Without a Soul or a Savior

WITHOUT A SOUL

WITHOUT A SAVIOR

Without a soul - Lacking sensitivity or the capacity for deep feeling and passion.

Without a Savior - Wandering with a message that cannot save.

What kind of passion does it take to give one’s life for something? The nineteen terrorists that crashed their planes on 9/11 were willing to sacrifice their lives for a cause. What kind of fanaticism does that take? What kind of faith is so strong that even one’s own life is gladly sacrificed for your beliefs, or even more poignant, for the Master of your faith? Men will volunteer to give their lives to defend their families and their way of life, but who will give their lives for their faith?

Believers in Jesus Christ will say they would gladly sacrifice their lives if asked. If it came down to that they say they would die for Christ. But what they fail to realize is that they have been asked to sacrifice their lives already. We are all called to be living sacrifices for the Lord Jesus Christ. We have lost the will and the desire to explore just what that means and all the present implications. The western version of Christianity has high jacked the Scriptures and used certain phrases like “the abundant life” or “I wish that you would prosper” and they have taken those clipped portions and constructed a faith which requires no sacrifice at all.

It is impossible to communicate with words just how deeply the Christian faith has been deconstructed and turned into a faith of convenience and personal aggrandizement. We have retained some of the words and symbols, but for the most part we practice a westernized form of what used to be the faith of Jesus. After the Industrial Revolution certain segments of civilization began to gain education and material things. And like the first lick of an ice cream cone, each step forward created a thirst for more. Work days became shorter and the home became littered with all kinds of modern accoutrements.

And in the midst of all this was a group of people who believed in Jesus. Perhaps many of them guarded themselves against the onslaught of material things and the spirit of materialism which always accompanies material things. But even if those believers who were living at that time resisted the allurements being enjoyed by their unsaved neighbors, the next generation was born without knowing or experiencing the faith in a much purer time. These new believers saw no point in rejecting what everyone was enjoying, but they knew they would have to make some doctrinal room for all this excitement over all this earthly new.

And make room they did, and each successive generation expanded these doctrines and began to absorb what the world had to offer. Now a television, for instance, is not evil in and of itself. But it provided a vehicle through which evil could enter each house without having the evil entity enter physically. But as believers added the modern inventions within their homes, much of which was innocuous, something very sinister began to take place. The spirit of materialism and personal happiness through material things began to seep into the hearts of believers and eventually in the church itself.

So the Scripture that warns that believers will “heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears” was beginning to be crystallized. And what that means in modern parlance is that since believers liked the things of this world and desired to seek more of them, they subtly and openly demanded that their shepherds fed them what they desired. And in order to achieve that end, the shepherds must also come in with the same attractions to the things of this world. And they did.

And little by little, footstep by footstep, and increment by increment the church not only tested the waters of the temporal allurements, and not only embraced the systems of man, but she began to teach them as coming from God. And material things and the systems of man were no longer inanimate tools about which to be very wary, but now they were part and parcel of the divine plan for the redeemed. Slowly but surely man’s life and man’s happiness began to be taught as God’s ultimate purpose. Serving God was constricted to be exercised on Sunday mornings and with every service God would rush to shower you with blessings which are now defined as material and monetary. Any kind of sacrifice was carefully crafted so as not to significantly interfere with the step by step climb that leads to more and more prosperity.

And after many decades, and after many alterations to the faith, the church eventually became a religious practice which enjoys all the artifacts of hedonism, and all the systems of this world, but maintains a thin veneer of Christianity that is remarkably empty of the life and teachings of Jesus. But the western culture by this time has become very proficient at organization and creativity, which the church has embraced and used to revolutionize the practice of the faith. And while maintaining in writing the foundational doctrines of the faith, the church has been able to significantly alter any resemblance in practice to the early church, or more importantly, the clear teachings of Scripture.

And this metamorphosis has become so successful and so penetrating, that even when confronted with the clear teaching of Scripture our hearts and minds cannot even see or accept them in their purist application. In other words we have become brainwashed. Like attempting to deprogram a cult member, the average western believer walks in all sorts of false assumptions and with a comfort level supported by the teachings of the church and the lifestyle of those believers around them which resemble their own. And armed with this kind of buffer any deprogramming can only begin with a miraculous move of God’s Spirit within each individual heart.

