If there was a short list of topics to stray away from in Christianity with the hope of keeping people from feeling uncomfortable, hell and judgment would both sit near the top. Heaven is heaven because it is forever rotating around the Son. Hell is hell because it is absent of the One from whom all goodness, love and light glow out of.
Could it be that the very bandaids that we are using to cover our symptoms are the very perpetrators that are most afflicting us? Day by day, we continue to lull ourselves into a state separated from God’s reality.
I used to hate the word “obey.”
I hated how it sounded; what it meant. When I was told to obey, it meant that I needed to fall in line, and conform. But I was a rebel.
I had never really considered what it meant to obey Jesus.
Everybody asks it. The Trinidadian-German Eurodance artist, Haddaway, posed the question with an echoed chorus and a techno beat: “What is Love?”
Perhaps we have lost a real, solid, immovable concept of what love truly entails.
Daily we submit to this lie that being efficient is the calling card of godliness. Says who? And who cares?
“What is truth?” - Pontius Pilate (John 18:38)
In the thick weeds of a confused culture that believes there is truth for you and truth for me and it does not matter if they are diametrically opposed, John pokes his head in to explain what Jesus said and meant: “there is no path, but Mine.”
Hand me any assessment you can find and I will be typecast as a black and white, logic-heavy analyzer that is destined to tell you about my day by explaining what I have learned rather than what I have experienced or felt. However, just like you and everyone you have ever met, I am a feeler.
The British author C.S. Lewis classified this viewpoint with the phrase chronological snobbery. Lewis gives his definition: “Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate to our age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”
“...And he has only each day to be faithful for the one short day, and long years and a long life take care of themselves, without the sense of their length or their weight ever being a burden.” - Andrew Murray
God dealt with the Israelites in the desert in a way that should bring us tremendous comfort... and humility. After doing the impossible and freeing them from the tyrannical grip of Pharaoh, God walked with the Israelites every day, never leaving their side.
Many of us know the proverb, “let sleeping dogs lie.” Could it be that Satan looks at Christians and whispers “let sleeping Saints lie”?
After spending some time studying the history of the church, there is one thing that is far more obvious to me than it has ever been: as Christianity becomes more and more widely claimed by the culture, the more deluded and fruitless it tends to become.
Paul Washer explains what we have been saved from very succinctly: “When a man gets saved, he gets saved from God. The justice of God was coming for you. God saved you from himself, God saved you for Himself and God saved you by Himself.”
We define ourselves by what we produce! ...Why? And what does God define us by?
