CHRISTIANITY IS NOT ABOUT FEELING COMFORTABLE

 

by Bill Muehlenberg

PostedJun 11, 20How many times have you met professing believers who tell you they are “comfortable” – or “not comfortable” – with something related to scriptural truth or biblical morality? They seem to have decided that truth and error, right and wrong, are to be decided solely on the basis of how they feel – if they are “comfortable” about it or not.This is what passes for Christianity today in far too much of the West. The Christian life is now all about feelings – about emoting. If something does not pass your emote-o-meter, you reject it. And if it passes, you embrace it. This is the tragedy of contemporary Christianity.How many times have you met professing believers who tell you they are “comfortable” – or “not comfortable” – with something related to scriptural truth or biblical morality? They seem to have decided that truth and error, right and wrong, are to be decided solely on the basis of how they feel – if they are “comfortable” about it or not.

How many times have you met professing believers who tell you they are “comfortable” – or “not comfortable” – with something related to scriptural truth or biblical morality? They seem to have decided that truth and error, right and wrong, are to be decided solely on the basis of how they feel – if they are “comfortable” about it or not.

This is what passes for Christianity today in far too much of the West. The Christian life is now all about feelings – about emoting. If something does not pass your emote-o-meter, you reject it. And if it passes, you embrace it. This is the tragedy of contemporary Christianity.

I encounter this all the time, and it grieves me greatly. Imagine how much more it grieves Almighty God. He designed us to walk in truth, to believe truth, to celebrate truth, to align ourselves with truth, and to speak truth. Yet most of us couldn’t give a rip about truth, and only worry about if we are “comfortable” with something.

Never mind the words of John when he said, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 John 1:4). If John were alive today he would have to write, “I have no greater grief than to hear that my children are walking in their emotions.”

Since when are we to base our lives as believers on how we feel about something? Since when is something to be accepted or rejected based on how “comfortable” we are about it? This has absolutely nothing to do with biblical Christianity. It is always better to be hurt with the truth than to be comforted with a lie.

Yet so many Christians today do not operate this way. They are running on an emotional autopilot. Whatever gives them happy feelings they run with, and whatever gives them icky feelings they eschew. No wonder the church is in such a mess today.

And we find examples of this all around us. For example, on many occasions Christians have spoken with me about the biblical doctrine of hell. They ask me what my feelings are about it. I first remind them that my feelings have absolutely nothing to do with the matter.

What does matter is what God has spoken about this issue. And given that he has spoken much about this throughout the Bible, we all better stand up and take notice. And even more importantly, given that Jesus spoke more about the realities and terrors of hell than anyone else in the entire Bible, then we really better take heed to this.

Here we have all these Christians who claim to be followers of Christ, yet on one of the themes he spoke about the most often, these Christians have decided that they will not agree with Jesus, simply because they are not comfortable with the teaching.

Their emote-o-meter is running off the charts, and therefore they have effectively decided to put their own feelings ahead of the clear teachings of Jesus. They sin doubly here: they trust in their own fallible feelings instead of the infallible Word of God, and they shake their fists at Jesus Christ, the one they claim to be a disciple of.

Yet they still somehow think they are great Christians! Go figure. I guess they are “comfortable” with that. It gives them a warm, spongy feeling inside, so it must be right. How can their feelings lead them astray? How can their emotions ever be wrong?

And it is not just clearly defined doctrinal issues they assess with their mere feelings. Matters of biblical morality are also decided in this fashion. What is right and wrong is determined entirely by how they feel about things at a given moment. The homosexual issue is a clear case in point.

Forget all the explicit teachings in Scripture about human sexuality in general, and the sin of homosexuality in particular. They have decided – based only on how they feel about all this – that sodomy is peachy, gender is fluid, marriage and family can be anything you want, and sexual sin really does not exist.

All that based simply on one’s emotions. I have chatted with so many of these people. They are “comfortable” with homosexuals and homosexuality. They have no problem with these things because of their lousy emote-o-meter. Instead of testing everything by the inerrant Word of God, they simply feel their way through life.

And these same folks have told me how “comfortable” they feel about having moved on from the faith of their fathers. They actually celebrate the fact that they no longer believe what their Christian parents believed. They have moved on. They are “progressive”. They are going with the times. In other words, they are running on emotions.

It is always easier to run with your deceptive and fleeting feelings than with the unchanging, solid rock of the Bible. These Christians have simply forgotten about – or more likely, completely ignored – warnings such as found in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”

The deceitful and misleading emotions have now become the defining means by which most believers today live their lives and establish their convictions. Truth means nothing to them, but feelings everything. They are so far bound by their fleshly emotions that they in fact end up suppressing the truth in unrighteousness as Paul warns about in Romans 1.

