The Church

Where should the Church stand on homosexual marriage?

What should the Church say about abortion and choice?

What should the Church say is the way someone can get to heaven?

What should the Church say about those who hold convictions opposed to the Bible?

Such questions as these led to Time's on-line article, "Will Gay Marriage Pit Church Against Church?" (here if you must). This is only an issue because so many churches in the 19th and 20th centuries diluted or neutered God's word to man, the Bible.

Principally speaking, the Bible is plain. The only proper sexual relationship occurs between a married man and woman. On topic two, human life is sacred because it was created in God's image, therefore the taking of innocent life constitutes murder. The Bible makes plain that Christ is the only way to secure a place in heaven for there is no other name under heaven by which man may be saved. And lastly, the Bible asserts that it is all the inspired and inerrant word of God and to teach or live contrary to what is written therein constitutes heresy or willful sin.

Those are not my opinions. These are what God declares in His recorded word. Contextually.

So here's the deal. If a religious organization asserts a position contrary to what the Bible makes plain, can it be called a church? The Bible makes plain that many will enter the scene spouting doctrine to scratch their itching ears but doctrine that runs contrary to what the Bible states. They will be wolves in sheep's clothing looking to devour and divide.

When I was a child, I heard about excommunication within the Catholic church. "How dare they!" I thought in my pubescent sensibilities. As I grew and studied the Bible, I learned that Jesus speaks about discipline within the church and that if one continues in an unrepentant state with regard to their sin, the church is to have nothing to do with that one (Matthew 18). Paul affirms the same point to the Corinthians church as they coddled a young man incestuously involved with his father's wife (1 Corinthians 5).

I am NOT saying that the Church is a home of perfect people. Hardly. It is the union of people who have been saved by and through the atoning work of Christ's sacrifice. It is of people indwelt by God the Holy Spirit to grow day by day in their obedience to God. It is of people who submit themselves to God and His word that they might become more and more Christlike.

Were the Bible merely a guide to gutting a deer or how to get up and down out of a sand trap, you'd get opinions and techniques as wide and diverse as the people wielding the knife or the wedge, but it's not. We conform to it. We don't conform it to ourselves.

As groups continue to reject what the Bible says, they cease to become churches. That's why when denominations like the Episcopalian Church condone the act of homosexuality and ordain its practitioners that churches within the denomination that hold to the teaching of the Bible splinter off and away from the denomination.

Church against church? Not so much. What we find happening is that groups are fighting against God Himself and what He has declared. You'll be hard pressed to come out on top of a battle like that.