September 2
“Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord.” (Hebrews 12:14)
The next transformation is directed at Christians who know the Lord, or at least claim to know Him, but don’t really appreciate what He has done for us. These are folks who claim to be Christians and have Christ as their highest priority, but in reality this is not true. There are other things, perhaps unconscious to the person, that they love more than Christ. Perhaps it is position, or success, or money, or power, or influence, or fame, or, in the case of our topic of immorality, pleasure and the gratification of fleshly lusts.
I can speak to this a little because I think this is yet another sin which has characterized me at times. When I look back on my life and career, I can see times where my career, my position, my image and how I appeared to others, my agenda, my interests and goals, my pleasure, etc. were more important to me in practice than the pursuit of Christ’s virtues like holiness and righteousness and being filled with the Spirit. Perhaps there was even a proud discounting and minimizing the character qualities and things that God values; I was worldly minded. I was still active in church and men’s groups and all, and I was faithfully attended church and was an elder in several different churches, but I could not say that the most important thing to me was Christ and being like Him, no matter what the cost. I wanted success and earthly prosperity; I wanted to serve Christ my way.
| FROM Conformed to the World | TO Transformed in Christ |
| 7. Thinking little of purity, holiness, righteousness, self-control, even taking for granted the salvation that Christ brings to us; behaving unworthy of His grace to us. | 7. Highly valuing purity, holiness, self-control, and sanctification; appreciating immensely the salvation Christ has given us and determining to walk worthy of it. |
Am I making sense here? I feel like I am struggling to accurately describe what I am thinking. I was worldly minded, and double minded, but I was not aware of it. It’s not that the things above were not important to me, but I desired worldly things more strongly than I desired Christ Himself. If you could examine my heart and really see what was more important to me, being pure and holy in every thought, word, and deed or being successful and prosperous, you probably would see that I longed for success and prosperity more than I longed for righteousness and purity of heart. To some extent I put earthly and temporal values higher than family and relationships.
In short, I did not treasure Christ and His righteousness and purity and holiness above everything and anything else. I did not highly value relationships and did not see myself as the servant to my family and others that I ought to have been, but to some extent I wanted others to serve my agenda and to an extent resented the negative impact my family had on my achieving my earthly goals. I would even find myself envying unbelievers and not fully appreciating, forgetting to an extent, how great the treasure of eternal life in Christ truly is!
This is important to understand, I think, and so I’d like to explore this more tomorrow.