"Sure to Bring Joy and Comfort to All Who Wear It"
The above title is a quote in the ad for this cross necklace. Wow. The other day I received a mass mailing letting me know I could receive a free blessed prayer cross from some scam organization down in the south. The first is a legal business, the second is an illegal trap, but I don't see much difference. Why is the church so susceptible to this kind of slick marketing and trickery? Is there something within the Church that opens it's members to thinking along these lines?
HT:Tim Challies
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Christian Subculture
2 comments:
It's interesting, isn't it? We take comfort in the physical, because we struggle to rest in the spiritual.
Take for instance a drawing my husband and i have: it's an artist's rendering of Jesus laughing. Obviously, no one knows what he looked like exactly, but we like it - it reminds us that the suffering Christ was also human and, chances are good, had some good laughs with the disciples. We had thought to hang it in our living room here in Chile, but the Spirit of God warned me about it after a visit to an old acquaintance. We had gone to visit after not seeing her in almost 2 years. Much to our dismay, her one poster of the Virgin Mary had become a shrine in her living room with statues behind glass and other idolatrous worship pieces.
It struck me - will people think i worship this picture of Jesus? Will people think i pray to this drawing? When people enter our home, will this just be another shrine to a religious icon?
We worship a living God, who while humanly on this earth said "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." And that is us. We don't have the privilege of walking next to Jesus like the apostles did while he taught and shared meals and touched people, and so we try to have some physical connection to our Savior to sustain us when we spiritually can't sense his presence next to us. So, we take comfort in symbols and crosses and nice (if idealized) drawings. Is it right? Is it wrong?
I think the problem is that we haven't learned well yet how to draw strength from the Invisible God.
You ask "Is there something within the Church that opens its members to thinking along these lines?" I don't think so. But i do think maybe within the Church we can remind one another more the blessings of trusting in Jesus until that day we see what we have believed in.
That's just my idea.
"I think the problem is that we haven't learned well yet how to draw strength from the Invisible God."
I think you're exactly right, Bekii. Now do you think there is something in the way the church operates, i.e. a deficiency within the church, that is causing it not to equip the people of God to draw on this strength? It may be different in Chile than it is here in the States, but it seems to me that the prevelance of icons and spiritual trinkets would indicate a possible weakness within the Church. Perhaps we are simply not teaching spiritual discilpines with the care that we should and then holding our people accountable for spiritual growth. I want to tell the purchaser of the blessed prayer cross that he doesn't need a trinket, he needs to actually build his prayer life.
What do you think?
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