Missing the Gospel

Today I stayed sick and missed worship with my church. I tuned into a couple of religious programs hoping at least to hear God's word, but I was rather dusappointed. Even though there were many scriptures quoted, I was saddened by the fact that all of the seemed to be geared toward finding success, God's will for my life or unlocking some kind of secret to being all I can be (for God of course). I must admit that I did not last very long and watched a recording of Psych and then fell asleep. I so longed to hear about the good news of God coming, of his inbreaking of time and how he expressed love, true love, that the world so needs. Instead I got a warmed-over version of the American gospel: if you do x then good things will happen to you. I've heard enough about what I need to do. What about what God has done? What about what God is doing? What about what God will do in the future?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blessed are Mourners: Beatitudes Pt 7

I've been trying for two weeks to write this post. I knew what I wanted to write, but I did not know (the kind of "knowing" that really matters) what this beatitude means. After all, it is the most paradoxical of all the beatitudes. On the surface it makes no sense whatsoever. If a synonym for blessed is "happy," as some translations put it, and mourning is associated with unhappiness, then in some ways Jesus is saying "happy are the unhappy." At the very least, we must admit that Jesus' way of seeing happiness is absolutely different than the common ways that we view it in our culture. I think part of the insight we need comes from the shortest verse in the Bible: "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). Over what was he weeping? Lazarus' death? The fact that he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead? That his followers did not have faith? I've heard all of these reasons and while any of them might be true, I think there is something that ...
Read more

Form Without Presence

During the time of Jesus the temple faith possessed all the right forms, liturgies and rituals but those things became ends in and of themselves. The temple religion was practiced in order to sustain and reinforce the temple religion. We don't read any stories about Second Temple Judiasm that come anywhere close to resembling those of the first temple or the Tabernacle where the presence of God was manifest and revealed. It seems as though they had all the forms without the ultimate goal of those forms. I think this is an easy trap for us today in the modern church. The questions about church, how to make the church work, how to keep the church running, how to make the church relevant, how the church can grow, or even how the church can be more biblical can lead us down a similar path. It's as if we think that when we find the magical church pill all will suddenly be well with the world. Over the last 40 years trend after trend promises to make the church what God originally ...
Read more

The Beatitudes and Personal Blessings, Pt 2

Image
I have been spending a lot of time with the beatitudes over the past few months, words that I heard so many times in my many years in the church have finally come to life. (See Part 1 of this series here .) One of the things that has stood out to me is just how much these blessings of Jesus stand in stark contrast to how we commonly talk about blessings today. As a part of my research, I've done some reading on how church leaders talk about the "blessings of God" on our lives. I've looked at themes like "the goodness of God," "the best life that we can have now," and even those who explicitly write about "the blessed life." (I'll refrain from actually naming books because I'm not here to critique any specific author. Instead, I'm looking at a trend.) In almost every case the focus of the teaching relates to how we can have financial success, how we can have a positive attitude and how we can be winners in this life, which is u...
Read more