Why would God allow a law changing the understanding of marriage to go through parliament? As I pondered in prayer, it occurred to me that the Lord is being consistent. How many times I have looked at a situation getting worse and thought, I must do something about that. I put it off only to see it move from an irritation to a major problem in the blink of an eye! I am left kicking myself for my complacency. God gave plenty of opportunity to act, but I was too busy with my agenda to be concerned for what He thought was important. So how has the Church in the UK been complacent? I cannot remember hearing a talk focused on a moral issue in decades! Not even on stealing or lies.
How can we expect God to stop the world changing marriage when we have been unwilling to teach on such issues? What hypocrisy for bringing up the subject now. I include myself here. I have favoured speaking on our relationship with God much more than on how that relationship needs to be worked out in the way we live. When working on the ‘www.beingrecreated.org’ website the pages concerning how we should live were some of the last to be added. It seems that we as Christians are so concerned about being nice, reaching out to our fellow man, and a nice relationship with God that we have forgotten that we walk with a Holy God.
2 thoughts on “Facing reality”
Really good post. As an elected member of the government, a Christian, and very focused on our “real walk” with God, I was drawn into this issue in a big way a few months back. No doubt I put off many in our church when I took that stance that we had abrogated our rights to try and make a stand on this issue. Unfortunately, we as a “church”, by our lack of action, have already approved of homosexuality; we given our rights away, and God has stood back and allowed us to do it. Like so many things, including eternal salvation, it is our choice, and don’t think He won’t let us do it. He has, He did, and it’s done. What we do now to turn it around is up to us…
I think the issue from here is to realise that this is not, as some would label it, the last taboo. We just can’t imagine at this stage what the next one will be. I am sure however that it will be so much worse than the current one that when we look back we will see this issue of marriage as a mere taster. Our cultural values are collapsing so quickly that change in degree is almost bound to be beyond what we could currently imagine. The church needs to make a strategic decision of turning around its attitude towards discipleship. Discipleship is not something that God does with a wave of the Holy Spirit, but is something we have to prayerfully develop in people through study of the Word and living by the Spirit. Only then will we begin to engage with and teach about how we as Christians really live in this world. It is probably too late to engage with the issue of marriage, but if the Church is willing to start speaking out now, it may have some ground to stand on when the next issue comes up.