Salvation only comes in one package, all of its parts are bound together with eternal glue, we cannot have one piece without the other, we cannot pick and choose which parts we like. This is an all in or all out message.

To some peoples dismay, we’re not allowed to custom make our own gospels that suit our lifestyles, no, Jesus must be drunk straight. Tailor-made gospels are non-gospels. Creating God in your own image is exactly what the Israelites did time and time again. They ran to idols because you can tell an idol what to do.

Some people have an idol named Jesus, He forgives, blesses, and loves to cuddle, but does He demand holy living, does He require repentance, is He Lord of all? Surely not!

God created man in His own image, and we turned around and invented Him in ours. Many people have fashioned a god according to their own desires, but such a god doesn’t exist. My father calls it “god 2.0,” or “designer Jesus,” but this false deity is merely imagined and has no footing in reality. This is what idolatry is: it’s fashioning a god of our own, and His name might actually be Yahweh, yet the version many have constructed is just as mythical as the stories of the pagan gods of folklore. We love a God who blesses but never rebukes, who forgives but never damns, who turns a blind eye to sin rather than violently confronting it with His transforming power, Whose main goal is to make us happy rather than making us holy. We have traded truth for comfort and have in turn embraced deception. Let us turn back to the authentic Jesus found in the scriptures and stop playing games with the gospel.

To some, Jesus is an add-on, like any other hobby simply meant to enrich a self-centered life. He makes it on their to-do list somewhere down the line, but He is not the all encompassing purpose of life and reason for living. We should rewrite that song “I surrender all,” to “I surrender some,” it would be more fitting for what we see in many churches today. It would go something like this, do sing along if you know the tune. “I surrender some, I surrender some, some to Jesus, when I feel like it, I surrender some.” Now perhaps I’m being a little sarcastic, but I am really trying to put in perspective how far mainstream christianity has strayed from its first love.