ARE YOU A “JELLY FISH” CHRISTIAN – PREACHER?

It is not hard to spot a jellyfish Christian or theologian. They care more about what others think about their beliefs than the truth of their beliefs. To use contemporary language, a jellyfish Christian or theologian is one who just won’t declare his beliefs. Nor is he willing to pay the cost for them. He professes to follow Christ, but when he is called upon to pay the price, he compromises, either redefining the Christian faith or denying it altogether.

Sadly, there are many jellyfish Christians and theologians today. If we are not careful, we can subtly become one too. We begin to compromise, shift our positions, become ambiguous, or hide our beliefs in embarrassment. And lest we be recognized for what we are, we begin to pressure others to do the same.

Jesus, however, was no jellyfish nor did he produce jellyfish followers, but disciples who would pick up their cross and die, literally.

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10:34-39 ESV)

J.C. Ryle described a jelly -fish Christian as one without bone, or muscle, or power. A jelly-fish is a pretty and graceful object when it floats in the sea, contracting and expanding like a little, delicate, transparent umbrella. Yet the same jelly-fish, when found on the beach is a mere helpless lump, without capacity for movement, self-defense, or self-preservation. Sadly, It is a vivid type of much of the religion of this day, of which the leading principle is, “Just love everybody, don’t worry about biblical doctrine, it’s just too divisive.

We have hundreds of jelly-fish men of the cloth, so called clergymen, who do not appear to have a single bone in their body of divinity. They don’t have opinions; and they are so afraid of “extreme views” that they have no views at all. THEY ARE TERRIFIED ABOUT BEING DIVIDED BY TRUTH, AND PREFER TO BE UNITED BY ERROR!

Thousands of jelly-fish sermons are preached every year, sermons without an edge, or a point, or a corner, smooth ear tickling diatribes, awakening no sinner, and edifying no saint.

We have an interminable number of jelly-fish graduates annually turned out from our Liberal and even so called reformed seminaries armed with a few scraps of second-hand human philosophy, who think it a mark of cleverness and intellect to have no decided opinions about anything biblical, and seem to be utterly unable to make up their minds as to what is Christian truth.

Worst of all, we have myriads of jelly-fish worshippers—respectable church-going people, who have no distinct and definite views about any point in theology. They cannot discern things that differ, any more than color-blind people can distinguish colors. They think everybody is right and nobody wrong, everything is true and nothing is false, all sermons are good and none are bad, every clergyman is sound and no clergyman is unsound. They are “tossed to and fro, like children, by every wind of doctrine”; forty days of this and fifty days of that.

They are often carried away by any new excitement and sensational movement; ever ready for new things, because they don’t have a firm grasps on sound doctrine, and are utterly unable to “render a reason of the hope that is in them.”

Never was it more important for all professed believers to hold systematic views of biblical truth, and for preachers to “preach the word, in season, and out of season” very clearly and distinctly, without apology.