Restoration Churches Needed

We continue our meditation on the call for a balance between holiness and grace in the 21st century. We have to live in the tension between being vertical holiness churches and being merciful churches. The process of sanctification is a long-term journey. Churches are needed that are willing to pay the price of reflecting the character of Jesus Christ.

Let me say something to the people who read me or listen to me or watch this program and it is that: if a Pastor or Christian leadership decides to go on this path of balance that I see reflected in the Person of Jesus Christ, they will receive many attacks from both one side as the other. On the side of people of extreme holiness and legalism they are going to be accused of being liberal and not adhering to the Word of God and of being debauched with things of the spirit because they are not continually cutting off people's heads when they are in a sin or other and are willing to allow a little space in which people come to the fullness of the character of Christ.

Or they will receive accusation from the other side, from libertine, liberal people who do not believe in holiness and who are in the business of calling the Church to loosen all ties and allow homosexuality to enter, to enter coexistence outside the marriage, that they enter the abuse of Christian freedom in other ways because they believe that this is simply a new age and that the Bible after all is a book that was written 2,000 years ago and that reflects the primitive patterns of a culture that did not know of Freud, nor of Darwin, nor of the discoveries of modern science.

So the cannon shots are coming from both sides: the cannon shots are going to come both from liberals who don't want to hear about the call to holiness that Scripture brings us and from legalists who want to steam saints overnight. when they themselves are grappling with their own secret struggles that they do not want to admit and it takes great spiritual courage on the part of mature, biblical Christians to maintain that balance between one thing and the other.

If we are effective in our ministries in maintaining this balance, what is going to happen is that people with wounds, needs and ties will come to our Church and they will come because they will identify our communities as places where they can find relief. for their souls and find a solution to the things that are affecting them.

The churches that reflect mercy and holiness are going to be the churches that in this century are going to grow and are going to be evangelistically effective. But what happens is that when these people come to the bosom of the Church they will then require a lot of paternal treatment and a very complex and sophisticated treatment that is capable of dealing with the situations that they are going to bring to the Church. A Church that continually brings in unconverted people is going to have serious demands and is going to have problems as well.

In our country there is a saying that says: "whoever wants a bow for something that will hold up" is an expression that is a bit harsh, but it means that if we want the privilege in the context of the Christian life, if we want the privilege of loving churches Evangelistic we are also going to have the complication of having to produce balanced churches, because when those unconverted people with many ties and needs arrive at the bosom of the Church they will need time to align themselves.

Imagine so many families that sometimes come to Church with terrible problems: the husband and wife are not married, they have lived together for many years and people who come to Church with ties of pornography and other types of ties, homosexuality, lesbianism, etc. . Those people are going to come and we are going to have to take them, talk to them, help them in the sanctification process, have personal counseling sessions or assign them a discipler or an understanding and mature person who deals with them, we are going to see them sometimes relapse. and that is why we have to receive them again.

That is why the apostle Paul says in Galatians 6: "If anyone is caught in any fault, he must be restored." Restoration churches are needed. Evangelistic churches must also be restoration churches. We have to take those people who come from outside and restore them and even being they within the Church with the passage of time several of them are going to fall and we will then have to raise them up again and restore them.

People who come to Church with drug addictions, alcoholism for example. God sometimes delivers people immediately but many times restorations take a long time and God in His Lordship sometimes chooses to take people through a gradual and gradual process to sanctify them because in that process they learn other things and develop other qualities. and they are also prepared for them after being a blessing to others also having learned from their own restoration process.

God is a very systematic God and He also takes time at times to produce people that He can later use for His Kingdom purposes. And that is why master churches, mother churches, teaching magisterial churches are required where it is possible to exemplify what the pastoral process is, the process of restoration and healing of souls.

That's why we go back to that passage that when we find that the people who are in our churches fall down and have different kinds of problems; It can be anything, it doesn't just have to be sexual or immoral, it can just be restorations of character mistakes that people make, imperfections. Gossip, backbiting, being excessively delicate and sensitive to criticism from others, depression, anxiety; All of these are also works of the flesh, they are sins and leaving these things and restoring from them takes a long time and requires a pastoral, merciful, generous treatment that gives people time to reach that more mature perspective at the beginning. which Christ wants to lead.

And we see that balance reflected in the treatment of Christ that we see in the Gospels. Let's be people of restoration, God bless you.