Are You Hiding Within the Church?

   Have you ever heard of the professional student? They enroll in school year after year and attend regularly. They go to classes and learn a great deal about, history, life and many other things. They even try to go the extra mile and do all kinds of extracurricular activities like, sports, band, and many other social activities. Then, graduation day rolls around and instead of going out into the world to leave their mark, they go back to school and hide in the classroom with the fear they aren't ready to face the world. They never put into practice all the knowledge they obtain and were trained to use. Therefore their knowledge is useless and powerless to make a change or an impact on the world.

    What a waste it is for someone to spend a lifetime in school and then never go out into the world to put into practice the principals they learned and to gain the invaluable lessons that only experience in real life can teach them. Yet that is exactly what many Christians are doing in the church today. We attend church, enroll in extracurricular activities like the sewing club, outings to big league games, ocean get-aways, canoeing trips, and trips to amusement or water parks. We relish the times that big name preachers come and impart their wisdom on us. We even furrow our brow and pound the desk with a hearty amen when the preacher declares that the world is hopelessly degenerate and in need of Jesus. But when it comes time to face the real world, when we recognize that our neighbor (we’ll call him Jack) or coworker (we’ll call her Jill) are lost and in need of Jesus, we run back to church and try to find an evangelist. We ask to have more courses taught, and more money spent. We call on the local church to have another combined church outreach. And while we organize within the “campus”, Jack and Jill die in their sins and go to hell. 

    It is time for us to stop being Sunday morning Christians. It’s time for us to put our faith into action. It’s time to stop hiding in the recesses of our church campus. Its time to reach out and pull sinners from the fire, hating even the garments spotted by the flesh (Jude 1:23). Stop merely reading and studying the bible; start doing what it says. God commands us to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. He says we are to leave the 99 good sheep and to seek after the one that is lost. If you want to truly experience God, it will not be within the confines of a church building. You will find Him in the highways and byways of life as you reach out to a lost and dying world.

    The Apostle Paul declared this in Philemon 1:6, when he said, ”I pray that you may be active in sharing your faith, so that you will have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ.”