Tim Keller, in Counterfeit Gods says:

An idol is something we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to positions of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrines for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtle but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a “scoffer”. Scoffers always show contempt and disdain for the opponents rather than graciousness, This is a sign that they do no see themselves as sinners saved by grace. Instead, their trust in the rightness of their views makes them feel superior.

Does that sound personally familiar to you? It has to me. Perhaps not as severely right now, but in the past, definitely. Sometimes we may not even realize that we have placed some of our hope in something other than the Gospel.

Many churches look at the churches around them as competitors, rather than partners. Or theological diversity as a threat to their ministry. I doubt this is anything short of a sense of religious idolatry.

Even if our theology is right, and our church is healthy, our attitudes toward other people’s theological ideas and churches reveal a good deal about what our own thought and theology means to us. “Scoffing” and “disdain” for anyone is not a good thing. But it’s especially revealing when those things are directed at people who share the same salvation we do.

Psalm 81:11-13:

"But my people did not listen to my voice;
   Israel would not submit to me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts,
   to follow their own counsels.
Oh, that my people would listen to me,
   that Israel would walk in my ways!”

In this passage, Asaph illustrates an important principle which runs throughout all of scripture. And, it’s one I’ve written on before.

There are times when a believer succumbs to destructive habits in his or her life and rides them out for a time. The severity varies, but most of the time the root is the same. God, at times, gives a believer up to his or her own sinful inclinations as a means of discipline. Discipline is good. Something like a parent allowing a child to get burned so they learn that it hurts.

While at times indulging our flesh feels rewarding, the underlying fact is that it is destructive and bad for us. When a believer enters a time like this, it isn’t long before they realize that they are suffering and return stronger than before.

This is why, I believe, a consistently good relationship with God won’t always look like obvious sanctification. Rather, sanctification will sometimes actually include times of serious struggle or even repetitive failure. For the believer, I believe, this is part of the sanctifying process we have to go through.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we go out in search of ways to gratify our flesh. No, we continue to seek God and seek to be like him. But when, we face times like these, we should feel encouraged. God is patient, molding and teaching us to be more like him, employing even the unexpected things we do and experience in order to meet his intentions for us.

Someone very special shared this quote with me on Facebook a couple weeks ago and it’s been echoing in my mind ever since.

“You can be sure that God will never take from you something that is good. Rather, when you are ready, He will remove the evil (sin) and replace it with something far better. He will tear down your fortress so that He can build a palace in its place" – Erwin Lutzer

As new Christians we might see our sanctification as a loss of things we love. But over time, we learn that though they are things we love, they are also things that will inevitably try to destroy us. As older Christians, we often fear the loss of something ‘good’ only to find that it was laced with something from our heart that was ‘bad’.

With always perfect timing, God removes those things from us and we discover again that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” (Proverbs 14:12)

Thank God that He knows the right way. And that way is better than anything we could ever conceive on our own.

Romans 6:19:

“…For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.”

There’s an important truth embedded here that I sometimes overlook.

“Lawlessness leading to more lawlessness…” Sin leads to more sin. Have you ever been stuck in a series of habitual sins? Have you ever told yourself that quitting cold-turkey would be too hard and so you thought you might try and ease yourself out of your sin pattern? I definitely have. It’s never worked for me and I’m betting it didn’t work for you either.

That’s because sin begets sin. When we sin, we sin more. That’s the problem. If we want to break our sin-patterns, we’ll have to stop more than that sin in specific, but focus on Sin as the grand tyrant it is.

sVery recently, a somewhat successful blogger, mother and Christian, made public her shift in thinking. More specifically, that she has become an atheist. I have to commend her honesty and bravery. If she was as active in her church as her post made it seem, she almost definitely has lost most of, if not all of, her church friends (which statistically among Christians would mean all of her friends. Of course, her own experience is all conjecture on my part).

I am not going to link directly to her post. Specifics aren’t terribly important and digital gossip is still gossip I’d like to avoid.

