The atmosphere you create around you will dictate the manner in which you will live. If you fill it with things that are pleasing to God, your life will reflect His beauty. If you fill it with things opposed to His will, your life will be shallow, ineffective, and virtually useless for the Kingdom. The choice certainly seems easy, but what exactly does it mean to “create the atmosphere” around you? Everything we allow into our minds adds to the atmosphere around us. The words we choose to speak add to it as well. The actions we take are the final element that goes into creating the atmosphere that surrounds us.
Discipleship
No Secrets
We all live with some facade. Few are comfortable allowing the world to see all their faults and failures. There are things we wish we did better and things we wish we didn’t do at all. If we’re honest, we all have secrets and things we hide from the view of others. It can range from the smallest bad habit to the most extreme action. We’re so careful to make certain these things never surface, that they do nothing to damage the picture we show to the world. Along the way, we forget one of the earliest lessons we ever learned: there is nothing you can hide from God.
In Love with Jesus
Are you really in love with Jesus? Would you do anything for Him, defend Him no matter the cost, even sacrifice your life for Him? I think it’s easy for us to say we love Jesus. I think we even mean it. The way we live our lives sometimes says otherwise. How often is it more convenient to put Him to the side for just a bit so we can continue on with what we want to do? When you’re in love, the object of your affection is the most important thing to you. You can’t eat or sleep because all you can do is think of that person. Your heart literally aches when you’re apart. Is this the kind of love you have for Jesus? More often than I would care to admit, I fall short of this ideal.
Avoiding Pain
We all avoid pain whenever possible. If there’s a way out, or a path around, we certainly choose it. We don’t like to be uncomfortable and so we keep to our usual patterns and habits. If we’re honest, we all have at least one area of our life that we know needs to be changed. But change is hard. Change can be painful. So we avoid what we know needs to be done, and push it to the back of our mind. Meanwhile God continues to convict us about the issue and the conflict grows worse by the day. It’s been well documented that few will change until staying where they are becomes more uncomfortable than the change itself. This should not be the way for followers of Jesus.
Gateway Sins
According to Wikipedia, “The gateway drug theory (also called gateway theory, gateway hypothesis and gateway effect) states that the use of less deleterious drugs can lead to a future risk of using more dangerous hard drugs or crime.” I think sin is a lot like this. Satan uses a “gateway sin” strategy to lure us into situations where we never expected to find ourselves. I’ve observed that the strategies of Satan are fairly consistent, merely variations on a theme. His goal, much as it was in the Garden of Eden, is to only slightly blur the lines for us. He doesn’t try and whitewash the entire canvas.