Pilgrim Soldier

As I celebrate a year of blogging I hope you won’t mind indulging me a little if I pull some stuff out of my archives from my earliest posts. The following was posted on 19th February last year and was called “Offensive Christianity”.

One of my favourite secular authors is Terry Pratchett and, despite him being humanist, I sometimes find stuff that speaks into my own life! In one of his books I found the following:

“If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched ‘em like a father and cared for ‘em like a mother … youwouldn’t find me just being gen’rally nice in the hope that it’d all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burning in me like an unforgivin’ sword. And I did say burnin’…’cos that’s what it’d be. You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people any more, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just … is just bein’ nice.”

Here a humanist writer has written something that all Christian’s should understand. Why are we satifisfied to sit in our often empty churches and be ‘nice’ instead of getting out there and communicating the gospel?

Jesus is the “Stone that causes men to stumble and the rock that makes them fall” (Isaiah 8:14), yet all too often we try to clear up the stones in the path of people so that they won’t stumble over us and be offended by us. Why? Instead we should be pushing on in the attack (note the American English equivalent “offensive”) and start fighting for the Lord of Lords and King of Kings!