Good Friday Christianity vs. A Christianity that Condemns
For this year's Good Friday Service I preached on Colossians 2:13-15:
13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14 having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
That written code that is mentioned is probably something like a record of debts, or IOU's, it's the things that condemn us, the things that God could hold against us. All of that has been taken away. As I thought about this passage I thought about the words of a young man named Robert who, at the Letters from Leavers site, said that he couldn't take the condemnation of Christianity anymore:
That's what Christianity does, makes you hate yourself. To be a Christian, one must believe that their self, their essential self is bad. Christianity takes away the natural exuberance from life. That's what happened to me as a child, and I spent the next 20 years trying to make peace with the angry sky-god I was told about as a young child. Finally something in me snapped, and I said "ENOUGH!". The last 10 years have been a search for self and truth. I will not go back to the mental slavery and self-hate that has so colored my life.
I am now trying to get back what was stolen from me years ago.
Robert seems to have experienced a church that didn't believe the message of Colossians 2:13-15, that the cross removes condemnation. I can relate - while I have found wonderful evidences of grace in the church I have also found hideous examples of condemnation. Often I have witnessed, been subjected to and have been an agent of condemnation. And, even in a situation like I am in now, where I do not face barrages of condemnation, it is very easy to condemn myself.
It seems that, if we take Colossians 2:13-15 as a unit then the armaments of the powers and authorities, which Jesus destroyed, would be the accusations on the list, the written code mentioned in v. 14. This ties in with Satan's nature as accuser. His greatest weapon against us is accusation/condemnation. And all too often, as Robert says, the church is his ally. Rather than applying grace to sinners, we apply further condemnation. Rather than focusing on what it means to be made in the image of God, we exclusively focus on people's depravity and sin. I know that we live in a time when people don't take sin seriously enough, but if we can't speak of sin without speaking even more of grace and forgiveness and acceptance, I don't know how we can avoid situations like Robert mentions.
If the cross canceled the written code, the debts, the IOU's then we ought to do the same in our speech with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Related Tags: Religion, Theology, Christian, Christianity, Church, Easter, Good Friday
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