Churches have a tendency to weaken our zeal for God, because there is no zeal for God in our churches; that is what is missing, because zeal is the quality of an individual not a corporate body. In place of zeal we have religious play-acting which, in the Greek, is described by the word hupocrites, meaning a mask that an actor donned to portray different characters.
Christians tend to wear masks when they gather together; it conceals their fears, troubles, sins and inner conflicts, but it doesn’t deal with them before God, because they are suppressed behind the hupocrites.
Jesus told us; “If any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26).
At first glance this seems “a hard saying” like those from which many of His disciples shrank (John 6:60); “who is able to hear it?” they said. But the fact is that all of those relationships mentioned here have the effect of binding us to this world and the distractions of family affairs. The Greek word for “hate” is misei and Hebraistically, what it means is to prefer less and love less, and signifies that discipleship requires single-minded devotion to Christ and a ruthless disregard to anything or anyone that might intrude upon that devotion. The antonym of misei is agape.
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