Monday Morning Music Ministry

3-18-19

I am not sure whether the American trait of consumerism has metastasized on the body of our character. Or, as a prime suspect, post-modernism has infected religion. Or, in the latest of history’s inexorable pendulum-swings, heresy rears its ugly head once again.

Of course it is a combination of all three tendencies (and more sociopathologies), the main debate being what factors predominate. A movable feast… or infestation, I reckon.

To me, the causes are easy to spot. And the effects are hard to confront; harder still to ameliorate; virtually impossible to reverse. Regarding the reversal of the crisis in contemporary religion, I look not to the Bible (which assures me that God can bring revival) but to history books (which reminds me that His apostate people seldom seek it).

Christianity in the West largely has become a business of spiritual specialties, no longer a smorgasbord of nuanced beliefs but, virtually, a food fight. Denominations, hundreds of them, are not in themselves the problem. When the church split in two – Roman and Eastern Orthodox – that largely was political and geographic, hardly a schism. When the Roman church grew corrupt, it fostered Reform, thank God, resulting in denominations. Eventually, denominationalism. Sometimes good (Solo Scriptorum) and sometimes bad (self-styled junior popes and contorted creeds).

I think the root of all these evils – of all evil – is the Sin of Pride. Going back to the Garden, it undergirds every other sin we routinely decry: hating, lying, lusting, unforgiveness, the rest. It is why God rebuked and chastised those whom He loved. It is why He codified the Ten Commandments. It is why He sent prophets. It is why Jesus taught. It is the reason that the Holy Ghost was sent. It is why the early Church formulated Creeds.

Pride. The belief that we know better than God; that His rules might be right for others, bit not us; that – frankly – we know better than God.

The human mind has an infinite capacity to fool itself. This dangerous attribute becomes deadly when combined with a society that is encouraging, indifferent, or enabling of these self-destructive impulses, as now.

Churches no longer squabble over whether Christ’s blood is present or symbolic in the Lord’s Supper. Or whether we have free will or are predestinated. Or if the Gifts of the Spirit are for today.

Just see what many, many churches and denominations are advocating in North America and Europe these days; or countenancing under their watch –

Toleration of homosexuality, abortion, adultery, divorce. “Hating the sin, loving the sinner” often has yielded to acceptance, and even enablement.

Doctrinal views of heaven, hell, forgiveness, and sin have been abandoned or have been stretched beyond traditional recognition.

Personal – that is, spiritual – crises seldom are addressed with spiritual answers in today’s churches. Sociological solutions of “acceptance,” and the New Morality (which is no morality at all), are offered instead. One’s problems originate with society or tradition or intolerance or faulty upbringing… never one’s own sinning.

The secular ingredients of these poisonous formulas always include an appeal to Pride, and seldom an acknowledgment of God. It is almost axiomatic, isn’t it, that flouting God’s clearly presented Will is self-destructive? God has sent Commandments and prophets and teachers and inspired scribes and councils, and His Son – out of love, and for our well-being.

Why do we scramble and scratch, confuse and contort, when He has laid out beautiful paths for us?

Christianity is shrinking in North America and Europe. Thank God it is expanding – sometimes by the proverbial leaps abounds – south of the Equator, in Africa and South America, in Southeast Asia, and even in China despite persecution and killings.

And the reaction of the contemporary churches in our countries that are dotted with cathedrals and church spires?

If you don’t like a spiritual belief, ignore it. If rules regarding certain sins are unpleasant, regard 2000 years of Christianity as “backwards” and “mistaken.” If Bible passages and sermons make you uneasy… move on; elsewhere, or to nowhere at all.

In that last option, people choose to move on, but it very possibly is to hell. To those who pick and choose what they should believe, that destination is not theirs to decide. The truth does not depend on your opinion of it.

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Click: Satan’s Jewel Crown – Bruce Springsteen

8-10-15

It has been said that Jesus, by the evidence of Bible accounts, displayed more mercy and forgiveness, certainly more compassion, to sinners He encountered, than to Pharisees, Scribes, and members of the religious establishment of the time.

