American Christianity seems to have taken a turn for the worst. More and more, people are watching preachers on television instead of taking part in a church community, they take hold of messages that emphasize how to have “Your Best Life Now” through the accumulation of wealth and power. Pastors such as Rod Parsley, Joel Olsteen, and Benny Hinn appeal to our ingrained sense of realizing the so called “American Dream”. However, through these messages disguised as “hope” and “encouragement” many have traded their souls both literally and symbolically. No longer is holiness seen as living apart from the world yet in the world, but rather a means to bring heaven on earth, wealth, power, and glory unto ourselves, temporal things that will eventually become meaningless as we stand before the eternal God. These messages deny the very fact that all that is earthly has an end to it. Jesus said that both heaven and earth shall pass away, but yet we ignore this fact as irrelevant because we are “in the here and now”. Although there is absolutely nothing wrong with seizing the day, there is everything wrong with taking that day’s focus on God and placing it on ourselves as a sense of self entitlement all the while telling ourselves that we deserve it.
This teaching is so easy to adopt into our daily lives because we are no longer called to suffer as Christ had suffered. We claim that we want to be like Christ, yet we only focus on the final product, His glory in heaven. We do not want to hear any more about suffering as we throw up our hands and exclaim, “We have had too much of that in our own lives already…why not focus on the positive?” However, if we do not gaze into the horrors that this world gives birth to every second of everyday, if we simply ignore the injustice and stop crying out to God for salvation and justice, then we have become numb. Christianity is nothing more than Prozac for the soul; it doesn’t heal, it simply dulls the pain of our existence. I know people out there will question this and make comments about how negative this is, how we need to focus on the hope that we have in Christ be happy. I am here to say that there will be times in life where we will be happy, but until we actually have joy in our lives, happiness in only a bottomless pit.
Joy is what keeps us moving through the rough road of life. Joy is what allows us to have compassion and love when we are in great want of it ourselves. God never promised us our “Best Life Now”, but has said throughout the Scriptures that there will be troubles and sorrows when we follow Him. When we forget this principle, thats when we should have cause to fear, and if at that point we do not feel that somehow we have lost connection with God because we are focused on our own self esteem, then we are almost beyond all hope of redemption. Where is the salvation from the numbness?
Observations