Blogotional

I quote those opening words from the Westminster Shorter Cathecism with some regularity on this blog. I am inspried, by a sermon I heard a couple of weeks back to focus on the word "end" and it's frequent conpanion "means."

The theme of that sermon I heard was that too often we treat God as a means to some other end rather than the end in and of Himself. The ramifications of this statement are all too obvious in our personal lives, and I no doubt as many read the words, the "amens" went through their minds. But I want to look briefly at two practical ramifications of this idea that may not be so widely explored.

The first has to do with the church. How often is God the means to build the organization instead of the organization the tool to aid the end of God? The temptation is so strong. The church being temporal is easy to lay hands upon, set goals for, work towards those goals, it is easy to confuse those goals and efforts with the God they are intended to serve. We need to remember the personally transformational reason Christ came - God had come to build a nation already, that of Israel, He had found that to achieve the nation He desired He needed first to change men at their very core. The business of the church is not to build itself, but to change men and to change men in a way that God is the end.

The second area where this ends/means idea gravely concerns me is politics. I am deeply worried that faith is becoming a means of political manipulation; that people are conservative or liberal first and choose thier faith practice accordingly, instead of the other way around. We do not nurture faith in God so that people vote one way or the other.

There is indeed an alignment right now between one political philosophy, one poltical party, and most people of faith. That, in and of itself, is not bad. However, in such an alignment people often confuse thier priorities, they often confuse their means and their ends.

Many would argue that such means we should somehow abolish the alignment - I disagree with that, I just think we need to delineate carefully the boundaries, and reinforce strongly, precisely what are the means and what are the ends.

Worse yet, both of these areas of application of this idea feed each other, in the wrong direction. Confusing the boundaries of politics and faith seems also to help build the faith organization. From a temporal standpoint, there appears to be some synergy, but at what cost?

Think about it, this is the same issue raised by things like the EU and NAFTA - are the economic benefits worth the loss of national identity? I don't want to debate that right now, but I do want to point out that the problems are the parallel, but the stakes much higher in matters of faith.

You see the loss of a point of national identitity, like say a currency in the EU case, is in some sense a trivial matter - but the loss of a point of identity like say "disciple of Christ" is in no way trivial. It cannot and never should be "disciple of Christ/Republican."

Our ends. our prize is what matters

Phil 3:14 - I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Stay focused on that upward call, remember it is our end - He is our end.

Related Tags: ends, means, Christ, politics, church