Is it just me or is it hard to make objective observations regarding the condition of the Christian Church in America without it coming across as a negative commentary or sounding mean spirited (and for the record I am neither purposefully negative nor mean spirited). I do however, want to begin some dialog regarding how we might better represent our passion for Jesus and commitment to obeying his teachings.
So lets all agree and lets all understand that purpose of this posting is give people permission to make observations and state our opinions without the fear of being misunderstood. So if you want, ask a question, make a statement or proffer a suggestion and lets have some conversation.
I guess I will start...
James 4 says that Christians should be careful about being friends with the world, lest they become an enemy of God. But Jesus exemplified with his life and stated with his teachings that he was and we should be a friend of sinners. It appears that there is some conflict here. Some contradiction. It is my observation that the world we live in is in dire need of friendship from some people who know God. In fact it appears that many, ok, i will say most, Christians are scared to death to befriend "non-believers". This saddens me. I get mad when I hear people defend the lack of friendship with non believers with the James 4 scripture or take an attitude of "I better be careful about getting to close to sinners, so they dont rub off on me". Maybe if we talk about it I will feel better.
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Yeah it's like Jesus protects us from "those people". Aren't we those people?
So I suppose someone needs to be the antagonist (although I believe mr. gonzo makes an excellent point by making the distinction between the context of the gospels and the book of James). This is not really the antagonist position just a thought spinning off after reading all the other posts.
It has been my experience that groups of Christians find themselves making much of one at the risk of ignoring the other. And what I mean is that well intending Christians in effort to follow Jesus in a manner worthy of their calling and not give into sin and compromise do so while failing miserably at be-friending sinners.
In the same way, other Christians who model so graciously the life of Jesus (the guy who ate dinner with prostitutes and "sinners") seem to be the ones who often find themselves at the table of compromise daily.
And it is not that we aren't all prone to make mistakes. Of course we are. However, I do believe there is a difference between messing up and sinning boldly.
Falling in love with the world and being friends with "sinners" or those of who have yet to discover redemption are two separate things. When Jesus made reference to the world, I think he was using the term world in a sense that we are meant for heaven and to always look that way for anything real and lasting. The world so often represents the passions that we all fight against. Lust, Greed, Hate, Envy, Slander. From what I see this goes on in the church as much as it does outside of it.
Being friends with non-believers, is not be-friending the world. Sure there could be made an argument that people who haven't yet accepted the need to battle their sin nature may be more comfortable accepting the passions we all struggle with as normal, and that can be tricky, not to fall in to the trap.
The trap however is a sliding scale, to some seeing a rated R movie is living in the world, to some it's alcohol or drug use. To some it may be as simple as using a euphemism - for those of you scoring at home that would be like saying frick, when in your head you are thinking fuck. Some will argue that just the fact that you were thinking the word fuck is the wrong part and saying a more socially acceptable version of the word is still just as bad. I agree, so just say fuck already.
This whole living in the world or not debate seems useless, the only thing that separates us from "the world" is heaven. We can't live in heaven yet, so until then we all live together, redeemed, still to be redeemed, believers, non-believers, widows, poor, orphans and everyone else Jesus mentioned when he told us all about what true religion is.
I think it is interesting that we always are having questions about right and wrong. "How should a christian conduct himself in the world?". To me it sounds an awful lot like "How do we behave like good robots?" My question is; how do we get away from the insecurity of needing to be seen as righteous before God and others, and move into enjoying the freedom and rest Jesus came to give us?
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