Saturday, January 16, 2010
My humble and honest opinion: a correction to my blog on Mere Christianity
As beautiful of a concept as uniting the Christians under one banner is I feel that I have not been honest in conveying my true opinion. In truth there is a reason that the Christians are separated as they are and if you look to history you will see that in many cases this is because people in a church decided that what the church was doing was wrong. The Lutherans were founded because of the fact that Martin Luther did not believe that the Catholic Church was correct in raising money by selling get out of hell and purgatory free cards to its members for their loved ones who had died. On top of this while we should be praying for each other and realize that we are all Christians we should not unify the church as I had said earlier while I was caught up in the moment. Any attempt to unify ourselves would lead to compromise and while in the world it is a better alternative to fighting our faith or rather the word of God is not something that we should change just to make others happy. We are not here to agree with the world or be loved by it we are here to be its salt its guiding light leading the world towards what is righteous. Things that the world views as being ok are not in many cases things we should agree on. One of the things that God says though is that we should love the sinner and hate the sin. In my church I have seen people who were members of the church for many years confronted about sin when they refused to repent they were asked to leave until they could. In my personal opinion allowing church membership to those in sin without first having them repent of it is wrong. This is not to say I do not think that we should reach out to them or show them the love of God. That is exactly what we should do. However we should not condone their sin. We are not here to judge that is God’s job we are here to spread God’s love and will to the Earth. We are divided for a reason, because throughout history we have watched churches do things that we believed God did not approve of and if you ever have a question or a doubt about something that your church is doing or a direction it is going in go back to the source the word of God and see what it says about the manner. If the action of said Church goes against the word of God I would highly recommend that you find yourself a different church. My family has done this twice since I have been born and while we found bits of truth in every church along the way and appreciate them for guiding us to where we are now we also realize that man is fallible and any church made by men is fallible, but God is not and so long as you trust in God he will lead you to the truth.
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Thank you so much for your blog post, Jacob. I really appreciated what you had to say. I also believe that you should be a member of a church that you feel has the most correct interpretation of the Bible and is faithful to that in the lives of its members. It is certain that there will never be complete agreement between the different denominaions, but that does not mean there cannot be unity in the church. You can love brothers and sisters in Christ from different denominations without compromising your beliefs to please them. Sometimes it is difficult to stand strong for what you believe, especially when others think you are being judgmental and self-righteous by disagreeing with them. It is not worth sacrificing the truth of God so we can all see eye to eye. Thank you also for bringing up the subject of church discipline. This too can be a difficult and painful topic. It is heartbreaking to see someone walking in unrepentant sin to the point that they are no longer allowed to be a member of the church. But we must remember that church discipline is out of love. We show love to God when we ensure that his church is walking in a way that is pleasing to him. We show love to the church holding it responcible to live out its confessions. Most of all, we show love to the erring member by showing him the seriouses of his sin and reminding him of his need for repentance. Thanks again for being so honest and for sharing this post.
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