Precept upon precept

I'm sorry I haven't been posting lately. I think my brain went into hibernation. The Canadian winter is not to be under estimated. I hope all is better with your foot. All is not yet well with my flu, which I think is pneumonia but I don't have the time to wait in a doctor's office to be told to drink plenty of fluids and get rest, so I've just skipped the middle part - that of seeing a doctor to begin with.

I don't think that all Christians mature at the same pace or even in the same way. Everyone has different strengths and our weaknesses are as important as our strengths. Jesus said, "My strength is made perfect in weakness."

I think when we as Christians are full of ourselves and confident of our own righteousness, that is when we become vulnerable to the evil one. We trust in ourselves and not in God. People often wonder why bad things happen to good people. If only good things happened, we would believe that the good things God gives us are due to ourselves. We then start to believe that we are the head and not the tail, the master and not the servant. I think this is a very serious issue for Christians and forms the theological basis for certain gospels like that of the prosperity gospel. IE, that our own works save us, not only in the world to come but in this world.

There is a place for different levels of Christianity - we all start off as children in our faith. We should only not remain children in our faith. But that is the starting point for every one. People shouldn't expect too much from new Christians and put too much pressure on them in certain matters, because they will grow in their understanding. Which is why I regard the prosperity gospel as blasphemy.

We had dinner company last week and one of the subjects that came up was how funny it is the way some people you knew when you were young have changed. The couple who were over for dinner mentioned someone they knew growing up who is now a fervent prosperity gospel Christian. The wife thought she had turned out that way because she felt shame over having been pregnant before she married and out of guilt this woman had become a religious flake.

I didn't see the connection. I think that shame can make people turn wholeheartedly to religion, wanting to redeem whatever they feel they did wrong in the past. That's why I don't scoff at jailhouse confessions of Christianity. I see no reason why those confessions of faith can't be the most sincere ones of all: consider the example of the thief on the cross. When you have run yourself into a corner, like an alcoholic hitting rock bottom, you have no pride left and then many people do turn to God.

But I don't see how shame or a sense of guilt and how far from perfect one has been will turn someone to a gospel that preaches prosperity in this world. The draw of the prosperity gospel, if a person really believes that they will get rich in a material sense because they are Christians, and all they have to do is name-it-and-claim it, has to be greed since material and not spiritual wealth is the entire premise of a prosperity gospel. And that is contrary to everything Jesus and the disciples taught about love of money being the root of all evil. You cannot serve God and the mammon.

I don't think that this prosperity gospel is simply immature Christians. I think that this is blasphemy and no more Christianity than those who would call themselves Christians and deny the resurrection.

Layla