"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation. 2Corinthians 5:17-18
To be a Christian means, or ought to mean, to be transported into a new world, a world with new ways of looking at things and new standards of worth and importance, where the things that seemed most urgent cease to count, and the things that hitherto appeared commonplace or impracticable become for us the only realities that matter. It has always worked out so, in the deepest Christian experience.
The things that had been counted gain are now found to be mere loss, and the things that were counted loss are now gain for the sake of Christ. And just that change in our standards of values and ways of looking at things was the primary demand of Jesus. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Change your mind and believe the Good News!
Look at what is wrong with the world in which we live today folks. Behind all its tyranny, its injustice, and its pain, is simply a wrong attitude to life. People are living for the wrong things. And behind that wrong attitude to life there lay something still more dangerous ~ a wrong attitude toward God, or perhaps NO attitude to God at all! If people would put God (and keep Him there) in the center of their lives measured against that background, reckoning both its grandeur and its littleness in the light of the great spiritual realities, then our whole aim would be redirected, and we should live no longer for the things that perish, and so our lives would no longer clash with one another.
The new quality of life which comes where God is supreme in the heart, that He called the kingdom of heaven; but only by being converted can people enter it. People seem to shrink from facing the fact that repentance means first of all a revolution in our thinking, a changed heart and philosophy of life, a new overturning of our standards of worth, schooling ourselves to see things from God's standard of living and not merely from the point of view imposed upon us by the conventions of our own social groove.
Spurgeon once wrote "Do all you can, and then do a little more; and when you can do that, then do a little more than you can. Always have something in hand that is greater than your present capacity. Grow up to it, grow more. By many little additions a great house is built. Brick by brick up rose the pyramid. Believe and yet believe. Trust and have further trust. Hope shall become faith, and faith shall ripen to full assurance and perfect confidence in God Most High." These are "good" standards for Christian living today.
May God bless you with a wonderful day as you set your standards to be pleasing in His eyes.
Love in Christ Jesus, Sandy |
