I came across this while listing to a sermon last week. The pastor was speaking on Matthew 8:14-17, the part where Jesus goes to Peter's home and his mother in law was ill with a fever. I'm not going to go through the entire sermon here, but the thing that I took away from the message was this: Our purpose is to know God and love others. We see in verse 14 that Jesus came into Peter's home and saw Peter's mother-in-law laying sick in bed. Then Jesus touches her hand, and the fever left her; and she got up and waited on Him. The pastor then interprets the text for the present day Christian: 1) we are meant to bring Christ to others. 2) We are meant to serve others at His touch. 3) However because of illness, Peter's mother-in-law is not able to serve until Christ touches her. What this means is that we can not carry out what God creates us to be until Christ touches us.
The pastor then goes on to say this: "Mankind is not wired for life without God. The soul of man is Christian. Man is meant to recognize the sovereignty of God and God's presence around him. Man is meant to recognize the fact that he has not been faithful to love others as he himself wants to be loved. He does not do unto others as he would like to do unto him. He is meant to come to the only true God for repentance and forgiveness. He is meant to know who God is solely by His Word that He has made known. He is meant to know that forgiveness and now reborn, began to do what God created him to do, and that is to know God and love others. That is what a human is meant to do." Man can not be what he was meant to be until Christ touches him.
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I've got a lot of things running through my head right now, probably because it's a bit late, but I really like this post...and not just because it's posted by someone other than myself (that's was yesterday's elation).
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be so much yearning for meaning and purpose among the younger generations. I think a huge part of that is the fact that they are the younger generations who don't yet have a family, but I'll make a post of that later. It seems like over the last 40 years the pace of society as continually quickened so much that we are constantly surrounded and shouted at and pushed to feel impassioned by so many millions of things that we know are frivolous that we are looking farther and farther down the line, past the marketing pushes and past the constructed associations and assigning the "pointless" tag to things farther down the line that have gone unquestioned in previous eras. We are screamed at that we "need a new car" so often that we being to flippantly dismiss it when it comes to mind, and that discard-it attitude starts a cascade of question-dismiss actions that takes a person down to the core meaning of life, and most always leaves them feeling that most everything is pointless, so why bother trying?
Without having God as the end-base foundation of life it's fairly easy to bore down through layer after layer of life and end on a vast and underlying emptiness. And so many are missing that foundation to give them strength.
Like Lewis posted,we are called to bring Christ to the community, but Christianity has fallen under such a bad wrap that it's difficult to carry Christ forward, specifically because we are not strong enough to do so.
We have to let Christ chip away at our self-centered world views and our pride before we can honestly hope to carry Christ's love to our community. And each chip that Christ carves away will be painful and difficult and it will seem as though he is punishing us for some sick reason. But like the great Renaissance sculpture, Christ is forming us, not deforming us. He is taking a lop of stone and slowly revealing the beauty that he sees in us that so that others can see a fraction, a reflection, of the beauty of Christ.
Until we offer ourselves up for shaping we can hope to encourage others to let Christ shape them.