Galatians 3:1 – You stupid Galatians! I told you exactly how Jesus Christ was nailed to a cross. Has someone now put an evil spell on you? (CEV)
It would appear as though it has been an evil spell indeed! Do we practice a Christianity that is, in fact, concerning Christ? Or is it ourselves with which we are mainly concerned? Are we really expressing the image of Christ? Or have we perverted said image into our own? Do we really experience the divine reality of the Cross of Christ? Or have we torn Him down to hang a sign promoting our human ideology?
It would appear as though the evil spell that has been cast converted Christianity into some dead religion with its leader found dead as well! From a radical, risk taking adventure into a boring, inactive, and complacent avoidance of the unfamiliar. Resurrection can only mean resuscitation in this conversion. Oneness has been changed to sameness; uniqueness has become uniformity; a peculiar people to a picky people; exciting is now simply existing; healthy means normal; reconciled only to be reconditioned. Freedom from slavery to sin is now bondage of another sort!!
The world outside of the four walls (that have, interestingly enough, replaced church) has found us to be ineffective, irrelevant, and irreconcilable. No longer is conversion to churchianity acceptable; conformity to a so-called church culture has corroded. This in no way constitutes a compromise, but a raise of the bar. It is a killing of the status-quo by the killing power of the cross. It is precisely the transformation exhibited by the first three hundred years of people called Christians. It is a lifestyle that is demanded of disciples by a living Savior, rather than a death-style contemplated by a dying breed!!!
- The Pastoral Staff
