The irony is that while God doesn’t need us and still longs to have a relationship with us, we desperately need Him, but don’t want Him most of the time.
When we decide to depend on God for everything because we realise that we need Him, we will become less dependent on other people’s opinions. Then, sharing His love and Good News despite what some of your Facebook followers and neighbours believe, is just what we begin to do. The most liberating feeling in the world, is not to be guided by what I want other people to think about me, but what God desires from me.
Living the world’s way is never “freeing”. We shackle ourselves to the opinions of others. We allow the world to put a bit in our mouths and steer us in the direction they want to go simply because we look for popularity and approval from others. Let me ask you this; since when has loving others become old fashioned? Why is it wrong in the eyes of the world to have solid morals and principles and teaching those to our children? And when we do that, it is labelled as narrow-mindedness and hateful. I don’t even think most people believe in what they are saying or doing. They simply do it because their identity is found in what others think about them. It’s all about a rating system.
But when we allow Jesus Christ to be the King of our lives, He is in our DNA. As husbands, we love and honour our wives. What’s wrong with opening the car door for my wife? Wives love and honour their husbands. Why is that seen as sexist? We raise our children to to have a solid Christian foundation on which to stand. How is that being disrespectful? In fact, everything about being a Christian is about love and respect and honour. The problem is that the world has found new definitions for these words. When you don’t agree with someone, it is labelled as hating them. When I was young and I did something wrong, my parents didn’t agree with me. That doesn’t mean they hated me. In fact it showed how much they loved me.
We all need God, yet we choose to rather play the rating system game and try our best to get into the good books of the world around us. Imagine if Jesus did that. Imagine if He simply bowed down to the views and ideas of His time. He came to show us how to live. He came to tell us that the opinion of the world should not be the yard stick by which we measure our lives. Instead, God is the One who should be the guide on how to live and who to honour. The only good book that we should be concerned about is the one in which God writes the names of those who have given their lives to Him. Because on the day of judgement, the opinions of nobody will count, except God’s
God has everything we need. Let’s stay in Him.
Mark Davidson
