Dear Pastor Johnston

Dear Pastor Johnston (A fictitious name):


A short time back I was waiting for something, I don’t remember what, so I clicked on an I-Tunes freebie named Rise UP. It’s played and sung by a new – at least new to me – artist named Diane Burch. Her voice is clear, crisp, and seems to just draw one into listening. There aren’t many popular “stars” like that anymore. Mostly they make noise, talk dirty, and call what they scream singing.

I don’t know if she wrote the lyrics but they make for a thoughtful poetic kind of tune. Today, finding a popular song with words that have actual meaning is a treat. Much of the popular stuff we are all subjected to is nothing more than sexual innuendo with a thumping guitar rhythm driving it. I wish more of the new worship-choruses we sing were oriented more for poetic, meaningful, God-centered language rather than what appears to be words thrown together to accommodate the off-beat rhythms of a garage-band guitar.

I suppose the younger people enjoy the garage-band sound, at least they pretend they do so we cater to their whims. All of Christendom, at least in the U.S., seems to cater to what people like and not what they need. Forget that boring stuff like sin, repentance, obedience, redemption people don’t like to hear that stuff; It makes them feel bad. Instead let’s continue to lead them to believe they can choose to avoid hell if they're in the mood. Tears of sorrow for the guilt of sin(?), man it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that. But I digress.

Back to Diane Burch. One line that stands out in her tune is “…if it’s happiness you want, life is what you’ll get.” Whoever wrote that actually thinks and is a poet. There is another stanza that deserves comment as well:

Why not say it like it is
Like you know you should
Before they break your little heart
Ooh, break it good
Feelings on the inside
Never let you down
So why not say it like it is
Even if it don't make your mama proud

From our past conversation's you know I’m absolutely against the premise of this song. “Feelings on the inside never let you down,” is the kind of information recent generations of American children have been raised and on which our grandchildren are being raised. Feelings are not the means of cognition, yet we have allowed this irrational, evil concept to insinuate itself into our minds’. We have abrogated our responsibility in that we no longer seem able to make the crucial distinction between our privatized experiences and the reality of God speaking to us through the cognitive message that is the Word.

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, who, for the most part influences much of American thinking today, made the point long ago that in changing our concepts we will change how we experience the “phenomenal” [reality]. We can see this Kantian philosophy, for example, mirrored in Oprah's push for the Zen-like nonsense of Eckhart Tolle. Little do we realize that Zen Buddhism in disguise is quickly becoming the religion of America. Many Church leaders, no longer able to differentiate God's reality from wishful thinking, preach using nothing but the language of "values" and "feelings," both of which are the mainstay of Zen Buddhism, Oprah, and Eckhart Tolle.

Personal experience is everything in the minds of most Americans. If we have a bad experience we are told all we need do is change how we think about it and we will find peace and harmony. Feelings, rather than thought, are what we use to feed our emotional experiences so as to change our consciousness of reality. We do this because we actually believe "feelings on the inside, never let you down.” So the feelings we have about our experiences is what we preach, teach, and talk about. We live, breath, think, eat, and sleep, feelings. What we fail to recognize is that by buying into this lie we have slipped into the relativistic-realm where truth becomes a matter of personal preference and not the objective absolute Truth that is embodied in Jesus Christ.

Here is the problem in all of this: My feelings about my experiences are indefinable impressions of the past with no basis in the reality of the present moment. They are nothing more than a fleeting emotional response to a moment in time which has passed by the time my autonomic nervous system sends its sensory signals. In other words, as soon as the present moment passes - the feeling passes. A Zen Buddha understands this since it is his life-pursuit to empty his consciousness of God's reality because he believes the empty mindedness of Nirvana is the only true reality.

We do, however, remember what we thought about that fleeting sensation, but as humans we are unable to remember the actual feeling. The result of this inability to remember the actual sensation leads millions of us into addictions, family breakups, crime, narcissism, all the ills of our sinful-humanity as we go on a quest for the Holy Grail of a ethereal feeling which can never be relived in exactly the same way.

Each new moment presents a different situation with a new and different feeling. Therefore, If we do not mediate our emotional response to sensory input through our mind’s we live more like instinctive animals than as creatures made in the image of God. That is why Jesus gave us this as the 1st commandment, “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this [is] the first commandment.” (Mk 12:30).

