This quote comes from todays Utmost for His Highest. I read this statement several times, and pondered it each time. It caused me to evaluate my life, public and private. It caused me a little twinge of concern as I did as I thought how do the two stack up? Is there no difference or is there a big difference in the two? Stop now for a few minutes and just think of this quote, "My worth to God in public is what I am in private." For non believers I will make the challenge jujst to compare your personal life to your public and see how they stack up. Ok, take the time I offered now to think.
Find any descrepencies? Anything that while you are home, or in your car, office that you would not want anyone else to know about? If there was then these are the things that are being refered to at this time. Maybe we would be ambarrassed by them, scared, punished, whatever but the point is that we have created two selves, two Mikes. The one that we want people to see and the one that we don't want others to see.
For me as a Christian, Jesus asks us to be a light, a Holy Temple, and example, to do things out of love for others not out of personal gain. There is a multitude of descriptions of what we hould be to others all steming from the Holy Spirit within us. He also makes a point to the Pharisees that they are white washed tombs. Pretty on the outside, fresh, clean and dead on the inside, ugly and stale. This is what Chambers is relating to, that we can not have this duplicity in our lives. Chhristian or non Christian it is not the person that we should be, it is not Holy and it is not healthy.
I am truly only as good to God as my heart is, the well spring of my soul. I am only as useful to His Kingdom as the example that I am to others. I can fake it for a while but eventually the truth comes out and the worse things are that have been hidden and not worked out, the worse the judgement. For the Non Believer, no matter how "good" you want people to think you are, you are only as good as your worst thought when all is said and done.
To follow Christ is the realization that you do have these things within you that are not good, not Holy, not as the Creator intended for you. To be saved you don't have to be in a deep dark place with no other way out. Plenty of Christian families have children the grow up in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. To be saved you only have to realize that what tends to be in you is not always "good" and that Jesus Christ will give you the one true path to what is truly "good", God.
So God knows what is on the iside. He will always judge according to what He sees there, be it now or at the time of our deaths, He will unfold the outer layer of what the public sees and look at our soul. There He will see who we truly were as we went about our lives. With this in mind we should continually evaluate, continually ask for forgivness, seek true repentance form the things that hinder us from truly glorifing Him in our lives. Then we are moving closer to a more full relationship with Him. For those "good" people, do the same evaluations and ernestly seek to improve what you find. You wouldn't want to be a white washed tomb.
Lord, even in me I find dark spots. I ask that I continue always to look for them and when I find them taht I am able to bring them to your feet, have true repentance and move closer to you. I long that I may have no difference between what is the public eye and what is in the private areas within me.
No comments:
Post a Comment