Friday, February 8, 2008
John 17:9-19
TEXT
How do you understand sent and sanctified?
Like I wrote about yesterday, I think that God sent Jesus to Earth to show us a new way to live within this world. At the end of his life Jesus nows sends his diciples into this same Earth to continue to show this new way of life. What is difficult to work through is that they were sent into the world and yet they were to be set apart (sanctified). One of my greatest struggles with students is to help them understand how to live in this world, but not of this world. We are sent into this world to be the hands and feet of Jesus and yet we are called to be set apart from it. If we are going to be these hands and feet then we have to be aware of the world we are in and how it works by actually living in it. To often we try and escape the world through all different kinds of ways like setting up our own "Christian Bubbles". When we do this it becomes harder to fully understand the idea of being sent. Sometimes we are good at being set apart, but struggle with being sent. Some love the idea of being sent, but have no idea what it means to be set apart.
How do we do both?
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2 comments:
I agree. Seems like many Christians, myself included at times, take an "all or nothing" position. Either we are so separated from the world we have no impact or relevance, or we are so much a part of it, it's hard to see that we are Christian.
The trend in America lately is to have a "Christian" version of everything the "world" has, adding to the Christian "bubble". The whole concept reminds me of Donald Miller's joke about going to a Christian Office Supply store to get a new stapler because his had been defiled by secular paper! It's funny, but then I wonder if we have "Christianized" our surroundings so much that we can scarcely be in contact with the those lost in the world without feeling defiled by them, instead of remembering that we have been sent and set apart to be Jesus to the them.
He certainly got his hands dirty during his mission and probably doesn't understand how we got "bubbles" out of His example.
Denver says we should be blue people. Like if a spy was on top of a building looking down at crowds of people below with ifrared goggles. Most of the people would be red, but there would be some blue people mixed in among them. Without the goggles, everyone would look basically the same, but they're not... the blue people are different.
We're supposed to be the blue people.
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