Religioneers & Lifebites

Speaking of religioneers … I tell you what: the phrase "lifebites" really ticks off the religioneers out there in the church and in Blogland! 

 

So anyway, what kind of Church uses the phrase "LifeBites" in their advertising? We do. We believe in staring reality right in the face. Denial sucks too! It sucks the Truth out of a person! When we say life bites, religioneers get all pissed and close their ears to what comes after, "God knows, He cares and He restores" because they're so caught up looking for their ticket pad to write me a whopper and throw it down before the throne of God demanding a hearing!

 

Cool! That's Ok. What I want them to know is - now listen: it's not for them! "Lifebites," as a slogan, is for the people who still know that the world sucks! It's for those who haven't had the reality stolen from them by false religion. This spinning world sucks the life from every person unless the REAL Jesus is invited inside to sit down and rule. Life can suck the joy and the purpose from the person. Life on the planet sucks the fiber from our imago die, and denies that we can live on the planet coram-deo and still be accepted by God. Those are the only two Latin phrases I know, and I've always wanted to use them because I think they sound so coooool!! ("Image of God" and "before the face of God" in that order.)  

 

In Matthew 5:10-12, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

 

Jesus said if you want to bring some light into this world, you have to live in such a way that it might bring you persecution - pain for your courage. Ok, so He was talking about the persecution that when endured, would bring eternal joy. And even during the pain – if it's really persecution – one could sense the grace and presence of God at the deepest level. I get that, and I trust that. But is still hurts!!! And life still bites. My fellow religioneers, that's just the way it is on a sin-soaked planet. Get used to it! 

 

In John 16:33, Jesus warned us again that life would hurt: "These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." Tribulation? Yeah, that can't be good! Sounds like life bites to me! You see, life bites points to the need for redemption found in Jesus Christ, who said, "I have overcome the world." 

 

And Paul the Apostle told Timothy in his pastorate that, "… all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution." (2 Tim 3:12) That sounds like life bites to me! There it is again!

 

You know what religioneers need? A good dose of what Jesus really said – a good taste of how Jesus really lived, and a good picture of His heart from the Book He authored. They/we need the perfect reality with which He taught the crowds. By the way, the only people He was ever really pissed at were the religioneers! Some of us oughta stop believing what our teachers tell us and go read IT for ourselves to see if it really says we are to dress up in church in order to please God - and other myths and legends. 

 

When we open the Bible, we gotta stop sifting it for stuff to make our business a success, or compete in the market place, or to help us lose a few pounds. Though many Americans need to do that, we have to open the Bible and ask the living God of the Bible to read our hearts! Then we will be able to face reality with hope, not denial. If we actually read the Bible with humble eyes, we'd even stop thinking it was our option to give an opinion on most subjects. Humble people look to themselves before God first, and then let God look after others. They're just like that.

 

Jesus said, "there will be tribulation …". That's reality folks, and it bites hard at times. And then He said, "But I have overcome the world!" And that's hope. You can stand in poop and live in denial, but I'd rather stand in poop and live in hope.

Religioneers

I think the Church is filled with what I call religioneers. A religioneer is a controller. They substitute true spirituality for pious activity; one who thinks better of oneself because of what one does to please God. This kind of person supports rules that are not in the Bible seducing people into a sense of false guilt, getting them to confess 'sins' that are not even sin. A religioneer is the kind of person Jesus confronted when He accused them of being more concerned about the toothpick in someone else's eye than the tree in their own.

A religioneer is a person who takes comfort in rules, so they have to take little responsibility for their inner life before God. He or she sees themselves as a moral cop to tell others when they are out of line, how they must change, reduce, delete, erase, remove, expunge, or obliterate anything that the moral majority believes must be expunged (I love that word!) from one's life before one can approach God and be good in His sight. Religioneers like to re-engineer their surroundings so that they create an environment that is more clean and pretty, so that God will be welcome.

