Following my church's Bible Reading Plan lead me to read Exodus 35 today and I simply marveled at how the Israeli nation was ready to sacrifice their belongings for God. I understand that there were many of aspects of rebellion during the Exodus but this specific aspect really caused me to think of how the society I live in views sacrifice and saying no to your own desires. I will limit my usage of the word society to be defined as the predominantly Baptist Christian community that I am surrounded by. I didn't realize before just how much we treasure our belongings and our freedom to have the things that we want. Unfortunately I see this translated a lot into the church setting. We do things and wear things and act in a manner that is a spiritual obstacle to our brothers and sisters and don't even give a second thought to it. Things that are not completely characterized as sin are automatically put into the "I'm free in Christ to do this" category and we don't bother to think twice about how it affects other people. We don't respect our elders and their views; and dismiss them as traditional and old fashioned. So what if their views are traditional and old fashioned? Does that dismiss us from being responsible for not making our brothers and sisters stumble? I think not. I think we are ought to take this example of the Israelites being able to sacrifice anything for God and apply it to our lives and be willing to give up anything for the sake unity. I have heard someone who moved to a more liberal church describe to me the freedom of being able to wear certain things and follow certain fads as if they were the most important thing and it just saddened me to see how tied we are to the things of this world that we chase after them and love them more than we love God or the body of Christ. Do you find yourself lusting after things that are not in themselves sinful but could be if you put them into a context that makes someone else stumble? I challenge you to analyze the things that you love more than God; what are you not willing to give up? Do you love the Body of Christ enough that you are willing to give up any of your possessions for it? Don't know if any of you even had remotely the same thought process when reading this text but it just really struck me and caused me to go on a little tangent but still brought me to good reflection of how practical all Scripture is to our lives.
Last Sunday's youth sermon was truly convicting. And not just a "yeah, that was important" type of convicting, but really a "wow, I need to change my whole perspective and really hit the root issue here, truly repent and ask God to change my heart in this regard" type of convicting. The whole time I felt as though the sermon had been specially crafted for me- to really get me to analyze my own heart and realize how little I love the people that are truly my brothers and sisters. By nature I love to critique everything- I always thought it would be awesome to have a career where I get to criticize companies or stores and tell them what they are doing wrong. Unfortunately my sinful nature brings this into the way I deal with people. As I was listening to the sermon I realized that judging people was just my default setting. In my own head, to myself, I always concealed this as honest assessment or analyzing- instead of downright, sinful judging. When I would be c