Quantcast
Channel: foundation – 1 Love for Christ
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 13

Burned By The Church – Part 3

0
0

405514489_6459680ed9_b

On Monday, I opened my post with the following:

“I’ve heard people say that they’re not “coming back” to God until the world burns them more than the church has.”

Today, I want to delve into the second reason for which I believe people make this rash statement: they’re worshipping the body of Christ instead of the Head of the church, King Jesus.

Maybe this sounds unfair. I’m not making an exclusive statement here. I’m positive that there are countless situations where men, women and children alike have sought help from believers without expecting impossible things from them, and been wrongly treated, turned out or trampled on. I personally know individuals who have reached out to the body of Christ, looking for a listening ear, or some other small gesture of kindness only to be coldly refused. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, many Christians have become wounding agents in all the wrong ways. Selfish, prideful and domineering. What I want to address today is the mass exodus of young people from the church, who were raised in the church. And here, I think we find in most cases, individuals who were looking for perfection where there was none. I think we are dealing primarily (but not exclusively) with teens and college students whose Christianity has crumbled because it was built on hypocritical humans instead of Jesus Christ. In their defense, however, I want to add that because the church at large is now more about show than they are about the Savior, they’re inviting idolatry and tempting young people to hold them to a standard they can’t possibly deliver on.

Matthew 15:9 says, “But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” That word vain means emptiness; hope disappointed. We have an epidemic of formerly Christianized youth who have discovered that they don’t want Christ anymore, because they have been bitterly disappointed by Christ’s people. The two are not one and the same, and the entire foundation of their “godliness” has been the morality of other, depraved human beings. That kind of foundation doesn’t weather storms well.

As a disillusioned teenager, I emotionally and spiritually walked away from God, the church and Christians and swore I’d never have anything to do with them. Why? On many fronts, Christ-followers had wronged me (and I shouldn’t need to add that I wronged them!). But the sting of hypocrisy only grows when the hypocrite has had false expectations placed on them. I believed that Christians were something they weren’t: perfect, or at least en route to perfection. When I put my trust in Christians and their moral appearances, I set myself up for disappointment and left them no grace for their inevitable failures. That was my own doing, because I allowed the church to become bigger in my eyes than God.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a brief look at some ways we can address these issues individually and as a body.

By: Hannah Stelzl

Photo Credit: Flickr


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 13

Latest Images

Trending Articles



Latest Images