They become excellent evangelists – for secular humanism. Thus they have become enemies of the gospel. Instead of helping people and aiding them to be set free by the truth, they keep people imprisoned in their sin. But hey, at least they are “comfortable” with all that!

By running with emotions, they have rejected the living God as revealed in Scripture, and invented a god in their own likeness. This is a god who accepts everyone, loves everything, hates nothing, and is stirred by nothing. This is the polar opposite of the God we read about everywhere in Scripture. As I just read the other day in Psalm 5:4-6:

For you are not a God who is pleased with wickedness;
with you, evil people are not welcome.
The arrogant cannot stand
in your presence.
You hate all who do wrong;
you destroy those who tell lies.
The bloodthirsty and deceitful
you, Lord, detest.

This God – the one true God – would not make these progressive Christians feel very “comfortable”. Indeed, such a description of God would trouble them greatly. Their emote-o-meter would crash and burn over such truths. They would reject such a God immediately because he does not line up with their worldly feelings.

So truth is spat upon. This means that the God of truth is spat upon as well. Emotions trump everything. ‘Sorry God, but you need to get with the times. Don’t you know that God is only about love? A love that accepts everything and everyone and never is disturbed about anything?’

That of course is not real love. Nor is it real Christianity. One’s comfort levels have nothing to do with real Christianity. As Doug Groothuis once said: “Since the truth may not be what we would prefer. It is revealing that so many people today express approval by saying, ‘I’m comfortable with that,’ and disapproval by saying, ‘I’m not comfortable with that.’ Comfort is important when it comes to furniture and headphones, but it is irrelevant when it comes to truth.”

Quite so. Or as Adrian Rogers put it: “It is better to be divided by Truth, than to be united in error. It is better to speak the Truth that hurts and then heals, than to speak a lie that will comfort and then kill. It is better to be hated for telling the Truth, than to be loved for telling a lie. It is better to stand alone with the Truth, than to be wrong with a multitude. Better to ultimately die with the Truth, than to live with a lie.”

Comfortable Christianity is really a contradiction in terms. There is nothing comfortable about carrying your cross, denying yourself, crucifying the flesh, and running against the ways of the world. The truth of the gospel is always uncomfortable. The sooner we learn that lesson, the better.

As C.S. Lewis rightly said: “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

Or as he said elsewhere: “I haven’t always been a Christian. I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”

As Russia Invades Ukraine, Pastors Stay to Serve, Pray … and Resist

JAYSON CASPER|FEBRUARY 24, 2022 

“In our churches—whether it is Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, or Evangelical churches—there are more new people. Not only on Sundays or Saturdays, but also during the week,” he told the Australian Bible Society news service. “On evenings when we have a Bible study, new people are coming. They want to pray, to hear something that brings hope or comfort.”

Rick Perhai, director of advanced degrees at KTS, said the international church he pastors in Kyiv has several leaders recommending the congregation continue its worship this coming Sunday. Some of their expat members have fled; others want to stay and join the fight.

He laments that the enemy is seeking to destroy Ukraine as its Christians grow more and more poised to carry the gospel to surrounding nations. Nonetheless, he is praying for the Russians, asking for God to grant them repentance.

But his petition is also imprecatory.

“Pray that the nation of Russia would tire of their tyrant’s rantings at home and abroad,” Perhai said, “and that they would remove him.”

Dyatlik also requested prayer for “the truth,” citing all the “perspectives” in the media.

“We did not invite the war. The Kremlin and Vladimir Putin brought it to Ukraine. … There is moral evaluation of the acts of aggression like this,” wrote the theological educator. “These acts have biblical definition and biblical evaluation. Please pray for the spiritual discernment about these things.”

Dyatlik closed his prayer letter with requests for believers on both sides of the conflict:

Please pray about Russian Christians that they would raise their prayers and voice toward Russian government to stop the aggression; [that they] would not keep silent; please pray for the Western governments, of the US and European Union.

Finally, please pray about Ukrainian Christians, that we will serve and live as the community of hope in a full sense of this term; that during these terrible times we would invite more and more people to the relationships with God and His children, to the relationships of love, hope, encouragement, support; that our minds and characters would continue to transform into the character of Jesus Christ.

Western nations have roundly condemned Putin, and readied sanctions. Reports circulated of Russians lining up at ATMs to withdraw their cash, fearful the nation would be cut off from the international banking system.

