I love the church. I just love it too much to leave it the way it is. I don’t think my church I attend is much different in this respect from a lot of other churches and that is what concerns me the most.
I thought about my Sunday School lesson today. We had a lesson on the battle of Jericho and on the sin of Achan. It was alright, but unfortunately, the main point stressed was obedience to the commandments of God.
Don’t get me wrong. We should be obedient to the commandments of God. However, when Joshua was being written, while that was part of the intention, I think the obedience to God was based on a much larger idea.
What did Jericho teach? It taught that God is in control. He was fulfilling his promises to Abraham. He was showing the new generation that he would be with them as they conquered the land. The sin of Achan shows that he is absolutely holy and that is to be treated seriously.
Our churches though seem to skip to application immediately of the text. The Scriptures are described as a revelation. A revelation of what? An ethical system. Ethics are good and the Bible teaches ethics, but you can find great ethics in the Greek philosophers and even in several secular humanist writings.
No. The Bible’s uniqueness is that it is a revelation of God. Thus, when we read the Bible, we should try to find something about God. We should come to see how he is revealing himself and then say “Based on that, how ought I to live my life?”
Yet is it any wonder I grew up seeing Christianity as simply a teaching on being good to your fellow man? I don’t remember hearing anything about what the doctrine of the Trinity was. In fact, I don’t hear Trinity sermons today at all.
How are we to live then? We are given commandments with nothing to base them on. God says not to have pre-marital sex. Why? Hmmm. I don’t know and I’m on this couch here with this girl and she’s really good-looking and I’m sweating bullets and I want this so badly……
If someone is in such a situation, then it could be that a few verses from Paul won’t stop the onslaught of hormones. We sadly know that our emotions can override our logical reasoning at times. Many of us have in some ways given in to lust, anger, pride, etc.
Christianity is more than ethics. Christianity is a belief about the whole of the universe. Maybe this is why we don’t live the Christian life. We’ve made it a set of rules instead of a whole way of seeing the world.
We are about more than fixing people. We are about truth. Yes. The church is to help you with your problems, but they are to be a bastion for truth also and to stand strong against the force of darkness.
I urge the church to fix itself. We need to get back to the teaching of truth and then to application. I do not believe we can hope to change the world if we do not return to the essential and orthodox doctrines of the faith.
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