In her post which puts some background under he conversion, she links to a number of YouTube videos which decry Christianity and the Bible. The YouTube videos, like usual, take many of the harder passages from the bible and isolates them from the whole of scripture. Or, assumes a lot of things about the state of naturalistic thinking and the reason behind that.

In a few words, the woman remade these points with her own lexicon. Citing misogyny, slavery and child abuse as some of her biggest contentions with Christianity. Though in the length of the whole post, these were pretty small points. Perhaps the “wrinkles” in the fabric of her faith which eventually lent themselves to a full fledged tear.

When she really got down to a heated monologue it wasn’t about Christianity, it was about the Church.

This is long, but if you’re a Christian you ought to read it!

The woman absolutely did not want to serve as an elder in her church for a second term.  The woman did not like being an elder.   Being an elder was mostly about money.  How to get it and how to spend it.  She came to understand just how much money it took to maintain the large brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  The amount of money it took made her sick.  It was thousands and thousands of dollars every month.  She thought about how all that money could be used to alleviate human suffering and misery and instead it went to to heat and cool and pay a mortgage on a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  She thought about the hundreds of dollars that she gave every month to maintain the huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  She thought about how if she gave that money to a starving family or a hospital in Africa or a school in the slums of Brazil, she would be doing a much better thing than when she gave that money to heat and cool and staff a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  But the bible commanded that the woman give ten percent of her money to the church and not to starving people in Africa.  The bible was more interested in the empty building and not the miserable people who were suffering and so was god.  The woman did not want to be an elder anymore because she wanted to forget about that money that went to heat and cool the huge brick empty church building, but the woman felt like she had to be an elder. Because that is what christians do.  They serve the church… or the the expensive brick building that stands empty six days a week.

What has she said here? She’s said, in extreme brevity, that there was a painful mismatch between the money they had and what they spent their money on.

In the case of this woman, it seems that her church failed to help her, or at least give her the tools, to iron out the theological wrinkles in her faith. If that isn’t one of the churches important functions, I’m not sure what is. But more than that, her church’s self-absorption led her to misunderstand the whole point. Unfortunately, it ended sadly. Though my own story must lead me to believe no one is out of God’s reach. There is still hope.

I’m heartbroken for this woman, and my own lack of faith leaves me fearful for the huge number of people in the current church system. The church cannot continue like this. It’s disgusting and stories like these are just the refuse of something that should be beautiful, but instead is disfigured and grotesque.

So, can it stop already?

Jesus teaches that our sins are our own, and the guilt belongs to no one else. It’s hard to accept. Even after Eve ate the apple in the Garden, she told God that the serpent had tricked her into doing it. And perhaps that was a unique event in history, but it didn’t exonerate her guilt.

Matthew 15:19:

…out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

When a man and woman who are courting each other fall into sexual sin together, it was not the situation that created the sin, it only afforded the opportunity for the sinful nature to exercise itself. The things and situations around us are not to blame for our sinful failures, those failures reside in the heart already.

Matthew-Henry puts it this way:

It is the heart that is desperately wicked, Jer 17:9, for there is no sin in word or deed, which was not first in the heart. They all come out of the man, and are fruits of that wickedness which is in the heart, and is wrought there.

A mere disciplining of our situations is a dire insufficiency in our fight against sin. To block our chances to sin does very little but paste a pleasing veneer over the surface. The only real solution is to appeal to the grace of God in Jesus Christ to actually change our hearts, so that we might desire different things completely.

One of my favorite Puritan authors, Ralph Venning (author of the classic The Sinfulness of Sin) shares a little saying with gigantic meaning.

“To this we must say that He who promised forgiveness to them that repent has not promised repentance to them that sin.”

I had to read it a couple times to get what he was saying.

In our sinful nature, we’re wont to take God’s grace for granted. To even try and use it to give ourselves permission to venture (however temporarily) into some sin.

Yet, while we may lean on God’s grace as free and unconditional, the conscious choice to venture into sin on the back of that grace may be evidence that we’re not the recipients of the grace we dare to use licentiously. God has promised forgiveness to everyone who repents. But, to those who see it as an opportunity to sin, perhaps God has not promised repentance.

Sin is a dangerous, dangerous thing.