evangelical divide

There are two kinds of wisdom and the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.

Today I find many Evangelicals who in their effort to guard the truth have done exactly the opposite. They have failed in Paul's simple instruction to Timothy. In their war for truth they have created their own earthly knowledge, packaged it as Christianity, and have missed the wisdom that comes only from above.

Our goal is love which comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. These false teachers want to be teachers of the law but they do not know what they are talking about.

Their teaching does not represent the God of love. Aware that their heavy yokes cause men to respond negatively to them, they teach that true spirituality is confronting error, that this is what Jesus did, and this is why the world hated Him and subsequently them. They dissect the Bible as some kind of text book to prove what tickles their ears and miss the whole of what God is saying.

I was recently struck by this yet again while reading through the Pyromaniac blog. Phil Johnson is posting excerpts from John MacArthur's Truth Wars. On Christmas Eve Dan Phillips posted Can the world "like Jesus"? What he wrote was (as is usually the case) true. But the message remains a far cry from the Gospel. The message of the angels on Christmas eve wasn't, "here comes a judge who will confront you - comply or go to hell." The message was “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord."

Evil is confronted in the Gospel but it looks like deliverance from darkness not a clash of theologies. There is a large segment of Evangelicalism that has lost sight of the trust they were instructed to guard. They have created for themselves a religion and are actively working to burden others rather than free them.

We need to recognize and reject this and at the same time we need to see why such deception is thriving among the Body of Christ - but that's for another post.