A Little Leaven

I cried last night, twice in fact. I went to listen in on our choir rehearsels, both the adult choir, and the children's choir. And while the children sang 'silent night' in such a way that it brought me to tears, the adult choir sang one of my favorites, Handel's Messiah. I began to ponder the beauty of innocent and heartfelt worship, and how retaining our purity, and keeping ourselves spotless from the world is a grace and a virtue. I came home, and happened upon this well known verse in Corinthians.
1 Corinthians 5:6, “Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?”
So what’s wrong with a little compromise? Under the guise of tolerance and interfaith relations, the church has been enjoying a peaceable truce with the world for decades now. It has been hugely productive for both camps. The world attends our special productions and concerts, we attend the world’s movies and plays, why, we have proven that all can live as one, coexist, and get along if only we meet halfway. They give a little, we give a little, and behold no more fierce opposition, no more debates and deliberations concerning the one true God, or the one true path, we’re all going to heaven anyway, just using different paths to get there. What’s worse, we glory in our foolishness and our blindness, we consider it a success merely because the pews are filled never giving a single thought to whether or not the souls that fill them are redeemed, saved and sanctified, or are merely ambulatory corpses.
One world, united in tolerance and acceptance of other religions, other gods, even the atheists and agnostics have a seat at the table. We have achieved in accomplishing what four thousand years’ worth of generations could not, we have united the world under the banner of mediocrity, inclusion, and ecumenism. Never mind that the Bible tells us to separate ourselves not only from the world, but also from immoral believers, to keep ourselves spotless and separate. Those were just shortsighted individuals who could not see the bigger picture. Fear mongers is what they were, scaring people into believing that a little compromise would lead to the unraveling of all that had been built on the foundation of purity and righteousness. They just didn’t get it. We’ve come such a long way, our thinking has evolved to such an extent that we can now plainly see what they could not, a little compromise is good for the bottom line, for the building fund, and for the church’s slush fund.
If you take a cup of sewer water and pour it into a gallon of the most expensive wine in the world, that wine becomes nothing more than sewer water. If you take a gallon of the finest wine in the world and pour it into a cup of sewer water, once again, you have very expensive sewer water.
What some refuse to acknowledge is that no matter how little leaven we allow into the church, it compromises the integrity of the whole. However little the compromise, we are making in order to achieve a certain agenda, it has successfully spoiled the entire lump, for compromise begets compromise, and sin begets sin. However little the sin we allow to reside in the camp might be, we must realize that it is the nature of sin, the nature of evil, to defuse itself, to spawn, to grow, to spread to eat away at righteousness, and destroy the souls of those that allow it to flourish.
Rather than actively seek out the leaven in our midst, and purge it lest we become contaminated, we welcome and invite compromise with open arms, and warm smiles. It is not the church’s job to make the sinner comfortable in the midst of the congregation. It is not the church’s job to seem compassionate and sympathetic concerning the sins that are evident in the lives of those who attend service. It is not the church’s job to tolerate anything less than the standard that God has set forth for His children. The church’s one duty, it’s primary goal, is to preach repentance, to point the way to Christ and the cross, and compel those who would hear to be born again, to receive the gift of salvation, to be renewed in mind and spirit, and pursue holiness.
One cannot make deals with the darkness, or with sin and expect them to keep up their end of the bargain. Sin will always renege on its promises it will always go back on its word. Once sin has a hold of a soul, once the darkness has talked it into compromise, it will be merciless in its struggle to reach its final objective, the destruction of the good.
We have been beguiled and seduced by the world, and by we I am referring to the modern day church, not realizing that the world has its own agenda, it has its hidden motives for treating us with a modicum of kindness and false sincerity. We revel in the glory of the world, and glory in our own ingenuity for building bridges and mending fences, not realizing that slowly but surely we are becoming the world.
Those who see beyond the now, those who perceive the outcome of compromise by spiritual insight, are troubled, vexed, heartbroken, and rightly so. For not only will the entire lump be leavened by the little we have allowed, but those who refrain from joining in with the unclean things, will be viewed as dissidents, dissenters and nonconformists, enemies of progress, and spoilers of unity.
If you believe it will only be the world that will persecute the people of God, you are in for a rude awakening. The outline of what is to come is already taking shape, like the first strokes of a painter’s brush upon the canvas. We can see where it’s headed; we can deduce the finished product, long before the finishing touches are applied.
There are those who give themselves freely to sin within the house of God, which allow compromise and selfish motives to dictate the sermons that are preached, and the path that is followed. Then there are those who have chosen to purge out the old leaven, to hollow out their hearts in anticipation of the new resident that will soon reside there, and soon there will be an inevitable clash of these two camps.
The persecuted or the persecutor, the divine or the profane, each must choose a side in the battle that is to come. God will stand with those who are His, who have chosen the narrow path of uncompromising faith, and will rightly judge those who claim to be His, but whom He does not know.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea Jr.