We’re still looking for someone who can offer a room to a woman in her 20s in need. It will involve some sacrifice on your part, but we’ve always known that following Christ means that. If it’s a possibility for you, please pray and consider. Thank you.
Christianity does not work—and the Bible makes no sense—unless God is fully God and of such singular importance that he is more important than life itself. If this is lost, meaning if God has become merely a means to human happiness, then everything from the conquest of Canaan to the “hard sayings” of Jesus in the Gospels become unreasonable and incomprehensible. How can such things be if God exists to make everything better and easier for us? But if, on the other hand, He is God, then He is no longer subject to our judgment but we are subject to His.
C.S. Lewis said it this way, “The ancient man approached God, or even the gods, as the accused person approaches his judge. But for modern man the roles are reversed. Man is the judge; God is in the dock. Man is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being a God who permits war, poverty and disease, then man is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench, and God in the dock.” That was the shift in the English Church in Lewis’s lifetime, and now it’s ours. God is guilty until proven innocent, which is the same as saying we are the judges, we are god.
In western Christianity, this is the crucial intersection where two roads—really, the only two roads—diverge. Every believer, every church, must decide: are we seeking to please the one, holy God, or are we seeking to be pleased by Him? Only the first option makes sense of God, as Paul describes him in Romans 11: “How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”
All this to say, stay away from the muddled, conflicted middle-ground that most Christians in America occupy, embracing just enough of God to be inoculated rather than enraptured. That world that one writer describes as “Christ-haunted” rather than Christ-filled. Don’t try to fit him in to your fast-paced, upbeat, upscale, Eastside life. But fit that life, or rather let that life be transformed, in, for, and by him. If necessary, sell everything you have and give it to the poor. He’s worth it.