They say common sense ain’t so common these days and it seems this adage couldn’t be any more true than in the church. Fear not though, in response to the overwhelming lack of understanding that has led the misguided among us to take their right to bear arms to mean they have a right to play God and commit other less serious but equally embarrassing acts, I have decided to offer an eight-week seminar this summer called “Common Sense for Christians.” Here is our course outline:
- Week 1: Being Pro Life- Believing that life is precious and has value means all life is precious and has value. You cannot bolster your shiny new gun and go out killing people you disagree with. You also shouldn’t blow up their places of business. Also, if you believe in protecting the second amendment, that’s great—but you might want to consider why a person who is pro-life would want to own a device that can take life. Oh, and if you are pro-life, you may want to really look into the annoying contradiction of calling yourself pro-life while supporting the death penalty.
- Week 2: Marriage- You can’t go around telling homosexuals that marriage is a sacred spiritual bond between a man and a woman until you start treating it as sacred. Fix your own marriages and bring your own divorce rate down, have fewer broken families than the rest of the world and maybe the rest of the world will be more apt to listen to you. Change always comes from within.
- Week 3: Poverty- Politically, you may have a point about it not being the government’s job to meet everyone else’s needs. However, as a Christian, Christ has commanded you to give your money to the poor. So, whether you give in the form of taxes or donations, you’re giving. Hoarding is not an option that is available to you.
- Week 4: Stewardship- All you have belongs to God. All you have is going to burn one day to make way for a new Heavens and a new Earth. When Jesus says don’t store up treasures on earth, there is a very good chance He means that if you have two houses, one of which you only use for a few weeks out of the year and there are people in your community who don’t have any houses, you may have a bit of a stewardship problem.
- Week 5: Politics- Jesus did not come to set up an Earthly kingdom and He didn’t send you into the world to set one up either. We serve an eternal Heavenly Kingdom. Political involvement is important, but it is always secondary to the Kingdom of Heaven, which operates under completely opposite and paradoxical rules than the Kingdom of this world.
- Week 6: Judging- If God had appointed you as the judge of the world, you’d have been born with a black robe, an tacky wig and perfect. If you didn’t pop out of your momma’s womb with these three attributes, then you are a worker in Christ’s field, which means you must sow the fruits of the spirit. In case you forgot, those are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
- Week 7: Sin- It does exist, and you do it too. If everything in life is a psychological problem we have no control over, or if everything we do wrong is just something society needs to learn to accept, then there is no need for a Savior. If there is no sin and there is no Savior, then we really don’t need to read the Bible or go to church anymore. We could instead devote our lives to debauchery, which is much more fun.
- Week 8: Unity- We don’t have to agree, but we should get along. Somewhere in the New Testament we’re told that we are all parts of one body. A body doesn’t function well if the hand is continually punching the nose or the right foot won’t stop kicking the left behind.
Get it? Got it? Good. Class dismissed.
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