Practice Love, Practice Love, Practice Love: The Loveless, Apostate Church

I find some things about the church to be rather ironic and actually (dare I say it?) hypocritical. How can you in good conscience ever say that you are a Christian when love, your love for God and love for the things that He loves is not the motivation for everything that you do? It's nothing less than sheer lunacy! Now, make no mistake I am very well aware of the day and time in which we live. I have every reason to believe that we are living in the last days, like the tail end and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Christ's return occurred in my lifetime. With that being said, Matthew 24:12 says, "Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold..."(NIV) so I truly understand the reason for the lack of love but I'm still irritated that it is such a major issue in of all places the Christian church.

A little over a year ago, I heard a message by Bishop George Bloomer regarding the things that would truly send one to hell. Basically he explains that the things that the Christian church often harps on of what will send a person to hell such as what a person wears and other legalistic, religious hang-ups may not lead to a thriving life in Christ but they will not cause you to enter into eternal damnation. But what he did say will definitely send a person to hell is how we treat other people i.e., how we love other people. The church has become so profoundly superficial in that all around the country preachers and pastors enter their platforms and pulpits and they fail to make reiterating and sharing the genuine love of the God that they claim to serve, a priority in what they preach. Bible teachers can expound in detail on the hermeneutical, exegesis of various scripture and yet they often fail in properly articulating to the church that the absence of love is the absence of God and if anything will send you to hell, the absence of God in anything you do no matter how well intentioned, will get you a one-way ticket there!

If you don't believe in hell then this post is not for you! If you are deluded into believing that your good works in and of themselves are what you need for you to spend eternity in the presence of the Lord. Believe it or not, people who have that unfortunate mentality are the very people who will stand before God in judgment and plead to Him about all of the good works that they've done and He will simply reply, "Depart from me you worker of iniquity, I don't know you!" (Matthew 7:23 paraphrased) Just thinking about being rejected like that hurts me to tears! Can you imagine going through the motions of feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, healing the sick, visiting the imprisoned, etc only to stand before the Father and be told that He doesn't even know you? The whole premise of Christianity is relationship with God. A loving, healthy, Father/child relationship with the Most High God! That was His reason for even creating humankind in the first place. Your motives for doing whatever you do no matter what it is, will be the deciding factor as to whether you will be blessed to spend eternity with God or eternity in hell. I know that it is not popular to talk about hell but it is a reality whether you acknowledge that it is or not. If you don't have love for God then don't bother doing all of these wonderful things for people. Some people are all too busy trying to redeem themselves in the eyes of people without realizing that the only thing that really matters is the redemption of God. You've already been redeemed in the eyes of the Father and once you accept and receive His love then what anyone else feels or thinks about you is irrelevant.

Okay enough about hell for now and back to the issue of the loveless, apostate church where love and compassion are faked in order to appear Christ-like and godly. Your church has missions overseas and across the country but there are people attending your church who are going home to empty cupboards, pantries and refrigerators. There are people sitting next to you that are hungry, homeless and without their basic needs met and the church is suppose to be there meeting the needs of the people but they preach and dance and shout to a good message that no one will remember all supposedly in the name of Jesus and those same hungry, homeless, needy people will leave the same way that they entered because it's all a show!!! I am realizing more and more that anytime that you can feed the hungry overseas but there are hungry people down the street from your church, that something is seriously wrong! Please don't misunderstand, I believe that we need to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and meet the needs of the poor and needy all over the world but what good does it do if we neglect to bless those in our own "backyard"?

I went off on this "practice love" trip after one of the prominent people that I have been following on Twitter tweeted about the need to practice love to everyone, everywhere and it blew my mind that this Buddhist has grasped as a mantra the whole concept of Christianity and what really ticked me off was the fact that if this Buddhist who is a generous philanthropist and charitable giver can grasp that concept then what's wrong with the church? Then he went on to say that he is trying to teach one of his children to practice love! That really bowled me over because I don't know too many Christians anymore who proactively teach their children to practice love, in fact some of the worst and rudest children are church kids. But a weak or even a new Christian may have seen this Buddhist tweet that and then after reviewing his acts of charity and philanthropy in comparison to the church be persuaded to believe that either Buddhist are more faithful in conveying true love than Christians or they adopt the erroneous concept of there being more than one way to heaven and thereby multiple ways outside of Christ to get to God. I know better so I wasn't shaken from that standpoint, but I am tripping on this mega-church, televangelist concept of Christianity that some times preaches love but you can't see the manifestation of that love in the local community. Before Jesus went back to glory He told the disciples that they (and we) would do greater works and this was more than likely because He was multiplying Himself through them and us so that we would be able to feed the hungry, heal the sick and meet the needs of the needy in a greater capacity because the effect of the Gospel has multiplied itself by the millions so there should be fewer people in need. Let me be clear, the church (not just mega-churches) has become a selfish, elitist social club of people who believe that they have it all figured out and that they have arrived and I am fully aware that Jesus told Judas when he became upset with Jesus over the woman who washed Jesus' feet with the expensive oil that we would always have poor people among us and yet this does not exonerate the church from it's responsibility to the poor and especially the poor who are living locally. This ignorant selfish, social club mentality has created a culture of celebrity within the church that exalts the people and their pulpit and in some cases, on-camera personas over the bare bones truth and expression of the Gospel which is LOVE! So people have been lulled into this obscene false sense of absolution because these preachers and pastors are successful fundraisers, so churchgoers believe that because they give tithes and offering that they needn't do much else because the ministry is reaching out to people on their behalf. Meanwhile they are sitting just a few pews a way from people who are hurting and are losing their homes, don't have food to eat or a place to sleep but it's okay to overlook them because it's obvious that they don't have enough faith to make them rich and prosperous so the church owes them nothing but a good God bless you and a half-hearted "Jesus loves You"! What a fallacy and just an outrageous lie! This is madness and once again, I am going to ask that the true Bride of Christ stand! Because the whore dressed in white who is calling herself the church does not accurately reflect the image of Christ but people are allowing her to call herself the Bride of Christ when they ought to know who she is by now!

I am hopeful because I have in recent months seen some ministries actually getting outside of the cliquish, four walls of their churches and into the communities to bless the people and serve God by serving the people that God has mandated us to love. Love is a mandate not a choice for the true Christian and that is love in word and in deed. Love will not allow you to look disdainfully upon a homeless family and not ask what you can do to help. Love will not allow you preach to people and not offer to meet their needs both physical and spiritual needs. Love for God, true love for God will not allow you to disobey the mandate to love everyone, everywhere! Christianity has been hijacked by a group of fraudulent people who have found it quite lucrative to preach and market themselves as Christians but they fail to stand the litmus test of what it truly means to love. I love the term "practice love" because sometimes loving everyone, everywhere does not come naturally or easily so it must come from the Holy Spirit within us and it has to be put into habitual practice so that it becomes apart of who we are and not just what we do! Just as God does not love, He is love; we must become love to a world that is hungry to see the love of God expressed through us.

I will repeat: The absence of love is the absence of God! God is love! Practice love! Practice love! Practice love!

Be abundantly blessed! Mediocrity hates greatness...be great and let the haters hate!

Mocha Brown aka Koretta L. Allen is available for public speaking engagements especially pertaining to subjects of single parenthood, being single, women's empowerment through the word of God and much more. Mochababybrown@gmail.com