Christian Living

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The church of Jesus Christ has been accused of being so heavenly minded that it is no earthly good. While the writer understands the sentiment, he disagrees with it, at least as far as the condition and impact of the church in his generation is concerned. A more apt expression might be that the church is so earthly minded that it is good for almost nothing at all.

The history of Christianity is filled with wondrous examples of the followers of Christ transforming the world with truth, compassion, and love. Believers have been heralds, the very voice of God, sharing the good news concerning God's love for mankind and his provision of efficacious grace unto the wayward soul. The message of the cross is one of transformative power and the early disciples were brokers, trading the poverty and impotence of sin for the richness and omnipotence of God - they were men and women who fearlessly shared the revolutionary truth that the wages of our transgressions had been paid, the power of sin had been broken, and death itself had been destroyed.

Despite intense persecution from religious and political leaders who denied the truth and feared the loss of their significance, authority, and power, these fearless followers succeeded in turning the world upside down for Christ in their generation. A different paradigm has unfolded in our time - apostles of the religion of humanism have traversed the world in the last century and one half, spreading wayward seeds that have grown into spreading vines of falsehood that have grown up among the once flowering buds of truth.

It is equally true and an even greater shame that over the course of the last two millennia, the church has, at times, certainly strayed from it's message of love and hope, binding many in the chains of the divergent extremes of legalistic form and licentious chaos. To venture to these poles is always wrong - the first leads to isolationist tendencies that restrict not only the followers of Christ, but the Savior's message as well. Conversely, the latter is a path to an imitative approach that will, without fail, confine the gospel's inherent uniqueness to a prison of ineffective similitude.

In either case, the attendant result is the same - the pathway upon which the ministry of Life can flow is narrowed and the walkers thereof inflicted with the dreaded malady of muteness, thus limiting those who may come and restricting where the road itself may go.

The answer is a middle passage, but not one characterized by the suffering and shackles of the historic waterway of the same nomenclature; instead, those who pursue this course are accompanied by the refreshing winds of comfort and freedom - breezes which indeed blow gently upon the heart of the traveller. This is the Way that leads to Truth and Life. This is the Way that leads to a Cross-road, an intersection of earth with heaven, of falsehood with truth, of death with life, of the kingdom of man with the kingdom of God.

It is a Way upon which the infiltrator much wind, knowing that he is in the world but not of it, that it is no longer he who lives but that it is Christ who lives in him, thereby bringing the assurance that he, like His Saviour, will "bring eternity to bear upon time." Truly, there is no higher calling and no greater purpose.

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