Teach the Truth

          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.