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

Back In Effect

Wow...it's been practically more than a month. I have missed posting to The World of a Christian Single Mother. Get ready because we're about to go live! That's right Mocha Brown is taking this movement to the airwaves of internet radio. I'll post more details once all of the kinks have been worked out!

Anyway, Abba has had me reading, meditating and praying through the book of Isaiah and the books of Acts, Romans and Hebrews. I read two chapters of Isaiah in the morning and two chapters of Acts (done), Romans (just finished)and two chapters of Hebrews (starting tonight). I have learned over the past year just how important it is to pray scripture instead of just praying off the top of my head and out of whatever my flesh may feel at the time. Isaiah 55:11 says essentially that (paraphrasing), "the word of God will not return to Him void but will accomplish the very thing that He sent it out to accomplish." You can't go wrong when you pray the word of God! It's consistent, and the Father is bound by the honor of His name and has promised to fulfill His word time and time again. What more do you need? Sometimes when we pray we get too caught up in emotion and a lot of times because of how we "feel" we end up praying outside of God's will for our lives. Then we get frustrated with praying and then we stop praying altogether because we feel that our prayers aren't being answered. Isaiah 45:23 says, "I have sworn by Myself, The word has gone forth from My mouth in righteousness And will not turn back, That to Me every knee will bow, every tongue will swear allegiance." (NASB) We must first desire the Father's will for our lives realizing that He will not withhold ANY good thing from us and His plans for us, that they are for good and not evil. They are to bless us and give us hope and a future! (paraphrasing Jeremiah 23:11)

Why not get take the time to get to know God for yourself through His word? It's not enough to "know" the Word through someone else be it a pastor, evangelist, television ministry or even your mama, daddy, grandmama, or granddaddy. In fact it is downright dangerous and a threat to your relationship with God to entrust something so precious to someone else without knowing it yourself. It's like trying to know your child through a nanny or babysitter. It's all secondhand knowledge and the problem with secondhand knowledge is that it is always compromised and filtered through someone else's experience. A prime example is the church that I grew up in which was very legalistic and taught that women shouldn't wear make-up, pants, braid their hair or preach or teach in the pulpit. It wasn't until I read and studied the word of God for myself that I discovered that there were modern-day Pharisees lurking in the church who distorted the word of God in order to subjugate and impose a legalistic form of "works" salvation that was based on what you wore rather than the love of God. Unfortunately a lot of these churches still exist but thank God that my hunger and thirst for the word of God saved me from a stagnant life of legalistic "works" salvation, based on denomination and not on the love of God. Many people will be deceived in the last days because they do not know the word of God for themselves. David Koresh is said to have known the Bible from Genesis to Revelation verbatim. However if his followers had known the word for themselves and had been seeking God and not a man, they probably wouldn't have been deceived to the point of death. My grandfather used to tell the story of a little bird that used to sit in a tree and sing "laziness will kill ya'! Kill ya!" Apathy and willful illiteracy will cause many to be deceived by false prophets and teachers. The word of God empowers us and blesses us to have wisdom and authority and power through The Spirit of The Only True and Living God. We get an awesome insight into the greatness of God when we read the word of God and read it not with the intent to manipulate and cause others to fall but rather to gain access to an intimacy with God that we would not otherwise be able to attain through other means.

I will continue this topic in another post but my prayer for you is that you will realize just how precious and awesome having the word of God is in terms of your relationship with Him. We'll also get into how to arouse a love for the the Bible in your children and it's not by reading Disney-type, watered down bible stories that are meant to be palatable for them but some of them take the Word out of context and treat these awesome life-changing stories as if they were nothing more than mere fairy tales or fables. You need to KNOW the Word of God and your children need to KNOW the Word of God!

Be abundantly blessed!

Mediocrity hates greatness...so be great and let the haters hate!

I'm Learning to Decrease...Less Is More!

I do not have a lot to say today which probably not a bad thing since I have a tendency to be long-winded and I know that all too well! But as I go along this way I am learning to abandon Mocha's ways for God's ways and surrender all that I am to Him because He can do more with me than I can. I have a tendency despite my best intentions, to jack things up royally! It's not easy and this has been a nearly 30 year process and it wasn't until I accepted accountability for my actions and stopped playing the role of a helpless victim that I began to see clearly that I was the obstacle in my way. All too often we want to blame others external to us for our failures and shortcomings; our trials and disappointments but all too often we are the reason why we are not blessed.

The Father did not create us to be victims, He would cease to be God! What would He have to gain by purposely denying us blessing? Because we choose our will over His will over and over again, He is still graceful and merciful to us but we can't experience the fullness of this life as it was meant to be if we don't allow Him to take His rightful place as King and Lord over our thoughts, our ways and our actions. We are only here in this world occupying these earthsuits for a short time, why not decrease so that He can increase and show Himself strong in our lives! It's a win-win-win situation! We become blessed, we are able to better bless others and it blesses God to bless us and have us bless others! It brings Him glory and praise! It is the ultimate in worship and all it takes is the acknowledgment that you unlike God, are falliable whereas God is infalliable and that in His infallibility can make things right in you. All too often people pray to be humbled and they pray for humility but The Word of God says for us to "humble ourselves". That basically means that He has already equipped you with what you need to get out of yourself, transcend pride and humbly embrace Him! HE IS LOVE! Now allow His love for you to change you and show you just how awesome and great He created you to be!
Be abundantly, overwhelmingly blessed!

Mediocrity hates greatness...so be great and let the haters hate!

Isaiah 54:17