Spurred by an article from Christian news wire, I wrote a post yesterday regarding the new post-Christian America, and the potential it holds to see the the true church rise because of coming persecution. I wrote in there about things that others in the world have suffered for years for the cause of Christ. We have lived for years under the blanket of Christendom, hoping never to face anything like this. Here is an example.
Yesterday I posted an article written by the Christian news wire that told of the shocking yet honorable death’s of two young men sharing the gospel in Florida. Though it was shocking to the author, and though he cried out for justice, and media coverage that would be given to any other individuals killed for their religious affiliation or belief, I find myself not terribly shocked,and not terribly fearful.
Prior to Constantine’s decision to make Christianity the national religion of the empire, the early church suffered horrendously. Eusebius, a historian of the time tells of people being boiled to death, fed to lions, pulled apart, and being forced to sit in a metal chair while being cooked to death. The most horrifying for me as I read was the man who was asked to recant his faith in Christ under the threat of having boiling hot lead poured down his throat. Eusebius tells us that this man, like many others, did not recant, he would not substitute Caesar as lord, for Jesus as Lord, and so that day he lost his life…in a most disturbing and painful way. I have a vivid imagination, often times too much so, and I just kept feeling the heat in my mouth…throat…and chest as I read, trying to grasp in what world a human being could do this to another, and in what world a man could so faithfully love his Jesus, that he would give everything…even unto death, for the sake of His name.
Do I believe the death’s of these two men are the ushering in of Barbary of this nature? The likely answer is no, but what I do believe is that this incident, however tragic, marks a new age for the American Church. One in which the faithful and the fakes will be distinguished clearly. In the days that Eusebius wrote, it would be foolish and deadly to say that you were a follower of Jesus when you really weren’t. The sad reality is that since about 325 a.d. there has been an influx into the Church of casual “Christians” who served a Christ of convenience. But with the threat of death looming for even sharing your faith, this practice seems to be soon coming to an end as Christendom dies, and a post-Christian era emerges.
My hope is that the church would rise, and those that truly belong to Christ would stand firm in the face of all possible persecutions, be they personal, social, or governmental.
This incident, however terrifying for the author of yesterday’s article and others, is full of potential. For years men and women all over the world have given their lives, literally, for the cause of the gospel. The fact that it is just reaching America is in itself a startling reality…but it is here nonetheless. Do you belong to Christ? I hope that your lips are not close to Him while your heart is far off, because if it is, the time will come when it will be weighed and measured by similar incidents of verbal, physical, and emotional persecution,and if you are not His, the world will know….but more importantly, so will you.
Two Christians Murdered for Witnessing in Boynton Beach
Why the National Media Blackout?
According to the Boynton Beach police, simply sharing the word of God on the street is what brought two ministers to the man who killed them. Tite Sufra, 24, and Stephen Ocean, 23, were shot and killed Saturday night after meeting Jeriah Woody, 18. They witnessed to Woody for fifteen minutes when he got a phone call and told the preachers he ‘had to go.’ As they walked away, Woody suddenly started walking back toward them. Sufra walked up to greet him and was killed with a shot gun blast at point blank range. When Ocean ran, he was shot in the back. After he fell, Woody shot him in the head execution style. Woody was arrested Wednesday and is charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
“As of today, there are no national news organizations reporting this vicious murder of two innocent Christian men. Why?” Cass said, “I’ll ask this: If two Muslims, or two feminists or two homosexuals were murdered, wouldn’t the media be all over it? These were two fine young black Christian men shot by another black man for their Christian faith, yet the media does not seem to care.”
Cass continued: “It is an ominous sign of our times that Christians are being shot on the streets and in our churches. Last year Jim Pullion was killed while holding pro-life signs in front of his granddaughter’s Owasso Michigan high school. Rev. Fred Winters was murdered while preaching in his pulpit in Maryville, Illinois. Increasingly we see Christian ministers threatened and churches terrorized and vandalized for their stand on marriage. Now when Christians gather for worship they must have armed security. Anti-Christian defamation and bigotry has helped to create this violent climate and it must stop.”
