The Bride needs to open her mouth. Satan has sent his whores into the church and whispered lies of loyalty and reputation. I am ticked. I'm mad at the prince of darkness. I hate him. I CANNOT WAIT until he burns in hell for eternity with no allowance to come near us. But I am also mad at us. I am mad at the Bride. I am mad at the church. We have built cages in our pews. Our Sunday school rooms have bars on the windows.
How? Because we have decided that church should have this image. The Bride should look like this. The Bride should talk like this. The Bride should be involved in these things but not in those. In all, we have decided to close our mouths. What am I talking about? I am talking about what we are afraid to talk about.
Sin. Sin in the church. Brokenness. Brokenness in the church. Bondage. Prison in the church. In the past few months, I have heard this several times: "We have made church into the Christian prom." I am understanding this to new depths every day. So many churches expect things to run according to the designated plan. People come in- with problems. We all have issues. We sit down and listen to the message. We talk with friends in this alleged community. If we are convicted in the message, we deal with it and never say anything. We try to make our repentance as quiet as possible. How often do you hear a deacon say "I have held so much bitterness in my heart, but God really convicted me today. It hurt, but praise Him for it." I have not heard it oft
If we are changed during church, we don't talk about it because we don't want anyone else to know we didn't have it all together when we walked in. We just want to be the faithful. We just want to be a role model. We don't ever want to be "the one who got healed." We don't want to be the ones on our faces because we have lived according to a lie. We don't want to be the one with unbelief. We don't want to be the apathetic one. We don't want to be the one with an addiction. We smile and sing. We deal with our sin on our own. Because getting help would require someone to know about it. We trade accountability and support for reputation and shame. So we keep up an appearance and fall into this Christian prom. Boy do we look nice. On the outside, we are stunning. Just as we think the Bride should be. Good job us. No. Fail.
So what's really going on at this prom? People are struggling with a sin. It feels habitual. It feels like they will never get over it. And we feel likes failures because honestly, sometimes we don't care. Sometimes apathy has got a hold on us. Sometimes we don't feel what we think we should. That leaves us stuck. We think we are terrible Christians. "How can I not choose Jesus?" "I must not love Him since I can't defeat this." "I am living a lie." No. You wanna know who's living a lie? All of us who parade around with our Bibles and say all the right things without saying the truth.
We need to open our mouths. "I am not perfect." "I gossip all the time." We need to start calling ourselves out. "You know what? I'm gonna stop in the middle of that statement. That's a rumor fueled by jealousy." Catch that unforgiveness. Who cares if it got half-way out of your mouth before you realized what it was? Call it what it is. Don't try to play it off as a prayer request or a "I just needed to vent" moment (Prov. 29:11). That's how we end up confused and trapped in habitual sin. Call yourself out in public so the rest of us humans can know that sin actually does exist in the lives of Christians, and we can recognize it.
Then there are those sins that we don't talk about. This issue has blown my mind over the last 6 months. I have grown up with this mindset: "There are some things that we just don't talk about in church." I really believed that was right. "That's not what Christians discuss." Now I am understanding- why the heck not? So let's go there right now. Pornography. I grew up just hearing allusions to this in sermons "Don't be looking at things you shouldn't." And that's about as far as it got. Even hearing the word porn made us squirm and blush. Listen, we are not Amish people with no access to that stuff so the topic seems awkward. Porn is everywhere. Even daytime TV is enough to lead your mind in that direction. But not in the church. Of course not. You know what's heartbreaking? To sit next to a college age guy as he fights tears and shame over this issue that he has fought for years in secret. And this guy was raised in church! Shame on him. No. Shame on us. We helped place those chains around his hands by acting like the problem would never be an issue for a Christian. As if pornography is some ultimate sin that anyone involved in should be ashamed to even mention. We have been keeping secrets and keeping chains. We don't let the youth pastor talk about pornography or masturbation, but when we find out our kid is struggling with it, we drag him to counseling and "make the pastor fix it." Oh what hypocrites we have been. Then Sex. I am so speaking to myself here. Historically it has been one of the most uncomfortable words in my ears. In my experience, this word was NOT spoken in church for any reason. Again silence brought with it shame. I look at myself and some girls I grew up with. At some point in our lives, we have been trapped in sexual sin, but we never said anything. We kept our image together. We just bat our pretty eyes and speak with an innocent naivety. Get real. We are not naive. But the Bride should be pure so we act innocent instead of begging to be remade. This show is a joke. It's a lie.
Our silence has left us terrified and paralyzed. We are not making war with sin. We are making truce with it. "I won't address you, so you won't come after me." Then when we find sin siting in our laps, we can't scream for help because everyone else has taken the same vow of silence. So we spend the rest of our lives trying to quietly ask this unwelcome guest to please leave. We should be getting ready for battle and preparing for bloodshed. Instead we are in prom dresses trying to dance the night away without letting anyone notice the shackles on our ankles. Bride, we may spend the rest of our lives keeping the surface of the dress white, but underneath the filth is building up. And we are leaving tracks of mud for the next generation to walk in. It's time we take off these dresses for some serious cleaning. Yeah, everyone will now see the filth, and we'll all see how dirty we are. But we'll never be clean if we wear the dress every day and never get it washed. Christ is not pleased with our prom. He is not pleased with the superficially white dress. He sees the shackles. He sees the filth. Our act has never fooled Him. We may have fooled ourselves, but truth still sets free.
Bride, let's open our mouths.
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