How To Be a Christian and Still Do What You Want

1) Ignore all how-to’s (including this one), especially those within the Holy Scriptures.

2) Teach that God cares more about the why than He does the what, and don’t even mention the how. That is, God cares more about why we do what we do than He does about what we do or how we do it.

Another way of saying this is that the attitude of the heart is more important than the action of the hands. God cares more about your motivation than He does about your effectiveness. Regardless of how pathetic the results of your beliefs and behaviors, “the intentions of your heart were good, and that’s what really matters.”

You might even throw in a quote from someone like Ravi Zacharias (I think) who said, “Intent is prior to content.” Of course, in all this, there is some obvious truth; you just want to avoid pointing out that it’s twisted. (I.e., you don’t want to say, “Notice that Ravi says, ‘is prior to’ rather than ‘is more important than.’ It would be better to say that the locomotive engine comes before the boxcar and not to say that the engine is more important than the boxcar. What good is an engine going back and forth on the track with only empty freight cars? Or how desirable would it be to have passengers loaded up with no power to get them to their destination? Both are important, and generally the engine comes ahead of the freight cars.” – But remember: don’t say that.)

3) Since this next one is so difficult (impossible really) to prove, you should likely be practicing it before stating it directly (if ever). – Establish the following presupposition: “God cares about the ends, not the means. The end justifies the means.” Of course, you must also avoid any and all arguments like the following:
a. If God just wants billions of people to praise Him for eternity, then why all this mess with the universe: creation, crucifixion, stuff like that? Why not just create people who will praise You all the time?
b. Why did God spend 6 days creating, when He could have done it all in an instant?
c. Why did He wait 4,000 years before bringing Christ to center-stage? Why another 2,000 years, at least, before the final judgment day?
d. Why all the cruelty leading up to and including the crucifixion? Why not just have the Christ die in His sleep?
You might say (although it wouldn’t be wise to do so) that “God would not make the best movie-maker. You’ve seen the kind … where there’s a lot of action, close calls, suspense, a long building up of the plot, a cliff-hanging climax, and then all of a sudden, something quite unpredictable occurs, which solves all the problems within a matter of 5 minutes or so, and the hero and his girl drive off into the sunset to live happily ever after. As if the movie-makers were running out of time, so they threw some far-fetched factor into the story to bring it to a satisfactory end for the viewer. God is the same way. – He has a particular end in mind. So no matter how messy things may look now, He will bring it all to a satisfactory end; … no need to worry about how.”

4) Once the presupposition of point #3 has been established, it becomes a rather simple task to preach that “the end which most concerns God is that of evangelism, the fulfillment of the Great Commission.” Evangelism for the modern church and its individualistic Christians is the wonderful justifier of all our compromises. It’s the perfect skin-color-matching cover-up for all our blemishes, the cure-all drug for all our symptomatic side-effects of some serious illness. For some examples, consider the following: A heart for evangelism means …
a. a Christian man can go into a strip-club and witness to the performers,
b. a Christian man can, in order to better communicate in the language of his culture, purchase a subscription to Rolling Stones magazine (including that one with a topless Britney Spears on the front cover),
c. a Christian man can grow long hair and get a tattoo because a Hell’s Angel will more likely be converted by someone who looks like him (the same reason that Jesus removed His clothes, cut Himself with stones, and lived in a tomb so that He might better witness to Legion),
d. a Christian can marry a non-Christian,
e. Christian parents can send their children to public schools,
f. Christians can skip church to be with the unsaved, especially if those unsaved are relatives,
g. Christian churches can determine their own style of worship,
h. a Christian can recommend any version of the Bible that might appeal to the (especially unsaved) reader,
i. a Christian can come up with his own interpretation of a Scriptural passage,
j. a Christian can come up with his own definition of God (“That’s the kind of God I serve.” – Isn’t that what used to be called “making an idol”?).
To summarize, you want to cultivate a mindset that God does not care about the process, that He is not a God of the means. This will aid the seering (er, did I say that? I meant the relieving) of the consciences of pastors and churches who want to circumvent messy disciplinary issues, Christian men who want to replace their spiritual provision in the home (via family worship) with material provisions (via consistent overtime work), Christian women who want to play masculine roles (working outside the home, teaching and leading in the church, etc.), and Christian people who want to divorce with other than Biblical support.