Last Sunday, our Senior Pastor, Greg Worley preached a provoking message about a subject that God has been dealing with my heart and mind about for some time. It was amazing to me to see how that God, through His Spirit, will often have the same concerns shared in leadership’s hearts, as to what their aim and focus needs to be for His beloved people. The subject matter of the sermon and my thoughts of late specifically deal with the practice of trying to reconcile world views, systems of thinking, and conventional wisdom with scriptural truth.
There has always existed a stark dichotomy between the way the world thinks and the truth of scripture. In short, there is no way to reconcile the two or combine them into a hybrid gospel or truth.
It doesn’t matter how much the world, or worldly-minded so-called Christians want to inflate the scriptures by trying to create hyperbole, allegory, metaphor, or even introduce quasi-scientific thinking (such as injecting evolution into creation stories of Genesis) in the end it will never join together. The world view of the inspired writers of the bible is understood to be one that believed and was grounded in the reality of the supernatural and the consistent understanding and demonstration of the power of God and the supernatural realm here on Earth.
It is the departure from thinking and understanding, along with the institutionalization of Christianity, through western culture, philosophy, and world views that have, over generations, minimized the supernatural nature of Christianity itself. Those things we don’t understand, or do not see, we conveniently stuff away into small theological boxes while at the same time not realizing in doing so, we turn the whole existence of Christianity into a giant Jenga game. In fact, the wisdom of the scriptures teaches in the first chapter of James that not being resolute in our belief of the scriptures in their infallibility and the God of the scriptures creates an unstable ground for Christians to stand on.
To paraphrase the first chapter of James verse eight, a double minded person or a person who shifts from believing one thing to another concerning the biblical truth of God, is unstable in all their ways.
Yet, here we are in modern Christianity seeing the Church conflicted within its universal body over issues that the Word of God has settled from generations, but because of fear or a desire to be accepted or pleasing to the world, it has opened doors to question established truths of the Word of God and even scriptural doctrines. I believe that James writes about this very thing in chapter two when he makes the analogy of a faithful wife and an unfaithful wife. In a marriage, the commitment must be absolute for there to be perfect monogamy. When we accept other sources as wisdom and truth but those sources violate the Word of God, we are opening ourselves up spiritually and taking in information intimately into our hearts and minds that can lead to a perverted belief system and perverted truth.
James 4:3-5
Amplified Bible, Classic Edition