Too many, maybe most, of America’s citizenry believes feelings are the only legitimate validation for our ethical, moral, teleological, and theological choices. Even pulpit talk is generally about "feelings" and "values" with seldom a word about "character" or "virtue;" and never any about the use of the mind in relation to our physiological makeup as image bearers of the living God.

I realize character and virtue are old fashioned words which suggest living in harmonious communal unity based on shared principles as codified in Scripture: And I realize that using our mind's to actually think is hard work. But, if we continue to let our emotions (feelings) rule our lives as Christians or as a nation, we can only expect more and more evil to prevail as we slowly descend into ever more barbaric patterns of living.

Pastor’s nation-wide should be talking about this stuff. But they won’t. Too many of them were supposedly educated in Universities and Seminaries which have lost the ability to teach our young how to think. They don't know how the mind works, and don't know that they don't know.

The shame is that careful attention to the actual words in scripture taught as fact to our congregations would go a long way toward reversing this travesty. But, I don’t see that happening any time soon.

Good and Evil

In a discussion with a friend the other day - a good Christian friend - I noted a lack of understanding for the word "sovereign" as we apply it descriptively to God as one of His attributes. (Sovereign is defined as having supreme rule. Note: a synonym is autonomous).

My friend in trying to come to grips with the concept of evil (the eternal problem in the mind's of men) he is confronted with the thought that God had either given Lucifer full and autonomous thought, and power, or God had created evil. My friend cannot wrap his mind around the idea of a loving God creating evil.

The problem of evil, as anathema to a righteous god, is a man-made categorical problem which has existed as long as men have existed. Evil is not a problem for God. It is part of His overall redemptive plan for his Universe and everything in it. We are the ones who have the problem as we struggle to understand with our limited capacity for thought.

Our human problem begins with this thought: God created an entity, Lucifer, who rebelled and became evil. Because he is imortal as an angel we think he was autonomous. He isn't and never was. Is 14:13, "For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: Isa 14:14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High." Clearly Lucifer's remarks are nothing more than wishful thinking because that didn't happen.  Omnipotent, autonomous, sovereign power has been reserved by the LORD God to Himself alone. (1 Ch 29:11)

I agree with Scripture and centuries of Church dogma, (Rev 19:6) God is sovereign/omnipotent therefore, Satan has only limited power and like us what he has is given him by God. He even had to ask permission to attack Job. (Job 1:11,12) Moreover, scripture tells us (Col 1:17) that it is God who keeps both Satan and his limited power in existence.

What that means at its most basic is that for reasons we may never know, God willed to create a universe in which evil would exist as part of His overall redemptive plan. Gen 3:9 tells us "And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil." Bluntly, Scripture says God created evil. Jhn 1:3 explains it this way, "All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made."

This means God created a Universe in which His Holy plans will be carried to completion regardless of what we think about the category of evil. In the mind of God and in light of what He has revealed of His universal plan for redemption of His creation - the use to which God puts evil is good. Joseph told his brothers, "You meant it for evil but God meant it for good." (Gen 50:20)

Our problem as modern, sophisticated, "religious" people with limited abilities is that we loose sight of the universals; we can't see the forest because of all those trees. By that I mean rather than try to understand the categories -good and evil- the way Scripture tells us God uses them, we assign our own wishful thinking to them. Having done that for centuries we come up with nonsense statements such as "...a righteous loving God cannot create evil."

 

We have conscripted two attributes which belong to the universal that is God's redemptive plan and in our mind's we have separated them in such a way we view them as universals in themselves. They are not universals, they are just attributes of something else, just as bark and leaves are not the tree.

God's plan is good and for it too come to fruition it must have a tension or a counter-balance, that is how the universe is made. That tension is good vs. evil. Just as we cannot know light without its opposite dark, we cannot know good without evil. We loose sight of the fact that in the Garden of Eden just after God had pronounced everything "very good," evil was already present in the form of the Serpent. We like to think about the "very good" but never stop to ask how the Serpent came to be in the neighborhood.  

Do we understand why God made the universe to operate in this manner? Of course not, we are not God. We only have a limited knowledge about God's plan of good and evil because Eve disobeyed God in the Garden and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Gen 2:9)

So as my friend wrestles with the idea that God has created what Christians abhor - evil, I can only suggest that we should carefully think about, examine, test, reason through, pray about, and ask the Holy Spirit for guidance as we tackle the really tough issues God has left us to deal with. Evil is one of those issues. God made it,, named it, and it exists. In God's mind and plan he has categorized it as good because it is used by Him for His good purposes. (Gen 50:20). We must learn to deal Scripturally with this tension and not with our cliches and slogans.

