Hosanna

by Pastor James Bell

The willful ignorance of God and his purposes by the media and the entertainment industry has perpetuated a disturbing and false concept of God. For the most part, our culture is buying into it big time.

The idea is that God is somewhere up there sneering and snarling at you because you are so messed up. The message is that you have two choices available to you with regard to religious convictions:

You are incapable of being good and you are honest about it.

Or

You are incapable of being good and you are a hypocrite.

You choose. According to the what is culturally acceptable, you only get to choose one. Okay, what do you suppose is the best choice? Here is how it might be described:

“It is to be aware that you are upsetting “the Good Lord” by the way you live, but you are an honest sinner, who might actually be so real and so honestly human that God begins to like you and feel a little sympathy toward you. I mean, at least you are not a hypocrite, whom God and everybody else despises. God will let you know how he feels about you by the things that happen, or don’t happen, to you in your life. If things get rough, you might want to attend a church service pretty soon to show a little respect. But don’t let that hypocrisy rub off on you.”

Just one problem with that concept, though. It’s totally bogus. Two thousand plus years ago, Jesus came to earth and changed everything. Knowing that we are incapable of being good, the Son of God was punished in our place, paying the price for our sins. God loved us too much to leave us separated from himself. There is a difference between imperfection (as we grow spiritually) and being a hypocrite. It is not hypocritical to take a stand for what is right, even though you need forgiveness when you don’t do the right thing. That is progress. That is growth. It can also make you a target for those who have failed to create their own righteousness and criticize the righteousness of Christ in others. They have “dumbed down” Christian teachings to formulate their own pseudo-spirituality that they will take with them to the judgement and eventually to an eternal hell.

One startling fact has not changed since Jesus walked the dusty roads of Judea and Galilee. It is the religious who hate Christ the most. Jesus was executed by Roman soldiers, but he was killed by the religious. The same misunderstanding of the righteousness of God permeates “Christian America” today. To be “good” has become a bad thing. To be “bad” is now a good thing.

God’s response is unchanging. He continues to love those who sin against him, and he offers them a better way. But, being limited by our own mortality, every person has their last time to reject him before it is too late. Understanding that God is not your enemy, you have a great opportunity to experience eternal life, beginning right now. Think about this prayer:

God our Father, we find it difficult to come to you,
because our knowledge of you is imperfect.
In our ignorance we have imagined you to be our enemy;
we have wrongly thought that you take pleasure in punishing our sins;
and we have foolishly conceived you to be a tyrant over human life.

But since Jesus came among us, he has shown that you are loving,
that you are on our side against all that stunts life,
and that our resentment against you was groundless.
So we come to you, asking you to forgive our past ignorance,
and wanting to know more and more of you and your forgiving love,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Stunned by the brevity and depth of this prayer, written by St. Augustine, I can only say, “Amen”.

How about you?

Tags: culture, Gospel, righteousness, spiritual growth, St. Augustine

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