Church, where are you?
Many books, blogs, and articles are written with the purpose of gaining allegiance, fame, or money. I caution you to read such thoughts with discernment, and to find council with the experienced in life before you adopt those thoughts as your own. Reader, I ask that you read the writer’s thoughts herein with patience and digest them thoroughly before acting upon them. My thoughts seek none of the aforementioned, because to write is my reward.
Reader, I ask that you read the writer’s thoughts herein with patience and digest them thoroughly before acting upon them.
Everyone who reads the Bible intimately, understands that a change of heart, produces a change of attitude. So, I begin by asking, “What barrier is there that love cannot break”? I do not mean in the superficial transactional sense, but the type that our Father lavishes upon us day and night. When love dies orthodox doctrine becomes a corpse, a powerless formalism. Until we learn and practice this, we will perish like flies in honey. And, our Lord will continue to weep.
Recently, within the Church in America men have used their freewill to debate over vain topics that neither show us more of God, nor help us to better love our neighbor. If this dispute is not sinful, then nothing is. The issue of racism has long been one of America's favorite preoccupations. On a political platform, the plight of Black folk and minorities is passed around like a football. Year after year only tolerance is promised, never real change. In the Church, Black folk and minorities are treated like lepers whose leprosy is perceived as fictitious. Unthinking and apathetic men and women are parrotlike, passing down cynical mindsets from generation to generation. J.I. Packer rightly generalizes this tension, he says, “Many of us Western evangelicals can smell unsound doctrine a mile away, yet the fruit of personal experience of God often proves rare among us.” Therefore, men who have tasted and drank of the purest form of love, affections atrophy for men and women created by the same set of Hands.
On a political platform, the plight of Black folk and minorities is passed around like a football. Year after year only tolerance is promised, never real change.
Every man with a mouth and social media platform feels obliged to comment upon the current tension within the Christian church in America. Some members of the Southern Baptist Convention have ignorantly condemned Critical Race Theory (hereafter CRT) without exhaustively defining what that perspective is. Not only this, they did not expatiate how and why this philosophy is a threat to faithful exegesis. Wounded minorities within the same denomination are fed up with the same ole’, same ole’ from our brothers. From my perspective, their patience has been exhausted. But, how long shall you beat a man before he screams?
We must be stiller than water and humbler than the grass.
I genuinely ask, “How can conversation begin when we disagree about reality”? Human nature shows itself best, in moments of trial. Are we ignorant to the schemes of Prince of the air? Shame on us, for, how could we when our Lord and Teacher warned us of this (John 10:10). Is this not the Evil One, dividing us, so that we can become weaker? The sin of pride and arrogance is front and center for the whole world to see. And, we are embarrassing our Father. Both sides and everyone in the middle, must put their pride to the side and listen to one another; we must listen not to reply, but to understand. A man’s reforming zeal ought never make him stubborn. It was Gandhi who prophetically put it, “Hate the sin and not the sinner is a precept which, though easy enough to understand, is rarely practiced, and that is why the poison of hatred spreads in the world.” We must be stiller than water and humbler than the grass. Until we understand this, the distance between our family members will grow and not diminish with the passage of time. True siblings, at times, fall out, but they never fall off. In the meantime, remember we fight not against flesh and blood. So, pray. Before there can be peace, there first must be understanding. I urge you to pray for understanding on both sides.
“Not all doctrines are at the heart of the Gospel, not all errors are properly labeled heresy, and not all disagreements are worth fighting about.”
