Preface
This message is inspired by recent events in this blogging community being decisive and factious. My words are a paraphrase of messages God is speaking to much better people than myself right now. Creating sects and becoming heretic hunters is not God’s will for you. It is my intention to insult you and hopefully get you thinking about the way we’ve been acting.
When I became a Christian so many years ago, the clearest and most concise thing I realized about the walk I had in front of me was that I must first figure out exactly what church I wanted to attend. Let’s face it, there are 52,000+ Protestant denominations. America, you have more gods than you do towns. Through pure chance (or will of God) I connected with an unnamed Charismatic church. I attend a denominational church every week because God told me to. But you will never hear me identify with any denomination, because it is not God’s will. All you brothers and sisters standing on street corners wasting time protesting homosexual marriage or abortion, your efforts are in vain. Your signs should say “God hates denominations!” Yes, I said it, God hates what we are doing in the world. Why are you trying to make world policy reflect Christianity when you can’t even get your own house together you are screaming about the speck in the world’s eye and you can’t even see the plank in your own. Jesus tells us that it will be better for the world on judgment day than it will for us, who have seen the light and messed it up Matthew 11:20-24. Let the world be the world and focus your efforts inward to healing the damage you’ve done to ourselves!
You Are Broken
Body of Christ, you are broken and you are too blind to see it. You tore out your eyes and cannot see that what you do displeases God. You have ripped out your ears so you cannot hear Jesus crying for your actions. You have taken your hands and thrown them in to the pits of hell where you can not get them back to undo the mess you’ve made of His church. Listen to me, why has Jesus last prayer gone unanswered? Why are we not one like He and the Father are one. The church in the deepest possible way is a metaphor for Jesus relationship to the Father, we were supposed to be perfect unity. The same language that is used of Jesus relationship to the Father is used of the Church. Ultimately, the design of man and woman as a marriage is a metaphor for the perfect Echad union of the Godhaed and the relationship of Christ to the church is that of man and woman marriage like we see in Eph 6. Listen to my words, why do you think homosexuality and other sexual sins are such a big deal if not because they violate God’s plan for man and woman and spit on that metaphor he gave us of being an Echad like the Father, Son and Spirit are an Echad. Further more what the church is doing by not being ONE is a WORSE insult to the Echad than any sexual immorality of the world.
Paul tells us that we are the one body, united by One faith, one baptism and one Spirit. But we have taken Jesus body and crucified it all over again and split into our thousands of sects and divisions. WAKE UP! WAKE UP! Body of Christ, revival is brought by bringing unity to the body not by preaching that you are the only one who knows the true way to salvation. Before the world can see the light, Jesus has to rise from his tomb and how can he do that if his body is broken in thousands of pieces and everyone wants to be an eye or a foot and not do the job he was given.
Listen to this message! Your relationship with God is directly and intimately connected to your relationship to PEOPLE! Jesus said the greatest commandment is: Love God and the second one just as important as the first, LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR! What is love if not a willingness to act on behalf of another? And who are you supposed to love? Everyone who only uses the KJV? Those who agree with you to worship on Saturday and not Sunday? The Pope? NO!! He says to “love one another as I have loved you” to be willing to DIE for someone else, people you hardly know like your neighbor, people you don’t like such as your ENEMIES! You have to love EVERY singly person in this world.
But you don’t. You split up the body over petty secondary issues that don’t even matter in eternity. WHO CARES IF YOU TAKE COMUNIION WITH GRAPE JUICE AND NOT WINE!? If Jesus is in you and Jesus is in me, you are my brother and you must love me and I must love you! Stop it, just stop it with your denominations and factions and cutting Jesus in a million pieces and refusing to listen to Jesus begging you to just act like one body.
The way we are acting is petty, it is stupid and it is not God’s will.
Closing prayer
God it is my earnest prayer that we realize that we are all part of the same family and it was the will of the enemy to turn Your Kingdom against itself so that it cannot stand and it is our Job as the official vehicles of God to FIX THIS MESS! God, we are one body and we need to realize that we are on the same team. Please help us stop making mountains out of mole hills and to be holy and obey your commands. Help us to get back to biblical standards. Thank you Lord in the name of the only begotten God Jesus.
