Preaching from Ephesians 1:11-14, John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, took a minute to call out Joel Osteen and his rotten book Your Best Life Now taking it to task for the false promise that it presents. MacArthur notes that for For unbelievers, this is their best life. For Christian, this is not our best life, but rather our worse life, because our best life will be in heaven.
Tim Hurd, who does excellent analysis every week and where we pulled the video from, also explains that this is the first time in a long time that the camera person is showing the crowds and congregants, now that California is allowing churches to gather. For many months they had abanded their traditional practice of showing the audience and chose to focus the whole time on MacArthur, so as not to give authorities an idea of who was in their congregation, lest they be subject to fines and punishment.
I was asked this morning if this was my last sermon ever, because it was titled the final blessing. (Laughter) Now I know for some of you that would be the final blessing (Laughter)
It was about a dozen years ago that a popular book came out written by Joel Osteen, the title of the book was your best life now. And it sold about 8 million copies. at the time it’s been 12 years since then and 12 rather dramatic years particularly, the more recent ones.
Such a jarring disturbing shift has taken place in the social order that we have in our country and around the world that I think few people are convinced that this is their best life right now. That would be a hard sell, probably good that the book came out before the current stress began, or it might not have been very popular. In fact there may be a number of those 8 million who would like to get their money back since this didn’t turn out to be what they had hopedWe are now living under dominant deception, dominant lies, hatred, crime anger, selfishness, immorality. A pandemic wickedness that most of all hates the truth and will assault the truth every possible way it can. And that means that the church of Jesus Christ is going to experience things that we haven’t experienced in this country or even in the West ever perhaps. the noble experiment of America have a just and civil society based on biblical morality and firm legal control by government exercising the threat and the reality of punishment to those who violate the law, is essentially over.
Nobody really seems to care to hide any wickedness anymore. Hearts are unmasked while faces are masked. This cannot be our best life! And it’s not going to get better. Evil men grow worse and worse. This is a free fall, not temporary. We’re going down and we’re going down under the sheer force of unbelief and sin unprotected and unrestrained by the judgment of God.
This is not our best life, not by any means to all who are in Christ, our best life is yet to come our best life is the glory of heaven.
