The Cancer Sitting In Your Church Pews

At first I thought there was just something wrong with my television.  It didn’t take long to realize that the problem was far worse than that.

I had stumbled upon a documentary about a bedridden, sixteen-year-old boy dying of liver failure.  It was obvious the boy would not be alive much longer.  His skin was bloated and stretched and the color of his face was such a sickly yellow that I thought the hues on my television were out of sync.

The camera soon focused in on the boy’s father.  It was all he could do just to hold back the flood of endless tears.  The clash of color in their faces was what initially grabbed my attention.  Unlike his father’s, the boy’s face was so yellow that it almost looked fake.  Like a mask of some sort.

Something just wasn’t right.

The television then began flashing recent photographs of the boy, taken less than a year before the now present day.  It looked like an entirely different person.  Those photographs depicted a young man in the dawn of his life—without a care in the world—and with little reason to believe that all was not perfectly well.  Unbeknownst to that boy in the photograph, there was a plague on the horizon.

Once the telltale symptoms of cancer began to emerge it was not long before his doctors diagnosed the problem.  The prognosis was grave.  Literally.

From that day forward the boy was no longer concerned about petty things like football, girls, homework, the weekend, or anything else outside of him.  What wrested his attention from the moment of his diagnosis was the stabbing reality that he had only a year left to live.  Maybe only months.  And painful ones at that.

I felt so sorry for that boy but I just could not get my mind off those photographs.  I was struck by how his physical appearance so closely resembled the spirituality of many churchgoers today.  In reality, his good health was little more than a façade.  A false veneer.  Fake.

Like many Christians sitting in American church pews today, he looked normal on the outside.  Yet somewhere below the surface of the skin there was a malignant defect eating away at his mortality and—short of a miracle—it was going to kill him.  And soon.

There had once been a season when that young man was interested in schoolwork, playing sports, hanging out with friends and living the good life; but the one thing he was most ignorant of was the one thing that mattered most.

I was reminded of how looks can be deceiving.

Like the seemingly healthy teenage boy smiling in those photographs, many churchgoers today are convinced that all is well with their soul.  They are so focused on painting the exterior walls of their spiritual façade that they forget about the importance of having a stable foundation.  It escapes their notice that “God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

They ignore the telltale symptoms of a heart out of tune with God, convinced they are just as holy as the guy sitting at the other end of the pew.

Like that teenage boy, our days in this world are numbered.  Seconds are slipping away fast.  Life is little more than a mist in the hands of a sovereign Lord.  The breath you just breathed was borrowed from Him.  You inhaled because of His mercy and exhaled because of His grace.  And it’s nothing but the sheer pleasure of a relentless God that you will ever do it again.

We are not divine.  Jesus is.  We were not fashioned by our Maker to obsess over worldly trinkets—but over Christ.  We exist in this world for no other reason than to flaunt and parade and “proclaim the excellencies of Him” (1 Peter 2:9).

It’s about time the contemporary church began to comprehend this simple truth.

Or as one pastor wrote for the opening sentence of his best-selling book on the Christian life, “It’s not about you” (The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren).

QUESTION:  How can we better minister to the people at our churches who attend regularly, think that they’re saved, but are truly deceived?