Tomorrow I will write some thoughts I have on this as it relates to the new frontier of post-christian culture in America. But, I’m curious to know, what do you think?
Jesus said to Peter, and His other disciples, “Who do men say that I AM?” After a few answers that were incorrect, it would be Peter who would say, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!” Centuries ago, this question was at the center of culture and humanity, and today it has not changed. It is no longer an argument, primarily, of whether Jesus existed, even History, Discovery, and Science Channel have a “theology” of His existence. What they, and many more do not have, is a true theology of His Person. Take into account this excerpt from a debate between Unitarian “Minister” Sewell and renowned Atheist Christopher Hitchens. the full transcript can be found here
The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion? {Minister Sewell}
I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian. {Christopher Hitchens, Atheist}
Let me go someplace else. When I was in seminary I was particularly drawn to the work of theologian Paul Tillich. He shocked people by describing the traditional God—as you might as a matter of fact—as, “an invincible tyrant.” For Tillich, God is “the ground of being.” It’s his response to, say, Freud’s belief that religion is mere wish fulfillment and comes from the humans’ fear of death. What do you think of Tillich’s concept of God?” {Minister Sewell}
I would classify that under the heading of “statements that have no meaning—at all.” Christianity, remember, is really founded by St. Paul, not by Jesus. Paul says, very clearly, that if it is not true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then we the Christians are of all people the most unhappy. If none of that’s true, and you seem to say it isn’t, I have no quarrel with you. You’re not going to come to my door trying convince me either. Nor are you trying to get a tax break from the government. Nor are you trying to have it taught to my children in school. If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book. {Christopher Hitchens, Atheist}
The Gospel is so very clear, clear enough that an Atheist understands it, and yet, it is the religious who have managed to convolute it, be ashamed of it, misrepresent it, and misrepresent He who is at the center of it. Unfortunately for Hitchens, and all of us, it is not believing it (mental ascent) or understanding it (knowledge of concepts) that make us followers of Jesus. It is the regenerating (transforming) work of God’s Spirit that alters us…through His Gospel.
I am not ashamed of Christ. He is the One true God, and saviour to all who receive the gospel, and I pray everyday that He would be my greatest treasure….He is ALL!!
But, Westboro Baptist, and those like them in various forms have made me ashamed to call myself a Christian, if they are what people associate with Christianity. You may be familiar with Westboro, and their hate filled leader from Kansas. In 1999 they picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepherd simply because he was homosexual. They frequently picket the funeral’s of dead soldiers, and are renowed for even picketing outside a Jewish primary school. In fact they spend $350,000 annually picketing various things and people they feel God hates.
They have become famous for this, when as Christians, it is only the fame of Christ and His glory that we should seek in all endeavors.
Though they recorded their first song, “God hates the world” a couple years ago, it was their latest nonsense that caught my attention on the radio this morning.
Recently they released a statement, flyers, and a song declaring God’s hate for Lady Gaga. I was shamed as I heard the morning show crew discuss this with contempt as they judged Christians and Christ by the measure of these hate fill pharisee’s. The song, a parody of “poker face” repeats over and over again “God hates you.” Referring to Lady Gaga.
Here is the reality of it all. The scriptures say in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” Does this mean that all will come to receive Christ, and come to repentance, no. Does it mean that God hates people, surely not.
God hates sin, not people, not the world. He despises it, and despised it so much that He bore the weight of all sin, so that He might save some. He became sin, so that we would not have to endure it forever or be away from Him forever…so that some might be drawn to Him by His Spirit, and saved. Does this sound like hate or absolute and unconditional love unknown to the human heart outside of God?