Jos 23:15 Therefore it shall come to pass, [that] as all good things are come upon you, which the LORD your God promised you; so shall the LORD bring upon you all evil things, until he have destroyed you from off this good land which the LORD your God hath given you.

Still the constant question is how could a Holy God allow evil to exist? Perhaps we will get to ask Him someday, but in the interim we must accept that He does what His will demands. Judges 9:23 is very explicit that if it is part of God's plan He uses evil - "Then God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech:"

Christ has given us our hope. He died so that we might live. Thus we know that someday, regardless how much we distort the concepts in Scripture Christ will make us alive with Him as part of His Church or Bride. When that day arrives there will be no more evil. (Rev 21:4).

If we deny God's sovereignty over absolutely everything, we are in fact denying God Himself. There is no middle ground on this issue. God is either keeping me in existence, making my synapeses fire as I type, or He isn't. If He isn't there is no such thing as god.

So, although we are maudlin about the idea that a loving God can't use evil because somehow we have gotten the mistaken notion that He is like us and dislikes bad stuff it is emminently clear God created evil, told us about it via the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and uses it for His purposes when He wills it to be necessary.

In the interim some heavy-duty thinking using the brains that God gave us helps a lot. Wishful thinking and sentimental nonsense about who our God is helps no one. God is God and He is sovereign over all that He has made.

A Great Sign

Redemption is the plan

When things fell apart in Eden, God did not trash plan A only to move to plan B. He immediately enacted his plan of redemption. This plan includes the redemption of man and the resurrection of his physical body. Paul tells us in Roman 8:19-20 that God is even going to redeem the present earth. If God is not moving to plan B with man and the earth, it is very possible that God will also redeem the animals.

I'm not linking the above quote. I'm using it to pursue a thought, not to point to a particular person for any reason. As a matter of fact, I got the quote from a blog I read frequently because of the truth and wisdom I find there. The thought I'm wrestling with is this: Is God sovereign or not, and if so what does that mean and what are the ramifications.

The writer above eludes to the idea that God does not have alternate plans for His work of redemption. I agree. What I find curious, however, is in our use of language we often trap ourselves by saying inexact things. I do it all the time: I mean to make a particular point, but when I write down the words the concepts I had in mind come out twisted and garbled. We all do this. It is part of the life we live in a fallen universe. I will probably do it in this post, but I hope not.

In the quote the writer says, "...He immediately enacted his plan of redemption." My understanding of Scripture is that God has revealed to us that creation itself, the universe, me, you, dogs, cats, - everything is encompassed in the concept "plan of redemption." I believe everything that exists was made to be redeemed, in my thinking I can't accept that things "fall apart," as though by accident. Things did come "apart" in the garden but not by accident. God designed everything in that story to happen just exactly as He tells us it happened.

Moreover, I believe redemption is the plan, it is not part of something else. Creation was made to fall which makes it the beginning of the "enact(ment) of redemption." If God subsequently enacted a plan of redemption,..." the implication is that it is subsidiary to something else, or a plan "B."

If Creation wasn't made to fall God got blind-sided by Satan and His - God's - original plan was thwarted. Even sin entering the world is part of the "plan of redemption." It did not happen by accident. If any part of creation or redemption is accidental then God is not sovereign and all this time I've spent worshipping Him has been a waste and lost cause. I refuse to accept that idea.

Sin, the fall, all the stuff we humans face in life, yes, even creation itself is the master plan of a sovereign God - and this plan is good. It is very good. (Gen 1:31) God is sovereign and the implications of this fact are seldom examined by we humans.

Thinking is hard work and we don't like to work. We would rather rely on our limited knowledge which can barely deal with the idea that God would have created us for one purpose and one purpose only - redemption. Yet, that is the fact. (Eph 2:1) We, the elect, were created to be redeemed and given to God's Son to live finally with Him as His chosen. (Jhn 15:16)

In the meantime just trying to understand the concept of sovereign is a challenge we should all come to grips with. The word means absolute rule over everything - not just some things. If we accept that definition we have a lot of thinking to clarify.

Blogger Design Templates

I curse blogger for their new templates. They are so easy to use, change, manipulate and play with I can't make up my mind which to use.

For today I like this one. On my laptop it is very easy to read and easy on the eyes. I'll probably try a different one tomorrow.

Idiocracy, mindless,whatever...

