17 Jan 2012
 In the town where I pastor there is a prominent billboard that serves as an advertisement for another church. The billboard reads, “Church is about finding purpose.” I take strong exception to this pronouncement. Although finding purpose is a byproduct of finding Christ, finding Christ, not purpose, is what church is all about.One can find “purpose” in any number of things: environmentalism, feminism, capitalism, socialism, conservatism, liberalism, multiculturalism, add infinitum. Yet, one can only find Christ in the church. The church is the sole stewart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and as such, it is divinely commissioned to introduce sinful men to their only Savior. If the church fails to fulfill its commission, the world has no hope of salvation.
The proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is what the church is all about. For a Christian to promote any other cause besides the cause of Christ is to undermine the church’s true purpose by distracting it from the primary thing to secondary things. Make no mistake about it, the church has no other commission but the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20).
Perhaps, the most popular preacher in American today is Joel Osteen. Osteen is the pastor of the Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, a church that draws 40,000 weekly attenders and has a television audience of 10 million people in 100 countries. He is also a bestselling author, whose first book, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, climbed to the top of the nonfiction list of New York Times best-sellers.
According to Osteen, Christianity is all about happiness. This explains the title of his new book, Every Day a Friday: How to Be Happier 7 Days a Week. In his book, Osteen teaches that happiness is a choice, which inevitably leads us to the countervailing conclusion that sorrow would be nonexistent in this sin-cursed world were it not for our preference of it.
Never mind that Scripture depicts Jesus as “a man of sorrows,” Joel Osteen is a positively giddy follower of Him who was well “acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). When Osteen speaks of every day being a Friday, he obviously doesn’t have Good Friday in mind, the day when our Savior “bore our griefs, and carried our sorrows” on the cruel cross of Calvary (Isaiah 53:4). Whereas Jesus taught that “taking up [our] cross” was a prerequisite to becoming His disciple (Matthew 10:38), Osteen contends that Christianity has nothing to do with taking up crosses, but everything to do with turning cartwheels.
C. S. Lewis once said, “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” Lewis understood what Osteen doesn’t, Christianity is not about happiness, it’s about Christ. It’s not about Christ making us happy, but about us making Christ known, which sometimes requires the sacrificing of our happiness in the heralding of Christ in an unhappy world.
Don Walton
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