Speaking of Materialsim...

This idea of materialism is tied in with apathy in faith, not working out their faith with fear and trembling. We are going to study through James next (in our church), and we will see how people react to ‘faith without works is dead’ because there are a lot of dead people in the church today.

I was reading a book called The Divine Commodity by Skye Jethani (Zondervan 2009). I was a bit leery of it because it is endorsed in part by Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle (both leaders in the Emergent Church movement), but he had some great things to say about consumer Christianity. He stated that, “We have abandoned the vision that Christianity is an alternative way’, and ‘the emergence of a Christian sub-culture that parallels the secular culture in every way reveals the captivity of our imaginations”. Now the Emergent Church movement has ironically  taken this truth so far that they are redesigning Christianity in their own manner of consumerism and in the process leaving the inerrancy of scripture behind – a tragic mistake indeed.

But Jethani is right about at least one thing, we (the church) in an aim to reach those in secular/alternative lifestyles have abandoned the truth, forgotten the fact, that Christianity IS supposed to be an alternative lifestyle! We have made it look so much like the world in effort to reach the world that those who are to be sanctified, set apart, different, are indistinguishable from that which Gods is calling us out of.

Oh well. God’s work is not a burden, but getting people to accept what they say they have already accepted is mine. If I’m getting tired of people who call themselves Christians, show up to church on Sunday and yet you cannot get them to volunteer to host a potluck or put their name in a sign-up sheet to take responsibility in just one little area of church set-up or break-down, how do you think GOD feels about that?! If it breaks my heart to see the attraction of materialism and consumerism invading the lives of my little circle of Christian  friends, how do we think it makes God feel when He sees it so rampant worldwide?

I don’t know about you, but when I grieve the Holy Spirit… and finally realize it, I am heartbroken. But when I understand the grieving of the Holy Spirit as He looks at the apathy in our little church, I’m grieved that their apathy may have something to do with my leading – and it is almost crippling. It hurts. I wonder, I ask, and I pray. That's all I can do.

The simple answer is that we do not live for Jesus because to live for Jesus means we must die to ourselves, and we are just far too important to ourselves to do that...