With every start of a "brave new world" the people of God have to inspect their foundations, make sure that they're still built on the bedrock of Jesus' words, and be ready to follow their Lord wherever He goes. More and more this is apparent, as we see and hear "church" leaders and dignitaries mouthing not the Word of God but the ideologies of men, seeking their approval.The Church Age and the age of Christian Empires is over. We're not in a post-Christian age, though, just a post-Church one. Where the Church as an institution has trouble in reaching the unsaved, the Church as people, you and me, can do what we see the Lord doing. Even today, He is out there, looking for His lost sheep. We can follow Him there, and do what we see Him doing.
"The Word of God is alive and active." Without our help in the form of commentaries and preaching, the plain and simple Word of Truth can convict souls of sin. The problem is, the sinner, as in the case of a person guilty of sexual sin, for example, homosexual acts, already has more than half the world preaching at him. Though the preaching is usually coupled with an invitation to accept God and His Word, the emphasis is placed on turning from the sin and living righteously. This the sinner cannot see himself doing. He may have tried it, and failed. Of course, he probably tried to live righteously by his own will power and hoped to achieve righteousness by his own efforts. That's precisely why he failed. Then, maybe even after trying this many times, he simply gave up, gave himself over to the sin, and decided, it's either God's fault, or else the scriptures need to be "interpreted" to include his particular sin as not sinful.
What the sinner has to understand, and what every Christian should understand, is that we cannot be righteous in the way humans think of righteousness. The Word says, "all our righteousness is filthy rags," and "the righteousness that comes by faith in the One who justifies the sinner," namely Jesus Christ, "the Righteous," is He in Whom our righteousness subsists. It is the righteousness of Christ that must cover us, not our own.
When the sinner understands this, then he can begin to have hope, and the healing of the soul, and deliverance from the bondage of sin and death, can begin to take place. It's when the sinner is confronted by his sin and the demands of the Law, without understanding this, that he has little or no desire to seek the Lord.
And can you blame him?
"What I desire is mercy, not sacrifice," says the Lord.
Mercy is not to accept the sin, but to accept and welcome the sinner with the good news, Jesus Christ risen from the dead, alive today, our righteousness and our justification, our savior, who saves us from sin and death.
How can we tell the sinner this, by our words or by the fruit of our lives in Christ which we, like trees planted by His Father, bear for others?
4 comments:
I have a pet peeve that I think is relevant to what you're saying here. My pet peeve is when we Christians expect others to submit to our expectations with out accepting the truth of our words.
If somebody doesn't buy into the truth of scripture, what possible reason could they have for following scriptures rules and expectations?
So much discourse happens on the level of "Well, I believe that the bible says that you shouldn't do X"
When people say "I don't particularly care about what your bible says." we often times miss the fact that this is a perfectally reasonable thing to say. I wouldn't be swayed by a Hindu telling me that their scriptures prohibit me eating a hamburger (I think on the grounds that it could be a reincarnated relative) Why should I expect somebody who is not a Christian to be swayed by scripture?
I don't think that this means that we shouldn't speak the truth in love. But it has profound implications for what we say and how we say it.
Yes, Jeff, your pet peeve is exactly the message I am trying to get across in this post. That's what I was getting at when I wrote,
"It is the righteousness of Christ that must cover us, not our own. When the sinner understands this, then he can begin to have hope, and the healing of the soul, and deliverance from the bondage of sin and death, can begin to take place. It's when the sinner is confronted by his sin and the demands of the Law, without understanding this, that he has little or no desire to seek the Lord.
And can you blame him?"
As I've written many times before, we are no longer in the Church Age, where we can assume everyone is a Christian even if they are living desperately wicked lives. In the 19th century, and even in most of the 20th, a person living in open sin still knew he or she was doing wrong.
I don't know if you've seen the film "Changeling" yet, but the serial murder who committed the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, and his teenage forced accomplice, both were fully aware that they had done wrong and were going to hell, if God did not forgive them. This is not the case with sinners today, not serious sinners, not "sinners lite" like us either. We can't possibly expect people who do not acknowledge Christ and the faith we hold to follow our standards, or God's actually.
Remember what holy apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, chapter 5:
I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person.
For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But those who are outside God judges. Therefore “put away from yourselves the evil person.”
Anyway, thanks for the comment. You got my point entirely.
Yikes! Protestant?
Re: "The Church Age and the age of Christian Empires is over. We're not in a post-Christian age, though, just a post-Church one. "
Is the Church not The Body of Christ, which is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow?
The clarification is in my comment above:
"As I've written many times before, we are no longer in the Church Age, where we can assume everyone is a Christian even if they are living desperately wicked lives."
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