Wednesday, April 04, 2007

A letter from a Revolutionary...

Understand...this is not a "real" letter, but the idea of a letter from a Revolutionary, sick and tired of the fake, weak, toothless and ineffective contemporary phariseeical, religiosity, churciosity generation!

Credit to Pastor James Smith of Firefall Church in Houston for passing this around through his distro list...

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Dear Saul,

I am writing this to inform you that I am leaving your church system. I know that a letter is not the best way to do things but I figured that without my informing you, you may not have even realized that I had left.

It is really no surprise that you would not have noticed my being gone- I was not one of those that you seem to prefer for a member; I was no doctor, lawyer or wealthy businessman. I am only a working class believer without huge amounts of money to throw into the offering basket or huge amounts of time to spend frequenting all of your social programs.

Although you may never notice my absence, I wanted to let you know why I am leaving your system because in my heart, I always find myself hoping that somehow you will turn things around.

For continuing to stay in position even when the bleating of the sheep can be heard. (1 Samuel 15: 13-14)

Performing part of what the Lord tells us to do while ignoring the rest of His command is not acceptable, Saul. I guess that you do this in order to please the people who are following you. But the Lord does not care about your good intentions towards the people- He cares about your obedience to Him. Have you forgotten that the word says that if you seek to please men, you can not be a servant of God?

I see you so many times worrying about what the people want to hear. I see you providing every conceivable program and entertainment in order to draw them. But what happened to telling them the whole truth? You can’t exclude the cross from your teachings because the people don’t like to hear it, unless of course you have excluded the cross from your own life. If that is the case, you really have no right to teach it anyway.

The bottom line is that you are not a servant of God so long as you are seeking to please men. And I can not stay involved in a system where those that lead are doing it after their own imagination and not the will of the Lord.

For bringing us into your churches as a novelty, so long as we pleased you. (1 Samuel 16: 17-23)

It took us awhile to figure out that you were doing this to us. We were always so pleased that you had “discovered” us that we just did whatever you wanted us to. We encouraged you, helped you in your ministry and defended you against every foe that we saw.

What we didn’t know is that you viewed us as a novelty that could be thrown away when we stopped being so shiny. Being rejected is not a good feeling for anyone and especially not for people like us. We put our whole heart into trying to help you, Saul. And we never purposefully did anything that we thought would hurt you. It seems that so long as we found favor in your sight, we were allowed to stand just behind you. But any time that your favor ceased- we were sent back to Jesse’s house.

We always found ourselves believing that there was something wrong with us personally when you had no more use for us. We would cry out to God to show us where we were so wrong that we should be rejected. The answer that we finally got from our Lord shocked us, Saul- He said that you were not Him.

For creating an effeminate army and then allowing the world to march out and mock it every day while you do nothing. (1 Samuel 17: 1-11)

Nothing that has been done sickens me quite as much as this one. When I came into the church, I didn’t do so from some squeaky-clean background. I came up on the rough side of the mountain, so to speak. To be honest, when I came into the church I didn’t really know what a real Christian man even looked like. I had been brainwashed by your generation into believing that my parents couldn’t be trusted and that the “old folks” had been way too rigid and their way of thinking should be done away with.

I came in looking for an answer and for role models to pattern myself after but what I found shocked me. I found the “warriors” who were sent to stand against the enemy too afraid to even go to the battle. I found that all of these “men” who had become the products of teachings on “Bridal Intimacy”, too soft to fight. They were so tough behind the closed doors of the church- tearing down make-believe strongholds and “prophesying” to the territorial spirits. But when the real enemy reared his head, the men were more likely to huddle than melee. Men like this are the obvious child of the hippy Jesus of the 60’s who is more a love bead sporting Gandhi than the biblical Christ. The disease of the 60’s had come home to roost in the church.

I am not of your generation and I hold no soft spot for your social commentary. When you talk of revolution, you mean love-ins and protests. When I talk of it, I don’t mean token gestures but kicking the enemy full in the face and rooting all of his garbage out of the church. I will defend the innocent, preserve liberty and hold the line at the cost of my own body if necessary. I will defend those who need it from the tyranny of evil men and I will do so with the Lord as my front guard and rear guard. Blessed be the Lord who teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.

It is a new day and I look far in the past, before you came around, to find my role models. I look to the heroes of WWII, who did not shirk at the possibility of death in order to stop the pain of the innocent. Who prayed for and supported their president. Who did their duty and never thought of burning a draft card or running away. These men are who I look to- men who could be Christians and find the heart of the Lord that dwells somewhere between pacifism and outright Jihad.

I do not look to your generation and your liberal, cowardly, psychobabble-spouting excuse for men.

Duck and cover, Saul.

For trying to force us to wear your armor when we are going to war to clean up your mess. (1 Samuel 17: 32-39)

If we were to have listened to you, Saul, we would not have even gone up to the battle. You were doing nothing, of course, but you said that we should not go because we were only youths. But when we came to this camp of the Lord, we did so with some past experience under our belt. We came after having survived the war zone of L.A. in the 80’s or the Ghettos of Chicago in the 90’s. We came from the Nazi Skinheads and Goths, the Gang Bangers and Punks. We came to you full of the understanding that God had saved us from the lion and the bear and any uncircumcised Philistine that stood against God would end up just like these had.

You told us that if we had to go to war, we had to go just like you did. But your armor doesn’t fit us and it never will. You don’t understand why we have tattoos or why we practice MMA for fellowship. You don’t know why we look up to people like Matt Hughes or Rich Franklin. You say that we can’t even be a Christian if we have plugs in our ears or if we don’t sound like you when we preach.

But we beg to differ, Saul.

You have failed to reach our generation with your Gospel. They are dying by the multiplied millions while you pose and parade and practice the fine art of political correctness.

We reject your legalism that has no comprehension that holiness is not about getting better- it’s about getting deader. That true holiness has nothing to do with the marks on our skin but it is about the nail marks on our hearts.

And we will wait for your approval no longer to do battle. If all that will stand up to the Goliaths of our day is we few, tattooed and pierced, socially questionable radicals than so be it. We will do so with 5 smooth stones and the battle song of the Lord on our lips. We will not look to you when we decide how a church should be run. We will not look to you when we evangelize our generation.

We will look to the Lord and to the battles that he has already brought us through.

All of this being said really just boils down to this:

Goodbye Saul, we have a battle to run to.

See you anon,

The Lazarus Generation.

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