Read this carefully...
“Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”
- Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God
3 comments:
I would have to agree with the author here. I've found that our modern day church attendees more closely resemble the Pharisees than Jesus. While in their day the Pharisees condemned people for not carrying out the ceremonial washing (a man-made law), today people are condemned for not wearing the proper attire (our "Sunday best") or for prefering a different kind of music. The true, unpolluted message of Jesus Christ is rarely heard in churches today and even less frequently lived out. Its all very sad because I don't think believers are intentionally legalistic and cold, it is just easier.
I love partaking in communion; the intimacy with Christ. But during communion today, I couldn’t help but to think of this post. I thought,”This is what communion has been reduced to; a tidbit of cracker, and a drip of juice.” As wonderful and powerful as the symbolism is, I am beginning to recognize that His suffering has been reduced, downplayed, conventionalized, made to fit a pg(parental guidance) mold.
And the saddest thing is that we are probably missing the very people who are the most open to his message because we're waiting for them to clean themselves up before we'll let them come to Jesus.
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