By Ben Disney
The basic premise of religion – that if you live a good life, things will go well for you – is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet He had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture. Timothy Keller
My goal was to say to the world, “This is not Christianity, this is not Christianity, this is a fraud.” I think the world knows that, but they don’t hear Christians say that. They wouldn’t expect Christians to say that. They think we’re in collusion with each other. If you just put it all together, people in America would think that Christians are people who are in this wacky prosperity. And that’s how they would define us. There’s nothing about the cross of Christ, the resurrection of Christ and the glorious gospel of grace, and there’s nothing about humility and sacrifice and unselfishness.” John MacArthur
Years ago I attended a heavily promoted church growth seminar in Southern California hosted by a famous televangelist. People from all over the country came hoping to discover the secret to building a dynamic, thriving mega church. Hundreds of clergy and church leaders packed the auditorium, hanging on every word, listening to a larger than life prophet of prosperity talking about how to grow a church. After the opening session, the televangelist opened the floor for questions from the audience. One attendee stepped to the microphone and asked, “What’s the single most important thing we can do help our church grow?” The televangelist thought for a moment, smiled, then replied, “Make sure you have enough parking.”
The audience laughed and applauded. To this day I don’t know if he was serious or not. I do know that he was lying to all of us.
What we believe matters. What we refuse to believe also matters. You remember the popular plastic wrist band people wore bearing the letters WWJD? It stood for “What would Jesus do?” Meaning think about what Jesus would have done in your situation and do the same. Being on the other side of it and seeing how some of us have become very good at wrapping our own personal agenda around a banner of self-promotion and self-righteousness, maybe another way of asking the question is this: “What would Jesus not do?”
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