God hurts

After being out of town for the weekend I returned to some saddening news. On the front page of Saturday's Visalia Times Delta newspaper was a story about a church in town who was going through a split. After reading the article I realized that the church was actually in my neighborhood. Before I knew it, I found myself in my car, driving out to the split church. I am not sure what caused me to take this little trip because I am not sure what I was expecting to see but a church building standing there as it had always been. As I slowly drove by the church grounds I half expected to see an actual split down the middle of the church building, dividing the two sides physically, or maybe I was expecting to see tears flowing down the side of the church building for all the sadness and anger that must have preceeded the actual split. Either way, I became captivated by the story and had to see for myself what kind of damage had been done at ground zero, and how bad the fallout had been after the bomb had been dropped. I didn't find any feuding families, or lines drawn with duct tape, or even so much as one person sheding a tear over the apparent divorce of a family of God. I drove home somewhat disappointed that I had not seen to my satisfaction what I had gone out to see...some form of sadness, anger, or anguish as the result of the split (nevermind the fact that I was looking for it in the physical characteristics of the building).

I decided that what I was looking for was not that odd, because certainly all those emotions had been expressed by the people involved, right? Well, maybe not. When I look around at the world today I find that family divorce is so common that no one even bats an eye at it. No longer is it news to anyone, and certainly no one is going to shed a tear when both sides are fighting to get ownership over everything that was once held as common. I would hold that the only reason that the newspaper found it a story good enough to print on the front page is that they wanted to show to the world that even the good Christian church has deemed it okay and sometimes necessary to go through a family divorce. We have fallen to the standards of the world, and God's heartburn becomes too much for a roll of Tums to handle. We can't keep turning to God with our intentional sin and say, "just take two Tums and you'll feel better about it in a few hours." We have been called to a higher standard, as evidenced by the life of Christ, and yet the world only sees us as a bunch of hypocrites. Why? "[We] acknowledge He is with [our] lips, and walk out the door and deny Him by [our] lifestyle" (dc Talk). God has never stood for our excuses, and He only gives forgiveness for those who sincerely regret. He is the only one sheding tears these days, and its because we give Him heartburn so bad no antiacid will cure it. The solution? We must be in the world, but not of it.