Are You Sure It Doesn’t Matter?

Greg Gwin

Imagine yourself walking into a drug store to have a prescription filled. You hand the pharmacist the form from your doctor, and then watch in amazement as he throws it in the wastebasket without even reading it. Then, without reading the label, he hands you a bottle of pills. By now, you’ve gotten your nerve up, and you ask,

“Man, what are you doing?”  “Well he answers, “I’m giving you some medicine.”

“But you didn’t read the prescription, and you didn’t even look at the label on these pills.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “Medicine is medicine – one pill is as good as another.”

“No sir!” you object, “I want the pills that my doctor prescribed, and no others”.

There’s very little chance that you will ever visit that drug store again. Common sense says that this is no way to handle the important business of our physical health.

Why not allow the same kind of common sense to help us in the far more important realm of spiritual things? For some reason, folks have decided that “anything goes” in religion. “Join the church of your choice” has become more than a mere slogan – it is the rule that most people live by. “One church is just as good as another”, we are told. How can this possibly be so?

Jesus said, “In vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Matt. 15:9). Note that the Lord says that some worship is “vain”, meaning worthless or good for nothing. He goes on to explain why it is worthless – because it follows the commandments of men rather than the will of God (Col. 3:17). Are you sure that one church is as good as another?    Think!