Today's Proverbs 31 Ministry Devotion, "Bootleg Faith" by Susanne Scheppmann, brought up interesting points on those who bootleg their faith. (http://proverbs31devotions.blogspot.com/2009/03/bootleg-faith.html) By bootleg, she means those who copy the faith of others. In elementary school, we called people who copied others 'copy cats.' If you were ever called a copy catter, you know what I mean.
Today, we have those who complain that the faith of others isn't authentic or that they themselves are not being spiritually fed. I would like to suggest that perhaps these feelings could very well spring forth from a person whose faith isn't grounded in Christ - from someone who is merely a 'bootlegger', a 'copycatter', a person who simply mirrors the walk of other believers but who hasn't genuinely worked out their own faith in truth and suffering.
As human beings, when we develop a dissatisfaction we often look to others to blame. As believers, we can even experience dissatisfaction with our own spiritual walk. We may not even realize our dissatisfaction is with our own spiritual life. So our worldly nature sometimes kicks in and we sometimes end up blaming others for our own spiritual state. In an authentic faith, however, the Holy Spirit would kick in and convict us of our wrongdoing, and hopefully we'd respond. Now, imagine that the person who has developed dissatisfaction is in fact a spiritual bootlegger. Because they simply mimic the faith of someone else, because they are not living out an authentic faith, when dissatisfaction occurs they have no spiritual foundation to stand on. Their reaction will be worldly because their faith is not real. When life gets tough, their 'copycatter' faith offers them no comfort or help. They are quick to point to others to blame - how others are not meeting their spiritual needs, how their Sunday School class, Church, Pastor, Small Group Leader, Children's/Youth Ministry is not meeting the spiritual needs of their family. But like my Grandma used to say, "When you point your finger at someone else, there are three fingers pointing back at you!" So, what's the 'point'? When we become dissatisfied in our spiritual walk, we must first take a long, hard look in the mirror at ourselves. Chances are, those three fingers pointing back at us are right, the problem is most likely within us and not with others.
In His Love, Cathy
1 comment:
This is good stuff… strong meat.
No matter how much church leaders may try to feed everyone in the flock, some will always demand more and never grow up. I think that churches sometimes miss the mark in trying to do too much to help believers grow. The goal should be to slowly make believers to be able to stand on their own two feet. That is, the church is responsible for helping believers grow “to a certain point.” After that, they should feed themselves and focus on helping the church with its mission.
To do that, church leaders need to “right size” the “expectations” of people about what they get from the church. The reason that seasoned believers are often the most dissatisfied is because they still expect the church to be spoon feeding them… long after the point they should be feeding themselves.
I heard Chuck Swindoll say once that the number one reason people left his church was because they complained they were not being fed anymore! Who could question the dept of content in Swindoll’s teachings? He’s one of the best Bible teachers in America today! This is a universal complaint in all churches… and it has less to do with the church’s leadership and more to do with the complainant. They are simply disenchanted and don’t know how to do the hard work of feeding themselves.
Hebrews 5:12 says it all for me: “At a time when you ought to be teachers, you have need that one teach you again…”
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