In Jesus' day, the religioneers had re-engineered the message of God to fit their desire for importance and power. What's pathetic is that they really thought they were doing God a service by keeping the dirty people out of a religious environment! No wonder God's presence isn't felt in our houses of worship any more! There is no dirt! Not the kind Jesus always hung with anyway – you know, tax collectors, sinners, and even prostitutes!

A religioneer is one who likes to paint up the outside, to present a pretty face and thinks that others must 'dress' like him or her. They're the one's that tell us we have to dress up to please God – that we have to dress up whenever we expect Him, like we would for the President of the United States. Bologna! Hey, to follow that line of thinking, since God is always with me, then I better dress up mowing the lawn, and trimming the shrubs! I'd better be ready to get oil on my Armani, because He is just as present working on my motorcycle as Hs is the building in which I worship Him on Sundays. If you believe in a God that only shows up when you're in some building somewhere, then you even have the wrong idea of the Church – it's not a building made with hands. It's a spiritual house made up of individuals changed by Jesus Christ. The first building is our work and the second is His and His will last.

We religioneers like to dress up the outside thinking – just like the ancient Pharisees and Sadducees – that we've cleaned the inside as well! Jesus said hogwash! The work of faith is heart work, not body work. You wanna know a secret? I used to be captured by that cultish clique, but escaped with my life! Thank God! I finally learned that God sees me naked anyway! God sees me from the inside out, not from the outside in! And God changes us from the inside out NOT from the outside in!

Religioneers often criticize stuff that looks real and authentic because they live in a world of denial, hoping that the clock never strikes 12:00 A.M so that they have to lose the glass slipper and the golden carriage, and head back into their own little corner in their own little room where they usually are alone and sad and bored, because they have no real friends. This sounds harsh and I wish it wasn't true! I know it's a real state of being, albeit a fantasy life, because I was THERE!! Don't get me wrong, I'm not perfect, or even good. I'm still purging the ick from my scales, but at least my sight is beginning to clear. By God's grace and because I live and worship among real people, that stupid pain-in-the-tail rod in my eye is beginning to fade!! Life still bites, but God rock! He knows, He cares and He restores.

I Confess!

To all who are angry, hurt, and confused about Jesus and His Church,

I’m a pastor, a guy, a father, a husband, a friend, a person, an American…and a jerk. I have a confession to make: I don’t love people like Jesus did, and like I should as a follower of Jesus. I say I love Jesus, but I haven’t loved you. I’m so terribly ashamed. I don’t expect you to just be happy now, but I have to get this right, with you and with God. I repent. And seek your forgiveness.

To those of you who want to have nothing to do with Jesus, and as well, to those would like to understand more about His life and His purpose, but have not asked, and have now lost interest because of the mess the Church has made the last 2000 years, I apologize for me and mine.

You may not choose to follow Jesus Christ or call Him Lord. You may have no official connection to a church. You may not even know why you’re reading this. You may have no interest at all in Jesus. You may even hate Him. That’s Ok. That could be partly because of “us” so please hear me: I apologize to you for a Church that seems as if she could care less whether you meet the Savior of the world or not. I apologize for a Church that seems not to care if you go to the heaven we preach or the hell we avoid. Sometimes we act like we’d like you to go to hell. We should be ashamed. I am. And I apologize.

I apologize for our self-centeredness and wrong-focus. We’ve told you to obey the commandments of God without the God within to show you the way and to empower you. We’ve tried to make you sing our horribly outdated music, and told you that yours sucked because it was about your life. Or worse, told you it was from Hell. And then we copied some of it and made lots of money! What greed and short-sightedness! I apologize.

When you visited us we’ve told you to give money for our grand building programs, when people in our cities were starving. We’ve tried to make you listen to long and boring sermons, as if you even knew what the Hell we were talking about! We’ve tried to make you throw away your records, your CDs, your movies, and your friends – all as if in doing these things you would be pleasing to Jesus – while all the while teaching that God is not a God to be appeased by our human effort! “For by grace we our saved...” Which is true, but we have none it seems. What hypocrisy. We have sinned against God and against you. Please forgive us.

