THOSE WHO HAVEN’T HEARD OR ACCEPTED HIS CALL

Wherever I go, I witness the majority of people do not display the love of God in their actions. In the majority of voices and words I hear from them, God’s love is not projected from their hearts. I sense God’s absence, His distance; not because He has chosen to be far, but because they have either not heard His call (Romans 10:14), or have rejected it based on worldly reasons (2 Timothy 4:4-6).

Displaying God’s love for all to see is the way unbelievers witness the church (the body of Christ) in action, as well as the work of God in the world. It’s not every day a person witnesses the miracle of someone cured of illness, or a person being brought back from the dead. But when we experience real love in action, and a Christ-follower gives testimony of Jesus’s movement in their lives, we experience what it is to witness God perform miracles in someone’s heart.

SECULAR UNDERSTANDINGS

Perhaps one of the reasons a person lacks the vision to see God in their lives is they have not opened the Bible. Or, if they have opened the Bible, they read it out of context, out of order, and without the intention of seeking the Lord. It’s easier for the Bible to be confusing when our heart posture is out of place. And it’s easier to lack the vision to see God in our lives when we don’t know the character of God as described in the Bible.

Reading the Bible in a secular manner will focus a person on secular discoveries; namely that it isn’t a holy book, that it isn’t inspired by God, and that it is errant. But a person won’t find those falsehoods if they’re searching diligently for divine intervention. When the heart truly seeks, it finds (Matthew 7:7-8). By seeking, we don’t give up at the first sign of misunderstanding. We don’t read the text, misconstrue its message and automatically assume that the mess we’ve just skimmed through is the Truth that Christians preach about. That approach isn’t truly seeking the Lord, that’s merely opening the book to find an excuse not to have to open it again.

LACKING IN SPREADING GOD’S LOVE

There are plenty of fake Christians in this world. That is, people who claim to be Christian, but whose lives bear no fruit of faith.

It’s true. There are lots of people who have noteworthy church attendance, but are lacking when it comes to spreading Godly love through their words, actions, thoughts, and motives. God sees it all, and He knows it all (Hebrews 4:13, Job 28:24). He’s watching how we choose to live our lives, and how our Christian faith impacts each choice we make, or how it doesn’t. He watches because He cares that we spread the Truth about His Son, who came and was crucified for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8).

UNDERSTANDING THE WEIGHT OF JESUS’S ACTIONS

This level of sacrifice cannot be underestimated: The one true God of all of creation sent His one and only Son to die, to save us from eternal damnation. When a person claims to be a Christian but lives the same lifestyle and carries the same mentality of an unbeliever, there are eternal consequences for that. Some people are annoyed with the idea of God “watching over us” and compare Him to Santa Claus. But really, God watches because He wants every single person whom He has called to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4-6). His mercies outweigh His judgment (James 2:13). He doesn’t want us to perish, but to have eternal life (John 3:16-17).

Eternal life doesn’t reflect from the life of someone who claims to go to church, but lacks an intentional filter on their language, or makes excuses for the actions that cause other believers to take their own faith less seriously. These are hypocrites, and they make the Bible, heaven, hell, and God all seem like fairy tales.

TO LOVE GOD IS TO HATE EVIL

Needless to say, the world is not in need of the Christian who is only Christian to avoid hell, which is generally the motive of those who claim Christianity without walking the walk. They don’t want to experience the eternal consequences of sin, but… they also don’t want to stop sinning. But the Bible says to love God is to hate evil (Psalm 97:10). Hating evil means placing a higher value on our faith and our relationship to God than we do on our fleshly, worldly desires. That means hating the bad habits we have, acknowledging them as bad habits, and putting plans in place to cut the habits out of our lives in Jesus’s name.

The world is in need of the Christian who is passionate about their faith; who, because of God’s grace, has acquired the humility to acknowledge their sin, and consequently admit to their need for God’s love, manifest most of all in Jesus Christ. Faith is a life-changer, and those who live as though faith were just a word have wounded the impact of the church in spiritually vulnerable, unbelieving hearts around the world.