I recently posted about the Christian Church, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox, which New York City is refusing to allow to be rebuilt. I named the leadership of that City the Idiocracy. There is no such word I guess, but there should be. My spell checker goes nuts every time I type it. I think we all know that those in charge on Manhattan Island today have somehow let the stuff that is supposed to be between their ears leak out: at least that appears to be what has happened.

This is not news, this kind of thing happened before. (There must be something wrong with the water on the Island). Gates of Vienna told me about it this morning:

Past as Prologue, 55 years ago? — Elegant statue of Muhammad “quietly” removed from the roof of the Appellate Division Courthouse on Madison Square, New York City in 1955, when seven feckless appellate judges, “encouraged” by the US State Department, needlessly submitted to Islamic supremacist dictates regarding “Tawsir,” or statuary.
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Mindless, craven cultural relativism — sadly pervasive in 2010 — has led NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg to capitulate to Islamic supremacism and support the odious Ground Zero mosque projectof the cultural jihadist Imam Faisal Rauf, and his coterie. The rather witless Bloomberg, of course, cynically recasts his moral and intellectual cretinism as championing bedrock American values, notably freedom of religion. However, the ultimately self-destructive Islamic correctness we are witnessing vis a vis the Ground Zero mosque, may be an endemic phenomenon amongst Manhattan elites, dating back to at least 1955.

Ecclesiastes says: (Eccl 1:9) "...and there is no new thing under the Sun." And Edmund Burke said, "those who do not know history are destined to repeat it." So, as much as I hate to see it happening the Bible and Burke both confirm we are going to watch a Mosque be built where there should be a very large, prominent, Christian Cathedral. I think we have all gone nuts!

Who said there are no prophets?

Peter Schiff was Ron Paul's economic advisor. Everyone laughed at him. I don't hear many laughing today. He said home equity would vanish. It's gone. Everyone was telling us to buy Merrill Lynch, its gone. The U,S. government owns General Motors, the Italians own Chrysler, and China owns the rest. I can understand why the talking heads laugh however, a prophet is not someone any of us like to listen to: especially when he tells us we are not doing the right things.

That's precisely why so many hate Jesus. He tells us do the right thing and we say he is nuts. Oh well, he said that's the way it would be - didn't he? As a matter of fact he was the first one to tell us to quite hanging on to things and neither a borrower nor lender be - or something like that. But, hey! Who knew? Those guys are just crazy prophets. Right?

Hitchens and his cancer

Christopher Hitchens is the famous Atheist author most people are at least a little familiar with. He has throat cancer and is being treated by the best that science has to offer. In an article about his ordeal I read, "Hitchens is badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste." 

For a man who has spent his career arguing for the impersonality and accidental nature of the Universe how is it, I wonder, he has a "sense of waste." If his theories of the evolved nature of everything are true how can whatever happens be wasteful.

According to the atheists the evolutionary process uses what it needs to advance its impersonal agenda regardless whether that is Chris Hitchens' cancer to kill him or the ant I just stepped on. It is not waste it is evolutionary progress to die for the furtherance of this impersonal process. To evolve is to be - isn't it?

Why Hitchens would now consider his contribution to the advancement of evolution as a waste is beyond me. What's more, I question how his evolved brain even came up with the concept of waste.

If evolution is true there is neither good nor bad nor is there accumulation nor waste. There is only the process of mindless change.

It seems to me, now that Hitchens has begun to confront his own mortality, that he may have begun to reason differently. Perhaps he might be thinking there is purpose in the universe after all. If that is so, then he will have to confront where that "purpose" comes from. It certainly cannot exist in an impersonal evolved place of gases which spontaneously coalesced from a singularity to make him.

Do you suppose he might, like Anthony Flew, at some point admit he was wrong and admit there is a God? Probably not! Hitchens has a lot of what we Christians call pride (I don't know what impersonal evolved beings call it) to overcome and I'm not sure he would do that.

It would be nice if Christ would call him to belief. That event, along with Flew's deathbed conversion, might go a long way toward changing the arrogant thought processes of the evolved elites who run our Universities in a manner which is now excluding as much Christian thought as possible.

We need to pray for Chris Hitchens - whether he likes it or not.

