There are two things that jumped out to me from the reading today. First, is the idea that demons do not revel themselves to people in “Britain” and I would add “America”. They do attempt to keep their presence in certain parts of the world “unknown”. Just this past Sunday we talked about this a little bit in the sermon “The Playbook part 1”.
Ah… now you see the connection.
You can listen to that message here
To believe in demons would be strong argument that God exists and that there are two sides to a cosmic battle (thank you Carman). The hope for the forces of darkness is that they can sneak in as something else that doesn’t shed light on the existence of God. They just haven’t figured out exactly how to revel themselves without reveling God as well.
Second, Screwtape says that the church can often be a tool “they” can use.
(Scary)
Yes, it is heavily guarded but some of them have been successfully infiltrated “to exploit extremism.” If “they” can get a group of people to focus on meetings, policies, movements, causes and crusades they will spend more time focused on those items and accomplishing those goals than they will in praying, learning the Bible, and reaching people for Jesus. – This one of “their” strategies and they are good at it.
If C.S.Lewis was writing in our day, he would see the social agenda as a distraction from the church’s mission. The church’s message often becomes the latest political crisis, a position on the latest cultural movement, or at least in 2020 the “theology” of the “mask” and “safety”. Some times relevance becomes the distraction. We become so focused on being relevant we miss Jesus. When relevance is more important than people we have become irrelevant and have missed the boat. All distractions (even ones not listed here) take us off the path we should be on and the path we should be on is a path where its “end” is faith and the world is its “means”. (We could of course put Jesus in place of world there).
We do not need another document that says ” all people are important” or that “we are sorry” for what happened to a particular group in the past. We need to take the time we have waisted on those endeavors and come up with some new ways to reach people then put those plans in motion. We need to focus on making churches healthy and epicenters of the message of the Gospel and fight against our message being anything else. If we as believers have gotten too “busy” or have hopped on the train of the latest cultural trend and ideology know this, we have been masterfully distracted from our true mission and we must get back to that mission and leave the distractions behind.
So I leave you with these questions…
Are you being distracted?
Are their movements in your life, causes in your life that you are focused on more than Christ? Do you pray as much as you think about those causes? Do you read your Bible more than you read about those movements? Do you share the gospel more than you share information about the latest news worthy moment?
Based on how you answered the questions above – Are you distracted?
Are you distracted?
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