We’ve Been Warned!

I don’t want you to forget, dear brothers and sisters, about our ancestors in the wilderness long ago. All of them were guided by a cloud that moved ahead of them, and all of them walked through the sea on dry ground.  In the cloud and in the sea, all of them were baptized as followers of Moses.  All of them ate the same spiritual food, and all of them drank the same spiritual water. For they drank from the spiritual rock that traveled with them, and that rock was Christ.  Yet God was not pleased with most of them, and their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.  These things happened as a warning to us, so that we would not crave evil things as they did. – 1 Corinthians 10:1-6

 

As Christians we are to have a totally different perspective on the world than those who don’t believe.  Unfortunately, far too many people who go to church on a regular basis, and call themselves Christians tend to live, look, and act just like the rest of the world.  They “revel” in those things which Peter says in 1 Peter 2, “…wage against your very soul.” 

I suppose it’s the same reason that people do destructive things with their physical bodies, that they know will eventually cause them great physical pain.  They don’t think that the day of reckoning will ever really come.  So, they happily trade tomorrow’s joy and peace for today’s short lived pleasure.  Folks, that is not a good strategy!

To give you just a couple of recent examples of companies that did this… Tyco & Enron.  Yep, they kept pushing the truth and the evidence further and further back until one day they could hold it back no longer.  They ruined their lives, the lives of their employees, and the lives of many hundreds/thousands of share holders who trusted them to do what was right. 

Maybe you’re continuing to ‘enjoy’ those things that you know you need to get rid of but you just want to hold onto them a little while longer, to enjoy them for just a moment more.  I wonder how many times the same discussion happened in those board rooms?  I wonder how many times they said, we need to do something, but then did nothing.  James 1:22 says, “Don’t just be hearers of the Word, be doers of the Word.”  Isn’t it about time…