Recently
I have been highly disturbed, even unpleased by situation in church/churches. I
hear a lot of comments from various christians, taht church is full of
hypocrytes, liars and so on.
This
process of „suspition of the church“ is going on for a while, however, recently
my so called „cup of patience“ overfilled. I watched few videos on youtube,
which were testimonies of ex-christians about why they became atheists. I do not
do any advertisement, when I tell you I was mostly moved by videos of users
KT45, Lee Lemon and others.
After
seeing some videos of those users I was not convinced, because their arguments
were not convincing. But it was clear what is their problem, where is the thing
that caused their leaving of God – it is church. Everyone of those man met at
church, family of God, the hypocrisy, judgementfulness, gossip, forcing to
something, manipulation, lots of rules and dogmas. I would like to belive, that
this is just a problem of a few churches in America, because that would make
the problem much easier to solve – because problem beyong the ocean does not
have to be solved by us.
Unfortunately,
I am afraid we are experiencing such problems here in Czech republic, or at
least we are very about to have those problems. In last three months I heard
plenty of innuendos at piercing, tatoos, smoking, alcohol, working in „dark“ society;
I heard lots of rules about how to treat to thow who ask you for marijuana (the
councel is: screw them!) and I also heard great frases like „This is about your
priorities. Either God or the other thing.“
Yes,
that is how those hypocrytes speak in churches. Forbide, command, judge. Their
lives are set to the schemes. They love traditions and conservatism more then
Jesus, who is untameable lion Aslan. They,...they...
Friends
– we don’t speak german, so why do we say „they“ so often? It’s always THEM. C.
S. Lewis in his book Great Divorce describes hell like giant world, where
everything bad is caused by THEM; at least people from hell say so: „He did it,
he betrayed me. They did not come to help me...“ Those victims of the hell also
point how unfair the world was, how they were surrounded by hypocrytes. Maybe
they looked after those hypocrytes so much, that they move out of their path.
Or
maybe, this is the case, when everyone goes opposite and we say they do it
wrong. Now there is need for God’s grace to show us that we are the ones who go
opposite. I heard of man who visited over 10 churches a was not pleased
anywhere; and he claimed those churched were horrible. If everybody goes
opposite you, it is highly probable, that you go opposite and you need to admit
this to your self with humble.
I
do not want to ignore troubles in churches and wash those hypocrytes, but it is
good to show the other side.
We
bother that THEY judge smokers, while we judge them for hypocrisy. We bother
about rules and commands, while we only move our head when we hear „cool phrase“.
We hate traditions and that is why instead of shaking hands we traditionaly tap
our fists. We find conservatism old-fashioned, so we spend our evenings in
pubs, because „home is boring“.
We
hate schemes in our life, while we save cool phrases of David Novák and Mark
Driscoll to folder „Favorites“, but not into our hearts. We hide the fear from
loneliness by „serving other people“, because they „need“ us. And instead of
repentance we say we „search for God“, because repentance is too schematic. We
need to proof ourselves that God is not against piercing, tatoos and other
stuff, so we share it excited with our friend and we find our they never judged
those things in the first place. The problem is only in our head. Is not this „proving
to myslef“ some kind of scheme in your life?
Lying
to people is weakness. Lying to yourslef is just a joke.
In
the end we make Jesus more cool then he really is. We quote only the verses
where God is strong. We love the part, when Jesus is angry in the Temple; but
those verses, when Jesus humbles himself we hide for „later“, because the lion
would seem to tameable after that. Jesus would not be so cool anymore.
Dear
hypocrytes: would we love Him, if He wasn’t cool?
