“In my opinion, if you hate somebody because they are different from you, you’d best get on your knees and repent until you can say you love them, until you have gotten your soul right with Christ.
“I can’t say this clearly enough: If we are preaching a morality without Christ, and using a war rhetoric to communicate a battle mentality, we are fighting on Satan’s side. The battle we are in is against the principalities of darkness, not against people who are different from us. In war you shoot the enemy, no the hostage.
“. . . It is obvious in reading scripture that what you and I commonly think of as morality is thin in definition. Some Christians, when considering immorality in culture, consider two issues: abortion and gay marriage.
“. . . I realize there are people reading this who will automatically dismiss me as a theological liberal, but I do not believe a person can take two issues from Scripture, those being abortion and gay marriage, and adhere to them as sins, then neglect much of the rest and call himself a fundamentalist or even a conservative. The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by definition, a theological liberal, because he takes what he wants from Scripture and ignores the rest.
“. . . I suspect any lack of love or feelings of anger we have toward the culture around us are not feelings that come from God, but rather our souls arising again to cast rocks at women caught in adultery. We should not expect Christ to respond any differently to us than He did to the moralists of His day:
“They dropped their stones and walked away, feeling ashamed that each of them had been proved a sinner too. And Jesus went over to comfort the woman, telling her, ‘Go and sin no more.’ (See John 8)”
Searching for God Knows what by Donald Miller (Excerpts from pages 190 - 195)
American evangelical Christians have hijacked our faith. While I believe that any kind of killing is wrong and that Scripture seems to be clear that homosexuality is wrong as well, I am stumped about why Christians seem to focus on these issues over others that Jesus seems to spend a lot more time discussing. For example: Divorce. Could Scripture be any clearer that divorce is just not at all what God has in mind for us? Yet Christians in this country have, by and large, accepted divorce as part of life and that God will forgive them if they leave their wives or husbands and become involved with someone else. But two people of the same sex who are committed to each other for their entire lives are going to burn in the depths of hell.
It’s just nuts. Jesus grieves just as much for the person who is divorced as the person who is involved with a person of the same sex. He is just as outraged by capital punishment as he is with abortion. And he’s really frustrated that we spend a heckuva lot more time focusing on how we can make more money while most of the world is focused on where their next meal might come from.
Lord, help me to see where my sense of morality is screwed up. Help me to see things through your eyes. Help me to focus on the kinds of things that you really want me to be doing – not on whatever cultural agenda happens to be fashionable right now. Help me to know what Jesus would do – beyond just wearing a What Would Jesus Do bracelet.
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