Human beings are like fading flowers today they are fresh and blooming, tomorrow they wither away. The Bible refers to us as grass. “For, “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, (1 Peter 1:24).
As we navigate the ups and downs in this wretched world, sometimes it becomes necessary to take a new direction. But change is a hard pill to swallow for some of us. So, many of us who are short-sighted and the narrow-minded put up barriers and resist every notion of change.
Then, one day a spiritual awakening happened, and suddenly you morphed into a completely different person. And for the first time you realised that you were wrong all along. It now becomes clear that the path you had chosen leads to a dead-end street.
Still, you have to decide whether to stay stuck in your old ways or reset and embark on a new direction. Thankfully, like apostle Paul, some of us choose to explore a new direction.
Today one of the most famous religious institutions–the Catholic Church, finds itself between a rock and a hard place. The head of the Church wants to take the institution in a new direction, but members of the ruling bodies vehemently oppose. Still yet, this hardened opposition is not base on Biblical principles. If anything, it is base on Church traditions sprinkled with some moral principles.
Therefore, it is not blasphemous to say the Catholic Church got stuck in tradition, in the same way, the Pharisees was when Jesus called them whitewashed sepulchres. For it appears that majority of its members both in the ruling bodies and the pews are more concerned about public opinion than winning souls for the Kingdom of God.
When Jesus was on earth, He ran into similar opposition. Luke 5:30-32 documents one of His encounters with the religious class. The Bible says Levi put on a great feast for Jesus, and there was a great company of tax collectors and sinners among them.”But the scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples, saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?
31 And Jesus answering said unto them, they that are well needed, not a physician; but they that are sick.
32 I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Fellow Christians and non-Christians, John 8: 7 (“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”), is undoubtedly one of the most powerful yet humbling Scripture in the New Testament. Unfortunately, many Christians either do not think the context of the passage apply to them, or they flatly do not understand it.
I have arrived at this harsh conclusion after observing fellow Christians for many years. I have realized that many of us, especially some who preach from the pulpit, are pompous and stuck-up. Like the Scribes and Pharisees mentioned in John 8, we enjoy pointing out the sins of others but we cover up ours. We even look down on the people we labelled as sinners with disdain.
Naturally, one do not expect a follower of Jesus Christ who truly understand Jesus’ mission and what He meant when He said: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32), to exhibit a repulsive attitude toward the people Jesus came to save. Unfortunately, none of us is blameless in this regard.
But if we are going to talk gospel according to Jesus and the disciples, then we must first come down off our high horses and face the harsh reality. The church cannot grow if we continue to pour water into the faces of those who need Jesus in their lives. Many of these people do not know that they need Jesus. Therefore, it is our solemn duty to tell them why they need Him.
As Christians, we must never forget where we were when we found Jesus. Some of us had been in similar situations as the people we now condemn. But just like Paul, we had an awakening and we turned our life around. Notice, Paul never forgot the life he had lived before he met Christ, but he never returned to it. And most noticeable, he was never Stuck-up, pompous, judgmental, or condemning.
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