In 2008, I preached my own mother’s funeral. She had struggled with cancer for a couple of years, and then passed her first night in Hospice. I was with her when she died. It was a hard time for all of us. I still miss her dearly. It was an honor for me to be able to speak at her funeral.
My mother struggled a lot with her Christian faith throughout her life. She seemed to vacillate between wanting to believe in God, and then professing agnosticism. There is a lot that could be said, but the details aren’t necessary. I honestly do not know what her eternal destiny was. However, I did not focus on any of that when I preached the sermon. I focused on her strengths as a mother, her creativity, her love for animals, gardening, sowing, and all the other things she found pleasure in, and how she used those to bless others, including myself. I focused on how life is brief and fraught with many unexpected difficulties for all of us, and how there is hope and the promise of eternal life in Jesus Christ, as we are all faced with the enemy of death as a result of the Fall.
I remember several people asking me how I would handle preaching her sermon with the uncertainty of not knowing exactly where she stood with God. To that, I say, I really don’t know exactly where anyone really stands with God, other than myself. I am no one’s judge, and it is not my place to draw those conclusions. I am inside no one’s head and heart, other than my own. That is true for all of us. We draw conclusions in our own minds, based on someone’s words and behavior. Those conclusions may or may not be an adequate representation of where another is in their standing with God. Only God really knows, He is the only one who can know. But, oh how we like to draw conclusions about these things in our own minds! We try to figure it out.
It seems like the world is full of religions organizations and churches that think they have the market on God’s truth. “If you don’t adhere to this doctrine or creed, you are not one of us. We are the true people of God.” I remember when I first started training for the ministry, within my (then) denomination’s study material there was a lot of emphasis on the differences between what is referred to as Wesleyan, and what is referred to as Calvinist theology. The Wesleyans like to point out what the theological errors of the Calvinists are, and vice-versa. The implication seems to be that if you are of the wrong camp, you are a heretic.
There is a lot of debate about how to interpret eschatology (the study of end time events.) We all have our opinions, and we all think we are right. I personally think we all could use a healthy dose of humility and be honest enough to admit that we do not have all the answers, and that we are capable of being wrong. I know I am wrong a lot, but it is not the end of the world. (Eschatological pun intended.) God knows my heart, and when I am wrong, He knows that is not because I am intentionally being deceptive and distorting the truth, I am just stupid! 😊
Since the early days of the church, after Christ’s resurrection, groups have popped up, claiming that they have the new, revealed truth from God, claiming that up until God intervened and showed their leader the truth, the church had been in error. This is how cults are formed. Two modern day examples of this are Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The premise is that, unless you are one of them, you are lost. Whenever you hear people talking like that, run for the hills! Does it seem logical to conclude that up until some 1800 odd years after Christ’s resurrection the entire population of those who call themselves Christians were lost and in error until God showed up and opened the understanding of Joseph Smith or Charles Taze Russell? I don’t think so.
Sadly, it is not just cults that think this way, some churches and denominations tend to think this way as well. One thing I ran into as a young Christian was other well-intentioned brothers and sisters in Christ that were of the opinion that unless you spoke in tongues, that you were not really filled with the Holy Spirit. You could reflect the glory of Christ in all your conduct, but you better babble, or you were a phony!
The truth is that the real, true church of Jesus Christ is invisible. Not invisible in the sense that you cannot see them or know them, but invisible in the sense that it is not one specifically organized group of people. The true church of Jesus Christ is all over the world, made up of people from all nationalities, races, socio-economic, political (and whatever other classification you want to stick on people) walks of life. It is a spiritual union, and spirit cannot be seen.
How many times have you heard someone say something like, “Well, if he was REALLY saved, he wouldn’t do that!” or “How can you call yourself a Christian, since you did (fill in the blank)?” They make it sound like their judgements of what another person does, or does not do, it the criteria by which another person’s eternal destiny is determined. People will also say things like this, “Well, I used to go to church, but then the preacher said (or did— again, fill in the blank.) They are all a bunch of hypocrites!”
When you stand before God, after abandoning the truth, He is not going to ask you what somebody else did that you blame for causing you to go astray. He is going to say, “Depart from me, you worker of iniquity. I never knew you.”
Another thing we need to keep in mind is that we never know where another person is, in the process that God is taking them through to come to know Him. It is different with all of us. There is no cookie cutter pattern God uses to stamp us into the image of Christ. A person can be behaving very badly, but it might be because the Holy Spirit is putting them under conviction for their sin. That is what He does, and when you are in that phase, you are miserable.
Another person may exhibit exemplary behavior that has nothing to do with faith in, and a relationship with God. So we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw about people, and the things we say about them, and to them.
Who are the IS’s and the ISN’T’S? Well, I’ll let you know when I get to the other side. In the meantime, I have decided I am not qualified to make those assessments, and it requires too much of my energy.
Danny's Stump 