Written by T.S. Weidler |
Saturday, March 2, 2024
Those who teach the nice gospel will usually maintain that the gospel is good news but that they don’t want to be mean. This is false thinking. The opposite of the nice gospel is not a mean gospel, it is the true gospel. The true gospel is not mean, nor is it nice. It is the righteousness of God, the judgment of sin, the eternal hope of Christ, and the salvation of the world.

Last Sunday there was a shooting at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. A celebrity prosperity preacher, Osteen boasts forty to fifty thousand attendees each weekend and is among the world’s most well-known pastors.
Joel Osteen is not a good pastor. Only God knows if he is truly a Christian, but he is certainly famous. He is best known for his book Your Best Life Now and for his extremely diluted prosperity gospel messages. He doesn’t teach the Bible in context. He doesn’t preach about repentance, the blood of Christ, the cross, or the wages of sin. In other words, he doesn’t preach the gospel.
Instead, he preaches about being nice and about the nice things that can happen to you, primarily related to money, relationships, and health.
Evil and Tragedy
On Sunday, February 12, an armed woman entered Lakewood Church and began to open fire before being killed by church security staff. The shooter was a woman who used the name “Jeffrey” and is believed to have been “transgender” to some degree. MSN called her a transgender Palestine supporter. The shooting’s sole fatality is currently the shooter herself, though she brought her seven-year-old son along who was struck by a bullet and is in critical condition at the time of this writing.
Joel Osteen made a brief statement about the matter: “There are forces of evil, but the forces of God are stronger than that.” This is possibly the first time Osteen has used the word “Evil” in a pastoral capacity. He is very conscientious about avoiding the word “sin” as well. A number of years ago he famously described homosexuality as “Not God’s best,” atoning for offense to the homosexual community by praying at the inauguration of Houston’s first lesbian mayor in 2010. Everyone smiled at the ceremony, while she continued down her road to perdition, and Osteen helped make sure it was wide and smooth, and “sanctified” by prayer.
The Nice Gospel
Osteen is the poster child of the problematic “gospel of nice,” a gospel that he perfectly exemplifies. He is always smiling, always has something amusing to say, and always has a winsome and pleasant reply. He never complains, never points fingers, and never identifies sin. If his goal is to be inoffensive and agreeable, and he’s doing his job immeasurably well.
But this is not the goal of the pastor – rather, the goal is meant to be bringing glory to God. If Osteen (or any “nice guy evangelist”) wins a convert by being nice, who gets the glory? The nice guy who smiled at them and made them feel welcome, or the Son of God? If Osteen fails to win a convert, what lessons are learned? “Be nicer” next time?
In addition to robbing God of his gospel glory, the “nice gospel” does not work. It has no explanation for human depravity.
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Written by T.S. Weidler |
Monday, July 3, 2023
Christian men, of all the men in the world, ought to be the most joyful, bold, courageous, and serious. Christian men believe in a resurrection, so they laugh at fear. They have no fear of man, no fear of death, and eternal hope in the making of earth as it is in heaven. This provides an infinite degree of hope, joy, and courage.  

There is a hardwired instinct in all men that drives them to give their lives and use their strength in projects and ambitions beyond themselves.  This drive is built into them by their creator, because he made them in his image, and it exists around the world, across all religions, nations, and generations. It is part of masculinity.  All men have this instinctive drive, it is only a matter of how they use it.
For a few hundred years, Christianity held influence over American masculinity.  Men used their strength and ambition to build, bless, provide for, and protect the weak.  This is not the only kind of masculinity there is, but it is the kind that develops from a worldview centered around Christ, who used his power to serve and not to be served, and who gave up his life for the sake of others, knowing his eternity was secure.  Men who follow Christ will use their strength the way he did for the same reasons he did.
Christian masculinity built the United States from its infancy, starting over a century before it became a nation.  Christian masculinity fought wars for independence, not wars for dominance. This is a unique trait found nowhere else in history.  Christian masculinity shed its own blood to set others free, and built businesses to serve their neighbors and provide jobs and wealth to their communities. After several centuries of unprecedented wealth, freedom, and security, Christian masculinity died of a thousand cuts, many of them self-inflicted by a lukewarm and passive church.
This leaves a masculinity vacuum to be filled.  Christian masculinity will either be replaced by non-Christian masculinity, or it will resurrect, but something will fill the void.  It is only a matter of what.
Woke Feminism
Feminism will not fill the masculinity gap.  If feminism could do this, it would have.  Feminism is a false religion that attacks Christian masculinity and Christian femininity but builds nothing in its place.  Feminism has nothing to offer.  It is an empty worldview.  Women cannot be men. They can be bad women or good women, but they cannot be men.  The harder they try the stupider all of it gets.
China
China has a surplus of about 30 million men.  These are men who have no chance of marriage and family, because the previous generation “aborted” murdered all the girls.  When the Chinese government ordered a one-child policy for an entire generation, the parents chose to have boys, and if they were pregnant with a girl, they killed her.
The Chinese government removed the existence of God from their minds, and became futile and evil in their thoughts.  God said “It is not good for the man to be alone,” and China raised up a generation of 30 million men to be alone.
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