That, however, is not the way of life you learned when
you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that
is in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former
way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by
its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and
to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness
and holiness. (Ephesians 4:20-24)
Now
I get to give a full-throated version of a rant I started earlier. When the
Ephesian church formed, it didn’t get a constant diet of feel-good sermons. Prior
to their conversion, the Gentile Ephesians would have worshipped Artemis. There
were statues of her everywhere, including city hall. She was a major tourist and
economic attraction. Her temple was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
In addition, there were the other members of the Roman Pantheon, the lareses
(household gods) and Caesar. But over all in Ephesus, there was Artemis, the
goddess of fertility. You can take a guess what life and worship were like in
that city. And that was all they knew.
Paul,
Timothy, and the others who built and led the Ephesian church had to teach them:
about God, Jesus, faith, morality, fellowship, agape, sin, righteousness, and
spiritual warfare. There was no time for the shallow, eyelash-batting sort of
love. Your fellow believers were your lifeline.
I
don’t know whether they would laugh or weep over the shallowness of faith
today. Through history, Christian teaching waxed and waned, of course. The early
McGuffey readers included what we would call theology – in their overview of
the alphabet. I'll repeat another rant - we need to stop thinking the people who came before us were stoooooopid.
Today’s
“one-track” pastors who preach salvation as their one and only message, or who
preach the feel-good gospel every week, or whose idea of teaching is trying to
be “relevant” and popular in a community. Yes, we need love, but we need to
learn what love is and how one does it. Otherwise, we can’t know when we are
doing it.
As the
Church, and as individuals, we are woefully under-educated, and those who
preach feel-good, relevant, pleasant sermons are negligent in their duties. We
need leaders who will teach putting on the new self (in detail), true
righteousness and holiness, and we need to find teachers who will teach those
things either in our communities or in books. It’s their fault if they don’t
teach, it’s ours if we don’t seek to learn.
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