Well, I've got to get back to casting stumbling blocks before my neighbors and driving people out of churches. It's hard work, but somebody's got to do it!
Perhaps the sequencing and logic of the exchanges got lost to you, somehow.
Understandable.
My message wasn't meant to be that comfortable anyway.
Has long seemed like God has been quite intent that I comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable as part of my destiny.
BTW, I doubt my wording accused you particularly personally. I accuse the mentalities described and a vast host of churches.
Certainly it APPEARS to me and sounds like many on this thread would be in the ranks of such churches.
However, I don't know
A) whether they'd be complicit in such behaviors or not
or
B) how much they'd have doctrinal, emotional, psychological, relational etc. sympathies with such mentalities while somehow managing to behave more Christ-like.
But the warning is still a worthy one. The mentalities expressed and a vast number of the churches demonstrating such mentalities and standard stances and practices are a hideous charade of Christianity. And they doom countless SEEKERS and lifelong Christians to hell weekly.
It's absolutely mind boggling to me that anyone would imagine to defend such a aberation of Christianity. To do so as though and insisting that the charade is THE MORE LOFTY, MORE RIGHTEOUS form of Christianity is beyond off the wall, to me.
Leaves me thinking that
A) all the references Christ made in the Gospels to the religious rulers of His dusty pathed days have been
'REDACTED' from their Bibles
or
B) there's some kind of mysterious brain fade going on where people read the words and they can't imagine the least bit of an application to them and their church/RELIGIOUS contexts.
Sad. Enormously sad.
THANKFULLY, Brother Warren is doing something active and constructive about such a sorry expression of church-based Christianity.