For all of its godlessness, this modern age hungers more than any other for love, compassion, and mercy. It hungers, too, for God (though often without realizing it) — perhaps all the more strongly since no other age has banished Him more thoroughly from all its affairs. Yet so many modern people think of the God of the Bible as a vengeful, wrathful, angry deity, a god of hellfire and brimstone, a god of legalism who demands rigid adherence to a moral code — a moral code which many now view as being itself morally intolerable.
Amen! People in our modern world need leaders to stand up and say they can be something more. That bearing their Cross is noble, that struggling against the daily demands of our life can be salvific.
It's a shame that so few of the modern Christian celebrities, or those who spread the Christian faith to the masses in the modern world, embrace this message of self sacrifice. All too often it's prosperity gospel, or the angry denunciation of sinners, or a holier-than-thou testimony which claims anyone who disagrees will go to hell. I say this as someone who wasn't raised religious but was exposed to the 'zeitgeist' of Christianity.
Of course, upon encountering the real servants of God, I realized their teachings were far removed from what our culture surfaces.
Overall we have to recall the beautiful doctrine of Theosis. That God calls us to become divine ourselves, that we can be better than the poor, foolish, flawed beings we know ourselves to be. He incarnated Himself so that we would know, once and for all, that we are meant for something greater. That our petty flaws and struggles, regardless of how serious they seem to us, mean so little in comparison to the life that waits us in Heaven.
Amen! People in our modern world need leaders to stand up and say they can be something more. That bearing their Cross is noble, that struggling against the daily demands of our life can be salvific.
It's a shame that so few of the modern Christian celebrities, or those who spread the Christian faith to the masses in the modern world, embrace this message of self sacrifice. All too often it's prosperity gospel, or the angry denunciation of sinners, or a holier-than-thou testimony which claims anyone who disagrees will go to hell. I say this as someone who wasn't raised religious but was exposed to the 'zeitgeist' of Christianity.
Of course, upon encountering the real servants of God, I realized their teachings were far removed from what our culture surfaces.
Overall we have to recall the beautiful doctrine of Theosis. That God calls us to become divine ourselves, that we can be better than the poor, foolish, flawed beings we know ourselves to be. He incarnated Himself so that we would know, once and for all, that we are meant for something greater. That our petty flaws and struggles, regardless of how serious they seem to us, mean so little in comparison to the life that waits us in Heaven.