So, I’ve been thinking about the Church as a whole a lot lately. And I’ve noticed a lot of things that are so far from right.

1: Love

Do we honestly remember what it means to love the lost? To love sinners? To love even each other? Or are we too busy searching for the ready-made Christians or the wealthy or the famous to see the dying and lost lying on our doorsteps? We seem to be too busy casting stones to bind their wounds. Do you honestly think by hating these people, by not loving them, by judging them, by not reaching them, and driving these dying people further from the God Who loves them that you’re doing the Father’s Will? No, you’re not. Instead, you’re being judgemental, stiff-necked, and you’ll have blood on your hands. The sinners you’re scorning are the least of these; Jesus Himself said ‘Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to Me.’ I know you can love people straight into hell, but love is also what will save them. We are called to love them. We are called to reach the lost and the dying. We are called to show these people God’s love. We haven’t been doing that. We have been trying to pick and choose who is worthy. Honey, trying to God’s job for Him is what got Lucifer cast out of Heaven.

On an even more worrisome note, do we even know how to love God? Do we truly love the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? I don’t believe we do. I believe, like the Laodicean church, we have forgotten our first love and grown lukewarm. Our first love is to be our love for our King. Not our love of wealth or prestige or any of the other distractions surrounding us. If we truly loved God, we would try to fulfill the Great Commission. We would be trying to reach the lost instead of telling them they’re too far gone. Love does not equal hate.

2: Worship

Do we even know what worship is anymore? Or have we just turned it all into a show? I believe we have. Worship is where you stop and where He begins. It is being in the presence of I AM and locking in solely on Him. It’s not caring what Ms. So-and-So three seats behind you thinks or if Mr. What’s-His-Name in front of you can hear you or not. It’s not something you do for everyone to gawk at. It’s you and God. It’s being in the throne room and being alone with the King and nothing else is important and nothing else matters in that moment. If they hear you and don’t like it, why’s it their business anyway and why do you care? What the Father thinks of you is infinitely more important than what anyone on earth thinks.

3: Judging

I touched on this a little bit above when I spoke about love. We have become quite judgemental of everyone around us. We think it’s our job to deem people worthy to even set foot in the building. If they’re not worthy and they come in anyway, we run them off. They would never fit in, we say. They don’t do things the way we do, we say. They drink, we say. They’re adulterers, we say. They’re gay, we say. They killed someone, we say. They stole something, we say. They’re Muslim, we say. They do drugs, we say. They cut, we say. They have tattoos, we say. They have a porn addiction, we say. WE say their sins are too bad. WE say they’re too far gone. WE say God could never love them. He loved you, didn’t He, sweetheart? Look back at who you were the day before you met Him. Look back at the things you’ve done. I know you’ll probably say ‘Oh, I never did anything that bad.’ Honey, the time you coveted your neighbor’s new convertible made you just as guilty as a thief. The time you were checking out the hot guy/woman while your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend wasn’t looking made you the same as the adulterer. Sin is sin is sin. It makes no difference what it is. So get off your high horse before you fall off and break your neck. Stop acting like an attack dog when you’re supposed to be a sheep. Sheep don’t eat people, figuratively or literally. The judgement and the hatred need to stop. WE are supposed to be a religion of love, not one of condemnation and hate. Again, love does not equal hate. Judgement does not equal grace. The world has enough hate in it. We could use some love and some grace.

4: Compromise

Compromise isn’t easy, is it? Not until it comes to our relationship with God. It becomes all too easy at that point. It’s easy to compromise on speaking the truth because no one wants to hear it. People would rather gouge out their eyeballs with a plastic spoon than hear the truth. So we gloss over it. We either hammer down on one group specifically or we leave out hell completely. Hell is a very real place. We don’t mention hell because it’s scary. You’re dang right it’s scary. And it needs to be preached about so ore people don’t end up in that nightmare. We don’t talk about testing the spirits to see if it’s of God. In this day and age, we need to be wary of all things, no matter how innocent it might seem. The devil is like a young lion seeking whom he may devour. And our compromises turn us into the perfect snack. We compromise on truth because we don’t wanna make people mad or hurt their feelings but the fact is they need the truth more than they need oxygen. If we speak truth to them in love, we’re doing the right thing. But skirting around it like a three-year-old afraid of a Halloween decoration helps no one.

I end with this. There is a war coming. We’ve been fighting it since the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve fell. It’s about to get a whole lot worse. Unless we decide to get out of this coma, how can we fight? We can’t. An army is no good unless they’re ready to fight. From what I’ve seen, we’re just a bunch of spiritual couch potatoes. If we don’t change, if we stay on this spiritual couch where we decide nothing we do is wrong, if we don’t come back to our first love, we’re nothing more than an easy snack for demons. Let’s get back to God and get ready for this war, eh?

FOR KING AND KINGDOM!