When was the last time you were satisfied by someone's apology if they weren't sincere? Or when was the last time you were talked into believing something that the person themself didn't believe? When was the last time you took a counterfeit dollar and tried to pass it off as the real thing? Never? Me too!
Now, I know this is going to sound weird but last week God used something rather odd to speak to me about counterfeit religion. It was a Coke can. Weird, right? Well here's the gist of it, I love soda, and didn't want to give it up, but knew that all that sugar was horrible for me. So, I have been drinking Coke Zero for the past however many months. Have you tried it? It really the closest you can get to the real things without having to commit to all the calories. Maybe you can see where I'm going with this.
The tag line that reads on the can struck me. Isn't this kind of what we do with Christianity? We want to have all the REAL CHRIST TASTE AND ZERO CALORIES err... COMMITMENT. Maybe this seems like a bit of a stretch, but I think that if you look at the churches in North America, well I think it's unfortunately too true of way too many of us. Scripture tells us to "Come TASTE and SEE that the Lord is Good." But how many of us stay at that first taste with out committing to 'DRINKING HIM IN'? And we call ourselves committed followers? We've done a good job of manufacturing for ourselves a Coke Zero religion, instead of getting the real deal. And we're passing off our product as the REAL TASTE.
