Are Message Believers Christians?
Question: Are message believers Christians?
Answer: Some are, some aren't. You can tell which ones are Christians by one characteristic (see answer below)
What defines a Christian?
How do you tell if someone is a Christian? According to Jesus, there is a simple test:
- “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”[1]
- “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back."[2]
But many Christians have veered from Jesus' command to love and become more focused on a set of beliefs, more concerned about themselves and their standing with God than about other people.
This temple model has been prevalent throughout Christian history, he noted. Stanley, who hopes to get the Church back to what Jesus called it to be through his new series, quickly went through a millennium of Christian history to show how Jesus and His command to love became lost amid creeds, politics and gatekeeping.
Religion, he said, is powerful and can be dangerous. It is evidenced from the time of Constantine the Great — who elevated Christianity, empowered a few men with the Scriptures and exiled those who went against their laws — to the hundreds of Protestant denominations today that each interpret the Bible differently.
"And the tragedy of all this … [is that] love lost," Stanley told his congregation.
While Jesus started a new movement where "love would replace law keeping," Stanley explained, Christians have largely reverted back to the ways of the Old Testament, blending the old "temple model" with Jesus' teachings.
The "temple model," as defined by Stanley, "grants extraordinary power to sacred men in sacred places who determine the meaning of sacred texts."
During the reign of Constantine in the 4th century, Christianity went from being a persecuted minority to an empowered majority. The problem, however, was that "Christianity became inseparable from the Roman Empire, the pastor noted.
"Church leaders created their own version of temple model with a little bit of Christianity sprinkled in," Stanley said. "Now there would be new sacred places, there would be a whole new group of sacred people that began to intentionally collect all the Christian texts, bind them together, chain them to the altar, and now they would determine what was taught what wasn't taught and how the text would be interpreted."
Sacred men, such as the pope, priests and archbishops, became the gatekeepers of heaven and hell through withholding communion or baptism and with the threat of excommunication.
When there was division over the nature of the Son of God (Arian controversy), Constantine put out an edict to have all of Arius' works destroyed and to execute those who possessed them.
"Suddenly, believing the wrong thing was a crime," Stanley said. "Suddenly in Christianity, what you believed trumped how you behaved."
"Christianity almost immediately became creedal," he added, noting the creation of the Nicene Creed, among many other creeds already in existence.
"There is no mention of love (in the creeds). In fact, there's no mention of behavior at all. You can subscribe to that creed and basically do anything you wanted. And there was a reason the creeds were that way. It's because the creeds were generally signed off on by the emperor and the emperors had bad behaviors. So the church leaders who were being funded by the emperors had to be very careful what they put into the Christian creeds.
Stanley moved on to the 16th Century Protestant Reformation where Martin Luther wanted to reform the Church. During this time, the Scriptures became available to everyone as the printing press was created. But the Reformation splintered, Stanley noted, and now there are over 1,000 Protestant denominations because of different interpretations of the Bible.
"Now you had more sacred places with sacred men with sacred texts telling everyone else how to live their lives and specifically what would grant them entrance to heaven," the Georgia pastor said. "And Protestants have been beating people over the head with the Bible ever since."
In all of this, Stanley imagines Jesus and the Apostle Paul looking down from heaven and asking, "How did this happen?" and saying, "We couldn't have been any clearer."
"I got them all together right at the end and I washed their stinking feet," Stanley imagines Jesus saying. "I told them this is an example, this is what you are to do to one another — as I have loved you, so you must love one another."
"How could the new movement of Jesus with a new command and a new ethic of love that was to serve as the filter for all of their decisions, how could something so pure, so grassroots, so one another oriented become so temple?
"The reason is because there is a little temple model in all of us … What you fear, what you see as sin, what you think God condemns has been taught to you in such a way our consciences have been shaped by it. Consequently, we continue to hold onto things that hold … the Church back."
Stanley believes what fuels temple model thinking is the failure to truly embrace the Gospel. While Christians may believe Jesus Christ died for them, this has to get to their hearts.
"Once you understand that Jesus and His Father are unequivocally for you, that there is no measure, no sin that puts you outside their love, grace has no … limits, that becomes the context … through which we understand the Scriptures," he stressed.
He reminded the congregation about what Jesus said — the entire law hangs on loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.
"Imagine if everyone realizes … God is fine with me," he said. "Now I must figure out how to be fine with other people so they can be fine with my Father in heaven."
So what about message followers
Message believers generally feel more guilty about missing church than about how they treated someone at work. They are more concerned about what God would do to you because of a moral failure than about what they did to the person they wronged.
Footnotes