We were recently travelling in northern Michigan when I spotted a bumper sticker on an old pickup truck that said, "God, save me from your followers." I couldn’t help but chuckle when I saw it, even though it really isn’t that funny. Upon further reflection I was struck by how profound a prayer this really is. The Lord has been ministering to me on this very subject for several months and this bumper sticker synthesized what He has been revealing.

Nearly every day I deal with people who have been chewed up and spit out by churched people. If I didn’t see God working in and through it, I would most likely completely reject the church and might even consider rejecting Christianity. You may not totally agree me, but if you saw what I see and heard what I hear, you would understand the depth of what I am saying. We do not realize how absurd our actions and judgments appear to those outside the church. Unfortunately many Christians would take that as a complement for holding to "sound doctrine" and would dismiss those comments, believing the world does not understand where Christians are coming from. However, the world does know love when it sees it. Unfortunately most of the time it doesn’t see it in the church. As St. Augustine so aptly stated, "The church is a whore, but she is my mother." The Church is the bride of Christ and no matter how she has sold herself for things other than Christ, He will claim her as His own and purify her for Himself. She is God’s chosen vessel to express Himself, and I LOVE her.

There are many people who have seemingly rejected God and want nothing to do with Christianity or church. I am finding that most of the time it isn’t God who is rejected, but what man has done with the things of God that the world finds so repulsive. I understand that having come through a similar path on my own faith journey. Jesus Himself experienced His greatest rejection as from God’s own people, while those of the world loved him and sought Him out. Has anything changed? Yes, we have the form of Godliness, but do we have the substance? Is our passionate love for each other a result of the love that we have for God, or an attempt to make us feel better about ourselves? Is our love for God a result of experiencing His passionate love for us, or an attempt to make Him love us more?

I believe both churched and unchurched people feel they must have a certain level of morality and be "good" enough to fit into the church. We don’t feel loved; we feel measured. Others have experienced our attempts to evangelize them when it was obvious that we were more interested in changing them than in getting to know them or loving them. We are often more concerned about proclaiming concepts and looking for conversions for our own benefit than we are about caring for and sharing with others. I have found people of the world have tremendous insight and perspective on Christianity. They easily see the hypocrisy in our lives and how our actions do not match what we proclaim to believe. People have hearts which yearn for God, but feel they need to be saved from God’s followers who want to force their own "righteous looking" but self-centered agendas on others. A friend of mine once asked a drunken pagan if he would like to become a Christian. The fellow’s response was "No, thanks. I have enough problems already."

I know I sound like I am against the church. That is not my heart. But I hope we can look at what we have become. Once we discover our lack of love, it can be a revelation of our desperate need of God’s love. Only then will we be able to love as He first loved us! He is the only hope we have to heal us from being the church at Ephesus as found in Revelation 2.

Lord, we love you so much but in our zeal FOR you we have often become the very thing we don’t want to be. It is our prayer that we would more fully know and experience Your love for us. That is the only way we will understand the ways in which we do not truly love You or others. Open our eyes Lord, we want to see Jesus. Amen