The way I see it,
He came to start a fire
In people’s hearts—
Even though he knew
That that sort of thing
Would only ever really
Interest a few.
But as irony would have it,
It turns out that among the rest—
Among the fire-rejecting hordes—
There would spring up quite an interest
In establishing great institutions
That would give lip service to the fire
While working to see that it never
Gets fanned into flame—
Where it might get out of hand
And turn their religion into
Something greater than themselves.
And to this day,
One finds many brands
Of this watered-down fire.
To be clear, the problem I’m pointing out here is not that the churches “aren’t doing it right”, as many regularly complain about them. Rather, it is that they don’t want the true fire of God. They don’t want to be wholly righteous and just and pure and loving and humble and surrendered. Their stock in trade is a watered-down version of that—one that leaves them an “out” from complete devotion—one that excuses them from having to learn the mind of Christ and his Way—one in which they can pretend that lip service is the primary service that Jesus expects, or that their modest attempts at living in the Way of Christ are truly the result of loving him with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength, as he commanded in both the Old and the New Covenant.
What kind of person would even want to live in a watered-down fire?
Jesus wouldn’t!
His “new wine” burst their “old wineskins”. His “patch of new cloth” tore their “old garments”. His zeal overturned their tables. His chiding embarrassed their corrupt leaders. And I’m pretty sure that someone like Jesus would create quite a state of emergency if he were to join any of today’s churches, because he would raise the barre considerably from the accepted norms of devotion and service to God. And something would have to give; either the church would repent, or the Jesus-like person would have to go.
You can generally tell between a person who gets his ideas from church and one who gets them from the scriptures. The latter lives to please God, no matter what the church does, and the former lives to please the church, no matter what God does. Drive the God-driven man out of the church and you still have a God-driven man. But drive a church-driven man out and you’ve wrecked his very religion.
