Changing the Environment

Matthew 5:14-16 NIV

"You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.  In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.

How Are You Impacting Your World?

The other day I was in a second grade classroom surrounded by children who were asking me questions and wanting help.  Suddenly a little boy next to me asked, “Why do you smell so good?”  I ignored him and kept talking with other children and he asked me again, “Mr. Walkup, why do you smell so good?”  I was so flummoxed by his question that I could give no response to the boy and was a bit dumbfounded for a few moments.  How come he noticed me?  What made him say that I smelled good?  How was I supposed to respond?  Of course you should never be surprised by what little children say whether it is good or bad.  They speak their mind and they are super sensitive to what is going on about them.  Their environment matters profoundly to them and although many of us have grown desensitized, it does to too us also.

Have you given much thought to what impact you make on others?  Not just close family members and friends but but anyone who comes in contact with you?  What part do you play in creating an environment for others?  You can ignore this question and many do.  Unless you are attracted to someone or in trouble or wanting to get something from someone, you may not think about the impact you make on those around you.  Other than pop psychologists who make lots of money teaching people how to influence others, rarely is much thought given to our impact on those about us.  There is however reason to ponder this question and take it seriously.  How do you impact the environment of others?

You have seen this phenomenon.  A strong personality alters the climate of a room and changes the culture of a workplace.  One child can completely change a classroom and one person influences how a worship service goes.  Yet you don’t have to be charismatic or loud or funny or pushy to be felt and impactful.  All you need is Christ living in you to change the world.

The Lord used interesting metaphors to talk about your influence.  "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.  In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16 NIV)  The light of the world, a city on a hill; that is what He says you are.  Of course for most, that is a preposterous statement.  Who is like that?  Maybe Beyoncé or Tom Cruise or Stephen Curry!  Do you feel like when you enter a room all eyes are on you, everyone turns to hear what you have to say?  Yet you have to take seriously Jesus’ statements like this because He gives the actual situation rather than what mere appearances seem to indicate.

Now I realize we are talking about the Apostle Peter, the majestic disciple who stood above all the rest until Paul came along but it is pertinent what is discovered in Acts 5: 12 and following.  The apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders among the people. And all the believers used to meet together in Solomon's Colonnade.  No one else dared join them, even though they were highly regarded by the people.  Nevertheless, more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.  As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter's shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. (Acts 5: 12-15 NIV) Even the shadow of Peter impacted crowds.  He did not have to say anything or do anything to have a dramatic effect on others.  What if this was the case with you?  Can you imagine your shadow being such a powerful influence?

Remember that Jesus declares that you are a city upon a hill, that you are the light of the world.  This is not just speaking of some great church leader or someone long gone.  He is speaking of you, that you are influential, that you change the way others see things, that when you are present, people are impacted by you being there in profound ways.  What if your shadow was just as influential as Peter’s?  What if your presence was dramatically life altering?  Could you imagine being such a person?

Paul said something that I cannot easily shake and it should make you pause   But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him.  For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing.  To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task? (2 Corinthians 2:14-16 NIV)   Everywhere you go, the knowledge of Christ permeates those who come in contact with you.  This is not a natural work but supernatural and it takes faith to believe it is so.  You bring Christ to your conversations, to your meetings, to each place that you go.  Now this fragrance of Christ may be faint or it could be strong but it is there nonetheless and you bring it with you. 

Surely we understand at least in theory, if not in practice, that how we live our lives impacts everyone else.  A smile we share, a pat on the back, a warm handshake, something encouraging or complimentary that we say changes the climate of a room.  If we rant or rage, if we criticize, make a sarcastic comment, gossip, lie, pout, we alter the room too.  The power of our personality affects others and we certainly know that is so.  We may not live with that in mind but are aware of it.  If Christ is in you, then His presence, which is supernatural affects everyone who comes in contact with you and there is a ripple effect; one person impacted changes even slightly the next person and so on and how far the effect travels we cannot measure.  If your personality changes the lives of those about you, imagine just how powerfully the personality of the Lord of the Universe living in you impacts those who come in contact with the Christ in you.

We don’t have time to describe the impact demons have in our world today.  The Apostle Paul warned that even those who profess to be Christians would be driven from God by demons and accept the view of life they promote.   The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. (1 Timothy 4:1 NIV)  We know what sorts of brokenness the Gospels tell us demons caused and how Jesus drove demons away from people and they were healed.  How much depression, anxiety, anger, bitterness, and physical suffering is brought on by demons even now?  Is it possible that where you work, at the schools and among your friends, demons are wrecking lives and making people miserable?  Of course it is and if Christ could bring joy and peace to people in His time before He was crucified, what great good might He do today through you?  It is not preposterous to think that Christ in you can heal depression, calm anger, take away anxiety and even make the sick well!  Of course He can!

