speak out against it,” the report explained.
“Ultimately, the dissenters, the ones who will not cave in, are going to be those who are faithful to the Bible,” he said. “And that’s what’s already leading to laws made against doing what we are commanded to do in Scripture, which is to confront that sin. And that’s just going to escalate.”
He added, “The fact that they identified it as a criminal conduct that could give you as much as five years in prison takes it to a completely different level, because Canadian pastors have been put in jail for just having church services.”
Similar legislation already has been adopted in several leftist U.S. states, such as California and New York.
Fox explained MacArthur was involved because of an email he got from Pastor James Coates, who was forced by Canadian authorities to spend a month in a maximum-security prison for refusing to shut down his church services last year.
Coates told Fox News C-4 is “anything but loving” because it appears to “shut the LGBT community off from the saving and transforming message of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“I believe our government is capitalizing on a politically expedient segment of its constituency in an effort to further dismantle Western civilization as we know it. To do this, it must outlaw its very foundation, which is rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview. Bill C-4 is another brick laid in this effort and is evidence that our government is under the judgment of God,” he warned in an interview with Fox.
He said the government simply is setting itself up to impose “persecution” on Christians.
A pastor in Calgary, Tim Stephens, told Fox, “We’ve seen that the new prevailing worldview is totalitarian, seeking to define marriage, sexuality, and control health choices. It is absolutely intolerant to opposing beliefs. All socialistic and communistic movements hate the authority and law of God that Christianity promotes.”
He was jailed twice last year for keeping his services open, events that prompted Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., to ask the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to put Canada on its religious freedom watch list.”
“Pastor Artur Pawlowski, a Polish-Canadian pastor from Calgary who has faced repeated dramatic arrest after refusing to limit church attendance, described Bill C-4 as ‘straight from Soviet Russia,'” Fox reported.
The law is just part of a “dark wave of hostility” that the Christian church is facing, according to Pastor Andrew Brunson, whose jailing in 2016 in Turkey prompted an international scandal over attacks on Christians.
He said the Bible’s foundational statements, from salvation through Jesus only to its standards for marriage, justice and sexual morality, are now the targets of hostility from the world.
WND reported when MacArthur, of Grace Community Church, called on other American pastors to join in the protest against C-4.
MacArthur posted online a statement that Christian leaders are encouraged to sign.
He pointed out the Canadian laws direct defiance of biblical teachings, in its statement that “heterosexuality, cisgender gender identity and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions” is a “myth.”
Pastor Andrew DeBartolo of Encounter Church in Kingston, Ontario, explained the law makes it now illegal to preach from the Bible on those topics of marriage and more.
WND also recently reported on a statement from Albert Mohler.
Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention, said, “Right now in this turning point between 2021 and 2022, we see the shape of the challenge coming to the Christian church even more clearly, or even more ominously. We are about to find out where the biblical Christians are on both sides of the Atlantic, and as you and I know, on both sides of the American/Canadian border.”
He said the LGBT movement, if it is successful in its campaign to persuade governments to restrict what is said about the same-sex agenda, eventually will target even the gospel of Jesus Christ as told in the Bible.
“Let’s just state the obvious. If the government can tell you it is illegal to teach biblical truth on the issue of human sexuality, the array of LGBT issues, understand two things. Number one, it won’t stop with LGBT and understand, eventually it means the criminalization of whatever Christian speech is no longer politically attractive. And that eventually will mean everything that is revealed in scripture, most essentially, the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
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