OzThoughts Thursday 13th August 2009

OzThoughts Thursday 13th August 2009

I recently was reflecting on the life of a friend. Her childhood was deprived and one which suffered because of the depravity of her relatives and friends. As she grew older her life just became filled with more abuse. People abused her and she abused herself with her lifestyle.

She reached an even lower point in life and it was during this stage she experienced Christian love and care and she became a committed Christian. Eventually she came to the point where I met her as a uniformed Salvationist, married to a Salvationist and raising her daughter with all the loving care and Christian teaching she was deprived of.

Her favourite verse is a favourite of mine. It is the second verse of the twelfth chapter of Romans:

2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (New International Version)


2 Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message)


For me, it was always a warning not to get involved with things which belonged to the world. It was a command to hang onto the Christian things which I had been taught from my earliest days and to turn my back on the rest of life which was against the ways God had allowed me to enjoy.

For my friend whose life had taken a dramatic change when she met Christ, it meant looking back at her former lifestyle, including friends and family who still enjoyed their old ways. It meant she would turn away from their friendship, if their ways were against God’s ways. She could not enjoy their company as they continued to enjoy the sins and pleasures of the world.

God had lifted her to a higher life and she was enjoying life on that level.

PRAYER:

Lord, lift me up and let me stand
By faith on Heaven's tableland:
A higher plane than I have found;
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.
The Salvation Army Song Book: Chorus: 80

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