Have you found yourself doing it lately? Especially in the past ten years or so? When people start vilifying the Bible with accusations about irrelevance, hate-mongering, misogyny, and homophobia, have you tried to make excuses for God? Especially when it comes from people who claim to believe that Bible but come right out and say it's wrong, do you feel the need to apologize for God?
I think I may have done that. I think I may have said things that sounded like I was embarrassed by what I believed. Finally, it hit me like a brick. If someone were embarrassed to admit they knew me, I would just leave. Wouldn't you? So how do you suppose our Father feels?
Just what are we claiming to be, people? Disciples of Christ or not? Servants of God or not?
If you love me, you will keep my commandments, Jesus said in John 14:15. Well, do you love him?
By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. (1John 5:2) The world will try to tell you just the opposite—that keeping God's commands means you do not love people. Who do you believe?
For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. (1John 5:3) Or do you disagree with John? Are God's commands too embarrassing to profess, too difficult in our culture's anti-morality, and too polarizing for our own comfortable lifestyles?
Until someone else comes along who will empty himself of Deity to become a man, suffer through the undignified life of humanity and die an ignominious death for me, who am I to say I don't agree with God's morality, with commands that affect what I can and cannot do in service to him, and how much I must put up with in other people? I will do as I am told because no one else loved me that much and no one else created me; no one else has the power to blink us all out of existence with a thought. Just what in the world are you thinking when you go around apologizing for God and his Word as if it were something embarrassing we have to put up with? If you hate having to live by God's rules, you may as well quit pretending.
This is what God told Jeremiah when he faced a group of arrogant, hard-headed, disobedient, unfaithful people, people who would ridicule and persecute him, and it would serve us well to remember it as we face that same group several thousand years later:
Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the LORD.” (Jer 1:6-8)
Dene Ward
I think I may have done that. I think I may have said things that sounded like I was embarrassed by what I believed. Finally, it hit me like a brick. If someone were embarrassed to admit they knew me, I would just leave. Wouldn't you? So how do you suppose our Father feels?
Just what are we claiming to be, people? Disciples of Christ or not? Servants of God or not?
If you love me, you will keep my commandments, Jesus said in John 14:15. Well, do you love him?
By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. (1John 5:2) The world will try to tell you just the opposite—that keeping God's commands means you do not love people. Who do you believe?
For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous. (1John 5:3) Or do you disagree with John? Are God's commands too embarrassing to profess, too difficult in our culture's anti-morality, and too polarizing for our own comfortable lifestyles?
Until someone else comes along who will empty himself of Deity to become a man, suffer through the undignified life of humanity and die an ignominious death for me, who am I to say I don't agree with God's morality, with commands that affect what I can and cannot do in service to him, and how much I must put up with in other people? I will do as I am told because no one else loved me that much and no one else created me; no one else has the power to blink us all out of existence with a thought. Just what in the world are you thinking when you go around apologizing for God and his Word as if it were something embarrassing we have to put up with? If you hate having to live by God's rules, you may as well quit pretending.
This is what God told Jeremiah when he faced a group of arrogant, hard-headed, disobedient, unfaithful people, people who would ridicule and persecute him, and it would serve us well to remember it as we face that same group several thousand years later:
Then I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth.” But the LORD said to me, “Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’; for to all to whom I send you, you shall go, and whatever I command you, you shall speak. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, declares the LORD.” (Jer 1:6-8)
Dene Ward
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