Our Lord said that to be used by the Father like He was, you must have faith in the Father too.  You must believe that Christ will powerfully work through you if you are available to God to do with as He wishes.  What might Christ do through you?  We cannot say but why would He not use you to bring peace and joy to those He has in your life?  I think that if you want Christ to change the world through your life, it starts with prayer.  James the brother of Jesus said, “And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven.  Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.” (James 5:15-16 NIV)  Pray for every person you can.  Make sure no sin is strangling your life with Christ and be available to the Father.  You too can release from demonic bondage those Christ has entrusted to your care!

Stable Baby

There is an amazingly casual quality to the description of the birth of Christ.  It is just there without fanfare or histrionics.  The child was delivered and no bright light struck the stable with golden hues, no blast of trumpets heralded the emergence of his arms and head, no earthquake shook the stable as the baby was softly given over to Mary.  It was a birth and in the moments immediately before and after there was a commonality to it...it was like your birth, like the birth of your parents before you and their parents before them.  Christ came as one more birth in a long line of births and the glow of it was as stupendous as when every other wanted and joyously anticipated child has emerged.   Nothing is so small and seemingly insignificant as when the Christ is born in you, when He makes you His home and yet the supernatural nature of it will awaken soon enough and your life will come alive with Him just as it did for the shepherds, the Magi, the Disciples, his mother and Joseph.  It may be silent now and even a bit dark;  it may be mundane and paltry as it gets lost in the uproar of the world's business, this coming of Christ to you but He has come and it will be astounding what He has done in you and through you soon enough.  The Christ will work His way out of you at home, at work and in all your studies.  He will clear out the darkness and His sun will shine brightly wherever you go.  You will become a light for the world because the Light of Christ will manifest itself in you at every point along your way.  Bethlehem may have been a dirty little town and the stable where Christ was born smelly and confining but soon enough His Presence exploded into the world with all the glory of God manifested.  It could be that you feel you are a mere stable for the Christ child's birth but nothing is so noble as the one who has Him born in her soul and the angels cannot contain their joy at seeing  Christ at home in you.

While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son.  Luke 2: 6-7a

Light Walker

There is the admonition today to "be yourself", to "believe in yourself", to "trust yourself".   All this sounds like wise counsel and of course it is upbeat in its approach to personality.  But it is sheer folly to put any real confidence in ourselves without taking into account the destructive working of Sin at every level of our personality.  Our dreams hint at the vast unconscious mind we possess.  It is a tangle of lusts, bitter frustrations and crippling fears.  Anger and hatred boil below the surface of our consciousness as does despair and loneliness along with hopes and loves and passions.  Our Lord is the great realist and he refuses to ignore the true condition of our humanity.  For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. (Matthew 15:19-20 NIV)  Many wave this all off as negative thinking but God knows how deeply Sin has worked its way in us and how corrupted the inner parts of our being are.  We don't need an infusion of positive thinking so we can blindly look past our true brokenness; we need a Savior to cleanse the deep parts of us that control our moodsand impulses.  John the Apostle puts perfectly what we must do.  Walk in the light and as the Holy Spirit reveals a matter of doing or stopping, immediately act upon that impulse of God.  As we remain in the light the Lord gives us, the blood of Christ will cleanse and purify the damage caused by Sin, even in the unconscious parts of us.  We will discover that while we walk in the light, the darkness in our dreams will begin to clear also so that we will see, as if on a big screen, the great work of our Lord in the inner parts of our soul!

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.   1 John 1:7 NIV

Loyalty and Its Cost

Is it wrong to want others to like us, to value us and respect us?  Should it not be a noble goal to have people speak highly of us at our funeral, for them to have fond memories of our life and testify of what a good and generous person we were?  So do we leave the path of rightness if it matters to us what sort of reputation we have developed and we care about the popularity we acquire?  Jesus insisted that if we follow Him there will be those who hate us and reject us because of Him.  Does that possibility frighten us?  Are we disturbed by how the Gospel in us is received?  When Christ works His way through our personality, it is not a trifling matter.  It is revolutionary; as upsetting as the day the colonies declared independence from England; as chaotic as when the realization strikes us that our children really are adults and no longer ours to keep in place.  The supernatural effect of the Cross is that the Lord Jesus Christ becomes Lord over one dealing after another and it will crack the care-free web of interacting we have built.  God’s peace does not please everyone.  Hope does not make everyone happy.  Holiness is frightful to many…so is kindness, generosity and mercy.  The world is not ready for a Christian man or woman who fully intends to let God live through the complete personality.  It will jar plenty; stun and mystify enough of the crowd to send some shivers down our spine.  You will not be prepared for being hated because Christ lives through you.  It will seem to you that God should have worked that out in advance; that if you are reworked by the Holy Spirit, He will make the path clear of boulders and thorn bushes for you.  But He won’t.  Just as the seedling needs the pushback of the soil to make it prosper and grow strong, you need the opposition of friends and family to develop spiritual backbone.  You are to be strong and mighty in God and it must be steady she goes for you as you gain some of the circle of isolation Christ faced.  Let Christ be the center of all you are becoming and soon enough you will be able to love those who hate you and let your critics have their say without being perturbed.  In the darkness of strained and ruined relationships, the light of Christ will shine brightly enough to guide your way through to the other side of the dismay you feel.  Just don’t let your attempts at realizing yourself be the instigator for your conflicts.  You are not, and forever will not be your own.  It is you and the love of Christ in all you do now.  Let Him have His way in your visceral response to broken humanity…in particular the part of that humanity living next door to you…or in your house.

Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.   Jude 21 NIV

History in the Making

If we look back upon the losses we have endured over the years, we might see certain trends...bad breaks, poor timing, lack of attentiveness to crucial details, slovenly habits, dysfunctional relationships, distorted views of self.  It could be that we got sick at the wrong time, were tripped up by our lusts or were mistaken about the character of certain people.    The regretful glance backward that morphs into self-pitying is corrosive to the working of God in you.  The very thing He came to do, redeem your life completely gets hindered by the regret you keep eyeing.  If we take God at His word, that Christ came to save us from our sin, then the obstinate pout must be put away.  But you may wonder how God could do this, how He could make the ugly moments of your past "redeemed".  His answer to you is the same as it was for the withered Elizabeth past child bearing.  "Nothing is impossible with God."  The worst of your circumstances are made new by Christ upon His sin bearing.  They are bought back and rebuilt...remade just as thoroughly as if an old wreck of a car were blown to smithereens and the molecules of it put together into the most spectacular of yachts.  "Nothing is impossible" includes your past and what has been done to you and by you is of no account anymore.  What matters is what God will do with it and that is, "make all things new."    The Lord is not afraid of your past even if you have built it up into a monster.  He has faced it squarely while dying on the Cross and mastered it.  You have nothing to hide anymore...it is out in the open...out in the bright sunlight of God's love for you.   Is it not perfectly reasonable that the bearing of your sin took place as day splintered off into darkness and the redeeming of your life came to pass as the first sparkles of sunlight broke upon the dawn?  You can moan about the missed opportunities and the regrettable decisions you have made but what is the point of that?  It is like weeping over winning the lottery or despairing over the successful surgery that saved you from cancer.  You have been redeemed!  Never look past that.

"Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  Isaiah 43:1 NIV

Walking in the Light

What does it mean that we are not our own, we were bought at a price except that we are not our own.  (1 Corinthians 6:19)  It is paganism at its core to struggle out of the grip of the Holy Spirit and venture off without a single thought what God who is truly God might want.  We are certainly free to say what we think and do as we wish but if we are in Christ we are not our own and that will become perfectly clear to us in the workings of God in our daily doings.  The things we ask of Him and the gifts we desire will lie neglected until we get this matter straight.  We are not our own.  To walk in the light requires we stay away from the dark places of independence and rely upon the Word to direct our steps.  Of course it isn't easy but it is the One Way that makes the love of Christ fill our hearts with lasting gladness.

The Dawn Is Upon You

At what point do you begin to question the sanity of chasing after Jesus, of wanting to please the Father, of listening for the Holy Spirit to guide you?  Is it after the disastrous decision you made, during the long wait for the hope you had being fulfilled or while you sing dispassionately of the God you once trusted.  Nothing speaks more of your faith than your determination to shake off the conundrums of misplaced affections.  The Lord who saved you will not allow any desire or longing replace Him as King of your hopes and dreams.  You were not called out of darkness to stay in the shadows.  The light of Christ will shine brightly within you but only as you give Him access to the dark places where lurk the aspirations you have for getting your way, your way.  The Lord must put a halt to your self-reliance before you can progress much further in the joy of your salvation.  Rejoice, the dawn is upon you!    The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn...Proverbs 4:18 NIV

The miracles of Scripture were never merely a deliverance from difficulty but they always were a sign of God near.  The blind man did not find it smooth sailing after he was given sight; his parents were cast out of the synagogue and his former blindness ridiculed.  Have we come to the point where all we want is a miracle but not the God who shadows it?  If your bill got paid somehow, would you let God consecrate your lust?  If your girl loved you, would you give yourself to holiness?  If your mind became clear and you could suddenly see the big idea, would you bury your clock as you prayed?  If you steered clear of the wreck or your cancer faded, would you give a true pagan your unmitigated faith?  How would you react to a bona fide miracle; an answer to prayer too close to God to be a coincidence?  Would you shake it off...would you take note of it...would you pause in awe of the God who saved you?  What sort of miracle do you need to notice GOD?  Is the Scripture enough for you to love Him and watch for His sway in the moments you have?  I have often wondered how it was possible that nine of the ten lepers gave no notice of Jesus once they got out of sight of Him and His Word.  Perhaps though, given what we see of ourselves and those about us, the biggest miracle of that day was the pivot one leper made when he gazed upon his skin and came running back to Jesus in awe of the Light that was no longer mere shadow.  Each day I make a record of ten to twenty things for which I am thankful God gave me the past day.  I have to do this or else I will go the full twenty-four hours and run the risk of missing the extraordinary gift of moments when Christ drew near to me.