Two Choices: The real God or a false god, Richard Lovelace on How Some Churches Want Ministers To Protect Them from the Real God
Richard Lovelace wrote: "The whole church was...avoiding the biblical portrait of the sovereign and holy God who was angry with the wicked every day and whose anger remains upon those who will not receive His Son. Walling off this image into an unvisited corner of its consciousness, the church substituted a new god who was the projection of grandmotherly kindness mixed with gentleness and winsomeness of a Jesus who hardly needed to die for our sins. Many American congregations were, in effect, paying their ministers to protect them from the real God.... It is partially responsible not only for the general spiritual collapse of the church in this century, but also for a great deal of [evangelistic} weakness; for in a world in which the sovereign and holy God regularly employs plagues, famines, wars, disease, and death as instruments to punish sin and bring mankind to repentance, the idolatrous image of god as pure benevolence (love) cannot really be believed, let alone feared and worshiped in the manner prescribed by both the Old Testament and New Testament." [1]
[1]Dynamics of Spiritual Life" Downers Grove, Ill; InterVarsity Press, 1979, pp.83-84J
From a sermon by David Scudder, Life’s Two Choices, 11/22/2009