Have you heard about all the evil that guns do? The current thought being promoted in the media is that because guns kill people then we should make every effort to confiscate or get rid of every gun in America. May I challenge that reasoning for a moment? Using the word “scalpel” to represent different kinds, how many doctors in this country kill babies in the womb of its mother? A conservative estimate is that in our country we are aborting about a million babies a year. Would anyone suggest then that we take away all scalpels from every doctor in order to get the scalpels away from those who murder babies?
How many people die on our highways each year as a result of drunk driving? Would it make sense to pass laws and require all Americans to give up their automobiles and trucks in order for us to keep people from being killed by drunk drivers? I would hope we would as reasonable people understand that some products are used in the wrong way by individuals. Do you know of anyone who has been harmed because they misused prescription medicine? Shall we rally and take away all prescription medicines to insure no one else will be harmed?
At the heart of this is that people are not made to be responsible for their choices. There are certain kinds of allergy medicines that you can only get through the pharmacy because someone uses the medicine with other elements and they create a drug to get high on. Do we demand that all such allergy medicine be removed from the market? Whether it is a gun, a car, or a pill, we understand that evil things are done but such is not justification for punishing all law-abiding citizens. We do not confiscate guns, cars, pills and so forth.
I would like now to apply this same reasoning to the spiritual side of things. Some argue that there are some Christians who use the term, “church of Christ” in a denominational sense. They say something like, “church of Christ preachers” or “church of Christ” schools. Is such correct language? It is not. Do we then reason that because some use it in an incorrect way, we should confiscate or get rid of those words out of our vocabulary? The apostle Paul addressed the fact that some eat herbs only and despise the Christians who eat meat. The herb eater was weak in the faith (Rom. 14:2). It is not right for him to remain weak in the faith but he and the “meat eater” needed to be fully persuaded in their own minds (verse 5).
Still others have argued that the term, “church of Christ” turns off the denominational world and we can never reach them. The solution then would be to cease using the term and, therefore, we can open doors. There is a whole new classification today. People are referred to as the “unchurched”. If we continue to use the language of “church of Christ” we will never be able to reach the “unchurched”. Somewhere in all the confusion men have lost sight of where the power is. The power is in the gospel of Jesus Christ to save men (Rom. 1:16). If we “sneak” in the back door to people’s hearts and not tell them who we are, we can bring them safely to Jesus Christ. This is false thinking because what brings men to Christ is by coming through the front door and getting men to accept the authority of Christ over their lives.
We need to quit listening to the world and being influenced by their language. We do not take away guns, cars or pills because these are inanimate objects that require the actions of humans to do good or evil. Neither do we get rid of Biblical terms because they are misused or because the world is turned off by the terms. Each day we are to confess Christ before the world by our words and or our actions (Matt. 10:32).