Pastor's Pen - August 2006

Dear Friends in Christ,

Throughout the biblical story God’s people are again and again told to resist the temptation to make accommodations to the ways of the world. Those who spoke to the people on God’s behalf from the Old Testament to the New recognized the destructive results of allowing the world and its ways to become the determining factors in the lives of God’s people. The Apostle Paul encouraged the early Christians to not be conformed to this world but rather to be transformed as the people of God. He knew that to be transformed would also mean to be transforming and as a result the world would not change the people of God, rather the people of God would change the world.

We as God’s people today need to hear these words as much in our lives as any generation of God’s people who have gone before us. It is easy to allow the world to shape who we are and what we believe. It is easy to allow the values of the world to become the values of God’s people. It is easy to allow the ways in which the world measures worth and importance to become the ways in which God’s people do the same. As easy as these things may be, it does not change the fact that this is wrong in the eyes of God. Wealth and social status may be important in the world but they have no place in the Church. The beginning point for relationships in the Church is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Each one is a redeemed child of God for whom the Savior died on the cross. Everything in the life of the Church is to be based on that reality.

No individual and no gift bestowed by the Holy Spirit are insignificant in the eyes of God. Each has purpose and place for the building up of the community of God’s people. None can be measured by the standards of this world, but rather are to be received in joy and thanksgiving for what they have been made by the hands of God. Jesus showed care and compassion for those who were in need, the weak and the powerless. Those who were strong and felt that they were without need were not the focus of his ministry. What has happened in the life of the Church that these standards are all too often reversed?

Certainly it is the result of sin, but in a more particular way it is the result of allowing the world to change the people of God rather than vice versa. Today as much as in any other time of the people of God, we need to be transformed by the power of God that we might be transforming agents for a world in need.