Reading someone else’s mail and your relationships!!

Back in the day, when we were pastoring, Jim was teaching about reading someone else’s mail….like Galatians, Ephesians, or Philippians.  We classify those books as epistles, or letters, and he helped me think of them that way.  When I read much of the New Testament, I am reading what eye witnesses saw and what they wanted other people to know.  This idea brought to life these books or letters in the New Testament; it was as though I were reading over the shoulders of those first century recipients of these letters.

This morning I was reading in I Peter, and Peter is writing about something that people are still trying to figure out, the fulfillment of prophecy – then the first coming of Christ, now the second.  As I read this, it brought to mind how real the return of Christ was to me as a young believer.  That awareness of his imminent return kept me from doing some things and caused me to plead with Him not to return while I was doing other things. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense now, but to me, as a kid, it was a guilty conscience pleading with God.  I just didn’t want Him to return in the middle of my sin.

This morning I was wondering what happened to that awareness,  that He could come back today.  Have we become so used to the gospel that we take it for granted?  We simply don’t even think or allow the reality of his soon coming to affect our behavior. And we don’t even think about the reality that He sees it all anyway.

Then I wondered about our relationships, our marriages.  Do we conduct them ignorant of the reality that God sees it all, whether we can see Him or not, or do we just not care?  I wonder how cultivating the reality of His presence might affect the way we interact with, and react to, our mates, to our children, to our in-laws or parents, and to those around us.  Would we use the same words, the same tone of voice, the same body language if we owned the reality that He is in the room?

I was a sponge at camp every summer, soaking up anything that would help me grow.  One summer I picked up the idea that not just the regular four-letter words were bad for us as Christians, but any words we used in anger.  When we were not functioning controlled by the Spirit, we were yielding ourselves to the control of the evil one.  All of that comes from someone else’s mail too,  Ephesians 5.

 

photo from stephsgenealogy.blogspot.com