Day: June 3, 2021

Thursday, June 3, 2021

“And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1 KJV).

How can we prevent ourselves from being “Christianettes?”

A famous preacher once posted to his social-media account: “I am valuable because He says so.” (That was it; that was his “spiritual insight” for his followers! Who is this “He” anyway?) Thousands upon thousands “liked” it. A well-known ministry wrote on its social-media platform: “Lord, we trust You.” (That was all; that was their prayer for the day!) Hundreds of people “liked” it. These are just a few samples of the shallowness of professing Christianity. It takes extremely little to impress us. We do not need to cite actual verses—church members are often not familiar with Scripture to appreciate it anyway. Evidently, all we need to motivate us is feel-good clichés, superficial ditties, vague assertions, and infantile concepts.

Since French is one of the sources of English words, the suffix “-ette” can be added to form diminutive (inferior, lesser, smaller) nouns. For example, think of “kitchenette” (small kitchen), “novelette” (short novel), and “sermonette” (brief sermon). Likewise, we can infer the meaning of “Christianette”: one who is short in spiritual stature, whose growth malnourishment has stunted, and is hence suffering frailty and immaturity. Such church members know they lack something, so they desperately seek whatever meager bits they can find concerning advice, encouragement, peace, and so on. To a starving person, every last crumb is welcome!

What makes this all so unfortunate is the world has possessed a completed Bible for 2,000 years. The Church the Body of Christ has had God’s Word for nearly 20 centuries. We should be much, much, much, much, much further along in our understanding of the Scriptures than we are. The global Bible literacy rate is so low it is staggering, to say the least, but to be expected—even among professing Christians. After all, very few characters in the Bible themselves were astute regarding spiritual concepts. The spiritually-anemic Corinthians in today’s Scripture had access to the truth, but they were too distracted with counterfeits to have any time or energy for solid spiritual food. We find ourselves in the exact same predicament….