From One of My Favorite Professors…The Quick Fix Doesn’t Work

Parallel factors are destroying the church in our context. We have pressing
needs and we don’t know how they will be met. Where will I get my significance?
What can I do to make myself feel that I count? Who cares about me and
understands me? Where can I find intimacy? We are a well-fed prison camp. We
have everything we need materially – housing, food, computers, cars,
entertainment, travel – but inside we are isolated and empty.

Worship then becomes the way we try to deal with our emptiness and our
isolation. The point about our worship is to make us feel better; the point
about God is to make us feel good. So we abandon scripture reading, because
that’s boring. We abandon the gospel story, because that happened a long time
ago and doesn’t look very relevant. We can go through a whole worship service
without hearing any reference to the fact that God created the world, delivered
Israel, sent Jesus to live and die for us, and raised him from the dead. The
Israelites forgot the gospel and gave up on God’s written word because they were
so concerned with their personal needs. The same thing has happened to us.

There is a tragic paradox here. We need to be brought outside ourselves by
seeing our lives in the context of a bigger picture, a bigger story – the gospel
story. But we are so overwhelmed by our emptiness, isolation, and insignificance
that we don’t pay attention to the bigger story. All we want to do is think
about ourselves in need, so we turn God into someone whose focus is on meeting
our needs. We make God a quick fix.

But quick fixes don’t work. The only fix that works is the gospel story and the
scriptures where we find that story. But we have given up on these. A New Age
person could visit many of our worship services and find everything we say and
do quite acceptable.

Read the Rest Here.