"Buttresses of a Bungled Building": The Woke Church

The rugged truths of the Bible point out not only the appalling state of our world as it is, but that we have to live a holy life in it by the power of God. Christians and Christian churches and institutions that rely on principles from today's political movements such as social justice are in danger of trying to reinforce the Gospel with "the Buttresses of a Bungled Building".  A buttress is a structure of stone or brick built against a wall to help strengthen or support it.  Today, churches are attempting to use the principles of social justice, virtue signaling, and "wokeness"  as "buttresses" to strengthen or support the Gospel message. 

But listen to this warning from our Holy God through the prophet Isaiah:

Because you have rejected this message,

relied on oppression and depended on deceit, 

this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging,

that collapses suddenly, in an instant.

It will break in pieces like pottery, shattered so mercilessly

that among its pieces not a fragment will be found

for taking coals from a hearth

or scooping water out of a cistern.

 Isaiah 30:12-14

   

The trouble is not that the wall has been badly built, but there is too much on the inside and it will burst through no matter what buttresses there are.  The real danger of a church comes in relying on this movement's oppression and deceit that forms from within the hearts of the people.  The supposed buttresses of social justice will prove to be breaches - the wall will break in pieces like pottery, shattered so mercilessly that among its pieces not a fragment of the (gospel) will be found... (Isaiah 30:14)

The principles and motives of compassion may be all right, but if the personal relationship to God is ignored, the whole message of the Gospel will come to the ground.  Faith in God will always manifest itself in right principles of compassion and justice, but if the church puts principles first she will end in losing her faith and trust in God.

If the Christian and the Church build on the principles of today's political and social justice movements, they will blot God out of His heaven.  And, the Church will end as a congregation of atheists where she began as a just and compassionate people who once attended to the needs and souls of men.  It is the same truth that Jesus pronounced: ...Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. (Luke 11:23)

In Luke 14:26-33, our Lord lays down the conditions of discipleship.  He implies that He is not less than a man among men - "I (Jesus) know the kind of building I am going to raise, I have counted the cost and only those in whom My work is effective will be taken up into My building and battling enterprises."  Consequently there will be no incompleteness, no injustice, no bursting out from within of what is wrong, in Jesus Christ's building - His Church.

Adapted from Oswald Chambers' notes on Isaiah