The Rollling Stones once said:

You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You just might find….
You get what you need!!!!!

That chorus immediately came to my mind when I read this article by Phil Cooke entitled The Prophetic Versus The Practical: What People Want Or What They Need? where the author talks about delivering the hard sermon of the truth against delivering the easy sermon of what I call the ‘positivanity’ and easy-believism.

Cooke’s article makes his points and gets down to the crux of the matter when he asks this question

Are we preaching a message based on the Bible’s intentions or the audience’s aspirations?

The question is valid in the quazi-evangelical world of three point happy-go-lucky sermons, two different services, and one verse of scripture that is mentioned by book, chapter, and verse but never quoted and expounded upon. Valid in the sense of the evangelical church deeming modern church as ‘relevant’, ‘real’ and ‘relational’…..

You look inward and wonder if this is real when measured up to your ‘real world’ when ‘reality’ is defined by the married family with six homeschooled kids living in their Thomas Kinkade blurred world refurbishing their home unused Y2K bomb shelter for the next four years of Obama. You look outward to see that the ‘relevant’ audience is not listening nor are they present on Sunday morning. They are somewhere else. The gym, the bed, home improvement maintenance, the golf course, Wal-Mart, the ‘brunch buffet’…. You look around and wonder where is the ‘relational’ when everyone migrates towards their clique and you are made to feel via body language that you are not welcome ‘yet’ and are viewed as either the ‘covert secret super-spy’, ‘intruder’, ‘plant of the enemy’ or ‘the actual enemy’.

We are all looking for what is real. The problem is that ‘real’ is a hard pill to swallow because ‘real’ is imperfect, messy, disorganized, and blunt. What we call ‘real’ is really full of ‘pre-programmed perfection’. Perfect voices in the choir. Perfect people profiled as church member of the month. Perfect camera angles to show the ‘reality’ on your reality tv show. Perfect answers to our imperfect lives. Perfect looking svelte women. Perfect blonde haired blue eyed Germans people to call ‘leader’.

We have our ‘official Christian worldview’ pre-programmed to perfection to know who to vote for, what brands to buy, and what Internet sites we need to be viewing. We have our ‘official Christian lifestyle’ pre-programmed and all laid out to run on schedule like a precision well-oiled machine with no room for errors, lateness, or deviance. All of this to make it easy to cope with ‘reality’.

All boiled down to pragmatics and practicality while we lack principle and power. And principle and power is what Jesus always manifested.

Power to heal. Principle to permanent change.
Power to change. Principle to permanent healing and forgiveness
Power to love. Principle to reach out.
Power to reach out. Principle to love.

Related Posts

1. The Prophetic Versus The Pathetic
2. Reality Show Spirituality To A Unreal Christian World
3. Esse Quam Videri
4. Church Hopping or Church Searching?
5. Selective “Professional” Christianity To Selective “Relational” Christianity