Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Thursday November 17, 2011

I am one of those dinosaurs that believe the scripture teaches that in order to be a true member of a church you must, as Jesus said, "be born again." Observation reveals that the ideas that cultures have really do not do the changing work that being born again puts into effect. The reason is simple. Affected change cannot change your origin or destination. The grace of God revealed in Christ Jesus does both.

I will not go into all the jots and tittles, but in Christ we are placed into the lineage of Christ in a spiritual birth and are no longer condemned with the Adamic heritage taught by Paul, in Adam all die, in Christ all are made alive. In Christ we are transferred from the Kingdom of darkness and death into the light of His dear Son.

C.M. Ward mentioned an account of a group of Western businessmen touring a foreign country and coming upon a group of natives feasting on human flesh, cannibals if you will. Shocked, they began to question the chief. To their surprise the chief answered their questions in perfect English. The chief revealed that he had earned Doctorates in two fields of expertise.

Another of the men asked, "How can you with your extensive education still eat human flesh?" The chief replied, "I now use a knife, fork and spoon." Here we see the beauty of education without Christ.

The niceties of civilization were in full play, but the core of redemption was totally missing in that Christ teaching reveals humans are in the image of God and there is no account of God recommending partaking of our neighbor's flesh or wife.

As a matter of scripture truth the horrors of cannibalism are typed in the spiritual sense as one of the worst practices for a Christian when Paul writes in Galatians 5:15 "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."

Just as a cannibal eating a human devours the human, so the bitter practicing of devouring another Christian with gossip and slander is an eating away of the spirit ending sometimes in suicide of the person being eaten alive by the critics. (Note news articles on bullying).

In any community you can drive around and see places of worship that used to vibrate with the glory of God and the joy on Christ in the hearts of those who worshiped there. Now these buildings are vacant, or a saloon or Mary the Twister's School of Exotic Dance. The Spirit as Elvis has left the building. Those who practiced biting and devouring one another soon were consumed of each other and the local witness having been eaten alive, disappeared.

Will Rogers told of fishing while a boy and hearing a rustling in the bushes, he checked and found two snakes fighting. He watched and went back to fishing. He left off fishing and went back to where the snakes were fighting. He noted they were gone. It seems each had gotten the other's head in its mouth and they had swallowed one another.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2011 Use with credit.

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