State of the Church - Part II -

Many of us, in our battle to preserve the Judeo-Christian morality of our society have forgotten a crucial, indeed, the central truth of the gospel. As Ravi Zacharias says it, Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good, he came to bring dead people to life.

We have gotten to a place where we, for the most part, have focused so much on trying to make society good through political activism, and through moralistic teaching in the Church that we have forgotten that the real point is life. Life must precede morality and morality without life is pointless anyway. We have frequently lost sight of Jesus through our maze of moralisms.

This problem has not only doomed our socio/political activism to failure, it has severely hindered our own spiritual lives and left us impoverished, with a faith that is but a shadow of what was originally delivered.

Do not imagine for a moment that I bring a message of “easy believism”, or a teaching that morality doesn’t matter. It is impossible, IMPOSSIBLE, to really know God, while justifying sin or insisting on living in willful disobedience to Him. The destructive power of sin can not be exaggerated.

Yet the fact remains that we will never find life, nor peace in following a code of morals, we will find it only in the person of Jesus Christ. When you reduce Christianity to moralist teaching, you have essentially made it into Judaism, or Islam. The defining mark of all human religion is the idea that following the proper moral code will result in eternal reward. The profound defining difference that sets divine religion apart is that it consists not in following a code of morals, but in a reconciliation. It consists in being restored to a state in which we know, and are known by God, in which we love and are loved by God.

It must be understood, and would be obvious but for the corrupt state to which we have fallen, that such a reconciliation will always lead to living rightly. For as Jesus himself said “if you love me, you will keep my commandments.” The heart of the gospel is the declaration that Jesus Christ is Lord, absolute and without qualification. That means that we recognize him as our owner, and absolute master. The idea that you can have a Lord whom you love, and yet do not obey, or who’s words you twist to suit your own desires in contravention of his intent is a complete contradiction.

I have been a Christian almost as long as I can remember. I have no time in my life when I didn’t believe the Christian message. I do not doubt that I was saved, but I often find that I look back and regret the shallowness of my faith, and most of all, the fact that though my faith was shallow, I believed it to be deep.

I have always tried my best to live by the Christian moral teaching, and to have correct doctrine but the truth is that for most of my life, I have loved the ideas and the teachings, more than I did Jesus Christ. I have been devoted to the morality and the ideas involved in the Faith, but not to Jesus Christ. I thought that because I had good doctrine, and good morals, I was doing well, and I had the fullness of the faith. The truth was that all the while, I really knew little of God.
When I get to this point, it is hard to know what words can possibly express what I am seeing and feeling. I look at my life to this point and I feel sorrow at all the time I thought I was so good, and yet was so blind, and I feel gratitude and joy that God has given me grace to see myself in the light of truth.

When I get to this place, I’m always reminded of the parable Jesus told to one of the Pharisees, with whom he was dining. A woman of ill repute came in and washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and her hair. The Pharisee thought to himself “if he were truly a prophet, he would know what kind of woman this is, and not let her touch him.” Jesus knew what he was thinking and he told a parable of two people who were in debt to one man. One person had a great debt and the other had a little debt. The man forgave both debts… who will love him more? The Pharisee said, the one who owed more.

For years I missed the point of this parable. The Pharisee was right, he who is forgiven more will love more. However, I always tended to assume that Jesus was speaking in simple factual terms about the two debtors. The one had a great debt and the one had a little debt. In the example, obviously the Pharisee is the one with little debt, and the adulterous woman had great debt.
That, however, is not the point at all. Which truly had the greater debt to God? The Pharisee or the woman? In truth, we can’t really know. The point, however, is that the Pharisee thought his debt was small, while the woman realized that her debt was great.

I spent most of my life believing that my debt was small, and as a result, I had small love for God. I had never really been grossly immoral, I had never really done the really bad things, so I had little to be forgiven of. There was so much about myself that I couldn’t see and at the heart of it all was that I cared more about teachings than about the teacher. I didn’t know how much I had been forgiven so I loved little, and I was not conscious of his great love for me.

The common thread in all this is passion and devotion for the person of Jesus Christ, rather than just commitment to an idea, or adherence to a code. It is an emotional experience for me to look at myself and see how much I have lacked this. It is both frustrating, and sorrowing, to speak of this to my fellow Christians and get nothing but blank stares in return. Or just as bad, people who agree without really listening and then go on as before, apparently ignoring the whole conversation.

It may be that I am projecting my own experience on to the Church at large and really I’m the only one who faces this issue, and this condition. If that is the case I am sorry. I don’t think that is the case, though. As I look around, I don’t see many people who really appear to know God well. I don’t see many people bearing fruit in their lives. I don’t see the Church prevailing against the gates of hell.

I see a lot of comfortable evangelicals searching for meaning in life, trying to figure out what piece of the puzzle they are missing. I see we have forgotten the words, “if you seek to keep your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will surely find it”.
If you find yourself agreeing with what I have said here, but having trouble really finding passion within yourself for Jesus Christ. Don’t be afraid, you are not alone. It is not something that comes easily to us, especially when we are living according to our own will. Ask God to kindle this fire in your heart. Ask him to show you how to grow in knowledge of him and how to walk in his life.

Those are things that are always according to his will, and if we ask them, really desiring them, he will accomplish them in us.
If you fall along the way, don’t be afraid because God knows that the flesh is weak, and he knows we are going to fail, as long as you are willing to get back up, he will do the lifting.