It used to be that you could watch a documentary and know it was on the nail, it was factual, it said something and you learnt something. Over the years this has changed, we now have documentary makers who stretch the truth for ratings and i think it's a shame. Over the last month the Discovery channel has been taken to task over some of its promotion of documentaries which when shown bore little resemblance to the actual adverts or promotion of them, causing problems overall.
It's getting that way with Christianity, people are stretching the truths to meet their own aims, to support their own views with little or no looking at history. Many Christians in a desire to appeal to all people love the loveliness in Jesus words, but don't want to deal with the hard parts of Jesus words, and we can't have one without the other. We have a propensity now to concentrate on love, to major on the nice but ignore or deride the hard parts, mainly because they are unpopular. Now love is important, it's the most important thing Jesus spoke of, but we also need to deal with those things Jesus said which are unpopular but they are there for people to read and see. You see once we concentrate on one aspect of Jesus and ignore the other parts we get a skewed picture of who Jesus was and what he taught. Obviously its nice to concentrate on the easy parts, to concentrate on love, but we do need to look at the whole and not just those parts which fit our ideas and ethos.
This is getting more to the fore now and we have people jumping onto the latest bandwagon of acceptance, what ever the latest buzz idea is many people will jump onto it. Depending on your viewpoint and it is open to debate, most people go back to the traditions of our faith, they stick to the doctrines and theology which has by and large shaped Christianity over the years and this is no bad thing in truth. There is no problem with new ideas but we need to weigh them against the Bible, tradition and what we know of God. You see as much as its an inconvenient truth people are sinners and they do need to be saved from that separation from God, how you define that is up to you. But occasionally we may actually have to pull someone up about something which is wrong and causes destruction. If we let someone carry on in sin and ignorance are we acting in love by not saying to them " hey stop it" sometimes we have to call people sinners, its what we are in our unregenerative state, its what we are outside of Christ.
Yes we need to show love, we can show it in all manner of ways, what we can't to is nothing, what we can't do is sit by and let it carry on unchallenged. We need a balance in our lives generally and we need that same balance with God, all one side does not help, all the other side is as equally foolhardy. Just like the discovery channel we need to stop promoting a fallacy for the sake of figures and revenue, and actually say "hey here it is, we have the answer" sometimes it's going to be hard, sometimes we will get hurt, that is an unfortunate side effect of life, sometimes you will get upset, people will disagree with you. None of us get a free ride, none of us are immune, the Discovery channel upset me with one of their promotions for a documentary but i still watch the discovery channel, sometimes i don't get what i want from God and i get upset, but i still follow and listen to him.
Pax peeps
Andy
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