The issues we have within our church are that we spend too much time thinking about behaviour that will not save us and not enough time thinking about those things that will preserve us.
We spend too much time thinking that life needs to be deserving. We now know that we should fear this Nanny State, for they micro regulate everything, from birth to the time when they will starve us to death or slip a poison into our veins.
Our leaders want to signal their virtue with public displays of righteousness: reaching fever pitch locally, as it election season, and the posters are up, as a toxic bloom, choking the earliest flowers of late winter and early spring. However, we are not preach virtue.
We are to preach Christ.
22Then the apostles and the elders, with the consent of the whole church, decided to choose men from among their members and to send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They sent Judas called Barsabbas, and Silas, leaders among the brothers, 23with the following letter: “The brothers, both the apostles and the elders, to the believers of Gentile origin in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, greetings. 24Since we have heard that certain persons who have gone out from us, though with no instructions from us, have said things to disturb you and have unsettled your minds, 25we have decided unanimously to choose representatives and send them to you, along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, 26who have risked their lives for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ. 27We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. 28For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: 29that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.”
30So they were sent off and went down to Antioch. When they gathered the congregation together, they delivered the letter. 31When its members read it, they rejoiced at the exhortation. 32Judas and Silas, who were themselves prophets, said much to encourage and strengthen the believers. 33After they had been there for some time, they were sent off in peace by the believers to those who had sent them. 35But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, and there, with many others, they taught and proclaimed the word of the Lord.
The law has about 640 commands. The laws of the EU fill a container. We are to love God, and not worship other Gods. We are to be faithful to our vows, and eschew sexual immorality. The apostles did not need to tell the pagans about honour or truth telling: the Platonists taught that.
They looked at the behaviours in their culture that needed to be corrected and repented from.
In ours, it is those things that atomise the family: that encourage corruption, and place people into groups deemed righteous or responsible, as if we cannot attempt to be both.
And we wonder why the Glory of God has disappeared. It is simple: he has left for we have rejected him, and we again consider lifes as something we can manage, and death a duty for those who we deem as not living sufficiently richly. We are again collective fascists. But this will end, for it is a lie.
Let us pray for Charlie Gard and his parents. That God will look on his life with mercy. And that his parents will turn to Christ for comfort. For they have got none from the state.