God has been given a bad rap by the very people who who claim they love Him!

Why is it that in today’s society the mention of God turns people off and Jesus is disliked and even hated by some people?

“Christians” have had it thrown in their face...”if God is the way you say He is, or the way you demonstrate Him as, I do not want anything to do with your God! If God hates me because I am not a Christian, yet loves you, who claims the title of Christian, yet you lack showing love, compassion and understanding, which I am told are God’s qualities, and seem to take delight and satisfaction in judging, condemning and sentencing me and you even dod the same to other religious people because they do not believe the way you do...tell me...why would I want to serve a God like that?”

Why do some Some Christians go around acting as if they are chosen by God to police the morality of the world? God is represented by some Christians as one who is against people and who is their condemning judge, this is due to their living on the wrong side of the cross. Rather than putting their arms around "sinners" and embracing them, as Jesus did, they take scripture verses out of context and use their mouth as a gun to shoot people with the their warped interpretation of the scripture they use as a bullet. Rather than fellowshipping, eating and drinking with them by literally meeting them where they are at, and intentionally loving them unconditionally...they wait for them to get their lives in order, come to their “church” and start behaving the way they behave.  And sadly, many times, rather than being agents of reconciliation and forgiveness, they go around protesting the sins of people and everything else they're against by standing and fighting for what they deem to be a “Christian cause”.

Jesus has not given us the mandate to be the moral enforcers in the world. We should mingle with people who don't believe as we do. Meet them right where they are. Accept them just as they are, putting our arms around them, listening to them, loving them unconditionally. We need to drop our self-righteous gun shooting of scriptures to belittle and condemn people in order to scare the hell out of them. Jesus told us that it is by love that we will turn people from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of Light.

By His example, Jesus demonstrated that the people who took offense by Jesus were not "sinners." Yet, religious people fail to comprehend this.  While sinners flocked to Jesus, it was the Pharisee-types, the duty-driven, law loving, finger-pointing, behavior-based religious people who took offense and scorned Him. Some people did convert to their side, Jesus told the convertors that they were responsible for making the converts more a child of hell than they were before their conversion.

The self-righteous performance-based religious people are the ones who should realize they have a problem with the unconditional-lover of the world. Without realizing it, their despising of God’s love and grace shows their rejection of Jesus and the work He accomplished on the cross. It is time we began living on the resurrection side of the cross by demonstrating God’s love, compassion and forgiveness. If we're going turn people off, let it be the self-righteous law keepers who refuse God’s gospel of grace given by Jesus to Paul...by loving and accepting others and showing them how God loves and accepts them, thereby offending the ones who truly should be offended by the gospel, the self-righteous!

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