Or, you better believe your sinful ass is condemned to hellfire and damnation...
On my Conversion thread (Link) little-whip, my wife, had this to say about me:
"Simon was the Penultimate, tongue-speaking, foot-stomping, slain-in-the-spirit Pentecostal for five years, and that was after He spent FOUR years as a Fire-Breathing Street Evangelist, accosting unsuspecting sinners wherever He could find them and telling them ALL about their condemned asses. One poor sap was cowed, teary eyed, into a corner after being the victim of His evangelistic derision for.....wearing a crucifix as an earring. (I'll leave Him to expound on why He found it so offensive at the time....)He was a zealots zealot, or at least He was until other zealots found Him too intimidating to associate with, [...] and He didn't waste His efforts hanging out in chat rooms and internet forums, He took it to the STREETS."
Now so far as this goes it's a pretty good characterization of how I was at that time - what it doesn't capture, however, was the maniac frenzy with which I conducted my evangelization of the godless Lost - who included everyone who didn't believe as I did, especially those Christians of other denominations, whom I regarded as utter heretics and would happily have burnt at the stake (I'm not at all exaggerating but being perfectly serious here - that was my sincere opinion regarding the proper treatment of unrepentant heretics) unless they recanted and accepted my Jesus as their Jesus.
Let me say at the outset - I have not a single conversion to my name. Even at the time this didn't disappoint or perturb me, because I didn't consider evengelizing to be my calling. What I was called to do, or so it seemed back then, was work with those who already believed, were my brothers and sisters in the church. I had ambitions to rise within the hiearachy of the church to which I then belonged. I was getting a name for being biblically very well read, doctrinally sound and committed while being radical in the good sense - that of being willing to do street work and sometimes to do it outside the congregation and the church and off my own back.
I once brought home two street-bums, fed them, let them bathe and wash their clothes, and spend the night. I swore my wife to secrecy and continued to befriend these two while telling no one else in the church, until things got out of hand and I had to go to my congregation-leader for help and advice. How that episode influenced their later lives I can't say but it certainly didn't make immediate converts of them. The situation I'd needed help with resolved itself and the two of them drifted away, and I still said nothing nor allowed my wife to speak of it.
That wasn't done consciously to promote my profile in the congregation and the church, but that's the effect it had because my congregation-leader announced the fact in our care-group (the smallest sub-cell of the church and the basic units of the different congregations). He wanted it known as a testament to my practice of our church's understanding both of charity and evangelization. He made his announcement weeks after the event and very close to Christmas because he'd waited to see if I was going to boast - the fact that I hadn't made a significant impression and later bought me influence I wouldn't otherwise have had.
That wasn't why I did it, but was the result of it all the same.
My successes in this field and others within the church community itself meant that my lack of result in terms of converts had no real impact on me. I undertook street-work not because I was good at it but because I thought of it as part of the foundational work of any christian - you tell people about Jesus because he's your Lord and Saviour and because he's redeemed you from sin.
The recognition of those things is the only properly christian motivation for evangelization there is - and honest evangelizing is no more than personal testimony plus the verbatim preaching of the gospel message; that Jesus is the only name on which a man may call in order to be saved. Like all good zealots I did what I did because I loved my God and wanted to serve Him (God was definitely male to me then, rathen than the IT it is to me now) in every way and at every opportunity - but I wasn't unaware that doing what I was doing was gaining me favor and promoting my interests in the church.
Zealotry requires double-think in a lot of areas. Since I did indeed want to advance within the church - I wanted to be a congregation-leader (they exerted tremendous influence over the lives of their congretation-members and were privy to all kinds of secrets, and were much more 'face to face' than the Elders) - I had to pay attention to what would promote that ambition, and at the same time deny that I was being ambitious. I was serving God in the ways I best could. It just so happened that they were all ways that were deeply unpopular with everyone else and that brought me to the attention of those I needed to cultivate if I was to succeed.
Some things were unpopular and didn't get you noticed - like taking part in the cleaning roster or in the general administration of the church - and those things I was never involved in. I went to every meeting. I attended every 'class'. I participated in prayer-groups and prayer-meetings, in care-group and congregation. But I never did anything resembling work - because I'm lazy, and that wasn't what got you noticed by anyone except the other drones.
There is a hierarchy of work in the church, just as there is in any organization. According to the Tent Maker that hierarchy is this -
1Cr 12:28 And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.
If some believer, some zealot, tells you that he is a prophet, or does the work of a prophet, or a teacher, or works miracles; then often the response of the non-believer is to say 'What arrogance' because it seems to the non-believer that the believer has made a totally outrageous claim of parity with figures such as Isaiah or Jeremiah. But the believer will tell you that he or she is in fact humble rather than arrogant and that no such claim is being made - because the inspiration to teach, or prohesy, or work miracles, as well as the power to do all these things is of God, not the believer. And the christian in question almost certainly at a conscious level believes this to be true - while all the while keeping at bay the recognition of an ulterior motivation that is in fact the engine of his zealotry.
This is why those who think that Christians of the fundametalist, charismatic and evangelical sorts are simple-minded couldn't be further from the truth. You need to be intelligent to practise that kind of self-deceit. Smart enough to know what it is will promote your goals, your agenda, clever enough to recognise the people you need to cultivate and to go about cultivating them in the right ways, and determined enough to carry through with whatever you have to do to gain the right kind of attention even if that's something distasteful to you.
Actually, even though I never achieved a single success, I always enjoyed street-work. I had no respect for the intellectual capabilities of the upper levels of the church hierarchy, I detested their sermons, and largely disliked the congregational meetings, and even more the meeting of the whole church in one place that occured once a month. I continued to attend because I was committed to the church's interpretation of the gospel - and because it was then the largest and most influential church in the city. So street-work came as a welcome alternative (occasionally) or an entertaining supplement to (as was mostly the case) the regular meetings and activities.