I apologize for our two-faces. When you’re addicted we call it alcoholism, drug abuse, or substance abuse. When we overindulge, we call it recovery, or a minor set-back, or worse: liberty. For this I apologize. We’ve placed more importance on our comfort than on your eternity, and on our prosperity, than on your need for love and kindness and deliverance from the things you hate, but can’t deny for some reason. We’ve excluded you from our lives and from our fellowship and from our activities because we’ve not wanted to soil ourselves. We have been wrong – dead wrong. And I apologize for me and my family, for me and my church, and for me and my ancestors in the Church. We were wrong, very wrong, and we repent.

My Jesus would have never treated you like this. He would have eaten with you, sat and talked with you, even skipped church to hang with you. He would have loved your simple attempts to be human. He would have come to your Superbowl parties and your birthday parties and your graduation ceremonies. He would have wept at your pain, touched your hurts, been patient with your habits, eaten at your tables. He would have loved you so much that you would have loved Him in return, I know you would have. But now you’re confused and mad. I understand. I’m afraid we – the Church – have painted a very poor resemblance to the real Jesus. I’m so sorry for our wrong portrayal of our Master. I repent to Him and apologize to you.

You see, I’ve forgotten that people touch the heart of Jesus. Whatever touches the heart of Jesus should get my attention and prompt me to action. His passion is to be my passion. His mission is to be my mission. And He loves people – all shapes and sizes, all colors and languages. With His help, I will clean up my act. I will love you. I hope you can see the real Jesus in me someday soon.

Very Sincerely,


Ashamed

Change what?...Why?

I have previously confessed that I am a 100% Jesus freak. I worship Him as LORD, and endeavor to follow Him as Master. I also believe that the Bible is authoritative as the Word of the LORD; and therefore, my basis for authority in life and work. (I know! I’m horribly out of touch and old fashioned!) BUT … this doesn’t mean that I believe or act like my Master calls me to act. I am inconsistent and fail often – daily! However, I refuse to let my failure, whether it comes from bad habits, bad behavior, or bad attitudes cause me to give up on the truth I have chosen to follow. I at least want to remain consistent over the long-haul of life. I choose to blame my inconsistency on ME, rather than that the God I serve has not the power to reign me in when I’m being an inconsistent, inconsiderate jerk! It means I have chosen to exercise my freedom of choice and be an inconsiderate jerk! 

 

I often fail to love people who don’t fit in my little window of appropriate, or relevant, or cool. I get pissed quickly at people who don’t put their shopping carts back at Fred Meyer! And especially irritated at the stupid people who cross the street anywhere and anytime they want to and force traffic to stop. They just saunter by, flipping us off with their eyes, if not for real - as if they have the right to make you and I choose not to run their sorry hide over! I want to roll down my window and yell, “Use the freakin’ cross-walk, idiot! That’s what it’s for! Or I’ll use my front bumper on your sorry butt ‘cuz that’s what it’s for!” 

 

Yet, all the while, I allow myself not to forgive! I allow myself to lust, to engage in greedy, selfish behavior, to lash out in anger over something petty, or to ignore someone who just needs a compassionate greeting, or a kind act to help them get in line at a busy intersection. I sometimes allow myself the supposed right to be impatient at someone I deem undeserving of such forbearance. 

 

Why all this confession? Am I guilt ridden? No, not particularly - now at least! And no, I don’t think organized (or disorganized!) religion has helped the world by blowing the horn of “moralism” in the face of people who need Jesus! But that’s not what this is about. Today, I simply want to take my place in the crowd of humanity stained and drained by rebellion towards God. I want to get in line for some wisdom about how to continue the journey of faith that was long ago begun with more zeal and less wisdom and experience. As 2007 begins I need change, or to continue the process of change with more focus and effort. 

