Leaders and members of a church fail to call out sin. We also fail to be intentional in our actions. Fear causes the church to retain its membership by pandering to the crowd. Members of a church do not want their sins to be exposed. People view the light offensive because their deeds are exposed.
John 3:19-21 (NASB):
“This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But he who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”
Too many services preach topics to the choir. The teachers tend to preach universal truths that are not too convicting. A good example is talking about a sin like idolatry. A preacher brings up plenty of verses on the subject without being relevant to what we are going thru. Idolatry could easily be used as a straw man. You stick everything to the sin that you are not convicted on. Our culture doesn’t use inanimate objects as idols. We use celebrities and political pundits as idols. They shape our culture when we put their opinions equal to God or above him.
We don’t spur on others to good works. Knowledge without purpose is dead. There needs to be a game plan every Sunday on how we can show God’s light to people we interact with. If we are not spurring each other on to righteous actions what is the point of the church? The great commission fails when we fail as a church. Our actions need to be intentional. We need to not think of what we heard Sunday but practice it. If the message doesn’t promote actions, then it isn’t one that need to be taught. We are stuck in infancy as a church when we don’t promote actions.
A big problem in the church is fear. We are constantly afraid to alienate people in the congregation. Teachers are afraid to call out specific sins that the church is struggling with. These sins eventually translate into the leadership. Therefore, the church becomes more secularized an ineffective. A church may lose people when leadership calls out sin. You can’t be offended by the light when you refuse to go into it. They stay in their own denial without paying homage to the truth.
Is our Church becoming more responsible or less? I believe the answer is unequivocally less responsible. We see people constantly taking in false doctrine. Therefore, we crave the lies in our culture about our sin because our leaders don’t expose the truth. We are afraid of the members of the Church reacting to the truth of their sin. I believe our country and the world is in a desperate need of a revival. It is unfortunate that Christians are the ones who need it.
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