Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"Wow Moment" for the day:

"Prayer is not a matter of pouring out the human heart once and for all in need or joy, but of an unbroken, constant learning, accepting, and impressing upon the mind of God's will in Jesus Christ"
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Life Together"

Monday, March 1, 2010

Distinction

Let's be really honest for a moment: most Christians simply do not devote oodles of time reading through books in the Old Testament like Leviticus or Numbers. They contain pages and pages of long lists of rules, specifications, measurements, population counts, and other such practices of the Israelites that do not have much immediate meaning for those of us walking with Christ today. After all, we do not perform animal sacrifices, worship in a temple, or march into physical battle as we move into the territory God has promised us.
Tonight, however, I was reading through a few chapters in Leviticus as part of my "Through the Bible in a Year" study. I was almost to the end of tonight's portion when I read the following:

You must therefore make a distinction between clean and unclean animals and between unclean and clean birds. Do not defile yourselves by any animal or bird or anything that moves along the ground- those of which I have set apart as unclean for you. You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.
-Leviticus 20:25-26

Okay, so unclean animals and birds. Don't eat them. Got it. But Jesus declared that was unnecessary as part of the New Covenant God was making with those who chose to follow him in Mark 7:18-20, right? So this all has little application to Christian life today, right? On the surface, of course. We do not have to go through the same rituals the Israelites were succumbed to in the Old Testament in order to retain purity, because we find our identity in Christ. But as I was reading this, something really stuck out to me:

You must therefore make a distinction between clean and unclean animals and between unclean and clean birds. Do not defile yourselves by any animal or bird or anything that moves along the ground- those of which I have set apart as unclean for you. You are to be holy to me because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be my own.

Those first six words hit me like a ton of bricks. We are to make a distinction. For the Israelites, these pages and pages of laws were designed to retain their purity and show that they were different, set apart, from the rest of the world and did not conform to the standards of the people groups around them. They were different, and they were different because they were God's people and sought to represent their Lord in the best possible human way. Today, we are called to do the same thing. We are called to be set apart and show the world that we find our identity in Christ and we do not want to be related to anything apart from Him. As Christians, we bear the name of Christ, literally, and that name is something the world can see and immediately make a judgment about us for. How often, though, do we bear the name alone and fail to make any other statement about our Savior? As representatives of Christ, we are called to show the world around us that we are different and that difference comes in our sanctification in Christ.
We are to make a distinction.