When I was a little girl, my mom jokingly said one day that if she did such-and-such, her boss might fire her. The term was unfamiliar, so I took it literally — horrifying visions of my mother being burned at the stake outside the speech communications building at Bob Jones University while her boss looked on, laughing, flooded through my mind. She must have read my terrified face, because she quickly explained and dried the tears I had already started to shed.
Talk of a church splitting conjured similarly inaccurate images — I imagined a huge tree, struck by lightening and shattered. What I never realized was that, unlike the tree, all those little pieces of a church are still alive and trying to grow, searching for a safer place to put down new roots and start over.
The little church we’ve been attending for a few years now was struck by lightening several weeks ago. There have been issues for a while, but it got worse when the pastor started preaching on things like Christian men not having facial hair. Guess Jesus and John the Baptist didn’t realize how scruffy and unprofessional they looked.
Anyway, when people started expressing disagreement and concern over the preaching of personal preferences as Scriptural truth, the pastor started attacking them from the pulpit and accusing his deacons of conspiring against him and such. It got very bizarre and ugly, and then *zap!* Straight out of the cloudy gray skies.
At last count, 68 people had left. That’s way over half the church. It has to be strange for the pastor to realize that the numbers were there to vote him out, but that people chose to leave rather than hurt him. He has to live with knowing that all the damage that’s done has been at his own hand.
I think the thing that bothers me most is how quickly and easily God’s people can turn on each other. We don’t even make the Devil work for it — we just tear our churches apart while he sits back and enjoys the show.
There are things that are clearly spelled out in Scripture that we can’t just agree to disagee about. Things that aren’t up for interpretation.
And then there are the issues over which we choose to separate. Things that Scripture leaves sort of open-ended, so that we can come to our own conclusions and convictions through prayer and study. We don’t all have to agree on them. It’s possible for two different people to come to two different conclusions on a subject and both be right. What matters is one’s conscience before God.
For example, I don’t believe it’s wrong for a Christian to drink alcohol. The Scripture warns us to “be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” It says that “wine is a mocker, and strong drink is raging.” But it never tells us that alcohol is inherently evil. It’s the abuse of it we’re told to avoid, because it can cause us to lose control of ourselves and commit other sins that we normally would never even consider.
When we do anything in such excess that it takes control of our lives, it becomes a sin. Or if we do it for the wrong reasons. On the facial hair issue, sure, if a boy grows a beard specifically as a symbol of rebellion, it will always have that meaning for him. He might decide one day that he needs to shave it as an outward sign that his attitude has changed. But if another man grows a beard because his face gets cold in the winter or to cover a weak chin or just because he likes the look of it, should the first man, now clean-shaven, look down on him? Do I really have to answer that?
If this sounds familiar, it’s because similar situations came up in the early church and had to be dealt with. It seems that Christians have always had a hard time accepting the simplicity of the Gospel. They want so very badly to add this or that — just some little “and make sure you never/always” so that they can feel like they have some part in making it happen.
We all enjoy being in on a secret. Who doesn’t like seeing the amazement on someone else’s face when you reveal your secret essential ingredient or the simple technique that makes all the difference? How much more impressive would it be to say, “Well, to get to heaven, you’ll need to trust Christ for salvation. Oh, and always wear red shoes. That’s it. Now you’re officially born again.”?
I had to laugh at Dr. Sinclair Ferguson’s illustration at First Presbyterian Church in Columbia a few weeks ago. He said that one Sunday after church, his daughter said, “Dad, I know how you can get more people to take notes on your sermons.” He asked what her idea was, and she said, “Well, every time at the end of the message, when you say, “The three things you need to know are…” all the men start reaching for the pens in their pockets, and the women start searching in their purses for a piece of paper. So if you’ll just say that more often…” Deep inside, I think we all have a longing for a good, bulleted list that will give us the key to life.
Well, the Bible gives us the list. It’s pretty straightforward. I think the bullet point that gives people the most trouble is the first one — men are sinners. All men. Not just the murderers, the rapists, and the thieves. So often, I hear people say, “I’m basically a good person.” That’s like saying, “There’s not that much poison in your cup of coffee.”
The Bible compares sin to yeast. It takes just a tiny bit of yeast to make the whole loaf of bread rise. And it only takes one sin to make someone a sinner. It can be as small as a single lie or as big as adultery or murder.
You might say, “But everybody lies once in a while.” Yes, they probably do. That’s the whole point. Everybody. There isn’t a single person who can honestly say that they have never in the course of their entire lives done one single solitary thing wrong.
The next thing people like to say is “Well, then you’re a sinner too, so you can’t judge me.” As Biblical proof, they cite Jesus’ words to the Pharisees when they brought before Him the woman caught in the act of adultery — “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.” But again, the whole point is that He was the only one there who could condemn or forgive her, because He actually was sinless. And notice that when her accusers walked away, he didn’t say, “OK, I forgive you. Go on back to what you were doing.” He said, “Go, and sin no more.” Becoming a Christian isn’t a free pass to do whatever you want and mutter a prayer of “Jesus, forgive my sins” before you go to sleep at night. It’s a commitment to conforming your life and your choices to God’s standard. Nobody ever fully measures up — we’re still human, and we still sin. But we stay on the path, and we keep aiming for the goal.
The best part is, it’s not up to us to earn our way to heaven. Christ already paid our way. There always has to be a substitutionary sacrifice for sin — in the Old Testament, people offered God the best animals they had to make recompense for the sins they had committed since their last offering. But instead of offering animals, we simply have to accept the sacrifice that Christ, the only perfect and sinless Man ever to walk the earth, has made for us. And it’s not temporary. His blood is sufficient to atone for every sin committed by every person who ever has or ever will live, because He met God’s standard of perfection.
All we have to do is accept His gift. He offers us life, joy, and freedom from the greed, misery, and emptiness that is ultimately all the world can give us. Talk about a good deal!
But so often, it’s the very simplicity of it that we get hung up on. Surely, this life-and-eternity-altering salvation can’t be ours for the asking! There must be a catch. But we can’t find it. So we set about creating our own.
We make up another of our little lists about what’s necessary to be a good Christian, without realizing that by doing so, we’re throwing mud in God’s face. “No, Lord, that’s not enough. We need to require people to use a certain version of the Bible. We need to require women to wear skirts at all times. We need to require them to…” And all the while, God is trying to tell us that He’s already taken care of it. His plan is perfect. We don’t need to fix it for Him.
Lots of people have said this before. I don’t claim it as an original thought. But it’s funny how most of the people with the lists will tell you that they believe in salvation by faith alone. And then they get so caught up with worrying about how people are dressed and what they do or don’t do that before long they end up with a works-based religion.
I didn’t intend to go on this long. It all boils down to this — God told us everything we needed to know when he inspired the men who wrote the Bible. Ignore anyone who tries to add to or take away from what He says. That’s it. It’s just that simple.