20 December 2024
Do not presume that your current comfort in life is an indication of God’s favor. To whom did God ever say, ‘be comfortable?’ The life you had before receiving Christ into your heart is not to be repeated in your new life. You have been changed, given a new Spirit. It is essential to recognize what it was that mastered you in the past. What were your lusts, your goals, your drives? Those should all be suspect. This is not about whether it is good or bad to be rich or famous, to possess land or have a nice car. It is about the things we allow to master us. Whatever has such a hold on our hearts not only influences us but is perpetuated to other people through our words and actions.
Peter wrote to the Church about such things. He addressed people who he labeled false teachers. These were people who had heard the word of God, responded positively, but returned to their previous way of living, ‘like a dog returning to its own vomit,’ he said. Did they deliberately lead others astray? Only in so much as it gave themselves validity to their own behavior. You see, it is about oneself being justified in what motivates the self. We want our individual sins, those things we have allowed ourselves to be comfortable to us, to not feel uncomfortable. We’d rather not have the Spirit bother us over our love of money, possessions, power, or pleasures. So, to foster a comfortableness for ourselves, we promote our values to other people. We become the false teachers that Peter spoke about.
When we come to the Lord, everything is supposed to change. One’s status in life becomes unimportant, for all our abilities and strengths are turned over to the Lord in His service. Whether the Lord keeps us planted in the same job or not is not important. Our jobs are to be done differently, our spending habits are to become different, our pleasures are to be turned onto Christ. We are to recognize that all we have is as dross, and be willing for them to be burned up. If this does not happen, we run the risk of being in a worse place than before we welcomed Jesus into our hearts. We are, as Peter said, pigs who, having been cleansed, wallow around in the mud.