It’s Time To Re-Think What We Re-Thought
Have you noticed that among some circles re-evaluation seems to be the rage of the hour. It’s contagion has spread under many hapless oneness church thresholds and started a plague of worldliness and ungodliness like no other generation.
Deep in the nature of every human being is the tendency to redefine the principles and policies of their lives. Seems we have an especially powerful tendency to rethink our position about something that we want to do or like to do. The world is constantly doing this, redefining what is right, what is wrong, who is good, who is bad. One need look no further than the huge gains made by the homosexual community in having their “alternative lifestyle” accepted and even condoned — and witness all the new bleeding hearts among the ‘enlightened’ that join the throng of deception—deceiving and being deceived..
It is not just the world that plays this redefining game however. Many a church has been doing this though typically at a slower pace – but as each generation builds on the right and the wrong decisions of their forefathers, what was considered abnormal can become, over time, normal and what was once considered normal can become abnormal.
I Corinthians 4:8-21 is nothing less than a full-scale attack on the slide of the Corinthian church toward normalizing worldliness. Worldliness is defined as the acceptance of the world’s value system, the way the world thinks and the way it acts. Paul has called attention to the fact that the believers in Corinth were acting like “mere men.” And they were fine with it but Paul was not, and he really spells it out clearly.
The Syncretic Church: syncretism is “the attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices, especially in philosophy or religion.”
The Corinthians had focused on the physical, the temporal, and found their satisfaction in carnal wisdom and perhaps the riches of this world much like the church described in Revelation 3:17.
Paul uses ripping sarcasm to describe their pathway — he tells them they successfully, (or so they thought) reconciled the Christian life with the world so much that they were completely accepted in a world that should have despised them.
Syncretism means that the pure gospel is polluted and weakened until it is robbed of its power, and that’s why when Paul came, he would look for the power of those who were leading the church into this kind of weakened state. We live in a world that seeks conformity to values dictated by the majority.
I think its time to not so much RE-EVALUATE the message as it is time to RE-ELEVATE the One God, Jesus Name, holiness message!
— jlg —