If you were to pick up a copy of the New Testament and read it with no previous knowledge of Christianity or Christians, you would get a very different picture of Christianity than what we see today. Christianity in America today is in trouble. With the gospel of success and prosperity, the doctrine of Eternal Security, New Age doctrines, witchcraft, and the acceptance of sexual perversions and gambling, it is no wonder that Jesus said, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). In other words, will he find true and accurate faith? Perhaps, because the truth is not something most people want to hear. Following Christ requires sacrifice; we must take up a cross to follow Christ. This means we must die to our own wants and desires.

There is no lack of churches teaching half-truths, because the churches are filled with people who believe what they want to believe. We are living in the time predicted by Paul who said a time will come when people will not want accurate doctrine, but will surround themselves with preachers who tell them what they want to hear (2 Timothy 4:3). The truth of the Christian faith is not a matter of opinion. We must find out what the truth is and follow it.

This book contains teaching on the Bible and doctrines for the purpose of leading and guiding people into more truth. Paul said there was a time when God overlooked ignorance of the truth (Acts 17:30); but he now requires people to repent (turn from sin) and accept the truth; this applies even more so today as we approach the return of Christ.

This book will analyze the teaching and lives of Jesus and the apostles to find out and explain the original Gospel for the first time in more than 1700 years. It will also examine Early Church writers to determine what they believed. Martin Luther restored some, but not all of the truth. Yet some of what he restored also has been forgotten. This book will also analyze various popular doctrines today, to show how and why they are true or false. You will learn why gambling is a sin, and even gain a better understanding of the Trinity.

Have you ever looked for an item such as an ink pen, a pair of sunglasses, or book but, despite your best efforts, you could not find it anywhere? Then someone comes along and picks it up and hands it to you because it was right there in front of you the whole time. My parents used to say, "if it had been a snake, it would've bitten you." That is the way it is with some of the truth contained in the Bible; it is right in front of you, but you cannot see it until it is pointed out to you.

The true Gospel is actually very simple, yet it is very hard for people in prosperous nations like the United States to accept. The more money you have, the less likely you are to accept the Forgotten Gospel, which is why Jesus said it is difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom. The Gospel is Good News to the poor, but not to the rich; the reason for this has never been properly understood, until now.

We have bought into the idea that Christians will naturally tend to become prosperous, so we are unwilling or unable to see what the New Testament really teaches on this subject. The Bible commands us to help the poor and needy; yet, most Christians only give token offerings to the poor. Christians in Western nations are gaining more and more wealth while Christians in other parts of the world suffer from impure drinking water, no sanitation or health care, and live in what we would consider a shack that is not even good enough to store our lawn equipment in. Richard Hays in, The Moral Vision of the New Testament, states:

No matter how much hermeneutical squirming we may do . . . obedience to God will require of us a sharing of possessions far more radical than the church has ordinarily supposed. For the church to heed the New Testament challenge on the question of possessions would require nothing less than a new reformation. (page 468)

Because the Church is backslidden, many Christians are calling for a New Reformation, but what most of them really mean is revival. An actual New Reformation would require a whole new branch of Christianity like Catholic and Protestant. Because of the many ills of present-day Christianity, and because denominations will not reform any more than the Catholic Church reformed in Martin Luther’s day, we need a literal New Reformation.

Present-day Christianity has so many problems that the only way to properly deal with them is a New Reformation. New wine requires new wine skin. There are already several books which are having an impact on many Christians, and movements already taking place which are helping us move toward a New Reformation. I hope the information in this book will be able to contribute.

George Barna has done extensive research on American Christianity for more than two decades. In The Second Coming of the Church, he writes:

The Church was called by Christ to care for the least of all people, and to be known by the quality of its love. Yet poverty is prospering in America. No nation on earth has a greater net worth than the United States. But that wealth is distributed unequally. The wealthiest 1 percent of the households in America own more than 40 percent of the nation's assets. At the same time, there are more than thirty million Americans who live in poverty--that's more people than live in the entire nations of Canada or Australia! Worse, roughly 40 percent of the poor in America are children. Despite these glaringly apparent needs, churches across the country are minimally involved in addressing this issue. For every dollar spent on ministry to the poor, the typical church spends more than five dollars on buildings and maintenance. . . .(p. 3)

Consider how we have repositioned spirituality. Faith used to revolve around God and His ordinances and principles; the faith that arrests our attention these days is that which revolves around us. We have demystified God, befriended Jesus, abandoned the Holy Spirit, and forgiven and even warmed up to Satan. Few Americans possess a sense of awe, fear, or trembling related to God. . . . (page 7)

The gospel being preached today is all about having your needs met by God. It’s about becoming successful, happy, and prosperous, which is not the Gospel that Jesus preached, which was that we must take up a cross in order to follow Him. This means that we must not only be willing and able to sacrifice ourselves, but we must actually sacrifice ourselves. That is, we must give up our human wants, our worldly pursuits, and our selfish desires, to follow Christ, even if it costs us everything we have. We can no longer live for self if we obey the commandments of Christ. You will learn what Christ wants of us in this book.

A question is often raised about good works; is it required or merely the works of religion if we are saved by faith alone? Does Jesus teach a gospel of success and prosperity or a gospel of poverty? Perhaps neither?

This book will also critique the false teachings of the prosperity preachers but will not name the ministers who are quoted. Even though you may guess the identities of the unnamed ministers, I do not name them because I believe I have been directed by God and the Bible against doing so. The angels would not bring an accusation against the devil (Jude 9), and the apostles usually did not name those who were teaching false doctrine, but did speak out against them in the writings of the New Testament. Another reason I won’t mention their names is so they will be forgotten by history as the names of the “super apostles” of Paul’s day have been forgotten.

