~ Doing Life, Living Church

There have been some rumblings in the camp today, some that have to do with the discipleship of believers, some to do with the interfacing of believers and unbelievers, and some to do with the fruits of spiritual life. So I guess that even I, in my clay palace, am capable of being effected by my environment.

Some time back there was a TV series (?) called Doing Life starring Tony Danza, the only significance for today is the title. For Christians have a life sentence, and we should be living as if we are doing life, not as the world does life but counter culturally. We should be allowing our life sentence to highlight that we have a future, that our life is fuller than anyone else’s.

We should be demonstrating all those things that are free to us through our Master Jesus the Christ. For we have all that the world can offer, without the negatives that beset even celebrities and the wealthy. We have love to extend to all that we come in contact with all because Christ loved us first, and that love is what will, ultimately, see the Kingdom of God arise on planet Earth.

So often it is possible to lose that kingdom feeling just because we allow the pressures of work, society, or whatever to implode our freedoms and suddenly we are no different to Joe Bloggs from just down the street, full of anxieties because things aren’t going the way that we wanted them to.

This is just where our adversary wants us. The deceiver has everyone else convinced that we are fakes or at best fools and hypocrites and when we lose our joy, or love, that is the evidence that he uses to perpetuate the lie. Before His execution Jesus told Peter that the Devil had eyes on Peter to break him but that Jesus had prayed to the Father to protect Peter. This would equally apply to all of us. Remember Christians are simply sinners saved by grace who have the mandate to bring others sinners to meet the supplier of saving grace

As I said there has been a lot of discussion about who is a Christian and how we would know them. This might seem ironic given the fact that I have just been spelling out how the world expect a Christian to be but this question has been coming from the Christian side of the battle. It seems that we have a higher scorecard to be marked, especially for high profile or public figures. This is not new. I seem to recall when Chuck Colson announced his “conversion” that there were those who thought he was looking for a sentence revision.

The issue for many in this case has been that the announcement of faith was done publicly and, for some at least, may have been a PR stunt. These people started wanting proof and they started with His so-called “fruit”.

Personally when I hear of someone coming to faith I am happy and give that person at least time prove their bona fides, as if it was up to me to decide whether I was being fed a line or not. After all it is not up to me, in the end, I may be one of the ones Jesus said of “away with you I knew you not”

It doesn’t matter who you are, if you come to faith you start afresh. The stains of the past are just there, in the past. When that happens it takes time for the Master’s Stroke to emerge in your in your life. And to top that the way I read the fruit of the New Testament they are for our personal enabling, they affect our testimony for sure but our fruit does not necessarily indicate whether we have had a valid experience. Too often this sort of questioning indicates to others judgemental hypocrisy and a lack of the sort of love that we are supposed to extend to each other

So we as the church, not the building but, the fellowship group, must start to behave as a faith group, united throughout the world to live the Gospel Message. The reason that apart from the title I have not mentioned the church is that It was my contention that we are the church, we just need to live as the church to push the Cause of Christ out to those who have not yet been invited to join the revolution.