No Change

I love experiments! (Particularly if I can contain the mess! ;)) When I was a kid, I took a water ecology class one summer in which we did a number of experiments and tests on different water sources in our area. I also did a number of experiments over the course of my junior high and high school years. When you do a long term experiment, you must make observations at regular intervals to determine the effect of whatever you are studying. As a kid, because of the small quantity of letters, my favorite observation to record was "no change". However, from a scientific perspective, "no change" is not often a helpful observation. When you are studying, you put two things together hoping for a reaction, a change. If there is no change, you have to go "back to the drawing board".

I began thinking about this idea in light of the sermon at church yesterday. In God's great grace, He gives us the gospel. Namely, that He is the Creator, Holy, Loving, and Just. He made us and we rebelled against His authority as King (and continue to rebel against Him throughout our lives). Because of the rift that this sin caused in our relationship with Him, He sent Jesus, the God-Man to save us from our sin by living perfectly in our place, and then dying in our place to pay the price for our sin. He was then raised from the dead to verify that everything He had claimed about Himself was true, and to give us hope for our own future resurrection with Him.

But here's the thing. I live in America, where it still costs relatively little for me to claim Christ. I can say I'm a Christian, be baptized, go to church on a regular basis, and even talk to everyone I meet about the gospel without the risk of bodily or financial injury. This has tended to breed a level of nonchalance about faith. I can claim Christ without any expectation of change-- at least in some groups. But that is NOT the way that the gospel works! God says again and again in the Bible that His word WILL accomplish what He sets out to do. So when the gospel enters your life, there should be CHANGE! It will likely seem very small, but over the course of time, you should be becoming more like Christ.

So, Christian, my question to you today is, are you in a state of "no change"? If your answer is yes, then I would encourage you to examine your life. Are you reading the Bible and praying often? Are you committed to a local church with whom you are gathering to worship God on a regular basis? And if your answers to these questions are no and that doesn't bother you, perhaps you've not truly believed the gospel. In which case, I encourage you, TODAY is the day of salvation!

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:14-21