· This weekend was completely crazy and insanely busy! I haven’t had one like that in awhile, so I guess it is a good thing to have happen every now and then. I am looking forward to Mother’s Day weekend, where the most stressful thing I have planned is a pedicure. Well, school stuff too, but I’m so used to that I’m afraid I won’t know what hit me when I’m done this summer.
Yesterday’s sermon at church was pretty awesome. I was thinking about a couple of different things related to that one and one I heard last week. Both were very convicting and SO many things I have been reading and hearing lately tell me this is a big topic for Christians.
Sex sells, and it is all over the place… we watch television shows or movies that have questionable and suggestive scenes, billboards, some commercials! I remember last summer the movie about the male strippers and the book series that came out and how popular both were. I have to admit, I went with a friend and her daughter (20 yr old) to see the movie and we were all three pretty disgusted and left before it was over.
In the other lane of sex sells, there is sexual sin and it is all over the place as well. I’ve known Christians in my own church who have lived together before they got married, and I’ve known others who waited til their wedding day to kiss for the first time. I’ve never lived with someone I was dating, so I don’t know what that feels like. I wonder sometimes what they are thinking. Do they get mad about something and decide they are breaking up and moving out? It seems so easy to do, especially since people look for perfection and become frustrated when they are unable to find it – SPOILER ALERT!!! There is no such thing as the perfect man or woman.
I know, it seems so hard to believe. I love movies. I love pretending those guys are real, and that the men I meet will always do and say the perfect thing that will fit the situation. I was talking about Mr. Darcy (if you don’t get the reference, just read Pride and Prejudice) to someone today and I think the thing I like about him the most is that he isn’t perfect. He always messes up with Elizabeth Bennett, and says the wrong thing at an amazingly wrong time, but she ends up realizing that she has fallen in love with him, imperfections and all.
Back to the sex topic. In church and my daily reading of the Bible and my devotional, the need to be ‘set apart’ and ‘holy’ are a call for Christians. How can we be set apart and holy if we are doing the things the world says is ok, when God is the one calling us to be different?
Romans 12:1-3 (NASB)
12 Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
3 For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
Just in case you needed to remember what it is that we are doing here (gotta love James… the man was just in your face about some things!)
James 1:22-25 (NASB)
22 But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. 23 For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; 24 for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.
25 But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does.
Know that God blesses us greatly when we honor His word and follow the guidelines He has given us.
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