JOY OF THE LORD

If fake Christians were all history ever had to offer, Christianity as a whole would have died out long ago. The world cannot find God in people whose love only comes at their own convenience, rather than in spite of inconvenience. The world will never see Jesus in the Christian who is only on their best behavior when inside a church building. The world will not hear God’s love when our nicest words are only when we’re in a good mood. Moods swing like a pendulum, but joy of the Lord is our strength, which means it’s our rock solid foundation that doesn’t dissipate like feelings.

We can be sad, we can mourn and weep and feel devastation, and yet give glory to God all the same by way of unwavering faith in His goodness. Even Jesus wept, but He didn’t stop being faithful (John 11:34-42). We can experience horrible suffering and still choose to understand that the level of depravity in our world was caused by sin, and understand we can still turn to God, receive His love, and heal through our darkest valleys. In turn, the world will see how we love God, and they will see God.

WE ARE ALL CAPABLE OF THE WORST ATROCITIES

The most Christian people I know experience trauma and still acknowledge God’s goodness because they understand the truth about sin: that free will was a gift given out of love from God for us, and it enables us to choose good or evil. Those who understand this don’t hide from the fact that all people are more than capable of being just as evil as the worst person we’ve ever learned about.

For instance, we’re all capable of being what Hitler was. He is but one example. Let’s not get caught up in judgment, assuming Adolf Hitler was the worst person to have ever lived! There are many people in history who have chosen evil over good with a conviction that disturbs the very nature of our understanding of morality.  We’re all capable of the most heinous, unthinkable evil. Just because not all of us have chosen that path, doesn’t mean we don’t have the capacity for it. The point is, we cannot compare. Sin is sin (James 2:10), and we have all fallen short of His glory (Romans 3:23-24).

LOVE COMES FROM GOD ALONE

The world does not need Christians who adhere to a system of belief in which they think the belief itself makes them a better person in its own right. That isn’t Christianity; that is short-sightedness, arrogance, and spiritual deception. When we love people as God commands us to (like how the good Samaritan loved the man who had been left for dead, for instance), there is no mistaking it as Godly love. There is only reward for the person who believes kindness to another human is its own reward, and who comprehends that that kind of love comes from God in them, not from themselves.

We do not love others based on a love we don’t have, since we love others based on a love we have been given; we cannot give what we have not received. We also cannot comprehend what we have not had revealed to us: There is no truth if we don’t know what is false. There is no Christianity if we only serve ourselves with a belief that doesn’t compel us give generously, and to truly love those who are in need.

OUR ANSWER TO GOD’S LOVE

I see people whose countenance spells out “robot.” There are, no doubt, feelings inside each person, and there is a truth to their experience. But they’re dead inside. Their spirit is dormant. First it’s in their face, and then it’s their actions and words: God is not in them because they haven’t said yes to Him. God will not leave us unchanged once we invite Him in, and we don’t invite Him in because a part of us, bigger than the other parts, still wants to sin, to rebel; to not have to answer to God’s love for us. But we misconstrue God’s love for something the world has deceived us into believing, and we have fallen prey to its lie.

GOD’S LOVE LOOKS LIKE GOD’S RULES TO SECULAR EYES

The type of people who tend to live like there is no God tend to think of what Christian’s call God’s love, as, “Your God’s rules.”

“Don’t do this and don’t do that,” is generally what unbelievers think of it. But really, it’s because what we do impacts our spirit and the spirit of those whose lives we touch. In a world where there are powers and principalities in a realm we can’t see, but which are operating within the same world we live in, we can’t afford not to pay close attention to how we love, how we think, choose, and who we worship.

SPIRITUAL DECEPTION THAT LEADS TO HELL

Spiritual blindness means living like there’s always tomorrow, like this life is all there is and that we should do whatever we can to make ourselves happy. Spiritual blindness also looks like loving only when we get something out of it, if not in the least, to think highly of ourselves for doing something society praises. But we don’t give a second thought to what praises God, and we ourselves turn from doing that because we don’t comprehend the importance of serving the only God who grants life to all living beings. Our misguided spiritual thinking deceives us into living lives that reflect pride, greed, and selfishness, and since those are not fruits of the spirit, nor do they reflect God’s love, they represent a lack of relationship with God, and they lead to hell.

