Thursday 18 August 2011

Reasons to be cheerful.

St Paul this week expressly warns Christians against getting over full of our own importance. So why have so few of us taken notice?
The church is full of important people. We are all at fault to some degree. The system encourages us to be important people..we are made to feel that the world may actually stop spinning if we fail to do something.
He warns us that we will not be popular. That people will not like us and that we should learn to live with that.

He gives us an enormous list of things we can do with the grace of God.
In the reading from Romans this week we are asked not to get conceited or self serving but we should be able to teach, to prophecy, to minister and to exhort Getting a false idea of our greatness is not to be encouraged. If we can do one or two things from his list it's only by the grace of God.

...I know so many self righteous and important people that it's hard to know where to start.
Self publicity is obviously wrong but here we all are blogging away and hoping other people will read it.
I know people who hardly ever leave their church without alerting the media. That's a bit of an exaggeration but not much!
Some people spend their lives seeking to be recognized. I never thought I'd be an advocate for listening to St Paul but maybe it is time to point out that in the list of what we can be good at, right at the end is the word cheerful. We should really try to be cheerful. Smile, joke, let our hair down occasionally in public.
The population at large still might not like us but at least we will have tried and in that we will always be in good company!


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1 comment:

UKViewer said...

Not sure about important people in the church? They might be important due to their status, constitutionally, but they should be Servant Leaders in the flesh.

And, I must admit, most that I've met actually have a sense of humour, sometimes in self-deprecation, and sometimes at the over-inflated ego's around, especially political ones.

But Paul does speak lots of sense, sometimes he is difficult to hear, he makes us uncomfortable, but if we heed him, we might just make a good fist of it all.