[JJ]

Originally Posted by aron

There's a hymn that says, "The Bride eyes not her garments/but her dear Bridegroom's face." Church leaders unfortunately specialize in eyeing our garments, and comparing them to those of everyone else. Unbalanced subjectivity, myopathy, bias (self-selection), judgmentalism, and self-justification then become the garments with which we drape ourselves.

I don't know how many times I heard young females blurt out emotionally in meeting that we should "love the church". Christ loved the church; so should we, right? Wrong. Christ loved the church and the church should love Christ.

Instead the church gets seduced, and distracted: instead of loving Christ, the church loves the church and it all goes south in a hurry. The Bridegroom is left waiting at the altar, and the church is hurried off by an interloper, waving a fun-house mirror before her, telling her to eye herself and her garments. "How beautiful you are, my queen!" (See e.g. Rev 18:7's "I sit a queen!")

And what is the Christ that comes out of this? A Christ that doesn't care about one's neighbor, or the poor, or the sick or weak or imprisoned, but wants to scour universities for "good building material". A Christ who is selective with scripture; it's no longer "every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God" but only those words which prop up a hermeneutic or teaching. A Christ that elevates fallen men. A Christ that judges everyone else as deficient. A Christ that doesn't care about "right and wrong", i.e. righteousness. I could go on, obviously.

The Christ that is the "centrality and universality" of this church-fixated world is not the Jesus of Nazareth of Whom Moses and the prophets wrote, and to Whom Peter and Paul and James and John were discipled. It's not the Christ Whom the Father sent, but rather the Christ whom the self-obsessed church manufactures to justify herself.

Well said, Aron. Lord Jesus, you are all and in all! Help us to keep our eyes on you, and point others to you.