On one occasion I conceived, organized and ran (with my congregation-leader's willing consent this time) a street-action (as we called them) It was based on this verse:
Isa 55:1 Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
This action was carried out by volunteers from my care group (there were 18 of us, excluding the care-group leader and his wife, and 9 of us participated). We bought loaves of bread and flagons of milk, put up trestle-tables on a main junction of a major thoroughfare in the town, hooked up a sound system, and proceeded to hand out bread and milk while giving away bible-tracts, while I harangued passers-by on the theme of eternal damnation as the price of sin.
I've never been intimidated by public speaking, I can be articulate, passionate and eloquent. And since my text came from Isaiah I was very Old Testament in my approach, emphasing judgment, wrath, and damnation. Jesus barely got a mention, except as the key that let you open the only door out of hell. Very little of the love of God, very much of fury and judgment directed at the sinners of the city and their wicked ways.
Zealots love drama and the OT is far more colorful and dramatic in its drama than is the New Testament. The New Testament is primarily about the work of being a Christian, about faith and works in the real world. The Old Testament is about the pyrotechnics, about plagues and war and genocide and miracles. It's a far more useful series of books for the zealot that loves the sound of his own voice than the gospels. The dramatics and the fireworks allow for a truly oratorical performance - and if that tends to impress those who already believe and can appreciate the nuances of the performance - rather than actually gaining converts - then that's all to the good of the purpose the oratory serves, promoting the preacher and not the word that's preached.
I believe, now, that all zealots come to share this fundamental dishonesty in the end, even if they don't start out that way. I didn't. In the incident my wife refers to, in which I browbeat and cowed a young man, the rage that fuelled my onslaught was genuine. I was outraged that anyone could or would wear a crucifix as an ornament rather than as a declaration of faith. He wore a tiny cross in the lobe of his left ear. I was attending a vocational college in my hometown at the time and I preached my first hellfire and damnation sermon in public, that day, in a hallway of the school, in front of a mezmerised and horrified audience of 17 year olds - many of whom knew my sister, who attended the same school. She was near-mortally embarrassed by the incident and forever after denied that I was her brother, or had anything to do with her, if the episode was ever mentioned in her presence.
I was an honest zealot then, enraptured by my God and blinded by a truth I knew others could see as well as I - it was just that out of sheer perversity they refused to acknowledge it. And I was determined, from the very beginning, to confront them with what I even then considered to be deliberate and knowing disobedience.
This is also an engine of zealotry - the conviction that those who don't share what drives him actually know and believe, deep down, what he knows and believes in public - but will not admit to it out of perverse wickedness. And in the beginning it is a conviction, sincere and honest, and all the more dangerous because of it. Some zealots become fanatics precisely because of the repeated refusal to admit what he knows to be a self-evident truth.
I became a dishonest zealot when I finally found a church I could commit to and in which I wanted to be fully involved - on my terms and in pursuit of my own agenda. Not all zealots come to that expression of dishonesty. Some go on to murder in the name of their religion as a cause; some simply find a soap-box and preach from it at every opportunity - all the while piously referring to their vanity as prophesy or teaching which, in their humility (humility being a part of christian piety) they attest comes to them from God because, after all, they're only vessels.
Just as in my case, these soap-box prophets achieve nothing by their prophesying, and take the sting from their failure by saying that they have no responsibility for conversion because conversion comes from God, not from men. Just as in my case they ignore the testimony of the New Testament which, in books such as Acts, records that thousands upon thousands were converted at the preaching of the Apostles; which records that thousands listened to Jesus as he preached and turned away from their previous lives in consequence of hearing him speak.
It's true that not everyone is an Apostle, and that every Christian is subject to the Great Commission - to go into the world and make disciples of all men - but even the least well equipped to evangelize can ensure that when they do preach the word of God their preaching doesn't actually repel their hearers.
True zealots of any faith are marked by this lack of success, and by their complete indifference to it, just as I was. I was not responsible for what happened to the seed once I'd thrown it on the ground. Those who heard me were responsible. And if they failed to convert, or refused to convert, then the fault was in them, in their hardness of heart, and they were to be held accountable not me.
What feeds the zealot is not success but attention. The more you respond to them (whether that response is in the form of ecstatic conversion or outraged repudiation) then the more they will claim success - because the Word (whatever it may be) is being heard. If the Word is preached and heard then the believer's obligation is satisfied; leaving the soap-box prophet or teacher to bask in the attention of the unbelievers and the approbation of those who believe as he or she does.
Of course, the zealot may measure success in other terms: in bodies blown apart, buildings destroyed, politics hijacked and democracy thrown into confusion; but still the Word has been preached and heard, and after its preaching there is the warm fuzzy glow of knowing that everyone is fixated upon you, enemies and friends alike, your agenda advanced, your goals brought just a little closer to being realized.
It was of such people that Jesus spoke when he condemned, in the Gospel of John, those Jews who prayed in public and made enormous show of their piety. Son of God or not, he was right when they said they already had their reward. I was one of them, a long time ago, and I know I got what I wanted, what I deserved, and what I had earned.
In the end I became sickened by such rewards, which is why I am no longer a zealot. As to why I'm no longer a Christian there are many reasons. Two of them are that I became aware of the vanity and culpability in myself that is a principle drive of all kinds of zealotry; and another is the realization that such vanity and culpability is a vital part of Christianity itself. To be Christian, except in rare instances, is to be vain and culpable - and the only way to avoid that vanity and culpability is to flee the religion itself.