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Tuesday July 7, 2016

 

Approximately thirty years ago, I was listening to an interview between a child and the Pastor of his church. The Pastor asked: “son what do you want to be when you grow up?” The child answered: a “returned minister”. The Pastor then asked him, what is a returned minister? The child responded by telling him that a returned minister is one who stands on the altar and tells people stories about going into the jungles to preach about Jesus and having to eat monkeys. So, you want to be a missionary the Pastor asked in return? The child appeared puzzled; he looked at the Pastor and replied, no! “I want to be a returned minister. I do not want to have to eat monkeys, I just want to stand on the altar and tell the story!”

 

Here we are thirty years later with a whole generation of people who want to be returned ministers. We have people who want to be rich but who do not want to work and people who think they are smart but who never actually studied. I know a man who wrote a book on how to become wealthy and yet he is broke. I know of another person who wrote a book on how to build a successful marriage and then got divorced multiple times. All you have to do is search the social media walls, you will see there is no lack of people claiming to be successful who want to make you successful too. For the majority of these people, the problem is not what they believe; the problem is that they do not practice what they believe.

 

James 2:23-24 NIV

“Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness,” and he was called God’s friend. You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.

 

Abraham was less than perfect and yet he became one of the three patriarchs of the Judeo-Christian faith. It was not Abraham’s faith that caused him to become one of the fathers of the Judeo-Christian faith, nor was his righteousness a factor; it had everything to do with the actions he took because of his faith. As born-again believers, we should live our lives in a manner that displays our faith because our acts of obedience are what reveal it. We need to act in a way socially, morally, financially, physically, and spiritually that displays what we believe. It is not enough to just believe, we need to also practice what we believe.