EVADE DECEPTION AND HELL

Unbelievers tend to think of hell as a myth to scare people from making choices we dislike, rather than understanding it’s a real place originally created for the devil and the fallen angels, but now it is also for people who don’t want God at all (Matthew 25:41). If we only understood the nature, complexity, and depth of God’s love for us, we might reconsider what it means to say yes to Him.

God’s commandments become our top priority when we are able to understand that God gave us the commandments for us to live a more fulfilling life. Similar to how a human parent teaches a child not to burn themselves on a stove to prevent them from harm, God’s commandments are meant to help us live a life we can feel joy within, fulfillment through, and experience His unlimited love during, so that we don’t become deceived by the world and end up in hell.

A DISTANT, DRAMATIZED GOD

When we obey God and love Him, we reduce the distractions of spiritual obstacles blocking us from all He has to give to us. But when we choose sin (disobey His “rules” and rebel against His love), we can’t experience Him the same, if at all, because our spirits aren’t ready. We’re blinded. Unfortunately, what follows is that the blind will view God as weak, not all-powerful, not all-loving—just distant and seemingly dramatized. Suddenly, that pillar of fire and smoke from the book of Exodus seems very fantasized and not at all miraculous, because we view God as a fictitious character rather than as a timeless, omnipotent, perfect Being from which all creation came.

When we look at God with blinders on, not only do we not see Him, what we do see in His place is a caricature (like the old man with a beard in the sky) unbelievers either blame or ridicule to express their frustration over living life in a place where all we understand is the inconvenient consequences of sin (without even calling it sin), rather than the benefits of faith in the Bible-based God who has already come in Christ and saved us from our own deserved eternal judgment.

A CALL TO SPIRITUAL ARMS

If you’re reading this and you consider yourself a believer but you can’t honestly say your life is different than when you became a Christian, then please take this seriously: Reconsider, truly, what faith means to you. Pray and ask Jesus for discernment, clarity, and for Him to reveal Himself to you in order to remind you how faith in Him is not something to take lightly. There are souls at stake. Time is short already, but humanity’s time-clock is running out as well. We are in the End Times. Jesus’s return is imminent. The church is needed right now, and the church’s voice is still a whisper. It needs to be the voice above all the rest (underneath God’s own voice in each of His followers), calling God’s will into action.

We don’t need people who only want to call themselves Christians, but whose hearts aren’t actually for Christ. The world needs the love of those who believe in the will of God, and who have chosen to surrender their lives as vessels for Christ, no longer living for themselves and their desires, but out of their love of God for his people.

RAMPANT SPIRITUAL WARFARE

There is war in our world. Death and chaos. There is a lot of spiritual dormancy, and yet spiritual warfare is rampant. There are people who aren’t living out any kind of faith, who barely function as more than a robot performing actions. Everyone who is alive in Christ needs to be loving these people in such a way that they can see that despite this crazy world, God exists; He is real, Christ is risen, and we are here to celebrate His pending return by how we love Him and our neighbors (Luke 10: 25-37).

EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, AND EVERY TONGUE WILL CONFESS JESUS AS LORD

Christians, I pray we come alive more than ever now. Remember the God we serve is also our Judge, and we will answer to Him for everything. There isn’t much time left and there are many, many lost people. Go out for the one, and maybe we will find more. Give praise in Jesus name for everyone who believes. Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord, but we hope there are more people who won’t wait for that day before they bow before Him and worship Him with their lives.

PRAYER FOR THOSE WHO ARE SEEKING

Lord Jesus, thank You for Your sacrifice on our behalf. Thank you that God called us to Himself through You, and that You reveal Yourself to us through the Holy Spirit. Grant us discernment as we evangelize and minister to the lost. Grant us the heart to love one another boldly and compassionately, and help us to forgive those who trespass against us. Thank You for Your Word, that we can rely on its Truth to set us free from the bondage of spiritual lies. Give us peace as we go out to serve You, and only You, with every part of our lives. We pray this in Your precious name, Jesus. Amen. 

Photo by Axel Eres on Unsplash