The prevailing religious attitude of our day focuses on liberty, pleasure, and personal fulfillment. This is not biblical Christianity, but a self-serving substitute. Historically, biblical Christianity has been attacked as repressive and regressive. Dare attempt to obey the revealed mind of God and you are castigated as a puritan, or worse, a pharisee.
Christless Christianity is humanism cloaked with religious pretense. Self-fulfillment of the individual is the end of all things.
Two marks indelibly etched in the character of Christless Christianity are worldliness and rejection of authority. Though not always equally obvious these two marks, spiritually speaking, form the genetic code of a sort of Christianity which wants nothing to do with the Lord Jesus Christ of the Bible.
God has given us clear warning: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” 1 John 2:15.
Worldliness listens to this text, but doesn’t tremble. Why? Because it never identifies itself as worldliness. It prefers the more refined name of liberty. Liberty in this instance is freedom, not to do God’s will, but to gratify the human will. Nothing so clearly demonstrates the corrupting nature of human depravity.
The Christless Christian justifies the pursuit of pleasure on the basis of liberty. Nothing is a matter of sin against a Holy God, but a matter of preference. Few absolutes exist. Personal opinion reigns. My opinion is as good as your opinion, is the hallmark argument of the Christless Christian whose chief glory is self.
Refined liberty seldom admits to seeking pleasure, choosing the more socially agreeable term of self-fulfillment.
Self-fulfillment ultimately negates the crown rights of our Sovereign Lord. Loving and willful submission to His authority doesn’t exist. Submission is bondage, and bitterness its frequent fruit.
Self-fulfillment has a what’s-in-it-for-me attitude. The thrice Holy God is relegated to the status of a vending machine, approached only when the covetous spirit fails to grasp its object or when storms and trials threaten its carnal comforts.
Self-fulfillment’s vision is myopic. The long range goal of God’s greatest glory is blurred and unrecognizable. Instant gratification is clear and primary.
Christless Christianity finds simple obedience to God’s Holy Word to be too complicated, too constraining. How else could it be? Christless Christianity, by definition, has no Christ, much less love for Christ.