Cultures Collide (2)

"Precisely because the church does not exist for itself but completely and exclusively for the world, it is necessary that the church not become the world, that it retain its own countenance. If the church loses its own contours, if it lets its light be extinguished and its salt become tasteless, then it can no longer transform the rest of society. Neither missionary activity nor social engagement, no matter how strenuous, helps anymore. …"(1)

Link to Cultures Collide (1)

Runaway Slave

HT: Grouchy Old Cripple

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church

As the Idiocracy running the city of New York debates whether to throw a party or not over the building of a monument to the religious beliefs of those who killed so many on 9/11, what about the little Christian Church that was destroyed on that day? Has any Imam or politician anywhere spoken up to question the delay in rebuilding this Church? Nine years for permission to rebuild seems to me to be slow even for the money-grubbing, thoughtless bureaucrats in New York and New Jersey. But, hey, that's just my Midwestern opinion: I'm not sophisticated like those elites.

[Photo Courtesy of New York Times]

The plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center complex include building a new St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church quite close to the original location.^[1] The church will again house a worshipping congregation. A museum will also be built for the projected large influx of visitors that will come to the site.

On July 23, 2008, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reached a deal with the leaders of the church for the Port Authority to acquire the 1,200-square-foot (110 m²) lot that the church had occupied for $20 million. $10 million is coming from the Port Authority and $10 million is coming from JPMorgan Chase & Co. (Wikipedia)

[note: JP Morgan was given $25 billion in bailout money].

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is a tax supported government agency. So in essence the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey will pony up $10 million for the replacement of this Church and the taxpayers in the rest of the nation will pony up the other $10 million. Don't forget, JP Morgan Chase took billions in bail out tax money not long ago. And if reports are true they haven't spent any of it on rebuilding this Church.

What I would like to know is who has stopped the Saudi Government from rebuilding this Church? Oh! "There is no Saudi money for this honorable task," you say. I didn't know that. I just assumed since it was Saudi nationals who destroyed it the so-called civilized Muslims in Arabia would have the decency to chip in to rebuild it. Shows you what I know.

I need to get out more often.

Cultures Collide

In the late 19th century Sunday schools were formed in churches as a means to teach the children in the emerging industrialized world to read so as to be able to access the Christian Bible. From that humble beginning we now find ourselves locked - it seems - in a culture oriented totally around the needs, wants and desires of our young. Fathers are becoming more and more to be viewed as nothing more than superfluous and according to most TV commercials and sit-coms as idiots.

[...] developments began to coalesce to form a new understanding of the "place" of young people in leading industrial societies after the mid-nineteenth century. A period of public education was made mandatory for young people in many parts of Europe and the United States; increasingly, schooling became an expected and routine part of the life course. At roughly the same time, the field of medicine and the emerging discipline of psychology began to differentiate the stages of the human life course more precisely, determining a "normal" standard for biological and social development based on chronological age.[...] (1)

So as the world surrounding the Christian World, a World that is called to be in but not like its surroundings (1 Jhn 2:15,16), the Christian World has slowly remodeled itself on the order of its surroundings. Now the church is almost indistinguishable in its makeup from the rest of society. Far from the Biblical model of Father, Mother, children, all led in unity by Elders as members of the Kingdom of God, we too have now segregated ourselves by age believing we are doing God's work led by the Holy Spirit - as one Deacon recently told me.

The ease with which Satan has been able to bring about this transition is astonishing. There are few, if any, voices raised in protest as the church changes into just another expression of our surrounding culture.

[...]The driving force, the engine, behind youth culture is greed. It is the creation of an entertainment industry lusting after money. From the beginning, the elite controlling the media recognized that sin is profitable—that they could boost sales by creating products which chipped away at moral restraints and standards of decency. So, with purely mercenary motives, they deliberately made their products more and more offensive. The music became noisier, the speech became more insolent and vulgar, and the clothing of teen idols became more and more disreputable. Soon, the media were filled with sex, violence, and rebellion. Through its campaign against morality, the entertainment industry succeeded in opening up a gap between parents and children, the so-called generation gap. Children embraced a way of life that scorned the traditional values of the older generation. Over the years, youth culture has sunk into worse and worse decadence and has enlarged its constituency to include many adults as well as many children. (2)

A critical question facing the child of a Christian home is whether he will identify with his parents or turn against them and join youth culture.[...]

Sad to say my own church has been caught in this trap. Everything we do is now oriented toward "peer" or age group activities. Even in worship service the youth sit apart from parents or are in a segregated "children's church."

The top down family concept so prevalent throughout most of the history of Western Civilization, sustained by the model of God's Kingdom being built on earth, has been destroyed.