4 Responses to Friday Message: Disunity? Really?
Michael Dilig September 6, 2012
This is the truth, and so many will not accept it. It is a sad world we live in. I pray that the Lord does fix the mess we, God-fearing people, are in right now.
Gil Sanders September 7, 2012
This is both an encouraging and convicting article. The way you expressed the severity of this division is well-put. We shouldn’t soften our message with cotton candy words, but with the harsh truth as it really is. At the same time, I hope others realize that your response comes out of a genuine love for the church, just as Christ’s anger toward the moneychangers was a result of His love for His Father’s house. Indeed, if we are not united like the Echad then how can we expect to influence the world at all to be like that in their marriages?
Alfredo September 7, 2012
Isaac, thanks for posting this. Not because I agree with it but it helps me to bring out where my disagreements lie. In this article you say we should eschew denominations and you exhort the church to continual unity because the church is divided. But this raises some objections on my part:
First, from the Catholic point of view, the Church isn’t divided at all. Maybe the Protestant community is divided, but this doesn’t show that the Catholic Church–which from the Catholic POV simply is the Church–is divided. I agree that there shouldn’t be so many denominations, but that’s because we think ideally there would only be one.
Second, what type of unity do you propose? Unity of love? Unity of doctrine? Or by ‘unity’ do you just mean that we should not even talk about people who hold to false doctrines? If the first, then the Church *isn’t* divided, because the tens of thousands of Protestant denominations can still love each other. If love is all that’s necessary then I’m not sure what dividedness you’re complaining about.
If on the other hand you mean by ‘unity’ unity of doctrine, then that leads to my third objection, viz. that having no denominations whatsoever is impossible. There are those who are heretical and those who are not. Non-Trinitarians are heretics. Those who deny the Resurrection are heretics. Those who think the Bible is just a book like any other are heretics. In excluding them from the Church we inevitably create denominations. So there is no way of getting around denominations. Hence, you must mean something more like the third option, viz. perpetually ignoring our differences and letting the elephant in the room go unnoticed. The obvious problem with this is that this is no true unity at all.
The way I propose unity is simply that we unify on those doctrines we all hold, while acknowledging our differences. Thus, though Protestants and Catholics differ immensely, we all believe in the Triune God, the Incarnation and Resurrection of the Son of God, the Bible as the Divine Word, and salvation through Christ and his grace. We also share many beliefs about morality and politics. So I think we should unify on these aspects. That’s why I disagree when you say “All you brothers and sisters standing on street corners wasting time protesting homosexual marriage or abortion, your efforts are in vain.” On the contrary, marriage and the value of early human life are precisely the things we can unify on! And of course, I think we can be united in love.
But still, this is why I am afraid of the increasingly flippant attitude toward doctrine that I feel is being expressed sometimes on WC. You say “WHO CARES IF YOU TAKE COMUNIION WITH GRAPE JUICE AND NOT WINE!?” Well, I do. Catholics have held since the earliest years of the Christian Church that the Eucharist literally becomes the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. It is the sacrament of life. It is what Christ talked about in John 6 when he told us that he was the bread of life and commanded that his disciples eat his flesh and drink his blood. If we hold to this doctrine then how could we simply dismiss it as irrelevant? If we think Christ instituted this sacrament then how could we think our adamance in holding to it is displeasing to God? How could we not hold it to be of the utmost importance?
Sorry if it seems I’m being harsh since I’m not. I’m just trying to be frank in the same way you were in this post.
PX. September 14, 2012
Hello Alfrado,
I realize it’s been a week since you made this comment, sorry for delays.
I appreciate your response but I feel in some ways you illustrate the point of this message perfectly. Because I don’t do comments as a matter of principal you can expect a response to this in the form of a legit post in a few days (this weekend is my first big stay-up-for-48-hours–because-i-can’t-find-enough-time-in-the-week weekend of the semester so perhaps by Wednesday of next week).