Trevor Brown
Austin Jones
Calgary, AB
What does being a Christian mean to you? Living and
loving as Christ lived and loved.
Stuck in the Mud
Words by Austin Jones
If you grew up in church, you’ve probably heard Christians should
be “in the world but not of the world.” It’s as if the world is seen as a
huge mud puddle, and if we go outside of the church we’re going to
get ourselves dirty.
The message seems to be the world is going to corrupt us. Like
Isaiah, we’re very aware of our sinfulness and that the world
around us only makes us worse. We have “unclean lips” (Isaiah 6: 5)
– meaning we can’t even praise God appropriately or speak on His
behalf – and we live in a world where everyone has unclean lips.
Well, if we only remembered the next verses too, we’d see the mud
puddle idea is wrong. After Isaiah
laments his sinfulness, one of the
seraphim touches his lips with a
piece of burning coal and tells him
he is made clean.
Or consider what Jesus thought
about our mud puddle. He wasn’t
afraid to come down to earth. He
wasn’t afraid of “playing in the
mud.”
When the coal touched Isaiah’s
lips, he was made clean. When
When someone becomes a Christian they are transferred from the
kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God. And because we
have been made holy through Christ, the world cannot take that
away.
Because we have been redeemed, we are God’s holy presence on
earth. When we go out into the world the Kingdom of God goes
with us. When we go into dark places, we are the light. We can bring
God into the most desperate situations by going to those places
ourselves.
We shouldn’t be afraid of getting dirty because that’s not how the
process works. All you have to do is look at Jesus’ ministry. He goes
out and heals the sick, casts out demons, feeds the hungry, and
spends a lot of His time with the tax collectors and sinners.
So remember to ask yourself: What happens when something
holy – that’s you, because of what Christ has done in you – touches
something unholy? They both become holy.
He wasn’t afraid to
come down to earth.
He wasn’t afraid of
“playing in the mud.”