 

Whether you believe in making resolutions at the beginning of a new year or not, it’s an important part of anyone’s human maturity to pick times to evaluate life - how we are living it - how we must change - how we must hold on what is good and forsake our unhealthy, self-destructive, hurtful and morally wrong patterns of behavior, as we head speedily towards the ultimate finish line? I just want to start with myself and focus on myself. That’s a good change for all of us!

The resurgence of talk about resolutions every New Year convinces me that Blaise Pascal said way back in the 16th century was correct: that even people without God, have a vacuum shaped like God within them: “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.” Pascal and many others like him have long encouraged us to admit the failure, corruption and emptiness of life, and to let God be THE source, to let God be the substance, so that we can live a long life if possible, and more importantly, a full life.

 

So, I am asking myself a few questions all over again: If no such ‘Pascalian vacuum’ why do I desire to change? Why do I even think about it? Why should I make an effort to change certain behaviors and drag certain habits to the recycle bin? So what if my behavior hurts other people – even the one’s I love? Why is it so terribly hard to change obvious patterns and behaviors? Where can I get wisdom to know how to change? Is there any time when we will have to give an account for our lives? Or, are we sentient beings who have no ultimate sentient source of origin to whom we must face one day? Does anyone doubt that life is short, unpredictable and difficult? Does anyone know the moment they will take their last breath? 

 

My response is that we desire to change because imbedded within us, is the desire to progress. It comes from our Creator-God, who will always give us the power to change, when we chose to - when we see that the paths we’ve chosen haven’t been working for us, and for those we love. That being said, we must go to that Creator-God for the wisdom needed to make change and make it stick. 

We Preach Christ and Sometimes Invite Bono?

"A Communion service driven by the music of singer Bono and his U2 bandmates is catching on at Episcopal churches across the country" claims a recent article on this little movement. (follow link for entire article: http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/2006-10-25-u2-churches_x.htm). Our church band has employed U2 music in our worship services for several years now, but leave it to the Episcopals of New York to make it stick! I personally think the U2-charist’ movement, as it's being called, may turn out to be a very cool way to help people connect the reality God and His love to their mundane lives all over again.

 

As we say, "nothing changes unless something changes." Something in the Church has to change, especially the Church in America that has become so issue focused we’ve lost sight of Jesus we say we preach. We need something to cause us to again breathe the fresh air of celebration, focused on God rather than the stifled and stuffy air of everything normal. Maybe a change like this will help some who’ve grown "deaf and numb" in their particular worship circles to pay attention once again? One may think it strange to consider adapting U2 music for use in a worship setting, or even heretical for some reading this. I think change is good if more people consider the activity if their Creator in their lives, or hear the Good News with new ears, as a result. In fact, I think it’s a freakin’ stroke of genius, if not a direct act of the Spirit of God! The risk, of course, is in that Bono and the Edge have become Swami, and Side-kick for many of us music freaks. So, we can easily think we’re worshipping God when we’re simply getting into the emotional river with a very charismatic leader. Caution! We are challenged by Jesus in the Scripture to be Jesus freaks foremost. Remember, that "thou shalt have no other gods before me" thing?  

 

However, we should also remember that God is still after individuals and calling them to a personal relationship with Himself, and that worship is the blessing of reaching up to the One who reached to His wayward creation first. He did this in humble condescension, by jumping into a flesh-suit and suffering the distance from His Father that we will never experience. He ran to us first. His affection demonstrated by the birth, life and death of Jesus, the Son, causes a response in people with a pulse. We celebrate this condescension at Christmas time, if we don’t miss it by the helter-skelter shopping pace in which most engage beginning the last Friday of November!

 

This is really nothing new. Much of our conservative hymnody was the result of someone putting words about God that people could understand, with the music of popular - bar room tunes - known to those who needed Jesus. Martin Luther’s famous "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" (German, Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott for you purists!) is one example. Written for the masses in a popular tune, it was first tolerated with much trepidation from the Church’s deeply rooted religionists, but has since been called "The Battle Hymn of the Reformation!" Can’t you just see people swinging their mugs of German Barley-pop to a paraphrase of Psalm 46? I'm gonna be there! 

