Matthew 23:4 says of the Pharisees, For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.

The Pharisees are a lot like much of the church today.  Realize I am not here pointing a critical finger at anyone.  I am not lifting up a critical nose at you nor turning a critical shoulder toward you.  I am though looking into the scriptures and saying God is calling for the church to repent.

Today those in the church are more comfortable with those of like-mind, who have been around them and know where they stand and know how to respond.  We really don’t want converts, we want robots.  We tend to want people who look, act, and smell like us and we don’t know how to get along with those that don’t agree with us, have more spirituality oozing out of them though they be of  a different mold, and those who we can’t control.

It takes a lot to pour into someone’s life and make a disciple.  Discipleship is the job of the church but we think it is too hard.  It is carrying the burdens of someone else and pouring yourself out into someone else.  Spiritually, it is equivalent to raising someone from birth as your own.

Instead of pouring ourselves into others, we instead increase our technology and create an assembly line of cookie cutter Christians.  They don’t ask questions, they follow the herd and we are much better at creating a kind of Christian inbreeding inbreed instead of molding converts with our sweat, prayers, and tears.  We like to hide within the church walls and put on programs  that show off our talents.   We instead need to be training the church to be the church.  To go out and minister, not entice others with pomp and fan fare to come to the church.  We fail to train the church to GO and we fail to disciple those we find.

In other words, we seem to do a good job getting visitors and we keep a superficial distance and don’t want to get too friendly, less they take away from our fellowship time or our afternoon sports fest.  We also do a good job raising children in the church from nursery to Seniors ministry that get discipled by osmosis.   The problem with the in-breeding method is you get the genetic mutations that come as a result.  This leaves you often with those who think they are better than others, and look down at everyone else.  They grow up with the truth, but don’t have the tears that make anyone interested in the truth.  So they marry the snotty nosed one they grew up with, and have children of their own, and grow the church from within.  The main problem with that method is there is little love for those without.  And little ability to converse with them.

I also think the church today is character driven, instead of letting people gently led by the shepherd, and we like to take the credit.  We will brag about how so-and-so came to our church and got saved  and is now the Pastor of a church of 7,000.  We don’t brag about the dozens and dozens who got away.  But we are quick to take the credit for the one that stuck.

We can take little credit for character.  It comes most easily from being raised by parents of character and it is a by-product of being immersed in a culture with character appreciated values and perhaps a fear of God.  America is not that way anymore.  The church can produce good character if the parents are on board, but the problem is finding the children with right character that are not jerks in their attitudes.  If you grew up in the jungles of Africa you would naturally act much different than if you grew up in the 1800’s.  You cannot brag about that, but you can praise God if you have the character to praise Him.

These might seem like I’m up on my soap box, and perhaps I am.  I just wanted to address some minor things perhaps.  But yet again, these are some valid reasons the world wants little to do with God.  We might have the truth, but we have to have the truth in love.

We need to work on the LOVE part.  “I’m praying for you, brother” is not enough.  We need to love in word, and in DEED.  That is the Bible.  We say we are bible believing Christians, but that often is in word only.

So we should be surprised that there is little actions to back up our words.