There is a song being played on the radio by the Newsboys that says, "God's not dead.. He's surely alive." This affirmation is true, but it should have a second course that says, "but the Church is dead." What happened? How have we fallen into the same ditch that the Apostles and Reformers dug us out of? How did we end up enslaved to the same doctrines of religious oppression and domination? When did we yield? The Church has become a shell, a broken ruin of itself. We have become complacent, compromising, duplicitous, and hypocritical. We point to the world and cry, "sinners! You don't attend Church and you flout God's laws! You shall be punished!" We then go home and watch depraved films and participate in numerious addictions. Hypocrites! We are becoming a new generation of Pharisees and Sanhedrin! We prefer the praises of men over the praise of God! We have become indifferent to the poor and we ignore the Lord! Shame on us! Shame on all of us! We cannot serve two masters! We must choose!
On Sunday we go to service to appear pious. We go to fellowship with other believers and to listen to the band play the neo hymns and then we let man get up and pontificate for hours. Why is his observances important? Why is his epiphany or revelation more important than the rest of the congregation? When did he become Pope with his Bull and his cap? I resent the fact that most believers are caught in a Neo Roman Church. We are just as marginalized as those during the days of Luther's Reformation. We don't buy indulgences, but we do attend mass and seek the approval of man. We've traded a love for God and exchanged it for the esteem of man.
If a saint is genuine in his passion to serve Christ, he must live a lonely life. For the Seminars are cemeteries, shipwreckers of zeal and true faith. Churches in the modern context are crypts that can suffocate a Man of God's ferverance and fire. We are told to submit to the authorities in our Church, but these men are as corruptible as politicians! They are swayed by the coin just as much as the clergy during the Middle Ages! They promote their own plans and will and call It God's doing. They believe Christianity and Humanism can coexist peacefully, but I say nay! You cannot have two gods! You cannot serve The Alpha and Omega and yourself!
On Sundays we gather to worship the Divine Creator of all things. Then during the rest of the week we worship things. We spend time with our iPhones and go where we can receive instant gratification. We make idols of pop culture and all the monsters. We invite vampires, zombies, and other abominations into our homes. We put Twilight next to the Bible, and we say, "Well, I'm not as bad as that person.." Self righteous hypocrites! Stop lying to God and stop lying to yourself! When will you be honest? When will you see that you are slave to your society? That you care more about what men think than what Almighty God thinks.
I'm not a judge. I am not going to tell you to live isolated from the world. That would be to go against God's word, "Be in the world, but not of it," and "I'm sending you into the world." I am asking for the Church to seek reform. To purge the corruption that is eating away at our Faith! We displace the Savior on Sundays and put a Pastor at the pulpit. We tell all the saints to be silent and to keep the insights the Holy Spirit has given them locked up so that one man can dominate hours with their rhetoric. For shame! No wonder droves of young people are fleeing the Church. They don't want to be controlled. They want a voice! The voice God gave them. One man with the gift of preaching and teaching gets up and talks on Sunday; but what about the hundreds in his congregation that have the same gift and are yearning to use it? They are told to do a Step Program or to become an Elder for seven years and then they will get their shot. Interesting, since Paul after his revelation began his ministry right away and later went to verify if it was the same Gospel he was preaching in
Paul didn't have to become an elder or take Step program. He was driven by a passion for Christ and he changed the face of Christianity. How much longer will we keep God in a box? How much longer will we ignore the Call God has on our lives? Are we really comfortable with living a shallow walk? Are we to go to mass and then live like everyone else? What good is that? You might as well submit to the devil. You already are giving Christ a bad name and it says, "I spit you out like lukewarm water, I never knew you!" You can be sold out for Christ or for men. You can either be bought by Jesus or by Mammon. Don't be hypocrite! It says theirs is the "outer darkness." You can't call yourself a saint and be a son of the devil. You can't profess love and be shallow.
How much longer will He wait? How much longer will Christ tolerate this Christian Aristocracy? He tried to shake it during the Reformation. He freed the oppressed with Luther's 95 Thesis. But what will it take now? Our Church if full of more devils than ever before! It is a den of thieves and murders of faith. Only the Remnant remains. The stout few in every cathedral, town, and country that won't settle for a shallow walk.
A.W. Tozer put is more eloquently, he said, "Christianity today is man centered, not God-centered. God is made to wait patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men... to persuade these self-sufficient souls to respond to His generous offers. God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking down to them in the slummiest way imaginable. This view of things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism, which while it often uses flattering and sometimes embarrassing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make man the star of the show."
We are the stars of show. We want the praise. We want our will. Notice how everything has become I centered. I want this and I want that. We even have gadgets called iPhone and iPad. It's all about us and our independence. We pretend to care about others, but when there is a little bit of discomfort we whine like children and complain that we don't like the feeling. Yet Christ said, "deny yourself and pick up your cross." To carry a cross is to suffer loss. It means we lose our will and let God take control. We stop our endless quest to rule over our own life and the lives of others to let God rule.
Instead of crosses, we have pocket watches or to be more modern comfort phones. We don't want inconvenience, we want everything to be in our control. I remember people had to arrange things far in advance and send letters of invitation to guests. The guests would then RSVP. Now we have cell phones and texting, people instantly get back to us. We are frustrated when someone doesn't return our call or text a response, we expect everything to fit into our schedule, because after all we are the most important person in the world right? Our time matters more. We don't care that Jimmy's Grandmother died or that Sarah just had her fiancée leave her. No, we want that response and to be reassured that everything is going to work out for us.
We need to broken of our will. The Lord's Prayer doesn't say, our will be done, it says, "Your (God's) Will be done." We pray this, but do we live it? Do we really want God in control? Our actions often are a resounding no. We think It's a good idea and pious act to say "Your Will be Done," but do we really desire such a thing? After all, Humanism, which dictates much of our mind these days says "what we want is most important," "if it feels good do it," "my happiness is most important." We wonder why the World is in economic hole. What did we expect? No one wants to be responsible for anything but their own happiness and the result is debt. If you take credit card and just get what you want, you shouldn't be surprised your family is in debt and your kids can't go to college.
Christ is the only one who compels us to "serve others." He asks us to "deny ourselves." To put aside our obsession with self to help those in need. Happiness and personal dreams are not evil. They become evil when they become more important than people. Our dreams can become our enemies. The only way to keep them from being tainted is to "submit therefore to God.." To "seek first His Kingdom." Then it says, "All (your dreams, good desires, and hopes) will be added unto you."
Where is our worship? That which we worship controls us. If we worship ourselves we will lose the capacity to love others. If we worship things or men, we become slaves to them. Emerson put it best, he said "Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming." What do you want to become? A selfish egocentric controller or like the God who created the Universe and who so loved you, that he gave his only begotten son to die for your faults and sins? "The choice is yours, I leave it up to you."
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