Sunday Church

This past Sunday at NorthCreek Church, our Pastor Jon McNeff, talked about "The Greatest Sin of All." The backdrop of the message was that all sin is hated by God, and that sin is anything that violates what God wants of us. There is not a person on earth who has not violated God in some way. The greatest sin of all is when people reject Jesus Christ and the sacrifice that He made for us to be reconciled to God.

Anyway, a few things really caught my attention. Comparisons were made between some of our more "common" sins and others. Jon talked a lot about apathy. He talked about how many people in the Bible were apathetic, including many of the Pharisees and others who had been raised "religiously.” I started to think about this in regard to our raising Judah. We don't want him to be raised in a Christian home by Christian parents with a Christian education, and growing up "Christian.” The idea is not to raise a particularly moral fellow with good values (Mormons already do that) because all of this might lead him to destruction. And the truth is, often, when you've been raised religiously, you're apt to become apathetic because of the unrelenting spiritual exposure which does nothing for a hardened heart, except to harden it further.

So, what this means in our lives, and how it will play out with Judah, is that we will have to be particularly vigilant about his spiritual condition. We need to honestly assess the tendencies of his heart, as we do our own, and raise him so that he will want to not just "be Christian.” We want him to understand that there are eternal implications of all of his actions and his thoughts and his feelings. If he goes to church just to please us, it might be better that he didn't go at all. Of course, there is nothing that we can do to MAKE him feel or think in a way that is pleasing to God. This is God's job. In the mean time, we can pray (and so can you) that God would soften his heart and prepare it to embrace Christ as his Lord.