Knowing the God We Serve

Of course to a degree we must learn to relate to those around us. We must learn to sympathize with them. We must teach and serve and share the love of Christ with those who don’t know Him. But I think it is a very dangerous thing for Christians to spend lots of avoidable time with people (or doing things) that do not think, believe, talk or act the same way that they do. I’m talking about the extra time where we really could be doing something else.  You may say, “Well we have to learn to be strong in every situation, we have to be prepared. “ To a certain degree I would agree with that…but I don’t believe we should seek out such “experience.” I think God will give us the strength when it is needed. I think the best thing we could do when faced with an ungodly situation is run as fast as we can in the other direction. Sure, there will be times when we will stand and defend our faith when we will befriend unbelievers and try to share our faith with them. But I think we should be very, very careful with what we allow ourselves to be drawn into. I guess, I have learned from trial and error that I am very weak…so I shouldn’t give myself any room to fall. I can tend to tolerate things that I should openly refute. I should be strong…but since I am weak I should almost cage myself in, giving myself no room to fall...I don’t mean from life, but definitely from anything that could cause me to stumble. Does that make sense? It’s loud in Starbucks today …I’m not tracking very well. :P

I guess if we saw evil the right way then we would treat it the right way. If we really saw the depth of human depravity and what it is capable of doing then we would stay as far away as possible. But how will we know what evil is and just how bad it is? (Yeah, now you know where I’m going with this.) Well, the Bible says that God alone is good…good and evil are opposites, right? So if we knew God well enough then we would know exactly what evil is, right? (I’m talking to myself.) So, if we read the Bible more with the intent of understanding God and all His attributes then we would see evil is its truest form…everything contrary to the holy nature of God.  So, I think what I’m advocating here is this... we should seek to be strong by knowing our Father, not continually throwing ourselves in the line of fire (the world)…especially when we don’t know exactly what we’re running from. If we know God then we will know what God hates, and we can stay away from it. We need to know the God we serve. We need to know everything we can possibly know about Him so that we may better serve and obey Him.

Sorry to preach again, but I need to do this to myself more often :)