Miles mentioned something in his sermon last week that has got me thinking a little bit. It's something that we have talked about before, but for some reason, this has stuck with me more this week than in times past.People are supposed to come to church, worship God with all their heart, hear His Word proclaimed, and hopefully are inspired to go home and continue to live their lives according to the message God gave them that week. If that means that you question a portion of the message, that's fine. If that means that you read through more of the context of the message and try to dig deeper, that's great. When someone preaches, the hope is that you leave with a desire to keep growing, learning, or at least thinking about that topic. So, we shouldn't feel that questions are bad, or wanting to further study is a bad thing.
But here's what often happens. We come to church, sing a song or two (but don't really worship), pick apart every word that is preached (in hopes that you can find an error), then only continue discussing or thinking about church when we bash something.
We let our opinions get in the way of the Message. Not necessarily in terms of the Message that was preached by the Preacher, but God's Message that He was trying to get across to us that day. We pick things apart, and get frustrated over our opinions when our opinions shouldn't be what's most important.
Not only do we give our opinions about the adult service, we give opinions equally to programming that we don't like or think should be run differently with youth, young adults, elderly, and so on. What's it going to take for the Church to get past our opinions and start coming together in unity in regards to the things that really matter?
3 comments:
Well, we've got another huge Natural Disaster that we are going to be helping people make it through. It seems like there have been so many in recent time. I feel like we should probably spend more time focused on serving the world in these times of tragedy than arguing about these stupid issues that really don't amount to much of anything. Maybe, although I don't think God would have a desire to kill these people in Japan or in Haiti, God sees these disasters as opportunities for His Church to change the world.
The problem I have with this is that how are we to go out into the world and proclaim the name of Jesus and preach and teach His Word if we can't even seem to get on the same page here at home. My biggest concern is that people think Christianity is like an on/off switch and when they need something or are hurting then they turn the switch on and expect God to make it all better. Well...it's not like that at all. It either a full-time on switch or it's completely off. A lot of people just don't understand that.
I totally agree! I have often looked at the church in America and thought that we compartmentalize spiritual and secular. We make things that we do throughout the week a part of our secular life and then church on Sunday or Wednesday a part of our spiritual life.
It's like we put all the different areas of our life in different boxes and we just grab one of them before we head out the door. But we can't put following Christ on a shelf, it's something that has to be with us everywhere we go. It's not "an on/off switch" like you put it.
Nice Comment!
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