"It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that He is ethereal but rather that He has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God's existence may nonetheless consider Him less interesting than television, His commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, His judgement no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and His truth less compelling than the advertisers' sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness. It is a condition we have assigned Him after having nudged Him out to the periphery of our secularized life. . . . Weightlessness tells us nothing about God but everything about ourselves, about our condition, about our psychological disposition to exclude God from our reality." (1)
The thought of sacrificing all that we have, all that we know, and everyone we love for the sake of Christ is a four letter word not only to those in our culture, but also to most of those who warm our church pews. Christ has called us to a life of radical abandonment, He exemplified this and we must follow unabashedly. The Bible commands us to live this radical life, yet modern Christianity has ravaged, deformed the Biblical Gospel into something unrecognizable by New Testament standards. The influence and consequence of the American Dream have infiltrated the Church and left its God looking weightless and impotent, all the while its "Christians" look no different than the world lurking outside its walls. In the name of Tolerance, the gross failures of church bodies to weed out the wolves among the sheep have left us with a Church that does not look like Christ, and members that do not exemplify their Lord. If we treat our God as a byproduct of some need to feel comfort, acceptance, involvement, or moral cushioning, He is not our God. Our God is not weightless: He is Lord, and our Lord has called us to radical obedience - will you follow?
“'He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it.'" (Matthew 10:37-39)
(1) [David Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Quoted by John Piper in his book, Don't Waste Your Life, pp. 121)]
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