selective reading

On my way home from Har­ry Pot­ter at 3am, I drove past this Bible church that always has annoy­ing signs out.  They write things that are appar­ent­ly sup­posed to make you want to come into their church.  I can’t remem­ber spe­cif­ic past exam­ples, but they did spell Matthew with one T recent­ly.  The one this morn­ing just got to me though.  “The wages of sin is death.  Romans 6:23”  Um, sure.  Yes, that’s part­ly cor­rect.  One word (“for”) miss­ing at the begin­ning, but the next six words are right.  How­ev­er, the major­i­ty of the verse is miss­ing: “but the free gift of God is eter­nal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  Per­haps I focus on grace too much (isn’t too lit­tle law, too much Gospel a crit­i­cism of the ELCA?), but that part of the verse seems exceed­ing­ly impor­tant.

You can’t scare peo­ple into believ­ing some­thing.  That isn’t faith.  And selec­tive read­ing bugs me.