December 14, 2002

I am sorry, but this is just downright satanic. Start with the "embracing" remark. Truly the Gospel is meant for all mankind. I think this was a large part of the ministry of Jesus – He came to make the salvation that was available to the Jews available to the world. Paul, in his ministry, just flat out said he wanted to take the gospel to the world. The Kingdom of God indeed embraces all mankind. But the priority statement in that line from the ad – it is absolutely theologically backwards. Indeed, sinner that I am, I cannot begin to embrace mankind until I have embraced God.

And here is the part that really, really bugs me. The Holy Spirit resides in us. My most direct experiences of God have been God’s expressions of Himself to me through other people. But confusing those people with God is a big issue. It is a form of idolatry. God may reveal himself to us in the lives of others, but we cannot embrace those others as God. God is far too large to be contained within anyone, or even within all of us.

What about that whole Open…Open…Open thing? The Kingdom must indeed be welcoming, but in our politically correct age, ‘open’ has an entirely different connotation. "Open," in the current time means "without boundary or definition." Here’s the essential difference, a welcoming church says, "Come on in and join our party;" an open church says, "Come on in and have your party in our house." There is a pretty big difference there.

Most people excuse these things by pointing out that they are only discussing outer manifestations of some inner phenomena. For example, "We are open to any expression of your love of God, but it is still God you love." Thus we have a contemporary worship debate. Thus we have Hollywood Pres. advertising their manifold worship experiences. But here comes the rub, two rubs actually. Rub one is that if we spend too much time worrying about expressions of love for God, then the expressions are more important than God is. Rub two is that if there is no uniformly agreed upon expression of love for God; then how can others ever know for sure that one does love God?

Remember that I said ‘satanic’ above? Well this is it. The evil one is, in most cases, not about making us kill, maim, and rape, no he is typically about tipping the balance in a healthy tension. Think about the tension between the two "rubs" I just described. One the one hand, it should not matter how we worship God, only that we worship Him. But on the other hand, if everyone worshipped God how they wanted, how would we ever know who really loved God and who did not? For years, the evil one tipped the balance of that tension towards uniformity and legalism, but in my lifetime, he has changed strategy, now the evil one seeks to tip the balance towards chaos. Suddenly a good thing like welcoming people into the fellowship of the Lord is perverted into something that makes us loose focus on God altogether.

Now we arrive at what is my real point of the day. It is often said that only God can change lives so we should just get about our business. It is manifestly true that only God can change lives, but how we get about our business is so vitally important. The movement in churches today seems to be not to build programs that seek to change lives, but to build programs that seek to build the church and simply rely on God to change lives in that milieu somehow.

Do you see the satanic pattern here? The good statement, "only God can change lives," is perverted to allow for a form of idolatry. The meaning of the statement is twisted so that it becomes OK to focus on the church rather than on God! In point of fact it is never OK to focus on anything but God.

It’s official. I have completed my duties in the committee structure of my church, at least for now. Every time I do it, it makes me heartsick. This time I served on the Missions Committee. I thought, that would be pretty good, mostly about spreading the Word. Alas, it was about anything but. We had to talk about the environment; we had to talk about feeding the poor; we had to talk about world politics. None of those things are bad, but they are not first priority. Those things are by-products of the first priority.

Did you know that many gold mines produce metals besides gold in greater quantity than they do gold? Silver is extremely common; sometimes being produced in ratios of two or three pounds of silver for every pound of gold. Mercury is also common. I know of one mine that produces mercury at a ratio of ten to one. And yet, they are still GOLD mines. Why? Because on a value basis, that is a dollar basis, they produce a whole lot more gold than anything else. In mining, one digs for value, not mass.

And so I believe it is with the church. In the mission area, Jesus even gave us a direct example. Want to feed the world – look to Jesus, he fed thousands with a few fish and loaves. You remember that story. The disciples were worried about feeding the crowd; Jesus admonished them to remember Him.