What makes a good Christian.
We are well into the start of a new year and I want to just remind us all of what it is that we think makes a good Christian in today’s world.
1Co 13:1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
When I was a child just starting school it became evident to me on the very first day that school was not going to be fun. First of all I did not want to go, so my mother walked me to school. Second, I would be away from home, which no doubt my mother wanted.
I did not want to be away from what I considered to be contentment, security, and safety. I was basically afraid of school. Of course I did not know that at the time, I just felt that I was being punished. Of course I knew I had to go to school, but I was not ready for it.
I whined all the way there about not wanting to go. I was five years old, I had no real desire to start going to school, I was satisfied not learning anything. Still, my mother led me to the great double doors of my school entry, and opened the doors, led me inside and turned and left.
I waited a couple of minutes, milling around with the kids in the hallway just outside my classroom, then turned to the great double doors and opened them and beat my mother back home. Crying all the way.
My mother promptly took me back, and opened the great double doors and took me to the classroom door, opened it and introduced me to my first grade teacher. Ms. Hooper. Who immediately introduced me to her rules for tardy attendance. Fifteen minutes in the cloak room.
So you see, my foreboding feelings were justified. I had dreaded this day for a whole summer and sure enough, my apprehensions were correct, school was not going to be fun.
I spent the first fifteen minutes of school in the cloak room, being punished for tardiness. Not a great start to an effort that I would spend the next 12 years of my life trying to cope with.
But in just a few days I had made new friends and came to understand that actually school was not that difficult. It was not all that long that I learned what it is that I was there to do. I was to be a good student, and all I had to do was to learn what it is that makes a good student.
Some of us Christians come into life that way, we just don't like the way things come into and out of our lives, Jesus too was a rebel of sorts, an inconvenient man for many of his Jewish brothers, the teachers of the law, the Pharisees and the saducees, He just didn't win many friends with the religious authorities. There was always that feeling when one was around Jesus that there was something he was trying to tell us. with Jesus the feeling always seemed to be that one was lacking something. Jesus was uncomfortable for some of us to be around. I always felt inadequate around him. Like he always knew what I was thinking. But we began to listen to him and he began to make sense, sure there has always been a God, but He was someone that was always remote, way up there on his throne, just an observer who kept records. We would someday have to face him, but not now. How wrong does Satan make us feel?
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