That seems like a stupid question, doesn’t it? If a church says it’s a Christian church, than it is, right? They all preach from the Bible and say the same thing, correct? In reality, many churches that call themselves Christian, really aren’t. The Mormons, for instance, call themselves Christian, but they give as much authority to a later prophet as they give to Christ’s words and the Bible. By giving equal weight to someone besides Jesus, the church has allowed practices that distort God’s message and block the true message from people’s hearts.
I should clarify that I haven’t studied the Mormon religion, so maybe it’s a bad example. I’ll come back to them later. A better example would be Muslims. According to the Muslim faith, Christ and the Bible are still valid, but Mohammad came later and had the more complete version of God’s message. In their faith, the Koran is more important than Jesus’ teachings. That belief changes their knowledge of God and their ability to understand His true message and be saved.
Some pastors accidentally do the same thing.
Many pastors these days preach what people want to hear. In order to win as many hearts as possible for God, they focus on how loving God is. Some churches decided that certain parts of the Bible only applied to historical times and not today. Today a loving God accepts everyone, no matter their sin, right? An obvious example is homosexuality. Many churches accept homosexuals since God loves everyone, but that isn’t what the Bible says. Read the first chapter of Romans if you want to read how God thinks of homosexuality by speaking through Paul. The body wasn’t made for it and it is clearly a sin.
By teaching only God’s love, pastors ignore or downplay the focus on repentance. Jesus taught repentance just as much as the apostles did in the letters of the New Testament. Matthew 10:38 and Mark 8:34 have Jesus talking about taking up a cross to follow Jesus. Being a Christian is not going to be easy. Jesus says that it’s a daily struggle. He’s talking about repentance, which a lot of pastors don’t want to talk about.
Repentance isn’t pretty, but it is necessary to Christians.
Repentance is hard work. True repentance is acknowledging a sin and being intentional about not doing it. God knows that nobody is perfect, but repentance is our gift to God. God created us to be perfect, but sin got in the way. Our “best life” and “best version of ourselves”, to use modern terms, is the perfect life God created us for. It was a utopia with God providing what Adam and Eve needed and them happily busy maintaining that perfection. As our Father, God wants us to live our best life. Like children of strict, but loving fathers, Christians should strive for God’s approval and that means repentance. That means striving to meet God’s expectations while loving everyone as He does. It’s a tough balance that no one can do, but that’s where Jesus came in.
He removed our sins in God’s sight by His perfect life and suffering on the cross. Our gratefulness for His suffering is the hard work of daily trying to be perfect. Jesus hiding our sins from our Judge doesn’t make it right to keep sinning. I think of it like a blanket. Jesus gave me a blanket to cover my sins. I know that the pile of sins under that blanket will keep growing all my life, but I don’t have to make it grow faster when I know I’m sinning. Something I struggle with everyday, and I know every Christian struggles with, is to stop doing something that’s a sin when I realize I’m doing it. Controlling my actions isn’t incredibly hard, but controlling my thoughts is really hard. My point is that repentance is hard, but necessary for pastors to include in their message.
Christians should test everything by the Bible.
Christians by definition follow Christ and His words. To know if a church is Christian or just pretending to be, test everything by what the Bible says. Don’t just rely on other people to interpret the Bible for you. Read it yourself and check your pastor’s message against Christ’s words. The basics of the Bible is to let it interpret itself. It’s not for us to add to the Bible, nor to take things out of it. We don’t get to decide what is important in the Bible and what is no longer relevant. God wrote the whole Bible, through human writers, knowing what was to come now a days. Isaiah lived over a hundred years before Cyrus was king, yet Cyrus was named three times and referred to a few times in Isaiah 41-46. That is direct proof that God knows the future.
The prophecies about Jesus life and death are less direct, but they started thousands of years before Jesus was born. If He created teachings and prophecies for then, why would He have written down teachings that no longer apply today?