Warning: If you are overly sensitive, believe the church is as ready as it ought to be, or you've already packed your bags and are at present tapping your wristwatch thinking that Christ is late in returning, please read no further!
Sometimes I wish I was tilting at windmills – tilting at the church is proving far more difficult. Sometimes I wish I was Sisyphus, resigned to pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down again, because then it would be easy to pluck hope from my heart by its roots, and throw it aside like so much refuse.
It’s the hope, and hoping against hope that makes life unbearably painful sometimes. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve held my breath at seeing some small sign of life within the church, only to conclude it was the breeze blowing through an open window that animated its countenance.
We still refuse to see what’s in front of our faces, we still refuse to acknowledge the fact that we no longer are what we once were, and beating our chests in mock bravery will only serve to bruise our skin.
Those we once wrote off as godless savages, those we once looked down upon as backward heathens, are now become more moral than we who have for long and long prided ourselves as being the people of God, in the nation of God, doing the work of God.
Those whom we pitied openly for never having known God, and never having been allowed access to Him, are now rejecting perversion and standing for what is right in the sight of God and nature alike, while we who continue to boast at being the apple of God’s eye are forfeiting our dignity, our principles, our convictions, and God Himself for some worthless trinkets and the illusion of political power. Shame on us for selling ourselves so cheaply, or selling ourselves at all for that matter.
Once more the church is about to play the harlot – an aging harlot whose lost her looks and is willing to sell herself for whatever is offered up. Yes, I know, ‘unthinkable, never going to happen’, but just you wait and see.
The ugly truth, the truth nobody wants to talk about, is that today’s church is as enamored with the world as the world is with itself. We’re doing all that we can – bending over backwards – just to get the world’s attention, just to get the world to approve of us, or throw us a few scraps, sniveling and drooling and whimpering as though the world’s approval is preeminent over God’s approval.
It’s as though the world is losing its mind, and the church doesn’t seem to care, or gather up enough energy to be bothered by what is happening. We no longer identify with the soldier, the athlete, or the farmer, preferring instead the title of couch potato, doing everything in our power to justify indifference and apathy.
Sure we’ll stand for Jesus – as long as it doesn’t inconvenience us.
Sure we’ll play the soldier – as long as we can get a guarantee in writing that we will not break a sweat or chip a nail.
We deserve what we’re about to get down to the last drop, down to the last tear, down the last sigh.
We speak of coming persecution in the abstract, not realizing that for most ‘believers’ today, the threat of having their toys taken away is enough to make them rethink serving Jesus, or associating themselves with Him.
We liked to pretend that if we ignored sin and perversion it would just go away, and we wouldn’t have to confront it, we wouldn’t have to stand for truth or righteousness, and we could coexist in harmony and mutual acceptance. We liked to pretend that the words of Jesus were hyperbolic exaggerations, and when He said that the world would hate us for His name’s sake, He wasn’t referring to us, to our time, or our generation.
‘That’s somebody else. It’s some other believer who will have to stand for Jesus, not us, because God knows our sensitive and sensible natures, He knows we bruise easy and an unkind word will make us cry as though it were the end of the world.’
The notion that God will somehow treat us any different than those who came before us is ludicrous on its face, comestible only for those who receive the opinions of men above the truth of Scripture.
When the day descends and finds you unprepared because you held on to the doctrines of men rather than the word of God, don’t blame God for your unpreparedness, blame the empty suits and smiling faces who insisted you need not prepare, you need not fret, you need not contemplate what is to come, because you won’t be here for those days anyway.
It’s not a sin to be a thinking Christian, and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise.
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.
Friday, June 1, 2012
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2 comments:
Cheer up, Mike. It may not feel like it at times, but you DO have a LOT of readers who take this very seriously. Seriously enough to pray that you are safely home in Romania with your family when we finally get blown up! Yes, much of the church is a mess, but not all. My immediate family, and others that I know, pray every day for supernatural strength and endurance for what is surely coming. I strongly suspect that many of the 'empty suits and smiling faces' are in hell already, to be followed by those still alive and ripping off their congregations. But they don't get a cent from me. The Lord told me years ago to make sure my giving goes to charities that help those most in need. I can't even imagine what it's going to be like when things get really bad, I just pray that whatever the Lord wills us to go through, He will give us the strength and guidance to do it.
In a by-gone era of our nation's history, America was effective in reaching the unreached masses throughout the world. I also believe that on the whole, we were once an upright nation who feared God.
Then, oddly enough, incrementally, America has been reshaped into the very thing that we once despised and denounced.
Sadly, I believe that from America's inception, our nation was targeted by the enemy because of the incredible potential for effectiveness that it possessed as a then free nation to manifest God's Kingdom throughout the world.
Like the Garden of Eden account, the diabolical serpent who beguiled Eve was in our midst all along. Sadly, we did not identify the beast as such, and gladly embraced its agenda, and greedily ingested its masked poison, the eternally destructive effects of which, we have only begun to see.
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