 

Maybe God is rewarding the sincerity of those worshipping Him, combined with some very suitable words that direct hearts to YAHWEH again? Maybe the "change is gonna do me good" thing really does work? Whatever the outcome may be, let's not be so myopic as to think that God may not use something outside of a largely dead church to reform Her again! After all, He IS God. And He’s done it before. For those of you who simply can’t be convinced that the lines of worship should be drawn by content, rather than by musical style, and that worship music can emerge from somewhere outside of a stoic church, I'm just going to repeat what a well-know pastor once said to a large audience after they heard that he had prepared a cigar dinner for his leadership staff after they had reached a particular goal: “lighten up!”  In love of course . . .  P/Rod

Careless Speech -- Different Gospel!

The evangelical church has worked very hard on our political agenda. Instead of preaching Jesus, we tell everyone that they can only find Him, have Him and receive His love if they adopt our brand of cultural re-coding. Sometimes our "message" comes across politically, like a fundamentalist right-wing "religioneer." The end result will be Constantine-like: just "herd the poor heathen Geeks into Lake Washington and pronounce them baptized, then we can create an army to go beat the crap out of the rest of the heathens." Only this time, the "heathen geeks" are wiser. When we make a show of arms that looks political, they now know how to beat us in that battle field. Maybe some of us are secretly thinking we can get some good exposure for Christ from a secular media. Are you kidding? They will slaughter you! That's their playground.

 

We deserve some criticism if we push a moral, social, or cultural agenda and not preach Christ and Him crucified. We claim to be the Church, but beat on those who need Jesus! Instead of presenting Jesus foremost, we seem bent to present what we claim to be His calling to the pure life, before the people to whom we preach even have the means to obey Him! When people with influence, again like many we read about in current blog traffic, forget that it's not just what we say, but how we say it, and in what order -- we lose the battle. I'm sad. 

 

Historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) issued epic warnings that political power is the most serious threat to liberty: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Now ironically, it seems that in our context we're beginning to see that those in power without accountability, will render threat to our religious liberty because of a false gospel preached to the masses. 

 

If the world hates me, I want them to hate me because I smell like Jesus, talk like Jesus, live like Jesus, and love like Jesus. Not because I'm yelling out in self-righteousness that they need to get their crap together then God will/might love them, and only then if they adopt my version of women, Church leadership, and male authority. I can respect a man for his opinions, but I don’t have to appreciate how he expresses them. Careless speech renders truth unheard. God’s people beware! I’m convicted. 

Permission for Un-Cautious Speech?

Leadership is a precarious position. We should pray hard for men and women who have been given a huge field of influence. Whatever they say "can and will be used against them" in the world-wide court of law. There are many current examples, just check out the current blogosphere. Power tends to grant permission for un-cautious speech. And power unchecked in the Church often fosters a gospel that holds the unbelieving world accountable to act like Christ, without knowing the presence of Christ. That is a false gospel. 

 

I know some of these church leaders. I respect them for their calling and their influence. I love these leaders in Christ. And as a pastor I understand their tension, their temptations, their pressure and the expectations their responsibilities place upon them. Pray! Many of them are excellent communicators. Some of them are skilled culturalists and most of them have a natural gift of leadership. But I believe we should always take issue with anyone who tries to sell a gospel that appears dangerously close to a political and moral agenda. 

This is not to criticize one pastor or another, there is enough disunity, but rather to clarify the Gospel and the climate many leaders are unwittingly (hopefully) building for themselves. While the Gospel of Jesus Christ does have clear ramifications for life change under His management -- the true Gospel IS “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15). It is NOT the “change-‘em-on-the-outside-and-the-inside-will-soon-follow” version that some pastors seem bent on peddling to their masses. Preaching a moral or socio-cultural agenda rather than Christ is a dangerous step toward writing our own gospel. Certainly there are strong and clear, moral imperatives in the Gospels and in Paul's writings. Even Old Testament prophets foretold that God would one day give us new hearts and write His Name upon them. There can be no life change without a heart change. Preach anything else and we introduce yet another cause for the unbelieving world to hate the Church for the wrong reason.  

