These Are Your Choices

When faced with a reality in which your spirit was created by God and will have to give an account for what you’ve done when your life is over, these are your choices, as it appears to me:

1. Embrace the situation and sincerely do your best to please God, learning as you go.
2. Reject the reality, and live however you want, either:
   1. Forthrightly denouncing the reality in full (as an atheist might),
   2. Being sloppy about some of the details of what God wants, and pretending that sloppiness is OK, or
   3. Deliberately twisting some of the details into something you like better, and pretending you’re devoted to God as you do it. (Think about it: #2 is also an example of this #3.)

Or in other words, you can live your life either:

1. Really listening to God, or
2. Not really listening to God.

Or in other words, still, you can live your life either:

1. Trying to please God, or
2. Trying to please yourself.

And if you’re into the choices I’ve highlighted above in orange, your choices seem to be either:

1. To go it alone, or
2. To enlist the help of any of a great many organizations and opportunists who are ready and willing to help you feel good about doing less than your best to please God.

And if you join an organization, there will be some issues with that they practice and teach. And when these become apparent (assuming they won’t correct themselves), your choices will be either:

1. To stand up for what’s right, or
2. To stay in the organization, either:
   1. Making your own judgment that staying is more important than pleasing God, or
   2. Twisting the matter in your head, and pretending that God thinks it’s more important for you to stay in the organization than to set the matter right.

I had a preacher tell me quite adamantly once that “Being unified (with the church) is more important than being right.”

I had another tell me that if I couldn’t be quiet about the church issues I had been wanting to discuss, I would have to leave the church.

I had another chide me (in a closing prayer) about asking questions that were “merely interesting, and not of core importance”.

I had another chide me (for not belonging to a church) because we all “need accountability”. Ironically, the reason I wouldn’t join his church is that I thought they were not being accountable to God on several points of scripture. It seems he was deeming accountability to church as more important than accountability to the teachings of the scriptures.

If you care about (really) pleasing God, and you belong to a church, it is inescapable that issues will arise in which the church is wrong in belief or practice. And if you are right about the issue, and don’t cower about it, it’s going to put the church in the position of either repenting, or deciding to please itself and to displease God.

There are no other choices.

And this puts you in the position of having to choose which is your master, the church, or God.

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

Jesus. Matthew 6:24. NIV

These are your two choices, according to Jesus:

1. Hate the one and love the other, or
2. Be devoted to the one and despise the other.

And if you don’t like either of these choices, you can pretend that pretending to do both is a viable option. This, of course, will offend God, who will eventually tell you so face-to-face, even though you already knew better, because you’ve read this and many other passages of scripture.

I have certainly seem some churches who trade on the idea that they’re more serious than most about getting things right. But I have not yet found one that isn’t quite a home adopting certain beliefs and practices that seem quite notably inconsistent with the scriptures in various ways. Nor have I seen one that leaves its members free to dissent on those particular points of practice and belief.

In the ones I have seen, the institution sets itself between God and the member, who is supposed to be pleasing God, primarily by being a member, it would seem—for seldom does anything arise that seems to trump the supposed importance of membership. And they’ll find you a Bible verse for that, even if they can’t be troubled to find you a verse for something else.

And you will have to decide—have to choose—whether to believe all this pleases God or not.

As for me, I think it angers him considerable, and that we have more than enough information in the Bible by which to know better. And all this pretending people do is an abuse of the faculty of imagination that God gave us.