Pick Up the Phone

Galatians 6:3
If you think you are too important to help someone, you are only fooling yourself. You are not that important. (NLT)

When we think of someone in need we may think about a homeless person, or someone who just ran out of money before they ran out of month.

How often do we decide to help someone else based on how doing so will affect us? All too often we are "me focused". We tend to think of our wellbeing before others. So we find excuses like we do not have the time right now or someone else would be better suited to help.

We think "Can I afford to send a check to someone in the middle of a tragedy in their life"? But thinking that, are we trusting in God to supply our every need first? As we reach out and help someone in their need, will we trust Him to supply ours? Do we have faith to know He will make a way for our month to end with just the right amount of money left over?

And we tend to think of needs in the form of finances. The reality is that many needs are emotional. People need a friend to talk to. They need someone to help unburden them by just listening. We do not have to resolve their problems. All we need to do is listen to them and then help them pray for divine intervention.

Have you ever thought of someone you have not heard from in a long while? Perhaps they need your help. Maybe we need to make a simple phone call to cheer them up or to let them talk to someone who cares.

None of us is too important to ignore others in their time of need. We need to stop fooling ourselves into thinking we do not matter and someone else can do a better job. We need to pick up the phone and call that person we have been thinking about.

Following the Law

Galatians 4:10-12
You are trying to earn favor with God by observing certain days or months or seasons or years. I fear for you. Perhaps all my hard work with you was for nothing. Dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to live as I do in freedom from these things, for I have become like you Gentiles-free from those laws. (NLT)

We live in a world filled with laws. Our government creates new ones daily. Who knows them all? Even the lawyers only know a few. They know the ones they have studied for the practice they have. As new cases are presented to them, they discover the laws that apply.

There are many laws, even some which have been around for hundreds of years that make no sense today. The more laws, the more restrictive a society we live in. We have to wear seatbelts when we drive. Those that smoke have to do it some many feet outside a building. The list goes on. Soon we will not be allowed by law to use incandescent light bulbs as they must be replaced by the new energy efficient florescent ones.

The Jews lived by their laws and were under the impression that strictly following them was the way to heaven. Mess up and you missed it. The fact is, as Jesus pointed out hundreds of years later, it is impossible not to mess up. Nobody except a perfect man could ever live up to all of them, and there was only one perfect man. He fulfilled the law so we would not have to live by it.

Paul preached to the Gentiles about Jesus, not about obeying the law. He did not ignore the law, but he knew it was following Jesus that brings salvation, not the law.

We are not to live encased in a cage of rules that limit our activity. Our life is not to revolve around a building full of believers; it is to be focused on the commission Jesus gave to each of us.

We are to be in the world, in the daily marketplace, letting the Holy Spirit guide us to encounters where we can share the good news that Jesus is alive today!

Follow the Rules

Galatians 2:17-18
Suppose we seek to be made right with God through faith in Christ and then we are found guilty because we have abandoned the law. Would that mean Christ has led us into sin? Absolutely not! Rather, I am a sinner if I rebuild the old system of law I already tore down. (NLT)

Paul speaks here with simple logic. If we do not follow the rules man has made it does not have an effect on our relationship with Jesus. Jesus said to follow him, not follow a set of rules or abide by Jewish laws to be saved. If we want to take on some of the old laws for our self because we like what they tell us, it is not wrong unless they go against what Jesus taught us.

Man seems to want to have both worlds. Over the years we have created our own set of rules or laws. No matter which institutional church you belong to, there is a set of rules you are to abide to. Before Jesus became part of my life, I lived under the assumption that if I was a good person and did good deeds for others, I would go to heaven when I died. In other words, my good works would save me.

Jesus came to dispel that theory. He said that to be saved we had to follow Him. So we came up with another rule (law) and that is what we call the sinners prayer. Nothing wrong with it as it fulfills Jesus requirement to follow Him. However, how often do we require it to be said before we believe they are really saved?

Then we look at the various churches in our communities. Each has their own set of laws-their doctrines. Some even decide what they want to believe from the Bible. They chalk up many of the teachings as belonging to the first generation of Christ followers. Yet, Jesus was speaking to all believers. And ALL means you and me.

I guess it comes down to this for me. Following man made laws makes life easy. We memorize them and abide by them and everyone we associate with is happy with us. However, it is the Holy Spirit that I want to follow, not the laws of man. The more I lean to the rules, the less I rely on the Holy Spirit to guide me.

I choose Holy Spirit.

Depend on Him

Galatians 3:2-3
Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ. How foolish can you be? After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? (NLT)

I enjoy reading. I like to sit back with a good novel and read for enjoyment. I even like to read about history; about things that happened long ago. Sometimes I can get lost for a while in my browser as I look up something and it leads to something else which takes me off in another area altogether.

In school we all learned to read for knowledge. We read to know about stuff. We read to fill our head with useful information-data from the past we may be able to apply later in life. Some of it is useless and I really cannot understand why I still know it! Other bits have been quite useful and throughout my life I have needed to know them.

However, it is as I used that stored data in life that it became real. The application of the information created personal experiences which helped mold me into the person I am today.

When I received the Holy Spirit it was not because of what I had learned from books or from the Internet or from others. I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior and He came to live in me. I was baptized by fire in the name of God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.

There was nothing logical about it. I believed the message I had heard and my spirit man was born again. I was a new person in the spirit. However, I was still an old person in the flesh.

My flesh, my mortal man rather than my spirit man, learned all the "rules" about being a Christian. So I set out to become a good Christian. There were things I should do and things I should avoid. There were people I should hang out with and people to be avoided. There were movies good to watch and movies to be avoided. Some things were good to talk about and others not. And I learned new phrases that all good Christians seemed to be using.

If I could just appear to be a good Christian I would be all set. I was trying to become perfect by my own human effort.

I am not saying this was necessarily a bad thing. It just was not changing the real me. It just allowed others to see the person I wanted to be, and this was not the person I turned into under pressure.

Only God can change us and that occurs when we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives. It is He that convicts us when we drift off the path. As we recognize His voice and ask to be changed, our desires to repeat what He pointed out leave and we are changed.

I no longer want to view those movies, hang around with people using coarse language, gossip about others, or even be fluent in the latest Christianize phrases. Do not get me wrong here. I am nowhere near perfection. I just want to give God all the glory, praise Him in my life, and let the Holy Spirit guide me through this life long journey.