Many Christians think that the New Testament books are books of doctrine, but they are not. They are documents of historical events and letters to local churches about important issues they were facing. Nevertheless, they do contain much doctrine. However, because they were not written as books of doctrine, some of it is not clearly spelled out as being doctrine. True doctrine is seen not only in what Jesus and the apostles taught, but also in how they lived their lives. They practiced what they preached. They lived their beliefs every day and taught their followers to do the same, which means that the Early Church knew the doctrines of the apostles, which is why they were not spelled out in detail in the New Testament. The apostles were not expecting the Church age to last for 2000 years, so they did not feel a need to put down in written form everything they believed. As a result of the passing of time, a few of the teachings of Jesus and the Early Church were gradually forgotten, but what they believed can be discovered.

There is also teaching which is spelled out in the Bible, but because it does not fit with what people want to be true, they cannot see what it actually says. So preachers twist the Scriptures to try and make them say what they do not say.

There are also some statements which cannot be taken at face value but only after measuring it against the whole of Scripture. What the Bible teaches in one part of the Bible cannot be contradicted by another part. So we must look at everything the Bible teaches to determine accurate doctrine.

We need genuine revival, but many of the denominations today started with revival only to grow into dead religion after the revival fires died. We also need a revival of truth; without truth we will always end up with dead religion. We delude ourselves if we think that all we need is the presence and power of God, or the anointing. Jesus said "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" (John 14:6) (NIV) and "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32) (NIV). Correct doctrine is very important; it is like the roadmap of a trip, without it we are lost. Jesus also said, "you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition" (Matthew 15:6) (NIV). But church doctrine itself has obscured important truth.

If you want a spiritual experience but reject sound doctrine, you will be led into error as quickly as those who reject any spiritual experience and accept only human reason. The Holy Spirit is not enough by itself. Jesus said "the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth" (John 4:23) (NIV). But it is also possible to have the Spirit but not the Truth. Some people only seek after the Spirit but don't want to dwell on doctrines because they say it causes divisions. "Just wait until we get to heaven and we will sort it all out then." But Jesus and all the writers of the New Testament considered truth important and attempted to correct false beliefs. Other people believe that only “line upon line” of human analysis will arrive at correct doctrine, but that is not true either. You must be able to follow the Holy Spirit or you will never understand the Bible.

There are of course those who condemn everyone who does not agree with them one-hundred percent on every doctrine. If someone holds one doctrine slightly different from them, they condemn them as apostate and going to hell. But unlike many churches today, I do not claim that the teachings in this book are one-hundred percent accurate. No religious organization or church is one-hundred percent accurate in all its doctrines. Some may be eighty percent right, others may be seventy percent or sixty percent, but none are one-hundred percent. This book was written to get us closer to that one-hundred percent mark.

Although right doctrine is important, you don't have to be one-hundred percent accurate to make heaven, or to be used of God in the ministry. Nor do you have to agree with me on all points in this book to be saved and go to heaven. If we have to have one-hundred percent accurate doctrine to be saved, then there are very few Christians in the world today. The purpose of this book is to discover as much truth as possible; because the more truth we have the closer we are to God and his perfect will for us as individuals, for his Church, and for the world at large.

Jesus came to give us life in the here and now, not just life in the here-after. But that does not translate into wealth or chasing the American dream, but merely to removal of poverty while helping others out of poverty. Jesus established a new social order, where justice and mercy ruled; but this is not being pursued by most of Christianity in America today. Churches are more concerned with getting more members, but they are not being discipled, supposing that maturity will automatically follow; but that is not the case. They will not automatically grow in the grace and knowledge of God, they must be taught. They will not automatically start doing good works, they must be taught to do them.

Because of the high level of prosperity in North America today, it is easy to overlook the needs of the poor in this country and around the world. I speak mostly, not of the starving famine victims, but of those Christians in poor countries who work at hard labor and struggle to barely survive. The famine victims normally get plenty of aid but there are millions of ordinary Christians living in desperate poverty every day.

Poor Christians will not automatically or miraculously receive justice in the courts, or get hired for a job, or get medical treatment. No, to accomplish these things action must be taken, on purpose, by churches and individuals; or at least a group of individuals. Christians in prosperous countries must be willing to give up a portion of their wealth to help their poor brothers and sisters in India, China, and Africa.

Yes, this sharing the wealth is something that Jesus and the early Christians did, and not just for temporary or regional reasons, but because that is how Jesus lived and taught his apostles to live. This will be thoroughly proven in this book!

The little that the righteous person has is better than the wealth of many wicked people. (Psalm 37:16) (GW)

Throughout this book, I use several different translations of the Bible. The reason being that there are no perfect translations; one translation may be very good in this or that book or chapter, but not as good in another book or chapter because more than one person was involved in each translation and some translators are better than others. So when I look up a verse in eSword computer Bible study program, I compare the verse in several different translations, including the literal translation, and choose the best worded and most accurate translation. Sometimes I quote one verse in two or three translations so the reader can get a clear picture of what the passage says.

Some people will want to bring out the “authority” gun, by saying that God has no self-appointed prophets or lone-wolf ministers, and they want to question whose authority I am under. This is an argument that has no merit and is used by people who want to silence those who say things they disagree with. The Bible records that the apostles discovered a man who was casting out devils in Jesus' name, but he was not one of the official disciples. They asked Jesus if they should make him stop, and Jesus said, "Whoever isn't against us is for us” (Mark 9:40) (GW). So Jesus personally condoned lone wolf preachers! As he should, because he was one, and so was John the Baptist, Martin Luther, John Wesley, and many more. But they were lone wolf ministers only in the sense that they were not under any human organization. God calls people into the ministry, not men or any human organization. So if they are called into the ministry by God, then they are not lone wolves!