Post-modernists often run with that scorecard and flame the embers of anti-clericism still glowing from at least the glory days of the French Revolution. But the angels are in the details. Just as Christ called the love of money, not money itself, the root of all evil, so must we notice that Jesus scorned the corrupt and empty religionists in His midst – the whited sepulchers. Their corruption, not their robes.

A tendency in the church since the start has been pick-and-choose Christianity. Believers and skeptics alike often are readier to say “Aha!” than “Amen.” Quick to say, “Gotcha!” and slow to pray, “God bless…”

The post-modern church, if a church it be, and the “emergent” movement, tend to seize upon half of Jesus’s teachings… indeed half of His messages, parables, and even simple sentences. I quickly confess that traditionalists like I am, and orthodox friends, are often guilty of these sins too. We all must constantly check our thoughts, words, and deeds against scripture.

But the contemporary church, and many theological writers amongst us, often discard the traditional views of sin, of heaven and hell, of the need for forgiveness, of the efficacy of evangelism… even personal salvation, Absolute Truth, and the Divinity of Christ. We don’t sin, we humans, they say: we make bad choices. These people are Enablers, but call themselves Christians.

Actually, many of them insist on identifying themselves instead as “Christ followers.” Whatever. They play more words games than you’d find at a Scrabble convention, intoning about “relational truth” and claiming to know that if Jesus returned to earth now, He would be more concerned with “community” and being “welcoming” than about those old biblical injunctions to believe in Him and seek eternal life.

These folks stick their thumbs in Jesus’s eye, no more – and no less – than their ancestors, the heretics of the ages. In the Apostolic Days and the first centuries of the Church, disciples and bishops were obliged to combat error and heretics. Seeking to adhere to Jesus’s teachings, and the inspired texts, delivered by and tested against the invocation of the Holy Spirit, Christian leaders convened Councils and wrote the basic creeds that define our faith (and often preemptively answer false doctrines). We need the guidance of the Holy Ghost, and the truths of the orthodox creeds, no less today than in past crises in church history.

Those who would distort the gospel – and the very lessons inherent in the gospel accounts – point to the criticism, Jesus’s visceral anger, with the religious leaders. So should we all be vigilant against corruption in the church, not just those attacking from outside. Of course. More so, in fact, than against secular leaders and the laity. Leaders must be held to higher standards.

But I have sat with, discussed, and hotly debated contemporary “Christian” writers and celebrities who insist that Jesus’s mercy, His frequent lack of condemnation, toward sinners, adulterers, prostitutes, meant that He “met people where they lived.” Indeed He did. He did not avoid, and often sought, their company. And as He did not condemn, neither should we, these new popes say.

But there we have the Half-Gospel that is overtaking the church in America.

Jesus usually did not condemn sinners in these Bible accounts. But He never endorsed anyone’s sin. In fact He would always tell the person to “go and sin no more.” He loved sinners so much that He desired that they turn from sin. Today? Jesus might go to a biker bar, say, or a gay rights parade. And I don’t believe He would overturn tables or bring out the lash. But He WOULD discern their sinful ways, and He would lovingly forgive, coupled with His invariable injunction to “sin no more.”

Jesus came to be the Savior of sinful humankind, not its Holy Enabler. Otherwise Bible prophecy, His ministry, His suffering and sacrificial death, the Atonement, His resurrection, is insulted – a useless charade designed by God Almighty. Heaven forbid.

A friend of mine, Harvey Corbitt, recently shared the thought: If Jesus DID return right now and preached the messages that many of our pastors and priests preach, He likely would not be perceived as an opponent of the corrupt world system… nor seized, nor put to death. Sad. True.

Enablers do not save people. But the Savior enables people to know forgiveness, to be redeemed, and to have the hope of eternal life.

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Kris Kristofferson tells the story behind his salvation experience and the writing of the iconic “Why Me, Lord.”

Click: Why Me, Lord