Death By A Thousand Compromises

The church is dying. For long and long it has been on life support but even with the artificial devices pumping air into its lungs, it is beginning to look and smell like the ambulatory corpse it has become. You can’t hide decomposition for too long. You can spray paint it, coat it in makeup, pour gallons of perfume one it, but there will always be that lingering smell of something not quite right, not quite healthy, and not quite living.

We talked ourselves into believing compromise was a viable option and that is where we stepped off the path. The more compromises we allowed in our lives, in our families, in our churches and in our pulpits the more the world seemed to love us and embrace us and fawn over us. We reveled in the world’s fawning. We reveled in the world’s acceptance, disinterested and indifferent as to whether or not God was likewise accepting of us.

We preferred the world over the God we purported to serve, and that was mistake number two.

The third mistake we made, a mistake which came on the heels of the first and second, is believing that once compromise with sin and the world began it could somehow be stopped.

We believed the lies of men when they assured us compromise was like a controlled burn rather than the raging wildfire it is. Some saw the train wreck coming. They tried to pump the breaks and sound the alarm, but it was already too late, and the train and its passengers continued to barrel toward the inevitable.

I hear the words of respected and even revered men in our day and age and I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The thought that we can dictate terms to God and have Him bend His will to suit our own seems to have enveloped young and old alike, from every denomination, and every corner of the earth. We think that if we throw a big enough tantrum, if we throw a big enough hissy fit, then God will go back on His word and no longer call sin what it is.

It is our compromises that have weakened us. It is our compromises that have brought us to the edge of the abyss, because with every compromise we made we took yet another step farther from truth and the will of God.

One can either journey toward the light or the darkness. One can either choose life or choose death. One can either submit to the authority and will of God in all things or cherry pick the things they like and fashion for themselves an idol they call their god. Since such individuals are the creators of their own god, they can and oftentimes do decide what their god is perfectly fine with, and what their god finds offensive, sinful or abominable.

Because of our fallen state, because of the compromise coursing through our veins, because it has been so long since we’ve contemplated the very notion of obedience and submission that we’ve forgotten what they mean, we comfort each other with the illusion that if enough of us deem something as lawful and just God will have no choice but to acquiesce.

God will not be bullied, pressured, or harassed into changing His will, especially when that which is asked of Him contradicts His very nature, a nature rooted in holiness and righteousness.

It isn’t one large wound that is become the death of us, it is a thousand little ones. A thousand little compromises causing us to bleed out and grow anemic, and wandering about in a daze asking ourselves where it all went wrong.

The sifting is upon us. Soon, sooner than some would like to believe, brother will turn against brother, mother against daughter, and father against son, because the Word of God has a way of coming to pass when we least expect it.

The shaking must come, the separation must take place, because the tares are choking out the wheat, and soon there will be no life left to speak of. One thing few realize is that the wheat and the tares were growing in the same field, side by side, in the same soil.

It’s not the world that’s choking off the church, it is the pretend Christians within the church, the compromised, duplicitous, hypocritical, self-serving souls paying God lip service who are choking off the true believers at the great glee and merriment of the world and the devil alike.  

With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea Jr.