The leaders of the church are powerless to guide the sheep toward Christ since they also have the added chains of vocation, personal financial support, human voices of praise, and the unseen but powerful intoxication that comes with preaching before a crowd. Believe me, those kinds of chains are extremely powerful. And when the world has imprisoned the leaders, then the church is at the mercy of the spirit of this world because believers by and large receive the words of their pastor as coming from God. This western ecclesiastical system is a self destructing construct which is spiritually void but insists it alone serves up God’s truth.

Even the forceful protestations about inerrancy and believing the Bible have become little more than doctrinal hubris designed to elicit the applause of men and stroke our religious egos. And with all that and more, the western church operates without a soul. Going through the redundant motions which are accepted as defining a church, believers by the millions become content with activity and all kinds of positive feelings. Most believers will not stay at a local church if they do not like the pastor or if they do not find fellowship with others. And with that clearly in the mind of church leaders, most pastors are professional smilers and strive to create a community atmosphere. There is nothing wrong with smiling or having a community, however when they become the core and the power of the church then what we have is a religious club.

And in addition the church must have an enemy with which to occupy her time and give her a sense of standing strong for truth. So who better to set up as a convenient piñata but the lost kingdom? So we can articultae all the sins of the lost kingdoms of this world and only give a blind genuflect to our own. Like the Wizrd of Oz, we magnify the sins of the world while exhorting everyone to pay no attention to the church behind the cutain. We pay more attention to the sinful expression of the unredeemed than we do to the Savior and pursuing a living reflection of Him.

And the church uses all kinds of sleights of hands in order to pacify our spirits and keep us from any painful self examination. Listen as believers catsigate the gay community. Listen as they assign divine motive to natural disasters. Listen as they demand an entire country adhere to Biblical morality. Listen as they preach capitalism and democracy. Listen as they exhibit a genuine hatred for Muslims or gays or liberals. And all the while they are creating a self righteous fog which blinds them to their own spiritual condition. And while the culture continues to deteriorate, and while this same culture continues to infiltrate the church, there still is no call for a solemn assembly or all night prayer gatherings to seek the face of God. We cannot see that there is anything wrong except what is wrong in the other kingdom.

Without a sacrificial and remarkable seeking of Christ in all things, the church loses her soul, and in so doing, she loses her Savior. And when I speak of seeking the face of Jesus believers look at me as if I am some mystic monk. That right there should tell us something. If the glory of God is in the face of Jesus Christ, then should we not seek it? And since the average pew dweller sees the Christian faith in terms of moral convictions, political conservatism, and religious activities then he is blind to the very essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

Every church should be a seeker church, but not in the accepted way western believers think. Our gatherings should be prayerfully set out to seek Jesus in all things and not to seek new members. But when a local church relies on clever slogans and manipulating music and over staffed organization, then you may very well grow in numbers. But you will be left with a religious expression without a soul and without a Savior. That does not mean that most evangelical churches do not mention Jesus in their doctrines or even in their messages, but it does mean that when juxtaposed against Scripture and the life of Christ the church lives in the power of the flesh.

And so here we are, dead to Him and alive to ourselves. Millions upon millions of professing believers pile up large amounts of money, enter into large amounts of debt, carelessly enjoy all the offerings of a hedonistic culture, spend little time in prayer, almost never witness, and laboriously go through the redundant motions of the western ecclesiastical structure. Soulless and hollow, and void of a true expression of the Savior. Repentance and revival are the only paths to a resurrection of the faith once delivered to the saints. But I sincerely believe before any real repentance can take place, and before our eyes can be truly opened to the situation, and even before we can receive the power necessary to be freed form our bondage, there must be a miraculous resurgence of prayer in all its mystery and power. Jesus told us that when we have offended someone we must go and speak to that someone.

Without a stunning awakening to elongated and sacrificial prayer

we remain hollow, soulless, and following ourselves and not the Savior.

How tragic, how very tragic.