Sunday's quote

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
This was the quote from Ghandi that I mentioned in Sunday's sermon. It is a challenge to us who follow Jesus to be more like Jesus, to follow Him and not to expect Him to follow us. While I do not have much appreciation for the argument that Christian faith is not true because of the behavior of Christians. I do admit that often our weakest point in our witness to the truth of Christ is in our resistance to the Holy Spirit at work to transform us to be more like Jesus Christ. The freedom we experience in Christ is just this we are free from Sins demands to follow our own selfish and often conflicted desires, and we are set free to follow Jesus Christ. As a Reformed Christian (You may ask me what this means if you wish) I do qualify my understanding of free will to understand that we are not free as we may seem, that all is in a mysterious way subject to the sovereign and ultimately good will of God. Yet at the same time this Will is mysterious and hidden and such as we experience life, we seem to be free to do as we will. In that case our response to this experience is to use such freedom as we seem to have to bring our will into obedience to the revealed Will of God. God makes His revealed will known to us through the combined and always consistent voice of the Bible as the Word of God and the inner direction of the Holy Spirit. If these two voices seem to be contradictory it is not that one is faulty. It is instead that our hearing is inadequate and that we should pray to God who gives liberally out of His love, for greater understanding of His will. It it not Christ or even a fault in Christianity that leads to such sentiments as Ghandi's. It is our own failure to be as obedient to God as we are called.
In Christ and on the Shepherd's Path,
Mark