Plexiglass Pastors in Pagan Land — E.A. Johnston

A Sin-Soaked Society and the Loss of Biblical Morality

We live in a sin-soaked world, in a sin-loving, God-hating society. We live in a day of public nudity, public drunkenness, public profanity, public lewdness, and public sexual perversion that permeates society like a backed-up toilet spilling over the land like an open, rotten, putrid sewer.

Blood fills the streets as murders and suicides are commonplace. Violence is out of control in the land. Why? You can get gunned down by a madman just by visiting the grocery store. We've made it easier to murder the unborn.

You can just walk into a drugstore and buy some pills over the counter to have an abortion. And 20 of our young people today are either homosexual, bisexual, or transgender. Church attendance has fallen drastically, and the majority of the nation no longer believes in the God of the Bible.

A Manufactured God and a Compromised Church

We've manufactured a different kind of God, a Santa Claus God, who only exists to bless his little darlings. America is no longer a Christian nation, but a pagan nation, where our own government has legislated God right out of the land, and our godless judicial system has legalized every form of vice and perversion.

And where is the church in all of this? Up to her neck in conformity and compromise with the world. In many churches today, what passes off as church is nothing but incredible nonsense. If a Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield could come back and walk among us today and visit the modern church, they'd stand up in the sanctuaries, pull all their hair out, and scream bloody murder at what the monstrosity the modern church has become.

Plexiglass Pastors as Spiritual Counterfeits

Pastors have taken out their axes and chopped down the old traditions, chopped down the old wooden pulpit, and replaced it with a plexiglass stand. Now, plexiglass isn't really glass. It's engineered plastic that is lighter than glass.

It appears to be one thing, but it's really something else. And we have a lot of plexiglass pastors who appear to be one thing, but they are really something else. Although they stand as ministers at a plexiglass stand in front of the church, they can't minister to you anything of spiritual value.

Like plexiglass, they are man-made and not God-called. They have no anointing of God's Spirit. They have no authority that accompanies them when they speak. Oh, they are gifted speakers. Don't get me wrong.

They're well-liked. They can make you laugh and show you good time on Sunday, but they can't help you spiritually. You can't even have a conversation with them about deep spiritual matters, because it's an area of great ignorance to them.

They may know their Bibles, but they don't know the God of the Bible, so they can only share with you what they know, which isn't much, and it's not really pertinent to your spiritual growth. A plexiglass pastor doesn't study the history of revival, because he doesn't understand revival, sees no need for it.

Numerical Growth Without Spiritual Revival

A plexiglass pastor is more interested in numbers than he is in spiritual transformation of his people. I was standing in line at my seminary graduation with one of these plexiglass pastors. I asked him if he was meeting with other pastors in his community to regularly pray for revival to come visit their churches.

And this man looked at me strangely and informed me that his church didn't need revival, because it was on the grow. He was already running 3 ,000 on Sunday. And that's all that matters to a plexiglass pastor, so long as his church campus is expanding with brick and mortar, and he's got a big crowd in church each week, then his numerical success speaks for itself, even if his congregation is largely unregenerate and going to hell, so long as the numbers are there and everyone's having a good time.

That's all that matters. The plexiglass pastor is into relatability and popularity, and he avoids anything offensive in his message. He won't preach hard against sin, because he doesn't believe that repentance is a necessary component to salvation.

A Sanitized Gospel and an Entertainment-Centered Church

He's taken a razor blade to his Bible and cut out all the offensive aspects of the gospel and watered it down to make it more palatable to sinful man. Then he got out his mop bucket and mopped up all the blood and gore around Calvary, threw out all the hymns about the blood, and made the cross so inoffensive and pristine and even almost plexiglass that you can sit down there and have your lunch.

His church will often have much of the world in it, like movie screens with flashing mood lights in the background, to hypnotize you into the new way of doing church, or the worship service will be man-centered and geared towards entertainment, having a good time rather than being God-centered and worshipful to a thrice holy God.

Laodicean Christianity and the Full Counsel of God

Listen, friends, there are some godly pastors out there preaching the truth. I know some of them personally, but many today represent a Laodicean church age of an apostate church in a pagan land. Ezekiel describes false prophets in the following terms, because they have seduced my people, saying, peace, and there was no peace.

Many believers in many communities have a hard time finding a Bible-believing church and a godly pastor who preaches the full counsel of God with a God-centered message. Many pastors preach a man-centered gospel that revolves just around the happiness of man.

And many pastors have bought into the mentality, if you want to relate to hogs, then you need to get into a hog-walla with them. But in the end, friends, they'll still be hogs, and you'll only be a fool.

How to Recognize a Plexiglass Pastor

Listen, friend, how can you tell a plexiglass pastor this is how? He won't preach against sin. He won't preach about a future judgment. He won't preach about hell. He won't preach about repentance. He won't preach about damnation.

He won't preach about God's wrath. He won't preach about the blood. He won't preach about holiness. He won't preach about lordship. His message is comprised of some light Bible teaching interspersed with humorous stories meant to make you laugh.

He is void of an anointing of the Holy Spirit, and consequently, his messages are void of authority from on high. He wants to be accepted by his hearers, so he will preach nice little messages that don't offend anybody.

The Preacher's Warning Duty and the Last Judgment

Unfortunately, nobody gets saved under his pretense of a ministry. Meanwhile, pagans die and drop into hell like dominoes in the wind because plexiglass pastors have no message of real help to them. Listen to God's word from the book of Ezekiel on the duty of a preacher.

When I say to the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way that wicked man should die in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at thy hand.

Well, how can you spot the plexiglass pastors at the last judgment? They'll be lined up with bloody hands.