“Bland-Aid”

I have contracted a disease.   Actually, more accurately described, I would call it a dis-ease.

Over the course of the past year, it slowly crept into my spiritual life and has festered, almost undetected, like a cancer.  I have noticed the occasional symptoms but they never seemed to last so…I just ignored the signs and kept about the busy pace of life.

Church, as a Sunday institution, has become almost irrelevant to me.  Worship feels contrived and the preaching no longer nourishes that place deep within me.  The resulting apathy only sharpens the contrast between my ongoing one-on-one relationship with Jesus (and the community of believers he has surrounded me with) and my struggle to get out of bed to attend church each Sunday.

You see, I long for the meat of the Gospel…the life-giving, grace-filled part that lies just beyond the horizon of the milk that so often fills the pulpit.  There is certainly a necessary place in every church where the message of salvation must be preached but where is the call to holiness?…the acknowledgment of our brokenness?..where is the exhortation to “live a life of love as if your life depended on it” as Eugene Peterson describes?

Blandness and apathy are the symptoms of my dis-ease with the church and I find myself struggling with the ”bland-aid” I have applied to a deep flesh wound.

If the church pews are filled with the same cross-section of humanity that I see in my daily walk, they are filled with hungry men and women, hurting and struggling, assaulted by the world and their own sinfulness.  They show up each week with a glimmering hope of meeting the Jesus that has the answers to the deep needs in their lives.  But, what they often receive is like a morsel or two to a starving man on which they must subsist for the week…it only whets the appetite but never truly satisfies. 

Jesus cares not about the pomp and circumstance of modern “churchianity“.  He stripped Himself of His godliness and come to Earth as a MAN…certainly to atone for us but also to reveal to us the heart of God.  “We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen.  We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created…for everything got started in Him and finds its purpose in Him” (Col 1 15-18 The Message)

In Him, we see an example of God’s original intent for mankind.  We were created in His image and Jesus, in his 33 years of walking this Earth, modeled what it should look like to live in absolute dependence on the Father…the same way we were originally designed to live .

When are we going to stop settling for the perverted version of life that the world has placed before us and step into the true life-giving, grace-filled existence that He bought for us with His blood?

I want to be challenged from the pulpit.  I want a pastor who calls the flock out of the slavery of Egypt and into the freedom of the promised land.  I want the truth of the indwelling life of Christ preached every Sunday until it sinks deep into the hearts of the congregation!

I want to rip the proverbial “bland-aid” from my church life and expose it to the awesome, healing, resurrection power of Jesus and frankly, I refuse to settle for anything less.