Pastor's faith blog
Blurred vision and no insight
This past week I ran my first ever FB advertisement promoting the upcoming "Activate the Kingdom of God" seminar to our regional and local community. What transpired through the engagement we achieved is rather revealing of the society we live in and as witnesses of the love and power of Jesus Christ, this calls for greater boldness and acrobatic faith on our behalf.
One of the things Jesus says in Luke 4:18 is there would be recovery of sight to the blind because of the anointed preaching of the Gospel. People in general are captives of collective opinions to the place they do not possess singular vision, they see things blurred by popular consensus and in the process lose their ability to think clearly or to recognise truth. All the comments we received are entrenched opinions of society where God is a figment of our imagination but science is real because it can be tested. In popular thinking Christianity is dead and churches are shutting down because they just want your money even though the event advertised is free with free refreshments. I accept my audience is ignorant on spiritual matter and eternity but what I want to here respond is the doctrinal programming of the Christian who commented re the advert. His comment read:
"The Kingdom of God is not something you activate. It's something you live and it's not there to make Western consumer Christians have exciting happy lives, it's there to change the hearts of people so they are happy to lay down their lives for others and bring justice in the earth".
At face value that may sound reasonable except that it is presumptuos ignoring the condition of many Christians who are inactive in the work of ministry which belongs to us all, not just the clergy. To live the Kingdom of God in truth and deed you have to activate your faith daily in order to keep the activity of the Kingdom alive in your life. It's not about knowledge alone, the activity of that knowledge needs to be put into practice as we go preaching, healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, raising the dead, casting out demons for freely we have received and freely we ought to give, as taught and modelled by Jesus in Matt 10:8. Good works don't add up to the work of faith and labour of love which are the benchmark of the Kingdom of God in action.
Fulfilment in Christian living is achieved by going and doing what Jesus told us to do. The Kingdom of God is a matter of Christ's righteousness being imparted to us by faith which leads to peace and joy in our hearts by the Holy Spirit--and that is the only way we will get the job done because everything the Kingdom of God stands for is an antithesis for the knowledge and spirit of this world. Doing it God's way is how you lay your life down for Christ's cause, anywhere in the world, including the Northern Western hemisphere where believers can be filled with the joy of the Lord too! The view every seminar put on by a church is to prop-up 'Western consumer Christians' is quite a nearsighted perspective of my FB commentator. As a local church with a global reach, we impact many poverty-stricken communities in Africa and South East Asia, countries once colonised and pillaged by imperial pride which still lives on in the intellectual reasonings of those who believe they are the gatekeepers of democracy and justice. As the living church we live beyond philosophy. We practice generosity by uplevelling the lives of the poor, the dejected and broken-hearted wherever they are found and we do so through the power of the Gospel of Christ.
FB comments aren't meant to be taken with any degree of seriousness but they are indicators of what people in general believe, even other Christians. Therein the need we have to put the truth back out there in people's faces because they have heard the lie so often, they now believe it and no longer have a grasp of what is real, true and eternal.
