What?! #3

Just so you know, this blog post will not make any sense what so ever unless you read it with What?! #2 and #4. Picking back up with 2 Kings 18:1-4, In the latter part of verse 4 it says “for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it.” The problem wasn’t that the snake was no longer useful, the real problem was that the Israelites were no longer focusing on God, they were focusing on the good thing that God had given them. So when else is a good thing no longer a good thing?... When the good thing takes the focus off of the good God who gave the good thing, that’s when it is no longer a good thing. I truly do believe that church on Sunday morning is a good thing, but I do have a problem with the mentality that a Christian can’t grow unless they are involved with a body of believers who meet every Sunday at 11…We’ll make an exception though, we can move it earlier if we need to in order to get out of the service in time to go to a restaurant and have a waitress serve us, the same waitress that we just bad mouthed because she wasn’t at church. Never mind the fact that she has three children, her husband just ran off and left her and isn’t paying child support and she has to work three jobs to pay the bills. If she wants to make it to heaven, then she should be at church on Sunday just like me…Oh, but I would prefer that she die and go to hell as long as I get my meal with a smile….give me a break! Jesus says in Mark 9:42-50 that we should get rid of anything that causes us to sin. I’m just wondering, if you are someone like me who has grown up in church all of your life, do you think that there has ever been a time in your life when you placed more importance on Church on Sunday morning more than on Jesus Himself? If we want to be honest, I believe that all of us who have grown up in church can say yes. With that hard truth in mind, I am currently seeking to teach our core group to understand that a church service should never take the place of Jesus in our list of priorities. That is the simple lesson that I am trying to teach in a very real and practical way. More in the next post.