This past weekend Abby and I went up to the Poconos for our anniversary. We had a very lovely time but something totally out of place happened that I will never forget. You would think that being our anniversary weekend we would not watch TV at all. Well in most cases that is probably true but you see with Zion we don’t get to just sit together and relax a whole lot. Plus, we don’t have cable so being able to have more than 4 channels as an option was really exciting for us.
Anyway one of the channels we could watch was a Christian station and on Saturday night they had a broadcast of Billy Graham preaching from back in the 1960’s. We could tell because it was in black and white. He was doing his thing, telling the gospel like it is but he said something that even though it was 1960 when he said it, it is still a problem today. He said if church going Christians were really followers of Jesus, crime would cease to exist, divorce in America would be a distant memory and the race problem would be no more.
You know I have to agree with him. I look at the church worldwide today and I have to say to myself, is this really what God intended for His people to be like. We have become so complacent in our comfortable little churches. We dare not go out into the world and mix it up with “those people” for fear something awful will happen.
Jesus said we are the salt of the earth but I fear that we have lost our saltiness; we are not very effective anymore. He also said that if we are neither hot nor cold; lukewarm he will vomit us out of his mouth. We need to break out of this comfortable mold we are in and start getting out hands dirty reaching the lost. We can turn things around and be the light of the world that God has called us to be.
God never called us to a life of comfort; He called us to a life of sacrifice. Romans 12:1 says to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice. That doesn’t sound like a life of comfort to me. Abby and I are on a campaign right now to simplify our lives. We have really come to a place where we just don’t feel right have so much excess when people in our very state, let alone the world don’t have anything. So we have tried to downsize and live with what we need instead of what we want. We got rid of all the clothes we don’t need or wear, changed our phones to have only what we need instead of a big fancy phone we really don’t use, and we are trying to give more monetarily to organizations, like Bethesda Mission, that help the poor and homeless. Now I’m not saying this to brag, in fact we tried to keep it pretty secret but I’m saying this now because in the midst of sacrificing all this stuff sometimes we hit...we’ll say roadblocks. But every time we get frustrated with our cheaper phones or we feel a financial pinch we’ve started saying to ourselves and each other, “It’s not a sacrifice if it doesn’t hurt.”
When we live a life of sacrifice other’s benefit and through that we bring people to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. What Billy Graham said is true, if we, who claim to follow Jesus, would start living as though we are followers of Jesus things will change drastically.
If you don’t believe me listen to this story from the second century. The Gospel exploded around the Mediterranean Sea because of a plague that hit the area. People were throwing family members out into the street if they were affected by the plague, in order to save themselves. Can you believe it throwing your own brother out into the street to die, just to save yourself from this disease? But just as fast as these affected people were tossed out, the Christians in the town would come and collect them, bring them into their own homes and care for them. A lot of the time curing the affected person, just to get the disease themselves.
People saw the love of Jesus come alive through his followers, embracing death and disease with open arms just to show a person how much God loves them and to share Jesus with them.
Now we might not have a plague per say but we have plenty hurting people to reach with the love of Christ. If you don’t believe me come spend a Wednesday night at my Youth Group. We have kids who come from broken homes, with parents being totally selfish and self absorbed; they face a lot of mature things for such a young age. They are hurting and need God’s love and that is just one example.
What crazy thing is God calling you to do, or to give up. Don’t be afraid to live a life of sacrifice, you may suffer here on earth but remember this is not our permanent home.
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