The Evolution Of The Gospel

I realize you may be as skeptical as you are sick to death of the gimmicks, the  self helps and quick-fix promises made by churches and individuals claiming to represent Jesus Christ. You are as “turned-off” by the pony-ride, inflatable gospel as He is!! So, what are we going to DO about it?

The first order of business is to REPENT. We must admit we have used, abused and misused the testimony of Jesus Christ and His Gospel to sell everything from investment opportunities to cemetery plots. We have turned the body of Christ into a business corporation. We have submitted the cause of Christ to voting bodies and church boards and subjugated the Kingdom of God and the will of God to the well-intentioned promotion of too many of our own good ideas.

We have substituted fads and programs for passionate pleading in prayer, and rewarded ourselves for a job “well done” that was not even the right one, much less, done right. Jesus’ simple command to “follow Me and make disciples” has fallen by the wayside, discarded in favor of organizational structure and behavior modification borrowed from the world and brought into the church by well-meaning leaders under the guise of pastoral care.

Nothing of the world, no matter how repackaged by the church, will ever become God’s substitute for love and compassion.

God’s ways are not our ways. Dressing up our ways in the pious rhetoric of theology and religion in what we have come to identify as the “church”,are so far removed from God’s original intention that even the unchurched can see it. And what has become of the simplicity of the Gospel Paul talks about in II Cor. 11:2-3?

There is very little that we tout as holy that even slightly resembles the opening acts of the first church. There is very little of what God requires that we even honor as mentionable suggestions.

The Gospel has evolved into liturgy, and vestments, and rituals, and sacraments and discussion groups very much like any other activity endorsed by the world. It has emerged looking nothing like anything Jesus or Paul or any of the New Testament writers outlined for us.

Our new gospel is laced with options and, as Jesus described,  “burdens too grivious to be born”.  This counterfeit Christianity substitutes social justice and doing good for Repentance and the Blood of Jesus Christ. It uses words like “peace” and “love to promote a tolerance of sin that elevates ethnicity and social acceptance to a place above the Truth as defined in and by Jesus Christ.

It colors the gospel green and yellow and pink, when the only color it comes in is red. The gospel most of us are following today bears no likeness to that preached by Jesus in the Beatitudes. It rejects the heart and the hand of the One Who healed and delivered and preached the Good News of the Kingdom that “whosoever will”, could be saved!!

We may not notice any extreme consequences for all this error right now, but nothing that rules here and now, including the lie, will prevail or protect us on the day of reckoning. Please consider for yourself, the seriousness of our present condition. May God grant us Repentance and a quick and deep change of heart.