Le Christ Vivant

For a while I had stopped using my daily French devotional but I picked it up again Thursday and the first two days caught my attention. Here is my translation:

"We have preached a Christ bland and insipid. We have announced a watered-down gospel and we have caused the youth to doubt the Holy Scriptures. We have removed that authority, and that is the reason that many of them ask "what is the point in subscribing to Christianity?"
God is no longer the God of the Bible, He is the God born of our imagination. We have stripped Christ of his divinity and the supernatural has been eliminated from our faith. Even the enemies of the faith have no objection to such a Christianity. They are satisfied if we have nothing but a social Christ. They are not opposed either to a Christ nailed to the cross: it is there to stay that they would like to leave Him - dead, bleeding, and attached. What they are opposed to is a Christ alive and resurrected.

It is a resurrected Christ who sent out the disciples with an entirely new message. They preached a living Christ. It is that which we must announce, not just on Easter, but each day of the year: the resurrected Christ wants to come into our hearts today! But be warned! He wants to radically change our lives. We reject that Christ because he jostles us, disturbs us, and we hesitate to follow Him in this materialistic, profane age that is avid about pleasure and loaded with prejudices...

We, the Christians, should be ashamed! We have limited Christ to sanctuaries, to temples, and to the religious domain of our lives. We have not lived an applied Christianity. We have made nothing but a Sunday engagement. We adore God from within the thick walls of a church, then we put Him in a quiet corner of our lives. From one Sunday to the next, we rarely talk about Him. We spend precious little time reading His Word or praying. We, the Christians, sometimes act and live as if Jesus was dead.

That Christ would never have any influence on the hearts in the agitated world in which we live. It is not the Christ of the Bible, and it is not the one we need.

The insipid, bland, and impotent Christ of the Church today bares little resemblance to the Christ who was announced by the prophet Isaiah. He has very few traits in common with the Christ of the early church, against whom the the world mobilized itself.

When Christ was on earth he went to the temple, but he didn't stay there. He went to the streets and met the sick, the dead, and everyone who had needs, in all classes of society, presenting grace and truth at the same time."

"Quelqu'un qui dérange" 12-13 Mai 2009 La Bonne Semence - 30, rue Châteauvert BP 335 VALENCE

What the author never really discusses is the obvious question, "So how do we fix this?" I think it's a French thing. They expect people to figure it out for themselves. But I pose the question to you, "If we truly believe that Christ is resurrected and living in us, how will that reality manifest itself in our daily lives?"