Is Anyone Listening?

I have been wrestling with a very serious problem of how to address faith for a lot of years.

See, in the time I have been a Christian, there has been a very interesting dynamic. Yes, I will at times say or do things I regret in relation to other people, We all do from time to time.

But what I don't understand is that if I truly drop the ball, I feel an overwhelming, overpowering sense of conviction; a need to make it right.

Problem one in what I am seeing around me is that I don't see that in my fellow Christians. And it's reached the point where I have to ask, have they become that calloused, or were they really Christians in the first place?

Many will argue that they have been persecuted. And certainly I wouldn't call academia or the public square particularly welcoming places for Christians, but we're far from any level of genuine persecution. Instead, we (collectively, this is something I try not to be) have been the persecutors. We have attacked the LGBT community, for instance, with hatred and anger that does not resemble anything Christ admonished us to do. It is certainly not the love manifested in I Cor. 13, or in the Fruit of the Spirit outlined in Galatians. And the battle we're trying to wage over the definition of marriage is a hypocritical one; we're not asking for God to bless our marriages; we're asking for state protection of our marriages, and then demanding the state deny that protection to those who don't think as we do.

There is no war on traditional marriage. Nobody from the state is going to throw you in jail because of your heterosexual relationship. Nobody is going to remove you from the room of your dying spouse and deny you the final minutes. Nobody will take your kids away from you and deem you unfit because you married someone of the opposite gender.

All of those things have happened to LGBT families. And to say that is action born out of love is to show a complete misunderstanding of what love is.

Meanwhile, while we've focused on the lifestyles of others, we've ignored the fact that workers' wages are continually falling, that more and more families are finding it impossible to get ahead, while at the same time business owners are making record profits and dodging taxes.

Read James 5:1-6 and tell me there is not an obligation to pay a fair wage.

We allow the racist culture within our society to slander immigrant children looking for an opportunity, while we worry about who is or isn't allowing prayer in school. We turn a blind eye to an epidemic of police brutality that strongly (although not exclusively) targets minorities, and when they dare march for justice, we quickly grasp at any straw to claim that individual deserved it. The ghost of Jim Crow is living larger than ever.

We have a RESPONSIBILITY to be SALT AND LIGHT, yet we're too wrapped upn in the Kardashians or the "Real Housewives of (insert favorite rich parasite city here)" to pay attention to the very real, very pressing problems our Savior charged us with. We watch a kid from Africa with a distended belly cry, we write a check to the organization on the screen, and we walk away, believing we've done our part.

A real Christianity, a Christianity of ACTION, has been traded for a Christianity of Duck Dynasty memorabilia and  movies based on urban legends and feelgood Christianity. Meanwhile, we're ignoring real, genuine, life or death matters.

The church desperately needs a revival. That should be self evident to anyone within the church. The problem is, many within the church do not WANT a revival.

And if any of us who claim to be part of the body of Christ do not want a revival, we know what that means. And it is NOT a good thing.