Sanitized Christianity?

Have we created a Christianity that has become sanitized? Before I get into what I am thinking on that question let me give you a definition of the word sanitize. It means, “To make more acceptable by removing unpleasant or offensive features from”

God calls us as follower of Christ to be sanitized when it comes to sin in our life. We are to get rid of those things that entangle us and keep us from being what God wants us to be and from having the type of relationship with him that He desires.

But with original question I am not talking about sin, but what I am talking about is have we removed the unpleasantness and uncertainty that comes with following God. I was studying today for our Wednesday evening Bible Study about Isaac. He was the child God had given to Abraham that would continue the line of promise. When he reaches his mid twenties or early thirties, God tells Abraham to take Isaac to Moriah and sacrifice him there.

For some of us if God were to ask us to do something radical like that it would grate against everything that we believe about Christianity, because most followers of Christ have sanitized their life from unpleasantness even when it comes from God. To think about God calling us to do something that is as unpleasant as killing an only child does not line up with most people’s view of who God is in their life.

God has called us to a radical faith, a transformed faith. It is a faith that calls people to step out of a comfortable boat onto a raging sea and walk on water. For most people their faith in God is the absence of anything that would disturb their comfortableness.

What if we are missing God’s greatest blessing because we have developed a faith of conformity to “Christian norms” and not a faith of transformity? I know that is not a real word but I like it anyway.

Romans 12:1-2 calls us to a different kind of faith that radically changes the way we think, talk and live. Read what it says, “Therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.”

Eugene Peterson in The Message paraphrases those verses this way, “So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

So, have you laid every aspect of your life out before God and said, “Here it is God do what you want, even if things don’t go the way that I want them to.” Or have you sanitized your Christian faith so that you have created a god in your own mind that is not really the God of scripture. A.W. Tozer said it best when he wrote, “If we create God in our image we create a God who can never surprise us, never astonish, never overwhelm us, never transcend us.”

If we have sanitized our Christian faith to get rid of unpleasantness then what a feeble and worthless God we have created for ourselves. I challenge you to allow God to be the God that empowers you to not conform but transform the world around you.