The Little Building That Holds People That Hold God

James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Why do churches not get this? I look at my surroundings, the churches around me, at least the ones in comfortable, yet modest, downriver Michigan and see a bunch of smaller churches trying to become mega-churches. Their plans are to build the biggest and most state-of-the-art buildings with cafe's and bookstores and visitor centers with all of the splendor of Solomon. Yet, not much is being done for the people that need help. It is weird that churches believe that they can get helping others accomplished in-house without having to go out to the ones who need them and help. So many churches have become self oriented just like the the people that reside in them and not much real religion is being done at all. No wonder people call us hypocrites, because churches are being run for ourselves and not for God. We do so many things with an agenda, we only do the ministries that may increase our numbers, not the going to Detroit stuff and helping a struggling soup kitchen or mission, no those won't turn into numbers for us, and the saddest part is that people are also loving with an agenda. They love others, or they think it is love, just to get them to accept Jesus or to come to church. God never commanded us to love others to convert them, the act of conversion is not something we can do anyways, God works in peoples hearts and uses others, not us. God commanded us to love others because we should love others, to model Christ, to live how God purposed us to live, not to manipulate people into following what you believe to be true. This is the single biggest reason I hate tracks with all the anger inside me. Because most people are not using them as a guide for witnessing to people, they are handing them to people they don't know and watching them walk away with no care of any real conversation. A friend of mine found a stack of particularly judgmental ones in the bathroom of the theater he works at, like you are going to go to the bathroom, see a track, pick it up and receive Christ all while washing your hands under the unsanitary blow drier. I am sorry if this offends some that rely on passing out tracks to fulfill their quota of loving people but it simply is not love. Try building a relationship with someone at work, talk to them about things in their lives, about TV or about movies or music or books or marriage or life. Be honest about who you are right away. Be honest about your sin, pray for that person, a lot. Ask God to open opportunities for you to share the Good News that Jesus brought to us and He will. Then your witness will come naturally, organically, and will hold more respect and credibility with the person you are talking to because that person knows you and knows you care about them. I don't know about you, but I do not make eternal choices like to live for Jesus by following some stranger that passes me a slip of paper or holds a sign in my face as I walk right past him. Do you? I would like to hear some things that we can do to reach out to our communities in love, let me know.

Freedom

Living in the freedom that God has given is a bit hard to swallow. I had always been taught growing up to make sure you confess and ask forgiveness for your sin before you die, or else... The bad fire, as my wife calls it, or hell as the church calls it. You say a bad word in traffic, you had better ask forgiveness before you crash and waste a life of service to God and end up in hell anyway. This was one of the biggest reasons I refused to accept the Good News Of Jesus... Because the Good News they were giving was not good news at all. It was no different in my eyes than not knowing God at all because inevitably I would forget to ask forgiveness for sin before I died unexpectedly and end up in hell anyway. It was hearing the Good News the Bible teaches that brought me into His freedom. I remember lying there on a set of train tracks and wondering to myself, while shaking in fear what hell was about to be like. When God sent a friend to pull me off of those tracks before I got hit, literally a few feet from being hit, I remember thinking for days about the Good News I had learned growing up and it didn't make sense. I was a man that sinned a lot, I was disgusting in every way and here God has saved my worthless life, or was it worthless? I couldn't figure it out in light of the so called truth I had always known, so I tried to die again in a bathtub, but this time I decided to consult God once and see what happened and here I am... Alive. The so called truths of the churches I grew up in were not truths at all, they were lies, they serve to keep God's people in bondage to sin when Jesus paid for it in full. The word Jesus used on the cross when He said, "It is finished," was tetelestai, which means paid in full, this was an accounting term, when a debt had been paid this was the term used and the term Jesus used on the cross to describe what He had just done. The battle fought, the battle won, it is finished, all debts paid. Believe. Jesus says BELIEVE. With Jesus comes freedom. We need not worry about hell, we need not worry about earning our way into anything, God says we could never do that anyway as our good deeds are filthy rags. This is grace and freedom, but why is it so hard to accept personally? Personally we beat ourselves up for sin and that leads to more sin and more sin until God says enough is enough and pulls us out for us to go and do it all again because we cannot accept the freedom we have. You can never earn your place in God's grace and you can never earn your way out. Belief is what the Bible says we need to do. That is how we are saved, and if you want to love God, which comes when we have the Spirit of God inside of us, God says keep His commands, which are all summed up with loving God and loving others. We have true freedom, when you sin confess it and move on, that sin is gone, forever.

A Crowd

I hate Youth Group marketing scams. A ministry uses catch your ear words like "Join us and hundreds more as we" kind of phrases. The kind of phrases that make Youth ministry less about God and more about a giant social event. I know that teens are social beings and that that is an important part of Youth ministry, but it seems that a lot of youth ministries have chosen to take the numbers approach to ministry, the more kids there are, the better the odds of saving some. But to be honest, if you do not have a proper support system set up, which most mega-youth programs do not, than they can be doing more harm than good to these kids. Teens need their friends, but it is important for me to note that they need God more. They need discipleship more. They need to see Christ at work in their leaders personal lives more. Ministry is not about being cool or trendy, ministry is about leading others to Jesus and making real disciples and you simply cannot do that with a big, loud band playing covers, or an energetic, charasmatic teacher giving a motivational speech. It takes more. Those things are fine to have, but what about the support, what about when they graduate out of your program, where do they go? What then do they do with their lack of discipleship and their caffeine sustained faith. We need substance, they need substance, we need to teach them life skills so that they will know how to stand when the wind comes. Numbers simply will not do that, a crowd attracts a crowd and attracts more crowds, but none of those will make a disciple.