The world's largest and most expensive country club is located in Montana. The Yellowstone Country Club has an area of 13,000 acres with 60 ski trails. It boasts the membership of such wealthy entrepreneurs as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Ted Turner, all liberal Democrats. The initial fee for membership in this club is $4 million and the annual fee is $250,000.
Our fellow citizens, “the rich and famous”, belonging to such a club, will not be excited by heaven if they were to go there at death. I have never been a member of a country club and do not expect such. I was a member of a Baptist church where the pastor was expected to be a member of the country club. I believe he and his wife were more comfortable at the Cape Fear Country Club then at the church. Another pastor of a Baptist church here was a patron of the local gambling boats. Nothing pleases Satan more then to have a pastor in his corner. Placing a pastor in a pulpit does not make him a Christian shepherd anymore then putting a sleeping sinner in a garage will make him a Mercedes. My banker tells me that some local country club members, in this time of recession, are scrambling to pay their dues. They cannot possibly be humiliated by leaving the club for lack of payment and it is total necessary for them to have the facade of this social prestige to adorn their family life.
Lets get back to basics. Christians are supposed to be transformed and not conformed to the world. (Romans 12:2) The church is no place for super bowl parties, no place for Halloween parties, and no place for divorced parents parties. We are a chosen people, a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9), not a place for addiction classes, not a place for the blessing of pets. The church wants to be blessed with the things the world wants, drums and drama, bells and smells, comfortable isolation in “padded comfort”, unbesieged by the failures and fathoms outside our walls. Whether cafeteria Catholics or buffet Baptist, we want to pick and choose, as in our regular diets, what we like not what is good for us. The nourishment of the gospel is for old fogies, not the intelligent elite sophisticates of the X generation. One of these sophisticates told me not long ago, “Golgotha was the disciple who killed the apostle David!” One of my assistants, reared in an Episcopal church and still a regular attender, did not know there was an Old and New testament in the Bible.
Just walking an aisle, becoming a card signer, changes nothing. Going into the baptistery a dry sinner and coming out a wet sinner changes nothing. A church member told me not long ago that she never once participated at the communion table. “And whatsoever ye do, do [it] heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men;” (Colossians 3:23).
As my dear mother said when I told her about one girl who left the baptistery pool and went with her friends to a movie house instead staying for church services, “who does she think she is fooling.” When your faith is built on a solid rock, you will be ready to withstand the trials of the world. I truly believe that 90% of faith is just raw courage. Faith is a verb, faith is action based on belief sustained by confidence. Faith in God is the most important thing in your life, can be seen easily by others, the bed is too short and the blanket is to narrow to hide committed faithfulness.
One of the worlds greatest preachers, a great Presbyterian, who preached over 400 sermons from the book of Romans, said, “As you think of heaven, what makes you think that God will let you in?”
“But because my love is as yet weak and my virtue imperfect, I must be strengthened and comforted by You. Visit me often, therefore, and teach me Your holy discipline. Free me from evil passions and cleanse my heart of all disorderly affection so that, healed and purified within, I may be fit to love, strong to suffer, and firm to persevere.”
From “The Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis book 3 ch. 5
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