 

I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed. (Gal 1:6-9)

 

The Church must repent for making our mission a social, political, and even moral one. Without "Christ in [them] the hope of Glory," the people He gave His life to forgive and reconcile have no hope to successfully follow any of our moral code, our social gospel, or our 3-step cultural clean-up plan. This is not the Gospel Jesus preached nor called people to receive. 

 

Jesus did not give His life to affect a social and political agenda. Even His early disciples had false expectations in this area. Many of us still want Him to come and set up His kingdom on our planet. And we're going to help Him out by condemning the sinners He came to save! We're going to help him by "baptizing" those heathens in our version of morality, and pronounce them justified if they adopt our version of the Bible’s family plan. But Jesus' kingdom is not of this world! It is as if we keep telling Him He's got it wrong. "Oh, Lord, are You sure? Look at all the earthly press we could get for You! You could maximize Your potential and minimize conflict if You would just set up government here!" Maybe we're more honest if we just admit that we want a following for ourselves. When this is our purpose, we do not know the God-Man. We have no idea of His power and authority. He doesn't need our opinion to run His universe. He doesn't need us to assist Him in building a sin-free society. Every time we've tried, we got it way wrong. Jesus hasn't called us to preach anything other than His message. We've preached our own for far too long.  

 

To be sure, Jesus calls us to help alleviate some of the pain and suffering in our world when and where we can, but again, He did not give His life for a more clean and fresh world. He did not give His life for a moral agenda. He did not give His life to clean up Geek City by pushing the gospel of "change the outside first and the inside will follow." He gave His life to save sinners who repent! When the Church re-engineers the gospel, she not only fails at her mission, but also becomes quickly irrelevant and impotent. We have nothing to say if we are not preaching Christ! And when we preach lifestyle first, many will never hear the real Jesus.

Moral Bigotry?

Often the people who have the hardest time repenting are those who’ve already repented! Christians sometimes act like because they’ve confessed Christ, they have no more repenting to do. That kind of “it’s all good, we’re gonna win” mentality is nothing but hypocrisy and it’s killing our witness of the real Jesus. For example: those who call themselves Christians and yet follow and push a moral code instead, should repent for claiming to be followers of Christ but following another code of ethics or system of morality! Jesus certainly preached morality, but the purpose behind His preaching was so that His hearers would meet His Father first! Jesus was concerned about the poor, but His agenda was to save men and women from eternal fire, not just earthly discomfort. Jesus was concerned about right living to be sure, but preached an alignment with the Father in a relationship that would empower obedience. Jesus’ plan for cultural change was to invest in people so that they came to know Him. Not first to force a form of righteousness upon them hoping that it would somehow result in an inner faith conviction about His Lordship. 

 

Others, maybe most professed Christians myself included, need to repent of moral bigotry – discriminating against people who have no conviction about our biblical morality, but are yet held to it by the Church. In the last fifty years much of our evangelical zeal is sickeningly similar to that of Emperor Constantine, who force-baptized the heathen hoards by driving them into water and then calling them Christians! Are we not comparably guilty when we, the Church of Jesus Christ, attempt to force people into our morality when they don’t even have the Spirit’s power or illumination to disobey their sinful nature yet? I say YES!

 

Many of us have spent our Christian lives building up steam against those who don’t follow Jesus’ moral imperatives, forgetting that unless one is part of the Kingdom of God by faith in Jesus Christ, there is no kingdom power available to enact life-change. Only Jesus is the power behind Jesus’ call to life-change! Do we not notice that though the world hates our churches they are still interested in discussing our God? Hmm… I wonder if we’re missing it? Maybe this is because we’ve become practicing Religioneers, in effect, telling Jesus how His Church is supposed to be. We’re preaching a different gospel than Jesus or Paul when we tell the world they must pass our tests of morality and culture before meeting our God. Now that is sin! 

