Onus II

 If you’ve been running through the mud all morning, with the requisite slips and tumbles, and come into the house, the first thing you do is wash yourself and make yourself clean. It’s a simple concept, one that the older you get, the more likely you are to practice regularly, but anyone with children can attest that it’s one of the most challenging things to convince your children of.

They come in from playing outside, and you can barely tell what color their skin is; they’re covered in what you hope is mud, but we have enough squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and deer running around that you can never tell, and when you tell them to go and wash their hands, they look at you like you just got dropped onto your head.

“But they’re not dirty,” is usually the answer, to which you point to the mud and bits of grass and other things covering their hands and under their nails.

“You can’t sit down to lunch looking like that,” you insist, “go wash up, then come eat.”

Grudgingly, ever so grudgingly, they do as they’re told, leaving a ring around the sink that would make a mechanic proud. When you ask them if they can tell the difference, they usually respond that it wasn’t so bad.

James lays out one precept, building upon another, so that you go from submitting to God to resisting the devil, to the devil fleeing from you, and once he has fled, proceed to cleanse your hands and purify your heart.

If anyone can honestly say that they are not sinners or double-minded while still living in the world, as the world, and for the world, then they don’t have to follow through with cleansing their hands and purifying their hearts. Still, it’s highly doubtful that anyone would say something like that and mean it.

Are we not double-minded when we say, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus,” with one breath, then go about ensuring our lifelong comfort with the next? Are we not double-minded when we ask God to show us His ways, only to balk at them when He does?

Friendship with the world makes us enemies of God, but somehow, we talk ourselves into believing that God will overlook it. We’re such good friends to have around that God will have to make allowances and share us with the world. There’s no deception more difficult to rid oneself of than self-deception. When someone deceives us, it’s one thing. We shrug it off, avoid the person, perhaps warn others about them, but when we deceive ourselves, it becomes an issue of pride. Surely, we could not have been so myopic as not to have seen it. Surely, it’s beyond us to be deceived in such a manner.

This is why the Word of God must be the final arbiter, the final authority, and have the final say. While we humans can err, God and His word cannot.

The reason there is so much confusion in the camp, the reason there are ten thousand voices saying ten thousand different things, and most people don’t know who to believe, is because they’ve not done the first thing James instructs us to do, which is submit to God. Ten or twenty years of going to church and sitting in a pew, people are still talking about their feelings when it comes to what the Word of God says.

I don’t care how you feel about a given thing; if the Bible says you must do it, then you do it. Your feelings don’t come into play; they are not part of the equation because the Bible never says if you feel like repenting, repent, or if you feel like obeying, obey.

We’ve brought so many worldly concepts into the church and have spiritualized so many things that have nothing to do with spirituality; we’ve pandered to so many for so long that nowadays, quoting the Bible is revolutionary in the church. We feel the need to qualify, quantify, and have a disclaimer regarding scripture, and heavens help you if you don’t. The Cat Mom Alliance and Beth Moore fan club will be out for blood.

Reading the Word of God in a church setting ought not to be an act of courage, and the fact that it’s deemed as such tells us all we need to know about how far the church has fallen from the way of truth.

I’ve had people ask me why they don’t feel saved after years of sitting in a contemporary church, and when I ask if they’ve repented, submitted to God, drawn near to Him, or purified their hearts, they answer that they walked the isle once when they were teenagers.

Everyone wants eternity, but nobody wants to do anything for it. We all want to claim we’re friends of God, but only in certain settings, only when it benefits us, and only when we have something to gain from the relationship. If, perchance, that friendship begins to cost us something, anything, whether the loss of the world’s acceptance or the praise of faux-friends, we back-pedal, guffaw, and deny Him as readily as Peter before the rooster crowed.

We are living the very definition of Laodicea in our modern era but somehow have the shamelessness to insist that we are the pinnacle of all that is spiritual and divine. God broke the mold when He made you sister Beth; there’s never been another so powerful and strong. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad: fools encouraging other fools to continue in their foolishness, insisting that they see themselves as different from the fools they are. Don’t believe your lying eyes; whatever you do, don’t believe them, but eventually, you’ll have to because sooner or later, the realization will dawn that distasteful as it may be, you’ve been seeing the truth of it all along.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.