This weekend I am going to see my beloved football team....Southampton. They are playing Leicester City at Leicester. I have been invited by the Chaplin of the Club to go with him in the main Leicester stand. The question is "do I wear my saints shirt or not????" Is is right to do so? Is it appropriate? Will i offend someone? Will I get beaten up?(Probably not as Leicester folk are a bit soft!!!) What do i do?
The church struggles with this diliama! How can we be in this mad place we call earth yet still hold firm to our beliefs and values as Christians? Do we just give in and accept that the world is the way it is and we need to "move with the times? Or do we hold firm regardless and just keeping doing what we have always done.
My gut feeling is neither! We need to realise that God is in the world, he craeted it after all! Why worry about where He is not(even though He is everywhere) and start to worry about where He wants us to be! Rob Bell "knocked me for six" this moring as i read these words; "I don't follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follw Jesus because he leads me into ultimate reality." Life is reality, infact "ultimate reality." This is it, no more no less, why get hung up on what we think it should be but what it actullay is at this very point in time. Being in the world does not mean that we confirm to it but converse with it.
But,what does it look like???? What ever it needs to, so that the Gospel is expounded to people who have yet to hear it. Once you have found your context, breathe it for a while then start to allow God to shape you in it so that it makes sense to you and you make sense to it!
Matt
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