It’s spelled T-I-M-E
Have you ever heard those sayings, “Nothing says I love you like TIME spent with your child?” It’s the same for all things isn’t it?
Last evening Bobby and I went out on Independence Avenue to share the gospel. Neither one of us were very motivated, we were exhausted from the long work week, and 4th of July mania. However we went down to the Avenue after some discussion and prayer time.
We had some pretty engaging encounters last evening, especially Bobby. He met a young man named Tyrone who said he had converted to Islam about a year ago. It sounded like this guy had a whole bunch of things he had thought about, he had considered eternal things but he had listened to more passionate people sharing with him about the Koran and discrediting the bible than he had ever heard anyone share to him about the things of Jesus Christ. He would say things like if Christ had died for all men what’s the point why aren’t we all 100% sanctified? Why do we need a “go-between” between us and God? All questions that we were able to answer and yet it seems as if there’s few out there in the world proclaiming the true Gospel of Jesus Christ, and showing Christ as He truly is redeemer, savior, master.
So please pray for Tyrone, some others we met were Isaiah, John, Shelia. Isaiah goes to a Charismatic church but didn’t seem to understand about Jesus Christ, or the gospel. He thought as long as you’re more good than bad you’re going to heaven. These were interesting times, Bobby was able to share the gospel with him and it was obvious he wasn’t quite ready to grasp it all in that moment, but you could see the wheels churning… We spoke to a man named John, a professing believer from Liberia and a women named Shelia who just as the conversation was getting good her bus came and she had to leave.
All of this to say that had we not gone out this evening and verbally engaged these people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, we would have continued while down here in the North East to live an isolated and insulated Christianity.
Christianity is not supposed to be a faith of isolated individualism or insulated introversion; it is a faith of living a Christian life and then making disciples from God’s elect whom he chooses out of the world. What does this mean? We have to engage the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I think something happens as you grow in Christ. When you first become a believer your heart changes, your life changes you begin to make friends who love God and slowly you peal away from that old life, or sometimes instantly you peel away from it. As you grow and grow you pay little attention to what’s going on in the world around you. Oh you see it on television and you experience it’s unpleasantries as you engage the workforce, where you have little influence or control but we spend the rest of our “Free” time with the body. This is much needed when we are babes in Christ because we are so often easily ensnared, however as we grow we forget that there is a lost world out there. We somehow stop making non-Christian friends, we begin for he most part to isolate ourselves from the world so to speak, living much like the Amish only we exist in the regular mainstream culture. We then claim to be in the world but not of the world. I don’t think that living in isolation or overly insulated Christian lives is what is meant to be in the world and not of the world.
We are to be in Christ and then showing or demonstrating Christ to the world. Often however we are the person sitting alone by themselves in the world, bible at our side or in our bag, with a great feeling of loneliness. We feel the strain of being sojourners but not the urgency to tell others about the journey, and the cross. We stand firmly in our Justification in Christ yet the fear of men scare us to death. The flesh wars against the spirit and the spirit the flesh, so why so often do we allow the flesh to win out in this area? What has allowing our flesh to use the fear of men done to the Church and our culture? We react to our surroundings and the world instead actively engaging the world.
We are to be proactively engaging this sinful world with the Gospel, the only thing that can truly give anyone in this world hope, but so often we don’t. We normally say it’s business, perhaps we have too many Christian functions to attend or perhaps it’s just life. We wake in the morning, we drive to work. We may have a spiritual conversation but rarely do we proactively engage it or seek it out. We allow the world to happen to us and then we deal with it, with our own personal faith but because of our own isolation even the Body of Christ suffers because we have lost a level of intimacy that only comes with time together. We don’t have time for time together any longer because people live so far apart, there are too many business meetings, too many things to get done, places to be.
We take in innumerable different modes of media, ipod, television, internet and we sacrifice engaging the culture and body life intimacy for entertainment or prosperity or both. We fear most of all gas prices, the economy taking our prosperity away from us, pulling it out from our fingertips as we hold on ever so tightly to that which we love. We grip tightly our earthly things which we pile up in our Christian liberty. All the while the people that we have isolated and insulated ourselves from, see very little in our lives that is different from their own. I am preaching to myself. Perhaps if they had more time for us as well, they could see more of a difference as if I could blame the lost.
I pray that our faith is never like being in a crowd of people, saved or lost and feeling alone. In the sense of being in the world but isolated from the the world, with the world all around us. I pray that the Holy Spirit would compel believers to desire three things; To love God more, to love the brothers and sisters of the faith more, and to love the lost more, and how do we love in these areas more?
It’s spelled T-I-M-E with them. Priorities must change, life must be different, we must not only love the doctrine we hear but we must make changes in our life to reflect it!
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