At my church in Kitchener we are going through "40 Days of Community" which is the follow-up to "40 Days of Purpose" from the famous book The Purpose Driven Life. For each of the 40 days you have a reading to go through. I just wanted to share part of yesterday's:
"Love cares about the destiny of others. If you knew the cure for cancer or AIDS, and you kept it as secret, telling no one while millions continued to die, would that be loving? Of course not, If you knew the key to extending human life by 50 years, would you want to share it with others? Of course you would. But as believers (Christians) who've learned the way to eternal life, we have an even more important, longer lasting, and urgent message to share with the world, and love leaves no choice"
What the author is saying is that as Christians, we believe that we have the most important cure in the world. The effects of sin on a human has eternal consequences, while the effects of AIDS are temporary. With this in mind, is a Christian a loving person if they don't share their faith. I mean, if they are honest with themselves, they believe that if people don't have Christ, they are going to be in Hell when they die. Sometimes we like to sugarcoat this fact with phrases that are more pleasant such as "eternity apart from God", but the reality is no Christ = Hell.
As a Christian, this is a devistating fact to ponder. I can do all the nice things in a world, but if I don't tell a person about Christ, have I really showed them love? Maybe in some ways, but ultimately not.
The way I see it, if a person's house is burning down while they are sleeping inside it, knitting that person a sweater might be nice, but it would be far more important and loving to wake them up and get them out of the house.
1 comment:
Hey Jamie,
It's Jenna. I appreciated this post because it sums up something that I've been working through for the past while. Believing that God has called me into social work, and being placed in a work-environment that serves people who are dying, has inspired me to petition God about how I am supposed to effectively and professionally minister to people in a place that is very much anti-Christ, thus closed to the Gospel. So, like those overseas, I also have to be strategic, and totally dependent on His leading. It's an interesting balance: knowing that there is GREAT need to proclaim Truth into the lives of the lost dying, but knowing that if I take my witness outside of God's leading, and take control of when and how I talk about Him, I could get myself kicked out of the very place that He's brought me, and render my witness useless. It's a tricky business, trying to constructively use a sense of urgency.
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