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In a story that will be related during our Wednesday night meeting (1.10.24) a child is told by his parent (after some extremely poor behavior by a “Christian group”) “They’re Christians and Christians hate you if you are not like them.”  The problem is that the world sees the church like this.  Too often we pontificate and lecture the lost without showing the grace of God.  Christian’s are not supposed to hate anyone.   Jesus told us hate is the same thing as murder.  So this should be apparent.  Throughout history, there have been many efforts to pull the kingdom back to the vision of Jesus.  Charles Dickens too a shot in A Christmas Carol.  Scrooge is complaining to the second spirit about the things done in “his” (God’s supernatural kingdom) name.  The spirit is more than a bit put off and replies, “There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us …. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us”

How easy it is for us to get away from the heart of how things were meant o be.  We, who claim to know Jesus and do things in his name, must seem very strange to him.  The incredible irony is that we oftentimes exhibit the exact sane actions and motives that caused a spike in Jesus’ blood pressure back in his day.  We, whoi claim to know the Father today, are also getting it wrong.  The world around us doesn’t have a problem with Jesus, most of the time it is his followers they have a problem with.  David Kinnaman  of the Barna Group (Barna Group, “Christians: More like Jesus or Pharisees?” June 3, 2013)  did a research project with the goal of assessing self-identified Christians to determine if their attitudes  and actions toward other people are more like Jesus or the Pharisees.  He said, “our intent was to create some new discussion about the intangible aspects of following and representing Jesus.”  They tried to identify qualities of Jesus, such as empathy, love and faith – or the “resistance to such ideals in the form of self-focused hypocrisy.”

Curious?  He found that 51% of Christians identified themselves more strongly on the Pharisee side, while only 14% (one out of 7) seemed to represent actions and attitudes consistent with Jesus, as identified by the Barna group.  There is a bumper sticker that sarcastically cries, “Lord save us from your followers.”  Think about this.  Jesus would have the same sticker.  “YHWH, save me from your followers.”  It wouldn’t have mattered though, these “followers” ended up killing Him.   The people yelling “crucify him” were His people.  They were rejecting the idea of God’s love and Jesus knew it was going to happen, he ven asked God to forgive them while he was hanging on the cross.  These attitudes must have made Him very mad.

 

Where are our attitudes?  Are we aligned with Jesus or Pharisee’s?