RELIGIOUS WANDERINGS

I was watching a YouTube piece by Malcolm Smith when I noticed a list to the right of other clips of other speakers.  I began to wander into one and out and then to another and out.

Very interesting.

John MacArthur was bashing Joel Osteen.  No sooner did I leave that video and I went next to a man I don't know with a Baptist church in Ft. Lauderdale.  He was bashing John MacArthur...severely.

Ah, my need to know more about what Jesus taught and thought.

Yes, so many of us believe our ways are so simple that anybody could believe them if they would just study their Bibles.  Yet, a difficulty the religious of us have is that we are so politically biased in many of the doctrines we think we can prove to come from the Word.  All groups possess the same blemish.

It isn't that the Word does not call us to facts and faith.  It is that we are flawed in both our search and development.  And yes, we do discover and mature in Truth.  However, it may be much more gradual about ourselves than one might assume.

The Bible clearly calls us to proper development of faith.  Error was called out.  However, a problem I soon developed in my Christian beginnings was my eyes were soon trained to see the errors of others while blind to my own.  And, does not the Bible also address that?

An angst arises from within for the community of unbelievers is thriving in lostness with hopes someone will throw them a lifeline.  We could do it.  But the religious world--me being a part of it--has gazed at our belly buttons so much so long that our neighbors walk about in a fog.

Recall Jesus speaking of making some twice the sons of hell as before?  Are church recruits in danger of finding Jesus to learn poor faith-system habits to the extent we do more harm as believers? 

Church.  It is the body of Christ.  It is neither God's Legal Court nor Business School.  It is, rather, a band of former rejects ourselves who turn on a dime to see that the lonely and the abused and the neglected discover the love of God....found within us; very average human beings who now try to shine via the Spirit of Christ. 

Religious wanderings are keeping a segment of society distracted, prideful, and dumb.  When our devotion is to work our religious orders with attentive defense while neglecting any who need moments of tender compassion, we have missed His calling...and begun to follow a self-made one.