Christian Living

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It is amazing how loose everyone has become regarding the salvation of man.

Praying the Sinner's Prayer is awesome, but it is just the first step and the beginning of a true Christian's walk. After taking that first step, repenting, turning from sin, and living a life dedicated to God becomes the real mission of a Christian, the "fruitbearing" life we need to strive for. We must strive to live a life worthy of the gospel of Christ, standing firm in the Spirit, so that people can hear about our lives as a testimony, even when they haven't seen us in person. And while it's true that people can't hear the gospel and be saved if we don't tell them ("Faith comes by hearing and hearing through the Word of God." Romans 10:17), they won't even be interested if we don't show them.

Of course, salvation is a gift from God by grace through faith and not of works, but we have to try, don't we? That is where we as Christians must tighten up our game if we ever hope to be successful fishers of men. Having a desire to be holy is honorable and I would venture to say 99.9% of Christians have a desire to do so. The problem is that holiness, as defined in the Bible, is scarcely attained, leaving non-Christians with a less than stellar example of Jesus Christ...us. Our everyday lives are the most important part of this equation and that is where the ball is dropped most frequently. During the one hour on Sunday when we gather to worship at the cathedral, we are the closest to God as we usually can get. It is when we leave those hallowed grounds that our fleshly desires almost instantaneously take control over us, quenching our spirit's holy fire with its death grip of sin and evil desire for another 6.95 days. It's during those times when we must engage in the spiritual warfare Paul wrote so adamently about in many of his letters.

Let us not be foolish and naive to the fact that demons are here to steal what we know as good and replace it with evil during those spiritual dry spells. The small amount of God in our lives these days is not enough to win the battles between our flesh and our spirit. The more this reversing process is repeated, the more we can't grasp that what we are doing is evil, so sinning becomes natural to us. We then condone other people's sins more easily and it becomes a snowball effect...and we all know the old snowball-headed-downhill ending. So IF we are going to talk the Christian talk, we must start to walk the Christian walk, or take a slow ride to a hardened heart. That's not the life God wants for us. He has equipped us with all the weapons we need and, if used properly, we can live a victorious life worthy of the gospel of Christ.

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