Meanwhile in Donetsk, where 25 missionary teams have been working to establish churches, gas lines require a wait of hours for a rationed supply of five gallons. Grocery stories suffer empty shelves, as Ukrainians stock up on emergency food and water.

Bandura conveys his supervisor’s two main prayer requests.

“First, to stop the aggressor,” he said. “But then for peace of mind, to respond with Christian character and not from human hate.”

Questions about Abortion and Life

by Damon Parker

To say that talking about abortion is like opening a can of worms may be the greatest understatement of all time. There is so much emotion and ideology attached that once the word abortion is uttered the lines of defense are instantly drawn, the trenches dug, and everyone settles in for war. To try to ask people to see things from other points of view, or even acknowledge the other side may have a decent point or two, is to stand in no-man’s land with machine gun fire coming from both sides.

Yet, that is what I want to do.

Now, I definitely have a stance. I have really strong beliefs. But I do try to see and hear others.

So what I pose here are just some thoughts and questions. I am not pretending that some of them aren’t slanted. They are. I am not saying that I have all the answers. I don’t. But I wish that instead of blindly defending what we think, we would at least allow a question or two to seep in.

Please use this to simply think. If reading one of these questions or thoughts makes you want to instantly stop reading, or convinces you that I am in some other camp that you want no part with then slow down. Think. Why did that push your buttons? Too often we claim to be willing to listen, to be open-minded, to legitimately look at things from other perspectives, but when push comes to shove we quickly dismiss even a thought-provoking question if it differs with our own views. Just take it in. Think.

And please don’t assume that you know my answer to all of these questions. Some of them I don’t even know what my answer is.

If the reason for allowing abortion is that “it is a woman’s body, and she has the right to do with it as she wills”, then shouldn’t prostitution be legal? What about me selling my kidney to someone who needs a transplant?

We have a huge movement in our country to do things naturally. Eat organic, be at one with nature. Yet, many women who wouldn’t dare darken the doors of McDonald’s take birth control pills that dramatically alter what their body naturally does. Why is one okay but the other is not? And then how “natural” is abortion?

Can we please find better language for all this stuff? I read a blog post (written by a woman) that I felt was pretty even-handed in its approach to the Planned Parenthood videos. Yet, the comments were brutal, mean, and one even claimed that the writer was part of a war on women. Seriously? Just because someone is pro-baby doesn’t make them anti-woman does it? Do we have to paint each other into a corner because we are afraid if we actually listened to one another we might learn something or maybe even have to change? If all you can do is chant for your side (whichever that is), and paint the other side as evil, then maybe that is a huge part of the problem?

Let me ask a question to those who are pro-life: What are you doing besides voting and complaining to be a part of the life-giving solution? Are you adopting kids? Fighting for justice? Seeking ways to help the poor and suffering? Trying to stop wars and violence?

Let me ask a question to those who are pro-choice: If someone truly believes that a murder is being committed, what do you expect them to do? I mean, if I knew that someone was going to murder your mother, wouldn’t you want me to do everything in my power and then some to stop it? If someone believes abortion is murder, would you think much of them if they just did nothing?

I hear some people make the point that if the “conservative ” camp cares so much about life, then why aren’t they doing more to stop wars, domestic violence, the death penalty, etc…? You know what; I think that is a pretty good point.

I hear some people make the point that if the “liberal” camp cares so much about stopping something like the death penalty, why don’t they care more about abortion since for every 1 person executed in the United States there are around 25,000 abortions? You know what; I think that is a pretty good point.

I am pro-life. Let me explain. I am for senseless killing to stop, whether it is done with a gun, a grenade, an electric chair, or a scalpel. There is far too much people killing people in this world.

I am pro-choice. Let me explain. I believe that one of the first things God gives people is freedom. They get to choose to even do stupid stuff. We can choose to do things that hurt us or our relationships, or we can choose to do things that bring joy and peace. But we all have the right to choose. However, my personal belief is that rather than defining abortion as the moment of choice, it would be more honest to look at all the choices we make that lead up to that moment.

Finally let me say, I follow Jesus. He is the Lord of Life. Therefore, I stand for life and dignity anywhere I can. But that does not mean that I hate or disparage someone who has an abortion. No, I treat them with love and dignity as well. I just hope that we can all move beyond the idea that we have to hate the other side, as well as come to a place where someone can think what we are doing is completely wrong, but we don’t interpret that as hate. It is the only way this discussion can ever move forward.

Spirit vs. Flesh

Two natures beat within my breast,

The one is foul; the one is blest.

The one I love; the one I hate,

The one I feed will dominate.

unknown author