Into the Flip Side

Jared at The Gospel-Driven Church commented on the post that Brant had posted here and asked the following question:

"Contextualizing those letters to Galatia, Corinth, Thessalonica, etc., what do you think Paul would write to American churches?"

well that's about as big of a question that can be asked right now I think, but this is my preliminary thoughts with more to follow.

I have been going through Galatians in preparation of an upcoming short talk I am going to be giving. The letter to the churches in Galatia was in many ways a call to return to the good news that was preached to them original by Paul (captured in Acts 13 and 14). There were Judiaziers who after Paul had preached and had started to tell the new converts that faith in Jesus was not enough, and that they needed to also pay attention to curtain Jewish rituals and practices.

I am still formulating this thought, but I am beginning to work out what I think is a parallel in many respects to what has happened in some American churches. We have turned our eyes away from the good news and have started adding to it all of these other things that we must do as if faith in Jesus is not enough in and of itself.

We still say "faith in Jesus" as our battle cry but then we add through pratice several other things, attend a certain amount of meetings, pray this way or that, practice these yearly rituals, have this type of service, appease people through certain messages, and so on and so on.

Now the issue is not the practice of these things necessarily as I think many of them are important, honoring, and valuable, it is more that there is confusion as to its significance or the order we put everything in. We must start at faith in Jesus alone, and then work from there. I do not think that many preachers are choosing to do this, I think if asked they would say "well of course faith in Jesus alone, but that is a given. I am addressing what comes after that.", however I think what is getting lost is faith in Jesus alone is not a given, at least not any more.

We are so overloaded today that we need every Sunday, Wednesday, Saturday, every morning to be reminded that all of this other stuff has a place (maybe some of it doesn't but that's a different post) but none of it comes before or even matters if we do not start at faith in Jesus alone, that is the good news.

I think it would be easy to write a post about how Paul would puke if he saw us today blah blah blah, but the truth is I think we need to be brought back to the truth of the good news, the truth of the cross, the sacrifice of Jesus and redemption.

we need to do some serious emptying out of "stuff" stuff in our homes, stuff in our lives, and stuff in our hearts. clear it all away and return to the good news.

Jared also linked to an amazing video by Francis Chan here. This is where I find myself being drawn more and more each day and he says it way better than I could.