Westboro, you are shameful, and you make me ashamed…my only solace is that God will judge one day. He will judge your misrepresentation of him, your waste of money to propagate hate when you could have been funding the mission of God (to save and serve), and He will judge your self-righteousness.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”
I have heard many leaders from the emerging church movement,including Rob Bell and Brian Mclaren, consistently reference the “way of Jesus,” which to the careful ear ends up being an emotion driven attempt at replicating the be-attitudes for the good of the world. I want to believe these men are sincere in their desire to tear Christ away from rigorous religion that is wrought with rules, but empty of life. I want to believe that this is their desire, but what is being shaped by their words and message is a Christ-less Christianity focused on replicating chosen behaviors and words of Jesus, without any significant relationship with or replication of Him.
The “way of Jesus” can not be reduced to replicating what He describes in the sermon on the mount. Even Ghandi, a man quoted as saying he found nothing miraculous in Jesus death on the cross found comfort in the way of doing life presented in the sermon on the mount, but he was not a follower of Christ. And this is what this message of “the way of Jesus” deeply implies. The ability to do life in a manner that seeks to imitate Jesus’ words from that particular teaching, but not to have Him in all His strength and glory.
If we wish to replicate the complete “way of Jesus” then we must talk about hell…alot. Money…alot. And fight religious rule making in an effort to exult the Person of Yahweh. We must speak strongly against sin, and honestly about grace, and humbly about the cost of discipleship. What I have described is the true way of Jesus, and even this limited survey is not complete.
Jesus said that He, in fact, is the way…that Him, in the fullness of His Person was the “way of Jesus” and the only way to replicate that is through His power…in Him, by His Spirit, those were His words. As long as we carve up the scriptures to support the things we wish to define ourselves by, and ignore those that cause complications in our manufactured theology, then we will never know the way of Jesus, and certainly won’t be able to live or communicate it to others.
Jesus is the way of Jesus, He is our great treasure, and without this understanding we are simply green peace, red cross, or the salvation army…and oh yeah, we sing songs about Him sometimes too….
There are many things in this life that have been deemed “disposable” in one sense or another. Relationships(if you care to challenge that look up this years divorce rates), jobs, material goods, people in general. Though you may push back against this it is clear, from the facts that surround us, that we are such an inwardly focused people who most things in our lives only hold value as long as we give it value.
So the question that looms is, can faith be counted among these other items? According to a friend and member of our fledgling gospel community it certainly can, or at least that’s what she learned when she was growing up, and it has severely impacted how she views Jesus, and His gospel…and those who say they represent Him.
Last night we continued to explore the book of John, and in the latter part of chapter 6 we came to this statement, “66After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.” Presumably these were people who followed Jesus relatively closely, and yet because He said something difficult to them, you will have to go and read it, too much detail to go into here, they decided He was no longer worth following. Amazing…these were not people dependent on the written scriptures to know Jesus intimately, they had Him, incarnate God in flesh, and yet…their faith…was disposable.
This was my friend Audrey’s experience growing up, and even now with some of her friends and family who profess to follow Jesus…Jesus was and is a function of their life, when convienant…and when He is not, when there are things that they refuse to let go of to follow, or things said in the scriptures that they want to resist, she explained that they simply ceased to follow, and ceased to take her to worship with the church when she was a child.
Is Jesus really that easy to get hooked too and unhooked from? Surely not! But this is how many who call on His name treat Him and His gospel, and it, along with fools on television begging for money, are the primary reason why many of friends are skeptics, doubters, agnostics, and atheist. It is these people who turn them away from Christ. They offend before the gospel ever has a chance to.
Ghandi is famous for saying, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” This is telling. I wish I could show him 1 John 2:19, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.”
Here is reality, many of Jesus disciples turned away, because they were never truly his…many treat Jesus and His gospel as disposable because they don’t truly belong to Him. If you are a skeptic, and have made an impression of all Christ followers because of one of theses “many” I am sorry, truly. If you say you are a follower of Jesus, are you? Or will you turn away? Is your Jesus disposable
