I have recently been disturbed, once again, about the abuse I have seen thrown around towards fellow Christians by Christians. I wrote this blog 2 years ago! (where does the time go?) So I thought I would re-post it! It isn’t Easter right now, but it was when I wrote it and I’ve left it as it was for effect:

Easter is just behind us and many of you reading this have seen, taken part in, heard once again about what Jesus went through during that first Easter weekend. Even if you’re not religious, if you’re involved in social media, I imagine that some of your friends and family are and so you’ll have seen things – images, videos, gratitude status’ and so on. Unless you live in a cave, you know we’ve just had Easter.

Recently, I was reading the accounts of what happened that day and something struck me in a way it never has before. It made me think a lot and the question that came to my mind was ‘what kind of people actually stand in a crowd and shout, “Crucify Him!”’ Just think about that for a minute – could you do it? I honestly think that whoever was ‘on the stand’ I could not imagine those words coming out of my mouth. They didn’t just say it once; they repeated it over and over…

Matthew 27: 22, 23 & 31

“What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” Pilate asked. They all answered, “Crucify him!”

Mark 15: 13 & 14

Crucify him!” they shouted.

Luke 23:21

But they kept shouting, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

John 19: 6 & 15

As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”

I ask you again, could you do that? Even if it was someone who had committed a terrible crime, I just don’t think I could send a person to be nailed, that’s nailed – I say again, nailed to a cross!! What kind of people were they? Had they had dinner with their families that evening? Had they been to the synagogue? Had they cleaned their kitchen? Were they ordinary people who turned into savages on that first Good Friday? The only answer I have is that something evil was involved in the hearts of that crowd that day – it makes no sense otherwise or it may have been something familiar to the day and a spill over from the arenas where bloodshed was ‘normal’ entertainment or maybe they were more animal like back then… Thank goodness it was 2000 years ago and a severely ugly part of our history. Or was it?

Shropshire – March 2015

There was a young man on top of a tall building. What was going through his mind? What had happened to him in his life to bring him to this point? God is the only one who really knows. Maybe if this was the year that Jesus was crucified we could understand what happened because they were obviously more thuggish back then? But it wasn’t! It was now and on the streets of the UK. People were telling him to jump!

Here is what one woman said,

“As we walked past, there were some youths shouting ‘Go on, do it – jump’,” she said. “It made me feel quite sick, actually, and then a lot of them were filming it, but to see some grown men filming it…

Grown men filming it! How had their day started? Shower? Had breakfast with their families? Maybe they were on their way home or to work. The only answer I have is that something evil was involved in the hearts of that crowd that day. I wonder what the mood was like around the dinner tables that night, especially of the grown men who filmed it. Do you think they showed the video to their kids? Could you have shouted, ‘jump!’ Could you have shouted ‘Crucify him!’ What gets into the heart of man that would turn him into a savage? Maybe it’s because they don’t know Christ! Yes, that’s it, thank goodness – they don’t know Jesus. Surely if you knew Jesus you couldn’t be so savage or could you?

The other day I stumbled across yet another huge piece of writing on a well-known Christian teacher. I didn’t read it all because there was oodles of it – nicely italicised and emboldened as they made their points about how wrong this man is. There are people, scratch that, there are Christians who seem to have dedicated their lives to tearing down people, scratch that, brothers and sisters in Christ. Have these high profile teachers got EVERYTHING right? Of course they haven’t. Have you? Have I? The comment on this particular article, and there were many, that really made me mad (righteously of course!!) was this one, ‘the pit awaits him!’ The pit awaits him!!! Who do we think we are making judgments such as this? The said ‘pit’ does exist according to scripture. If I’m honest, I wish it didn’t but it does. God does not want anyone to go there. I do not want anyone to end up there. Could you say, ‘the pit awaits him’ about anyone? However bad a person is and let’s face it there have been some unimaginable atrocities meted out on this earth since it began – well after the forbidden fruit was eaten – and we will face judgment. BUT that is up to God and not up to me. To condemn another believer to the pit is the lowest of the low and I hope the person who wrote it will be convicted and remove it.

