One of the many things I love about Night Church is that after the sermon we have a Q&A time. We had some great questions on Sunday from Daniel 1.
One of them was this - “Is it possible for the same decision to be compromising for one person but actually Jesus-honouring for another?” For example (a scenario I mentioned in my sermon) deciding to skip community group to go to work drinks.
For one person, this could be part of a worrying pattern of drifting further and further from Jesus and conforming to the Babylonian society around us. For another person though – they may make this decision out of a genuine desire to find opportunities to share the gospel and see their non-Christian mates come to know Jesus.
I think this is true – the same event may be drifting for one person, and God-honouring for another. So how do we know which we are? My encouragement on Sunday was to look carefully and prayerfully examine our hearts. One of my favourite quotes is “what the heart desires, the will decides and the mind justifies. This captures so well the process which has led me to make lots of bad decisions in the past. My heart wants to do something, my will decides that's what I'm going to do, and so my mind finds a clever “Christian-looking” way to justify this decision to myself and others so I get what I want. So we carefully examine our hearts, asking "what do you want me to do, Lord", rather than asking "what can I get away with".
But as I've thought about this scenario more – I just had one more thing to add.
Let's say you do get invited to drinks with your workmates when Community Group is on. Or a birthday party on a Sunday morning. Perhaps something more significant like a wedding or a significant birthday of a close friend or family member. You could skip the church thing to go along. At the very least your friend would know you valued them by being there, perhaps you might get a chance to share Jesus with them.
But when you think about it – wouldn't it be actually making a stronger, more powerful witness to your love for Jesus, and how much you value him if you said - “hey I would really love to be there – but I can't – I've got church – I don't skip church unless I have no other choice.” They might ridicule you for it, they might get offended, but one thing would be clear: Jesus is your number one priority.
Just some food for thought.
Yours in Christ,
Andy.