Tuesday, April 24, 2018

It's Time To Leave The Christian Welfare Culture Behind And Get To Work



Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you… —Luke 10:20

{CHAMBERS} “In Luke 10:20, Jesus told the disciples not to rejoice in successful service, and yet this seems to be the one thing in which most of us do rejoice. We have a commercialized view— we count how many souls have been saved and sanctified, we thank God, and then we think everything is all right. Yet our work only begins where God’s grace has laid the foundation. Our work is not to save souls, but to disciple them. Salvation and sanctification are the work of God’s sovereign grace, and our work as His disciples is to disciple others’ lives until they are totally yielded to God. […] As workers for God, we must reproduce our own kind spiritually, and those lives will be God’s testimony to us as His workers. God brings us up to a standard of life through His grace, and we are responsible for reproducing that same standard in others. […] Whenever our Lord talked about discipleship, He always prefaced His words with an “if,” never with the forceful or dogmatic statement— “You must.” Discipleship carries with it an option.”

{ELGIN}  Do you consider yourself a “Christian worker” or do you think that only people who are ministry in church or on mission are the workers.  I ask because if you read some of Chambers devotions you might think that they don’t apply to you.  We are all Christian workers with a common ministry.  We have all been given the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:17-20) “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors  That means that we are all workers.  Imagine if you went to a football game to watch and the coach came into the stands and said “Suit up, I am putting you in!” But you just came to watch the game .. to cheer when someone gets slammed to the ground … you had no intention of letting that happen to you!  Being a Christian is not a spectator sport.  It’s messy, demanding, grueling at times even.  But we are not asked to “play the game” on our own.  We have the power of God with us and in us.

I want you to see the bigger picture.  In Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren wrote “It’s not about me.” And it isn’t.  We are not saved to tell the world about ourselves … just to be blessed and happy .. content with our comfort …. we are Christ’s ambassadors .. we represent Him to the world .. but for some of us, we don’t do that so well.  We refuse to get out of our seat … we try to blend in with the crowd around us … we only want to enjoy the “upside” of being a Christian … the benefits and blessings without any responsibility toward God.  It’s like a Christian welfare culture.  Lord bless me but don’t ask me to do anything that would make me feel uncomfortable or endanger my lifestyle or relationships or require me to do something for You.  Think about it .. pray about it .. and repent if you need to … Then get you game face on (which is to say get right spiritually) .. the Coach is putting you in!

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