Living Biblically

Living Biblically

Since January I’ve kind of been on a series that I ended up calling, “Living As A Christian.” Over the past several weeks, however, we’ve looked at how a lot of believers and churches have left the foundational roots of the faith, and have been living their lives and conducting the affairs of the church in a similar way as the society around them, even to the point of calling sin as acceptable and okay. And if someone have the audacity of calling out the sin, they’re called intolerant, and these accusations are not only coming from those outside the faith, but unfortunately by those who call themselves by the name of Jesus Christ, or Christians.

I recently was looking up the history of the Great Wall of China, and how the Mongols successfully overcame it and invaded the country. And while the Great Wall has a complicated history, what I found in some renditions is that the Mongols bribed one of the gatekeepers.

In a way, this is what is happening within the church. It is the gatekeepers, that is, the church leadership that is selling out to the cultural norms of society, which is why we see major doctrinal shifts toward unbiblical stances.

Satan knows how to get at our hearts. Satan has a strategy, as he continues to fill our minds with all the stuff of the world. And I hope you understand and hear what I am going to say, and that is that Satan doesn’t have to curse us, instead he gets us to curse ourselves by living our lives in direct opposition to God and His word.

This is why Christians and the church are not affecting the communities and the world for Jesus Christ. We need godly wisdom to live in this ungodly world. Therefore, we need to watch what we let into our hearts.

The Bible says in Proverbs 4:23, “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life,” which is what Jesus makes sure we understand saying, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth good things, and an evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things” (Matthew 12:34-5).

And seeing what Jeremiah says about the heart, that it is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9), we need to be careful not to let in any more of the bad stuff.

How can we do this, by putting in more of the good stuff, that is, not succumbing to the philosophy of this world, but taking a Biblical worldview, that is, we need to form our stances from what the Bible says, and stay true to the biblical doctrines like holiness, righteousness, faithfulness, and the like.

Literally, we have to start telling our minds how to think; instead of letting the world and social media run wild through our brains. And we do this through the Holy Spirit that resides within every believer.

The Bible tells us to take off our former corrupt conduct and deceitful lusts and put on the new man we’ve become in Jesus Christ in true righteousness and holiness, and it says we do this by being renewed in the spirit of our minds (Ephesians 4:22-24).

It is the Holy Spirit that resides inside each one of us that should be telling us how to think, but if we’re not putting in the good stuff, that is, what the Bible has to say, He has nothing to work with, and we’ll start moving toward our automatic default setting, which is sin.

We can only begin to live biblically by thinking biblically, and that is accomplished when we open up God’s word on a daily basis and take in the wisdom of God on how to live a holy life in an unholy land.

And so we need to start living our lives in accordance to the Bible. But we need to be careful not to just read it, but to put it into practice, as the Apostle James so wisely said in chapter one verse twenty-two.

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22 NKJV)

We also need to be careful of not being so doctrinally correct that we become devotionally wrong.

There came a time shortly after seminary that people would come into my office just to debate some doctrine that they held dear, which they knew that I was not in total agreement with, like the “Once Saved Always Saved” or the “Calvin/Pelagius debate.” But it didn’t take long before I just quite debating them, because while we were debating the correctness of a doctrine, there were people who were dying in their sin and in need of the gospel message. That is what I mean by being so doctrinally correct that we’ve become devotionally wrong.