God has changed my life.
He started when I was a child as my parents took me to church, and I
learned so many things. Yet I didn’t
accept Jesus as my Savior until I was 15.
I looked like a Christian. I
acted and talked like a Christian. I
even won an award at a Christian camp for being the “most Christian boy” when I
in elementary school.
That’s where I find myself when I have the internal
conversation about Christianity and the culture. God has not told us to reproduce our life style
or the way we live. He told us to lead
people to know Him.
We live in different cultures. People do things different ways, dress
differently, talk differently, but everyone needs hope, faith in God who is the
beginning and the end of everything. We
must be careful not to judge if someone is saved by the way they dress or by
where they do things. Yes, when we
accept Jesus, our choices and decisions will begin to change. Those changes begin in our hearts from the
inside out. False Christianity is when
the changes are only on the outside but inside there is no peace or
forgiveness.
People will know we know Jesus by the way we love. The culture will change as God changes
people.
Many
Samaritans from the village believed in Jesus because the woman had said, “He
told me everything I ever did!” 40 When they came out to see him,
they begged him to stay in their village. So he stayed for two days, 41 long enough for many more to
hear his message and believe. 42 Then they said to the woman,
“Now we believe, not just because of what you told us, but because we have
heard him ourselves. Now we know that he
is indeed the Savior of the world.”
As
people saw Jesus and those being changed by Jesus they were convinced of the
truth. Often it is our actions that
speak louder than our words. Our words
and our actions must match, and when they don’t match, there will be problems,
confusion and destruction.
One of
the greatest problems in the world and in the life of Christians today is the
fact that judge each other by the wrong standards. If you do this, you aren’t a Christian. God uses all kinds of things to draw people
closer to Him.
May
God use us to make Jesus famous and to help others believe in God. That is my prayer. For the community I like in, I pray for
change. I pray that lives are changed,
that the economy changes and gets stronger, that the crime rate and drug use
will become less and less as Jesus becomes more and more real to the people I
meet.
God is
still in the business of changing lives.
Changing culture is God’s business as well.
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