Embrace healing

This post is from the defunct blog "Dying Church"

Frederica Mathewes-Green in The Church in Emerging Culture:

How can we know Christ? I don't know where to begin Begin. The place to begin is with repentance. You must not picture this as despair or masochism. Instead, you must see a sick person who wants to get well. We are sick, world-sick, self-sick, and even our ability to comprehend our sickness is damaged. We abandon ourselves into the hands of the healer, who loves us, who won victory for us and freed us from bondage to death... What dissaudes us from embracing healing? A powder-puff gospel that invites people to get comfortable instead. A cupcake gospel that invites people to like themselves just the way they are and to stay that way. A self-pity gospel that is afraid to reprove, though the Father will chasten every son he receives. A soft, enculturated gospel that is so dazzled by the prevailing culture's valuing of self-affirmation and self-esteem that it cannot call it to repentance.