Monday 11 February 2013

What is it with some Christians????


What is it with some Christians?

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged.   For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” 
                                                                                  Matthew 7:1,2

I just heard today about a Christian organization that receives some government funding to drill wells and build latrines in third world countries, had it cut because they had anti gay material on their website.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report that, “Until Tuesday, the organization's website carried a list of "sexual sins" deemed to be "perversion": "Turning from the true and/or proper purpose of sexual intercourse; misusing or abusing it, such as in pedophilia, homosexuality and lesbianism, sadism, masochism, transvestism, and bestiality."
  I happen to have a great deal of respect for the organization. Still however they are very much old school. They tend to without realizing it I’m sure have “special sins”.
Here they linked pedophilia, bestiality with homosexuality and lesbianism what garbage. There is no “special sins”.
I don’t care what you are, gay or strait the bible makes it clear when Paul writes, “But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference,  for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,  and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus”
                                                                                                             Roman’s 3:21-24
It’s interesting that my pastor this past Sunday noted that all sins are equal. There is nothing special when it comes to sins. And I would raise the question is homosexuality a sin? And YES I know what the Old Testament says. But we can’t go back to the Old Testament and cherry pick what laws we want to obey. What laws apply to today.
Consider these laws,
“Keep my decrees.
Do not mate different kinds of animals.
Do not plant your field with two kinds of seed.
Do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material.”
                                                       Leviticus 19:19 
Note the last line, do you wear a cotton polyester mix, or a cotton wool mix?
Here's another one,
“Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.” 
                                                                                                                  Leviticus 19:27
How about eating pork or shellfish, the list goes on and on.
It is not the church’s place to judge sinners. It is the church’s place to be as all inclusive as possible.
We are to go out and evangelize the world. To reach the world for a loving God who wants all people to come to know Him in a personal way.
God is no respecter of person. He loves and cares for all people.
Read the words of Paul to the stoics and epicureans in Athens,
"Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. 
 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.  And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.  From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.  God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.  ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ 
 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” 
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”  At that, Paul left the Council.   A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others"
                                                                        Acts’s 17:24-32 
Neither Jesus or any of his followers every spoke out about the sins around them. They went into a world that I am sure shocked them. They were Jews going throughout a secular world that had practices dynamically opposed to what they had been brought up with. Yet they simply presented the gospel and let God do the rest.
In doing so they changed the world.
It is something the Church in the twenty-first century needs to be doing.
We have no need to list sins on our website’s. We've all sinned, be we the average person on the street, the pope or the leaders of the organization that prompted this blog.
We need to extend our hand to people in every walk of life and say “God loves you, and show them the way to heaven.
            Think about it.

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