KingdomGeek

The the­ol­ogy of Christianity has needed fine tun­ing on numer­ous occa­sions. The Thessalonians, for exam­ple, believed that they had missed the Second Coming, result­ing in a cor­rec­tion from Paul. The early churches dealt with fine-​​tuning issues such as whether or not Jesus was divine, who the Holy Spirit was, and even which doc­u­ments were to bib­li­cal canon and which were not.

Perhaps most famous, though, is the period of his­tory which is itself called the Reformation, dur­ing which a vari­ety of men stood against the Roman Catholic Church by declar­ing such things as sal­va­tion by grace through faith alone.

This process has not ceased.

Churches today are just as they have always been: Filled with gen­er­ally well-​​intentioned folks who, rather than apply­ing the time-​​tested, God-​​blessed activ­ity of the Bereans, accept what their church lead­ers tell them with­out much ques­tion­ing at all.

Yet all the while, any­one from with­out their gath­er­ing is fair game for crit­i­cism & rebuke, espe­cially if such a person’s home church bears a label even slightly dif­fer­ent than theirs.

We need to start test­ing things. We need to stoke the fires of ref­or­ma­tion, purg­ing what is wrong from the church so that what is right may shine ever brighter.

Are you say­ing you know how to make a church perfect?

No, but I wish I could say that. I wish I knew what it would look like to live in true ortho­doxy & ortho­praxis. But I don’t.

What I intend to offer here are dif­fer­ent areas of ref­or­ma­tion which I believe need to occur. Some of them may not apply to your church; per­haps you’ve already embraced the right beliefs or prac­tices, and if that’s the case, keep it up!

There’s always room for ref­or­ma­tion toward bib­li­cal cor­rect­ness, and I trust that together we can progress toward that goal.

Around 2,000 years ago, the Old Serpent made an offer to a hun­gry, weak­ened Nazarene — an offer that for many would have been irresistible.

I’m sure you’re famil­iar with the account, but just in case: “Again, the devil took him to a very high moun­tain and showed him all the king­doms of the world and their splen­dor; ⁹and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and wor­ship me.” ¹⁰Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is writ­ten, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’” (Matthew 4:8–10, NRSV).

The pri­mary pur­pose of that brief pas­sage is clear, and Jesus states it about as suc­cinctly as any­one could: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” Keep that in mind. Continue read­ing →

I’m some­times over­whelmed at try­ing to under­stand man — not human­ity in gen­eral, but man in sin­gu­lar… the crea­ture, the being that each of us is.

We’re assailed from all sides with explanations,

that we have free will, that we are sub­ject to fate or pre­des­ti­na­tion, or that our actions are the mere results of a nearly infi­nite chain of chem­i­cal & phys­i­cal reactions,

that we ought to live for oth­ers or that we ought to look out for Number 1 first,

that our exis­tence is inten­tional, that we’re the result of past lives rein­car­nated, or that we’re sim­ply the result of an ancient bio­logic chain,

that we exist… or not.

Every sin­gle point — no mat­ter how small — of each of those posi­tions could be debated at length, and may very well be until we’re extinct… or until we gain preter­nat­ural knowl­edge in an after­life state (even the end of the debates is debatable!).

All of that is just one of the many rea­sons why I believe the study of God to be so impor­tant. When we can under­stand Him (well, as best as we are intended based upon rev­e­la­tion), most other ques­tions can be answered in short order.

So if one day you wake to find your­self in an exis­ten­tial quandary full of loathing and self-​​doubt and wracked with the pain and iso­la­tion of your piti­ful mean­ing­less exis­tence, at least you can take a small bit of com­fort in know­ing that some­where out there in this crazy old mixed-​​up uni­verse of ours there is a God who brings sense to con­fu­sion and order to chaos yet still can pay atten­tion to a lowly, unde­serv­ing crea­turely speck known as man.

Each and every one of us.