March 18, 2018

Are You Following Jesus or the World?

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. – James 4:8

We love the world. Oh, we may complain about things, get upset with those who disagree with us, and lament the violence, but we love it just the same. We just want to take all the good and shove aside all the bad.

It doesn’t work that way. We get a strong dose of both on a regular basis. Why? Because so much of what we term “good” really isn’t. We just can’t help ourselves. We want it all anyway. And that, my friend, frequently leads us to the bad.

Think about the movies you like to watch. How many of them have violence or sex or bad language? You watch them anyway because they’re entertaining. In fact, you’ve probably watched so many of them that you’ve become numb to what you’re actually seeing and hearing.

Have you ever padded your expensive account because “everyone does it”? Have you ever helped yourself to extra supplies from your workplace because the company “has plenty?” Have you ever bad mouthed a co-worker or played “politics” to discredit a rival on your path to a promotion? It’s all sin. That everyone else might be doing it doesn’t lessen the sin.

Do you ever make excuses for your failure to tithe? There’s just not enough money to go around. You don’t approve of all the ways the church spends the money. You aren’t certain that charities really do all they claim to do. You make excuses and keep it for yourself, neglecting to give first to God even though you know that’s what the Bible tell you to do.

We all like our lifestyles, don’t we? We work hard and deserve to be rewarded for it. We look down on people who have less than we do, assuming they don’t work hard enough, aren’t smart enough, or have secrets in their closet that have caused them to have less than we do. We loudly judge what we don’t know in a vain effort to justify how wrong our lifestyles really are.

It’s not that God doesn’t want good things for us. He does. Sometimes the blessings He extends are material things. More times those blessings come when we loosen our grip on stuff and extend a helping hand to His people. We are to love and share and be an active part in building people up, in helping the less fortunate. We choose to ignore the true call of His Spirit to focus on the desires of our flesh.

The slow shift toward the world and away from God rarely comes in a swift decline. Rather it comes from the small choices we make each day. Every time we compromise we step a little closer to accepting sin as “normal” in our own lives. Every time we point our judgmental finger, we are looking more like a Pharisee and less like the Jesus we claim to love.

We have a choice. We can pull back from the world or we can go toward it. We can be the light, solitary though the flame may be at times, or we can join the crowd. The choice belongs to you. What’s it going to be?