Mar 28 2024 Are You a Member or a Believer?
Punky and I are working through some spring-cleaning. I don’t look forward to this process, but I do like getting rid of things we do not need anymore. These are the things that are cluttering our house, no longer providing any value or service, and honestly…just taking up space.
It’s the same with our faith. We all need to take the time now and then to take stock of our spiritual lives and “spring-clean” the clutter from our soul. It’s not enough to go through the motions or take up space on the pews on Sunday or go to a weekly Bible Study. As believers, we need to continually and progressively grow closer to our Father. We need to know our Father so that we can point others to Him.
There are so many men and women around us who do not know God from Donald Duck. I remember a news segment from a few years ago where people in New York City were asked what Easter meant. Of all those interviewed, 50% had no idea. One woman interviewed said, “Easter has something to do with bunnies and Jesus laying eggs.” These days, I’m sure that percentage would be even higher.
As believers, those numbers should cause us to ask ourselves a couple of things:
- How many church-going people don’t have any idea what it means to be a follower of Jesus? Am I one of them?
- How many church-going people don’t tell others how to have a relationship with Jesus? Am I one of them?
R. Clayton Bell shared this story on bible.org:
A number of years ago Norman Cousins wrote an editorial in Saturday Review in which he reported a conversation he had on a trip in India. He was talking with a Hindu priest named Satis Prasad. The man said he wanted to come to our country to work as a missionary among the Americans. Cousins assumed that he meant that he wanted to convert Americans to the Hindu religion, but when asked, Satis Prasad said, “Oh no, I would like to convert them to the Christian religion. Christianity cannot survive in the abstract. It needs not membership, but believers. The people of your country may claim they believe in Christianity, but from what I read at this distance, Christianity is more a custom than anything else. I would ask that either you accept the teachings of Jesus in your everyday life and in your affairs as a nation, or stop invoking His name as sanction for everything you do. I want to help save Christianity for the Christian.”
Prasad hit the nail on the head when he said, “Christianity…needs not membership but believers.” It begs the question: Are you a member or a believer? What do you need to spring-clean in your life to help you deepen your faith as a believer in Jesus Christ?
As you spend time reflecting on what Jesus has done for you this Easter weekend, make a commitment to write down your story of how you came to know Him, and then pray for those in your life who do not know Jesus. Ask God to give you an opportunity to introduce them to Him!