 

The Apostle Paul faced a similar situation in first century Corinth (nothing new under the sun, eh?). His response was very simple for them, and for us, if we have ears to hear: “…we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Cor 1:23-24)

 

Again, I repent.

Different Gospel?

 

The Church seems full of what I call “religioneers.” Religioneers attempt to re-engineer Church to fit their agenda and promote their idea of how to operate in the mainstream. These attempts to make the church powerful and palatable are quite simply pitiful. Jesus was ticked off at those who were religious but void of the true message of God, not the people stranded outside of life with God who didn’t know any better than to follow the current leadership. 

 

In our religious culture it seems now implied that a Christian is quite literally anyone that’s nice once in awhile, lives in America, or at least the Western Hemisphere, goes to some church when there isn’t a child’s soccer game to attend, hasn’t murdered anyone or stolen anything big - or at least hasn’t gotten caught yet. That’s bad enough, but here’s what really sucks: when we, the Church, imply that to be a Christian one must be aligned with a political ideology! Shame on us! This is an example of the work of Religioneers: to make up man-centered systems of appearing to be aligned with God’s kingdom. If you’re in this category, you should repent! Jesus said, “my kingdom is NOT of this world.” So why the heck are we trying to re-engineer this world instead of preaching the one to come? 

 

We attempt to create systems and organizations that exalt ourselves instead of movements about Christ, that exalt Christ. We’ve attempted to force those ‘sinners’ to repent from ungodliness without even knowing the God to whom they are to repent! Maybe we are the ones who must first repent! I think so. I love the story told by Donald Miller in Blue Like Jazz about the true Christian attitude that lead some college students to set up a confession booth on Reid College campus. Then when the party animals came by to see what was really going on, their little booth became a reverse confessional! The Church began confessing to the world for our religioneering of the gospel which has produced some horrid aberrations of the teachings of Jesus Christ in years past. I Repent!

More on Repentance

Why is repentance so hard for us humans? Pride. Admitting we are wrong presupposes that there is a Someone who is over us and above us, and is therefore able to define right and wrong; a Someone to whom we must give account. The fact that people will not or cannot repent may be due to a person’s refusal to give account to anyone.

Repentance is first a change of mind towards God and a turning away from incorrect thinking about God that lead us to sin. Wayne Grudem defines repentance as “a heartfelt sorrow for sin, a renouncing of it, and a sincere commitment to forsake it and walk in obedience to Christ.” Paul Tautges wrote, “Repentance is not a human work but the gracious work of the Holy Spirit preparing sinners’ approach to a Holy God on His terms, rather than their own.” And therein we find the problem: our attempts to approach God on our terms rather than His. We hate it when the One Someone tells us the terms of relationship and says we have to humble ourselves and submit to those terms. That’s pride. We all struggle with it, and we need to repent.

According to the Bible, “all have sinned and fall short of His glory.” (Romans 3:32) God tells us our relationship with Him was broken by rebellion. To fix the relationship requires a sacrifice – a perfect One. He provided the solution we must accept to receive forgiveness and eternal life – one that only He could provide in Jesus Christ His Son. Thus, true Christianity - biblical Christianity - begins by receiving God’s initiative rescue plan, and making a heart decision to follow Jesus on HIS terms. It is not some patched together attempt that sort of lumps all religions together thus making their own! Religion like this sells a god we can reach on our own terms - patching some spiritual ideas together presenting it all before God as righteousness, and expecting Him to accept us on our terms.

And before we get all self-righteous, Christian, all too often this describes us and the churches we attend! Far too much of this religion has made its way into our churches and out the front doors into the culture of America, taking forms that damage the true cause of Christ Jesus, which is to glorify God by saving sinners. Some examples of these forms of religion are our political agendas, our moral agendas, and yes, even some of our social programs. Here’s the deal: attempting to proliferate our version of cultural engineering without “Christ in [them] the hope of glory” is just empty religion and it hurts the cause of the true gospel! From this we should repent. (To be continued …)