“I am still skeptical about the reasons some seek spirituality in the land, for the spirituality the land offers is anything but easy. It is the spirituality of a God who would, with lightening and earthquakes, sneeze away the bland moralism preached in many pulpits, a wildly free, undomesticated divinity, the same God who demands of Moses from a burning bush, “Remove your shoes, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” When God appears to Job, the comforting sentiments we might expect to feel are absent because such sentiments are at most God’s trappings, not the infinite himself. The God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind reminds him that, comforting or terrifying, he alone is God” (Anthony Lusvardi).

More and more, I become disheartened at the American brand of Christianity that seeks to accommodate sin and sinful lifestyles instead of preaching true repentance and belief. This spirituality is virtually indistinguishable from the culture it claims to be trying to reach.

As my pastor once said, people aren’t mad at Christians because they’re too different but because they’re not different enough. After all, they might say, “Why should I believe in your Jesus when He makes so little difference in your life?”

When the message from the pulpit is the same that comes from Hollywood and the media, it’s time for these churches to shut their doors and go find something else to do on a Sunday.

We forget the majesty of the gospel to transform because we have adhered to the form of religion but denied the power thereof. People can’t hope to see their lives changed if we neglect the message of both sin and salvation, faith and repentance, the cross and the empty tomb.

You need both the conviction and the compassion of Christ to be true followers. I heard recently that what the Church of God in American needs most right now is not so much revival but repentance. Then maybe once we got back to the true message of Christ, we might see the glory and the miracles of the early Church.