The Edge

…because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.
(2 Peter 2:2 – ESV)

Too often Christianity or Christian principles are “sold” as the key to getting ahead in life. It is taught that following God’s plan for your life is the way to get the edge you need to be successful. We tell unbelievers that they need to add God to their lives in order to truly shine. We sell weak or make-believe believers the idea that they need to do this or that “scripturally based” plan for prosperity in order to get on with their faith walk.

Of course it is given a Christian veneer such as “being successful will help you to be a better witness” or “better able to help others”. Friends, you cannot baptize self-indulgence into sanctity by starting off a sentence or book with “it is not about you”. It may appease you conscience to think that you want to be successful so that you can glorify God, but in that case your conscience is seared, not cleared. You cannot want improvement for yourself first so that you can then serve God “better”; that is just covering up your own desire for comfort. It isn’t wrong to want comfort and relief, but you are called firstly to serve God no matter what, thanking Him for any and every opportunity you get, despite hardship.

What matters is the quality of service not the quantity, and the amount of money or time or success you have into it all isn’t the quality, it is the quantity. Your degree of surrendered heart is the quality, and if you think more success, wealth, influence, etc. is going to make you a better servant, then your heart is not even close to being half surrendered. Mark my words: if you think that garnering recognition or being noteworthy means you are more useful to God, then you are seriously deceived and spiritually immature, at best, if you are even regenerate at all.

If you receive blessing in the form of worldly success, notoriety, comfort, money or things like that, praise His name. But would you praise His name the same if you didn’t? I think not, at least for those who buy into the modern pseudo Christian paradigm of the prosperity preachers.

Notice this about them; it is always about you, becoming a better you will make you better for God, they say in so many words. If you are not as successful in terms of money and worldly influence as you could be, you either lack faith, or you aren’t as glorifying to God as you should be. It gives God more glory for you to be the head and not the tail, they say. They repeat blessing verses as mantra, saying, “God has plans to prosper you, to give you a hope and a future”. Oh yes, the bible says things like that, but not in the same way that they sell it to you, they take the scripture out of context. Applying this to everyone in every situation, they twist the oft-quoted scripture to mean a universal umbrella of unlimited blessing from God. Does that match the life of Christ, or Paul, or John the Baptist?

They make the bible appear to teach what they want to foist upon you by using their modern day magic, their superstitious scripture sorcery. They start by taking several scriptures out of context, and out of the greater biblical scope. Then, by putting them together, they fashion a beautiful string of pearls, woven together to make a shining adornment to their teachings. But that string of pearls is just an albatross, God’s Word applied wrongly becomes more poisonous than any self-help book could possibly imagine, and the devil delights especially in this.

We need to discover Jesus, not as a means to our own ends, but as the end to our own means. When make-believers go looking for the edge, they often find it within so called Christian principles and such, but the total truth is that while they have found the edge, it isn’t what they think it is. They are on the edge, all right, but they are actually dangling their hearts over the precipice of hell. No amount of professing their false Christ will keep them from slipping off.

“Living For Today With An Eye For Tomorrow”©