Pastor Larry Peters has posted on obesity and how preachers have wrongly replaced the message of Christ's redemptive work with life-skill tips. Here is a portion:
My concern with the health craze is that when the Church takes up a cause, it becomes a spiritual cause, a cause of the Gospel. Living healthy is a good thing. Losing excess weight is a good thing. But that is not why Jesus came into the world. Your BMI is not what will get you in or keep you out of the kingdom of God. I worry when causes, even noble and good causes, become associated with the Gospel in such way that the very word Gospel becomes diluted and its focus made more fuzzy. It is diluted and fuzzy enough. We don't need to help it along in that direction. We have got some preachers preaching about sex lives and calling it Gospel, and now we have preachers preaching about weight loss and healthy living and calling it Gospel. Everyone who takes up a cause, no matter how noble or good, and calls it Gospel, ends up diluting, confusing, and distorting the real Gospel.His thesis is that the church needs to remain focused on its mission of making disciples and not get off track into these other areas. From whom else will you hear the gospel but from a representative of Christ's church?
2 comments:
And every time the church has instituted a health program - e.g. Weigh Down Workshop and the Daniel Fast - it is associated with false teachings.
Stick to our job.
Too often the church has the same standards as the world. In order to be used by God you must have be a certain size, have six pack abs, great tans, etc. OK, maybe not to that extreme. But the church has fallen into society's view of who is acceptable and therefore valuable. Somehow having the right number, whether on the scale, on an IQ test, on a paycheck or zip code proves that you are "it". Because we all know that unless you have the perfect score you are worthless and unusable. ;-) (tongue in cheek)
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