Monday, August 7, 2017
560 - Christianity's Decline?
Spirituality Column No. 560
August 8, 2017
August 8, 2017
Common
Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Christianity’s
Decline?
By Bob Walters
“Jesus Christ is the
same yesterday and today and forever. Do
not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings.” – Hebrews 13:8,9
We survey
modern society, the modern world, even the modern church, and believing
Christians shake our heads and wonder, “How did this happen?”
Modern
society shuns not only Jesus in most cases but refuses to admit the existence
of Truth. “Jesus is fine if he agrees
with me and gives me stuff” is a common sentiment, but even that notion is
leavened with “All religion is only opinion,” “Religions are all the same,”
“I’m spiritual but don’t need God,” and of course the ever-popular paean to
vacant self-sufficiency, “Hey, I’m a good person.” Right.
Let’s just “coexist.”
Jesus came
to save the whole world but on most days the world does not appear that it
wants to be saved. Or if it does, it
wants to be saved on its own terms not on the Godly, unbending formula of God’s
love, Christ’s trustworthiness, and the Spirit’s truth. Why?
It’s an obvious question with a painfully disturbing, single, easy, and to
the world laughable answer: Satan, the Lord of the World. He’s in it to win it, every day, endeavoring
to destroy what God loves and made in His own image, human beings.
The Church
of England recently decided to develop a liturgy specifically to help
transgender people celebrate their transitions.
In a festival of knee-jerk “me-too!”-ism the church naively bowed to its
secular despisers. Forgoing honest scriptural,
philosophical and theological consideration of transgenderism, the church
sought social relevance by erecting a façade that will not stand; the church
still won’t be trusted. As scholar Carl
Trueman offers in First Things,
“Alas, self-awareness has never been the strong suit of those liberal
Protestants who have perfected the art of always being belatedly in support of
whatever nonsense the sexual revolution is now declaring as a self-evident
truth that only a hate-filled bigot would deny.” Truth, as it were, be damned.
Society
wants to go it alone. The world
obviously doesn’t think Satan is such a bad guy. And the Anglicans are just one example – rife
around the world – of churches diminishing Jesus as Lord and replacing him with
trends, prosperity, or pagan spirits.
But take
heart: neither Christ nor His truth is in decline; Jesus doesn’t change. Fallen people in a fallen world, often, don’t
change either. When a modern church muddles
Christ’s identity, it only shows not much has changed in 2,000 years. Jewish society had the entirely wrong idea of
what the Messiah Christ was going to be: not a fierce conqueror of Romans but a
humble victor over sin and death. Read 1
Corinthians or Galatians to see early churches with confused doctrine and misdirected
priorities.
Pastor
Caleb Simerson up at Michigan’s Eden Bible Church preached a nice sermon last week
on the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4), pointing out that Satan is here to
ruin God’s seed but that Jesus came to nurture that seed with faith and love.
It occurred
to me that a tiny mustard seed of faith, planted in the good soil of a
believing heart, can grow to overcome anything and everything in the
world. Our hearts simply must trust that
Jesus will never change, and that we must never stay the same.
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