Are we living a life that is set apart? According to The Witness, upwards of 80% of South Africans are Christian. I feel like how I should want to respond to that is the expression of utter joy. But it honestly is just disheartening for me. And it’s for a simple reason. That statistic is not at all evidenced by society around me. I think that’s for a number of reasons that I won’t unpack now. It would genuinely end in a thesis mock-up.
What I will however discuss, is what I feel like it is to live a devoted, yielded life. When someone follows Jesus there will be in numerous areas, an eventual and perpetual shift in the heart. That shift then manifests physically, in our words and deeds and they are observable. Jesus refers to false prophets in Matthew 7:16 and He talks about “knowing people by their fruit”. That metric is to discern an earnest follower of Jesus from someone who isn’t.
What I’m getting at is that there’s something wrong and we are genuinely sick if we’re followers of Jesus that look like the world. We’re called to be set apart.
Love Christ Earnestly
Something that struck me and that I’ve pondered over a while ago is Mark 12:30. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” This, supplemented with loving our neighbour like ourselves is the Greatest Commandment. It is miraculous to me that the thing that the King of Kings wants most from me is my love. He just wants the affections and the devotion of my heart more than acts of perceived holiness.
There’s a cognitive dissonance that Paul talks about in scripture. He discusses it in Romans 7:15-20. The reality that we must reconcile ourselves with is that were are not good. Yes, you read that correctly you are in fact not a “good person” because only He is. And it is God that sets the standard for what goodness, holiness, purity and righteousness are. The reason why I say this is because our natural inclination is to yield to our flesh, it is not godliness. So the wrestle that Paul talks about is the internal battle, where there are warring sides and the question begs; who will you yield to and serve?
The reason why I talk about loving the Lord first is because this conversation can very quickly become one around behaviour modification. While I absolutely think there’s room for that where you’ve just got to beat your body into submission (switch off the tv, read your Bible, it’s not that deep). What should primarily underpin our lives is a love for God. Does your heart long for Him? Do you yearn for Him? If you’re struggling in sin can I submit to you that you should perhaps give yourself to Him more in lieu of the avoidance of sin? He replaces our heart of stone, with a heart of flesh. New desires for a new being.
There undoubtedly is room for nailing our desires to the cross and the pursuit of goodness because faith without good deeds is dead (James 2:14-26). But we must be wary of behaviour modification when our hearts are far from Him. Love Him, obey Him and turn and you’ll look like Him.
To Love Him Is To Deny Yourself
Jesus Promises the Holy Spirit in John 14, in verse 15 He says; “If you love me, keep my commands.” It’s so simple. The evidence of our love for Jesus is rooted in our obedience to Him. I think that it’s a great
An Elder in church asked a group of us a question two years ago and it rattled me. And no it wasn’t intense in its nature but I will never forget it. He asked “How’s your love for God doing?”. Didn’t ask how we were doing in prayer or in our quiet time. He asked a question that made me in interrogate whether I had kept the main thing (loving God) the main thing. I bring this up because it wasn’t focused on actions but on the condition of our heart.
Matthew 16:25 says “If you try to hang onto your life you will lose it, but if you give up your life for my sake you will save it”. That’s the nature of the Kingdom its to act in a way that is counterintuitive until it feels natural as the Holy Spirit change us from the inside out.
I started writing this blog post fully intending to discuss what it looked like to be a follower of Christ and the “how to’s” of it all. But the more I’ve pondered over it I’ve found that it’s incredibly simple, and easier than we’d like to admit to ourselves. We will live set apart life if we focus on loving God. If that is all that we do, our inclinations will shift and our desire for godliness will grow. And when the day comes that we must wrestle with temptation and sin (and it will) then hopefully we’ll feel more like we’re fighting against what God hates more than we’re fighting to obey the law.
If we love Jesus, we will love one another. When we do that, the world will know that we are of Him and we will be set apart.