So, to end… it seems that the crowd that shouted, ‘crucify him’ 2000 years ago hasn’t changed much. Some are even saying that to people on the same side!

These high profile men and women don’t have it all right and sometimes they don’t do the wisest things. BUT they are our brothers and sisters in Christ so let’s leave them alone. If they bug you that much, then don’t listen but don’t slander them either! Leave the judging to God and concentrate on what Jesus commanded us to do – Love (agape) one another as he has loved us…

I realise this title probably made you open this blog and you might imagine I’m going to say I’ve stopped praying or I don’t agree with it or I’m just giving up – I think you’ll be relieved to know I’m not going to say any of those things, but I do want to share are some thoughts of where I’m at with my praying journey. I may have more questions than answers right now, so I’m simply sharing my heart…..

Here is what I know:

God is good. He loves his children more than we understand. He is perfect in all of his ways. He tells us to pray ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. There is no sickness in heaven, there is no death in heaven so I want to believe that if someone appears to be dying too soon or is living in unnecessary suffering (not the kind that may bring glory to God), I can pray the same for my friends/family on earth, right? I want to see results as a direct connection to my prayer.

Some other things that I know:

My prayers don’t always get answered in the way I would like –  My friends die (too early, at least for me). Families break up. Sicknesses don’t get healed. ‘On earth as it is in heaven’…….

You’re probably thinking, well if your prayers don’t get answered, it must have been God’s will for your friends to die. If that’s the case, then why pray? Why not just be fatalistic and say ‘ God, let your will be done’ and head off to the beach? I feel like that is a cop-out. Here’s why I think that: generally speaking, if someone recovers, it’s God’s will and if the same person dies, it’s God’s will – they can’t both be God’s will, can they?

We all get emails, face book messages, tweets etc… asking us to pray for situations that are sometimes just horrible. The church rises, it fasts (if it’s really bad) it prays, tragedy strikes, the church is devastated and we don’t ask why, we just say, Oh well, it must have been God’s will….. So I ask the question I started with, what on earth is the point of praying? I’m tired of being asked to pray and not getting the desired answer.

Personally, I can’t accept this hit and miss kind of Christianity. I just can’t and I don’t want to – I’ll go as far as to say I don’t think God wants me to either. . I want to know what it is to get answered prayer every time, even if that is a ‘no’ and if it’s a ‘no’ I want find out as early in the prayer process as possible, instead of just not knowing. I’ve asked the Lord to help me with this and this is what I think He said.

The church is not close enough to him  to hear his voice. Intimacy is a rare thing. The general level of prayer amongst leaders is puny, therefore the level of the churches’ prayer is also puny. If we would hear his  voice daily, then when tragedy comes, He might just whisper, ‘no need to pray for this, I’m calling my son/daughter home’ Of course, it would still be sad for the people left behind,  but the peace we would all have would carry us through. Instead, the church goes into a frenzy of prayer only for the answers not to come and I,  for one, am left shaking my head asking, what was the point of praying?

We have to get back to taking prayer seriously. I address myself too. Some of you reading this will definitely have a strong prayer life, most of you won’t. That’s because we don’t really believe God answers prayer. It’s not what you say that you believe, it’s what you do, so if you don’t go to your churche’s prayer meeting (if they have one – God help us if they don’t), you don’t really believe in prayer.

God is not mean, but I just think he wants us to know him better. For me, I want to really know how or what to pray in any given situation and to do that, I need intimacy with him. If I can pray confidently, knowing what God’s will is, my prayer life will be lot less ‘lottery’ like and a whole lot more ‘fact’ like.

I wish I had more answers and maybe as I continue to ask, I’ll get more. My challenge to the church is don’t not ask questions. Be bold enough to ask, did we miss something?

The same spirit that raised Christ from the dead is living in you and me giving life to our mortal flesh….(Romans 8:11)  Where is that spirit? On the inside of me!  So, let’s not rest until we see what we all long to see. Will you have to get out of bed a little earlier in order to see it? Maybe…. How hard are we prepared to work for it? …..it’s our shift, let’s arise.