Day 2712 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Galatians 1:6 NIV

Why is there such a willingness to distort or pervert the true Gospel of Christ? Not out in the midst of a fallen world, trust me, I get that part. I completely understand why people flee from the message of the cross and the required repentance that our faith demands. This place doesn't want anything to do with being upright, honorable, responsible, moral, compassionate, or even kind. Common decency fell dead along the road a long way back and society just kept right on going. So I understand why the message our faith is built upon garners no interest in this dumpster fire of a society.

But what I'm talking about is within the church body itself. Why are so many people who are willing to bear the title 'Christian' seemingly unwilling to bear the kind of life that a follower of Christ is expected to uphold? Why are so many willing to take things out of context, gloss over certain topics, and blatantly say that some things aren't wrong when the Bible tells us quite plainly that they are? Have we seriously become so concerned for the comfort of our congregations that we're okay overlooking the danger that their souls are facing?

Well, I doubt very highly that anyone would come out and say it like that, but that is in fact what's happening when we distort the Gospel and try to make it easier to swallow. Whenever we avoid speaking the truth that God has given us to share, we're not only failing those that God has put us here to help, but we're also failing God by giving other things higher concern than our sharing of His word. But when will we realize that making people comfortable in their sins is absolutely the last thing that any of us are called to do?

Rather than worrying about helping someone break free from addiction we worry about what they'll think when we share something that calls them out. Rather than living in fear of having to watch people turned away from Heaven we live in fear of the anger that the sinful always resort to in this effort to fight against the truth that they must do everything to avoid as it confronts the fact that they've grown to find comfort in their chosen way of life deep in the shadows of sin.

Rather than fearing God and respecting His name and honoring His calling in our lives by fulfilling the mission He has given us, we live in fear of man because humans are the ones that yell at us and call us names. And sadly, we've simply lost the backbone and fortitude that once helped us be able to say that sticks and stones may break our bones but words will never hurt us. Anymore, it's the words we're clearly terrified of hearing thrown in our direction!

And when we reach this place where we're more worried about appeasing mankind than we are about pleasing our Father, then we're suddenly more than happy to toss aside the sharing of His full Gospel as we know that there will be some people who simply don't like what they hear. We'll say that homosexuality is okay because it's popular, and we don't want to appear unloving. We'll say that people can pick and choose their gender and demand people call them what they want to be called because we don't want to hurt their feelings by pointing out the fallacy in that nonsense.

We'll ignore the person who gets smashed out of their mind and hurts another person simply by chalking it up as a lost soul who is too scary to try and talk to anymore. We'll turn our heads at the lady with a bruised face because we don't want to stick our nose in her business. We'll speed past the person holding a sign on the corner and wonder why they don't get a job because slowing down and learning their story takes too much time and starchumps gets busy at rush-hour.

My point is that once we start down the road of finding excuses to avoid doing what God put us here to do, we'll always be able to find another, then another, and then another. We'll always be able to find some group of people who won't like that verse that God has placed on our hearts. We'll hear about another church burning to the ground in the next town over so we sort of edit out the prickly parts of the message we had spent hours putting together. We'll see another protest, another riot, another religious group caught up in some scandal and we'll shy even further away from being the nail that remains sticking out.

Friends, I think we simply need to accept the fact that much of society will never accept the message of the cross. Millions of people will live their entire lives doubting in the existence of God and laughing at those freaks who spend their lives on their knees seeking humility. But rather than trying to find a way to reach those who don't like what our faith really is, maybe we should just share what we've been given to share and stop being so wishy washy. Maybe we need to find our way back to what it is that we felt when we first found Christ and stop giving it away in this effort to make it more interesting to those who simply aren't interested.

This world doesn't need a gospel that makes people comfortable. We all need the Gospel that forces us to see just how wrong we are and how much harder we need to work to do what's right. But the problem is that millions of people show up to these fancy buildings once a week and hear about all the peace and comfort they have waiting for them while never once hearing about the mountains of sin that lie in their way to that eternal promise. They hear messages geared directly at making them feel welcome in those pews but they never hear about how sin shouldn't be welcome in our hearts.

And it all just keeps slipping further and further away from what it was always meant to be. If you give sin an inch, it will take a soul. If you give people some false gospel that leaves them believing they have nothing in their lives to change or get rid of, then they'll not change a thing and will never walk away from any of their sinful ways. In a world that is so consumed with telling everyone how great they are, we cannot afford to craft some religion that tells them the same just so we don't feel as though we're falling from the limelight.

If we preach a message that has people trusting in a lie then we're leading people away from God, and if we think He's okay with that simply because people will tell Him all about how nice and loving we were then we're idiots. If we think we can ignore His word or distort it in order to up our attendance thinking that He's worried about the quantity of our congregations rather than the quality of their relationship with Jesus then we're fools. If we think that we can call ourselves Christians while never coming close to pointing people the Christ found in Scripture, then we're those wolves in sheep's clothing that we've heard about.

The whole issue is that people will continue to choose only what appeals to their fallen state. We can't change that, but we also can't take it upon ourselves to cherry pick some verses that make people feel good or completely skip over the parts that make some feel bad in order to widen our reach and reel more in to boost our numbers. We have to stop looking at this as some kind of glorified marketing scheme where we just need to figure out what the consumers want in order to raise our profits.

This is about souls. It's about eternal life. It's about the fact that every single human is a sinner who is still prone to sin and the harsh realization that we can spend the rest of our lives trying our best and still end up falling short because without Jesus our best is garbage. It's about seeking out the errors in our lives and the wickedness in our hearts and hitting our knees crying out to God to please have mercy on us. It's about choosing to walk away from everything this world is so that we can have the joyous hope of a world we don't deserve.

It’s about trading ourselves for Christ and our desires for His salvation. It’s about no longer seeking to soothe our hearts of stone but exchanging them for hearts of flesh that are fully surrendered to serving His will rather than our own. It’s about simply accepting the fact that the Bible meant it when it said that the gate is small, the road is narrow, and that only a few will take that harder path that leads to life, and that it’s not up to us to act as some kind of religious road crew out trying to add some lanes so more squeak their way in without having to turn off the broad path that leads to misery.

This is so much bigger than attendance, popularity, social media followers, income, buildings, and worldly appeasement. It's bigger than being hated for saying things that are in fact harsh to the sinful side of our minds. It's bigger than being persecuted for being among those who are willing to wound someone if it means helping them avoid the death they deserve. It's bigger than us, and we simply have to start seeing it that way because any time that we waste slowing down to catch our breath and craft some way to reach out and make humans more comfortable with a message that isn’t comforting is time doing what we’re simply not here to do.

Friends, just speak the truth God has given us to share. It is just that simple. Yeah, there will be a whole lot of people who don't like it. There will be people who leave your church because your messages "just don't do it for them". There will be times that you have to say something that you know is going to hurt someone. But it's better to hurt folks with the truth that may invoke change than to coddle them with a lie that leaves them right where they are, headed straight toward the gates of hell.

Our job isn't to fill stadiums by finding a way to make the Gospel more popular so that more will be okay with what they hear. Our job is to share the truth of God's word and pray that people have the courage to look past the pain and seek out the reasons that His truth stings so badly. It's not because He's unloving or unkind. It's because we've fallen and have lost the desire to get up. And our sharing of the true Gospel doesn't mean that we're unloving or unkind either.

It just means that we love people too much to leave them where they are and watch them turned away from Heaven. And we're not willing to take on this world's foolish and hollow version of kindness because doing so means failing both God and those around us. And for a true follower of Christ, failing to help people find the Jesus in Scripture is not only unacceptable, it’s downright shameful.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold