Week of Chaos -makes me think

Another week of chaos has just flown by, a week that leaves us reeling from the thoughts of natural disasters and manmade horror. A tornado in Oklahoma and a gruesome murder in Woolwich. Some of the other things that took place in the news leave me gasping at how to express my thoughts. 

The man-made things I guess bother me more and more as we lose the moorings of a ‘once Christian culture’ and religion becomes the way of thinking for those that have such. I keep coming back to Biblical verses Religious as terms and I see religion letting us down left, right and centre. I have a fair bit more reading to do before I speak my heart and understanding but for now will re-emphasise that I believe the Bible is the revelation from God. Sadly there are those that deny such while in just the breath before claim that they uphold a similar view of scripture to mine. 

But then you have a man in Woolwich, where more and more a lone wolf idea is being shoved aside as more and more arrests are made, that used religion as a reason to murder a man in broad daylight on a busy street. It is garbage like this that remind me that religion is not the answer to our problems in life. Whilst the proclamation is a religion of peace there is no peace.

The bizarre part is that in Christianity we are faced with dilemmas of conscience that can leave us struggling to define what it means to ‘live soberly, righteously and godly in this present age’ (Titus 2:12) while scripture is clear. My take is that biblical living should change our lives, we truly should live lives of peace and love, while at the same time saying sin is sin. Yet always mindful of the thought that while we are no longer to participate in the behaviour that is wrong, we are to be a redeemed people that don’t forget what we are redeemed from. Pauls says it this way: ‘and such were some of you.’

So this dilemma of how to respond to things like the killing of Lee Rigby strikes deep into my Texas heart as my reaction is one that screams out for vengeance and revenge on his behalf. Yet my Christian side reminds me that I am to act in love and kindness toward those that are in need of something more than religion. My humanity at times like this make me want to lash out and my Christian side then says ‘no, speak of the love of Christ’. Sadly it would take way more space than this forum provides to sort this out, but at least you get the gist of my dilemma and I suspect many of yours as well.

So I shall leave us with James (2:25+27) definition of true religion: ‘But whoever looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed... Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world. ‘ The actions of too many religious people doesn't match that by a long shot.

Growing in Grace,

Rev. Jon Bergen