But, when the Church believes orienting everything around the secular model is the only way to survive it is time someone actually began thinking about what we are doing. God's Church will survive, but a particular church may not if the leadership is blind to trap it has gotten caught in. 

There is nothing I can do about this on a personal level other than what I'm doing here in pointing out that this model is unbiblical, and I believe sinful. Oh! There is one other thing I do and that is sit with my wife, our son and his wife and their children on Sunday mornings in worship service. We take up almost a whole row in the pews.

Who knows maybe our sitting together will be viewed as defying authority and our little rebellion against "peer" group segregation will catch on.

Stuff I’ve Heard

Not long ago I was listening to a sermon and the man giving it said,”I can’t give you meat, all you can handle is the milk of the word.” This was said to a congregation I presume has been churched for many years. I don’t know their individual spiritual condition but I assume the man speaking does or he would not have said what he did.

My mind immediately questioned why he would say such a thing. I thought if he has been the leader for very long something is drastically wrong somewhere. As the spiritual leader it is his job to make sure his “sheep” can handle the meat of the word. Logically, if they cannot, it is his fault and not theirs. Yet, his remarks were pointedly condemning of his audience for their lack of – what?

Mike Ratliff has posted about this in a spiritual gifts article here:

There is little doubt that there are some in leadership positions in the visible church that are there because of their natural abilities rather than the fact that God has gifted them to lead His people. If the latter were the case, they would not be leading their followers into apostasy as the passage I placed at the top of this post clearly states. Those gifted by God to be true leaders in His Church have the role and responsibility to do what? They are to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of Got, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Why?

 

I teach a class on the gifts in my church and one of the things I stress is for the class to always insure that what they think they have as a gift is not just natural ability. It is one thing to be able to have the natural ability to play Cello but it is quite another to play as does Yo Yo Ma. A good player has talent, Ma is gifted. The evidence speaks for itself. So it is with preachers and teachers.

So, when I hear anyone say something derogatory about someone else’s ability, be it musical or spiritual, I can only ask what is the reason – or as Mike asks, “why” is the situation as it is. Teachers are responsible for the education of those in their charge and preachers are responsible for the spiritual lives of their congregations.

The man who scolded his congregation for their lack of maturity in the Word should be very cautious about what he is saying. Someday he will give account for the accusation and he would be well advised to make sure he has done all within his power to insure he has taught them well. If he thinks he has been called to preach but has not been gifted for the task, my opinion is has made a mistake that has eternal implications.

Cheap Imitation

Here it is Sunday and I'm at home. Health concerns have me at only about 1/2 operational efficiency. That's fancy talk for I'm not feeling well. That's OK! I will get over it; or I won't. Whatever.

Anyway, because I'm home I was wandering around the "web" looking at some of the Churches around the country. (Who said the internet is not useful?) I visited the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Idaho Falls, Idaho. On their web site I read this about their sabbath day worship service:

Substantial, reverent worship:

The apex for every Christian week is Sabbath worship.

It is the duty of all Christians to present themselves with all of the family in the assembly of the saints to render praise to God, submit to the life changing discipline of the Word preached and the Word made visible in the sacraments of baptism and holy communion, sing the songs and Psalms of the Kingdom, confess doctrine, and give of our earthly goods for the support of the church.

We are called out of the world for these few moments to live in a world fragrant with the air of the coming Kingdom of God. Thus, we seek to provide the true laborers of worship (you, the saints) with all of the ordained elements of worship so that we might provide the true audience of worship (not you, but God) with worship that will be pleasing to Him.[emphasis mine]

I have never read a more beautiful description of what worship should be. "...a world fragrant with the air of the coming Kingdom of God." "We are called out of a world...!" How is it that we have come to believe that in the name of pride - we call it relevance - we think our choruses about what we are doing for God, the mind-numbing "modern" hymns we sing, the pointless shallowness of sermons about...about what?, we think are viewed by God as Worship?

The Sabbath should be the day when our entire focus should be on the God who is our savior and the Kingdom he is preparing for us, but what do we do? We drag our secularized desires into this sphere - rock bands and all - call it worship and wonder why we don't attract the unsaved. We don't attract them because the schmaltz passed off as a sermon, the garage-band sounds, and the constant harping about money is what they see on TV every day. Why would they want to spend their day off with a cheap imitation of what they live now?

Why can't we just show them the "fragrance" that is coming and allow God to do what He is going to do?