Dr. Ron Sumners
April 19, 2009
There is a tale told of a missionary who was working with a native tribe in the interior of Africa. He was hard at work trying to convert the native chief. The chief was an old man. The Missionary’s version of Christianity leaned heavily on the thou-shalt-nots. The chief listened patiently.
“I do not understand,” he said at last. “You tell me that I must not take my neighbor’s wife.”
“That’s right,” said the Missionary.
“Or his ivory, or his oxen.”
“That is right!”
“And I must not dance the war dance and then ambush him on the trail and kill him”.
Absolutely right!”
“But I cannot do any of these things. I am too old,” said the chief. “To be old and to be a Christian must be the same thing.”
How many people today picture Christianity as something old, sapless, joyless and casting sour looks at enjoyment? How many think of religion as the enemy of life and all the pleasures of life? John Lennon did. John Lennon was the founder of the BEATLES, the most popular music group of all time. After the Beatles split up John recorded a song entitled, IMAGINE. In the song he envisions a perfect world where there would be love and peace. This world would include “nothing to live or die for and no religion too”. How many people in the world see the church as the enemy of peace and love? How many see Christianity as the foe of love and delight? How many conceive of God as like the sour old lady who said, “find out what the baby is doing and make him stop!?” How many of us, both inside and outside the church, have reduced the Good News to a list of thou-shalt-nots?
Many are seeking peace of mind, peace of soul and peace of heart. They are drowning in a sea of confusion and conflict. God, for them, is a life preserver flung to a drowning man. And He is, if you happen to be drowning. But you aren’t drowning all the time. Sooner or later you have to start merely living again. What do you do then? Throw away the life preserver? If your interest in God is based on fear rather than love, very likely. You may be willing to pay any price for the life preserver when you are sinking; you will offer your worldly treasures, your lusts and greed and vanities and hates. But once safely on shore you may be tempted to throw it away and snatch back your treasures.
We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort in trial but joy at all times. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and enjoyment and laughter and we are meant to enjoy Him. Otherwise, our Christianity is not better than the native chief’s. We will try to be negatively good, and make a virtue out of misery and measure spiritual maturity by the numbers of pleasures we prohibit.
This is not the Good News, but rather, a way of despair and defeat, at best a way of escape. This is not the law of Moses but a meaningless law of fear. “Thou shalt not enjoy life”, was never a Christian teaching. It is we who have brought our fear and weakness into religion, and then accused religion of bringing it to us. We live in an age of fear, and we have infected our faith with our paralysis, as certain previous ages infected it with their cruelty. No wonder the Ten Commandments make us uncomfortable. We have turned it from thrilling affirmation of life into a dull denial of life!
The law given to Moses raised the Hebrew Children from a band of wanderers guided and ruled by their own passions. Their life was given a shape and a purpose and a plan! All of civilization was built on those stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.
The sins of the Children of Israel later took a different course. Their sins became bitterness, pride and a desperate attempt to play God. In short, the sin of fear. And that sin is still with us today.
Fear is so much our disease that we have forgotten that it is a disease; we take it for granted as the normal basis of all human actions. Our former Ambassador to the United Nations said that fear is the root of all American Foreign policy.
Our leading advertising agencies base a great deal of their art of money making upon fear. Our psychiatrists have founded a whole theory of misbehavior on it, telling us that the hold-up killer shoots, not out of a desire for money, but out of fear of the slum. They tell us that the wayward girl picks up men, not out of sexual desire or for money, but because she is afraid of her father; that the spoiled child throws tantrums, not because he cannot have his way, but because he is terrified that his mother does not love him. All of these theories may or may not be true but they reveal the mental state of the age that accepts them.
We live in a day when men are frightened, and how do frightened men deal with life?
They run away from it. Many flee openly, rushing from woman to woman or man to man, from drink to drink, from one empty amusement to another. They wonder why they get so little enjoyment from life-in-the-fast-lane. Some of us are prouder; we conceal our fear under hate. We look down on those who are different or nag our spouse or children.
How do we overcome this sin of fear? How do we escape negative Christianity? We find it in the words of Jesus, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow.” A way of saying it that helps us to overcome fear is: “Don’t worry about the future.”
The words of Jesus are timeless. What has worked for other frightened men will work for us. But our society refuses to listen; our whole economic system, our civilization, our American way, is built on worrying about the future!
Even in the church, we worry about problems we cannot understand or master, and we waste our time and substance on things that have no real significance. Some preachers, with the best of intentions, keep announcing plans for bringing Jesus, “up to date”.
We cannot afford to adapt the ideals of our time to the church. Those ideals are killing us spiritually! When your child swallows poison, you don’t sit around thinking up ways to get his system to adapt to the poison; you search for an antidote or an emetic. Instead of the church conforming to the ideals of the world, we must purge ourselves from them.
The answer is still the old answer; “Perfect love casteth out fear”. We do not need a world in which there is nothing to be afraid of, for no matter how pleasant and safe we may make this journey through life it will end in death for all of us. And we do need to remember that we have been redeemed from death and the fear of death. We have been redeemed from fear itself.
“Thou shalt not” is the beginning of wisdom. But the end of wisdom is “Thou shalt”. The end of fear is affirming all the “Thou shalts” that Christ has given to us.
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