Today’s Christian church is under constant pressure to renounce its confession of faith. On the one hand, in the East, countries such as Russia and China are following an anti-Christian, dictatorial path and persecuting the Lord’s church; on the other hand, in the West, the church is under constant attack from impurity and sin and is criticized when it takes a stand against sin.

In Russia, biblical Christianity is suppressed, but the official church survives—albeit at the cost of continuing to function as a pro-government organization. The policy of the Moscow elite aims to eliminate all religious groups except the Orthodox Church. Thus, all churches and religious organizations in Russia are required to officially register, and missionary activities are prohibited, except for those approved by the state in designated areas. Through these measures, evangelical churches in particular are being persecuted.

China is also intensifying its control over the Christian church and all religions. The Chinese government has decided that all religious organizations must now demonstrate that they support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system and are thoroughly implementing Xi Jinping’s ideas in order to obtain an operating license.

Xi Jinping’s thought has been enshrined in the Chinese constitution and incorporated into the Chinese Communist Party’s regulations, excluding all other ideologies. Xi Jinping’s ideas are required reading for students. The new regulations require religious institutions to embrace the policy whereby religion is replaced by the dogma of the Chinese Communist Party.

Places of worship must actively preach “love for the motherland and support for the CCP leadership and the socialist system.” Religious institutions will be required to preach national consciousness, civic consciousness, awareness of the rule of law, and the proper distinction between ethnic customs and religious beliefs, and they must not use religion to interfere with administrative, judicial, educational, and social affairs. All foreign individuals and organizations are prohibited from disseminating religious content online. Parents have been ordered to sign documents renouncing their faith in order to keep their children in school. Communist Party authorities in several provinces have ruled that anyone wishing to attend a church service must fill out a form and obtain government approval each time they wish to go to church.

Things aren’t any better in the West either. While we used to hear mainly about persecution in the East, the Christian church is now under attack in the West as well, particularly by the new “LGBT Pride” movement. From a social standpoint, if you disagree with this promotion, you’re looked down upon, and expressing dissent can cost you at least your job.

Pride parades resemble the religious processions of the Middle Ages, which celebrated events on the Christian calendar. They have their own sacred language that must be used when discussing their themes. If you use inappropriate language, you’re harshly criticized and rejected. It has its own dogmas that it tries to impose, along with a new vision of how society should be understood and a new moral code to which you must conform. It develops a kind of blasphemy law that criminalizes anyone who speaks out against its lifestyle or tries to convince someone to abandon it. Christian preachers who describe homosexual practices or sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage as sinful are guilty of blasphemy. Anyone who does not accept this new LGBT Pride religion is guilty of a hate crime, which is equivalent to rejecting someone based on their race.

At its core, this new religion is based on the worship of the Self. It is the universal belief that everyone must be free to satisfy their own sexual desires and other desires of the heart. If you come to the conclusion that “the Self is king, the Self is God,” you must also take the next step—to serve your own self.

There must be no constraints whatsoever on a person’s freedom to choose their path to fulfillment, especially those imposed by society or religion (particularly Christianity). In this way of thinking, I can be fulfilled and happy only when everything that prevents me from doing what I want is removed.

This new concept of life can have devastating effects. If we disregard the restraining influence of conscience and the commandments that the true God has established to save us from our sinful nature, we expose ourselves to a destructive force that we see manifesting itself in our society today. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the trans movement, which teaches children to mutilate their bodies.

They ignore the obvious physical realities—that a man cannot become a woman and a woman cannot become a man. Nevertheless, it has practically become a crime to express this viewpoint, which has been upheld by all societies throughout history.

As a result, we have children being put on harmful, untested medical treatments with puberty blockers, and young people undergoing irreversible surgeries that sterilize them and mutilate their bodies. If they later come to the conclusion that they made a mistake and want to return to who they originally were, they discover that it is no longer possible. This is the result of a false religion that blinds people’s eyes and causes those in power today to approve procedures that previous generations would have considered criminal.

This idea has its roots in humanism, which places man at the center of life, distancing him from God, our Creator. Our human identity becomes the center; we are free to choose who we are and how we live, without any restrictions—especially from God and the Bible.

This is how sex education in schools came about, encouraging children to experiment with all sorts of sexual behaviors without any restrictions. Children are encouraged to experiment with various sexual behaviors. Therefore, our “self” defines everything. Good is defined by what I want. Nothing is right or wrong anymore.

In contrast, the Bible tells us that our hearts are deceitful and corrupt, and we must repent of the sin that traps us in the grip of a fallen human nature in rebellion against God.

The Lord Jesus Christ came to free us from the things we naturally desire to do and to transform us through His Spirit. He can forgive us of our sins through the blood shed on the cross, so that we may become people according to God’s will.

LGBT Pride has its own message, which is in direct opposition to the Christian message. Instead of freeing yourself from the bondage of corrupt desires in order to follow God’s laws, you must reject God’s laws and society’s traditional moral values. They are the problem. Once freed from God’s commandments, we have a free hand to satisfy our sinful desires. This is the exact opposite of the Gospel, so we have two different gods, two different gospels.

Pride is the most appropriate word, because in Christian theology, everything that has gone wrong in the world is the result of Satan’s original sin of pride, in which he sought to take God’s place, as it is written in the book of the prophet Ezekiel: “Because your heart has become proud and you have said, ‘I am God, and I sit on the throne of God in the midst of the seas,’ even though you are only a man and not God, even though you act as if you were God.” (Ezekiel 28:1–2).

God has judged and destroyed all societies that have rebelled against Him. All the more so those that have permitted the sins of pride and homosexuality. Western society is walking the path that leads to destruction, along with God’s judgment in the Great Tribulation of the last days, before the Second Coming of Christ. The only way to be saved from this is to repent and believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Amen!