Called to be Different
by BOLIM
Have you ever had someone tell you that you’re weird for what you stand for? I have. See, we as Christians are called to stand out from the rest of the world; we are to be sanctified. The word sanctified means to separate for profane things and be dedicated to God. The world is 180O opposed to the Word of God, the kingdom of God and the children of God, so therefore it is up to the children of God to live by the Word of God. This will make us, the children of God, stand out and be marked by the world—those that don’t live by the Word—as peculiar, strange, weird.
I’m not advocating that you have to do weird things just to let people know that you are strange. No, we as Christian should just naturally—supernaturally—stand out of the crowd of the world’s system. In him Bible the religious Jews tried to be different from the non-religious Jews by their appearance and their actions and things like that (they pooh-poohed on the non-religious Jews). But then Jesus came along and He was different, He healed and performed miracles, the religious Jews didn’t do that. Jesus was friends with non-religious Jews and with Romans, Matthew 8:5, and He even called many of the religious Jews hypocrites. Jews made those religious Jews mad, why? Because He was doing what they should have been doing all along. He didn’t do any of that just to prove that He could or to let people know that He was God in the flesh, or even to stand out of the crowd. He did those things because they had to be done and no one else was doing them. And the people who weren’t doing it called Jesus, though the actual word in not written in the Bible, weird.
“You know the story of what happened in Judea. It began in Galilee after John preached a total life-change. Then Jesus arrived from Nazareth, anointed by God with the Holy Spirit, ready for action. He went through the country helping people and healing everyone who was beaten down by the Devil. He was able to do all this because God was with him,” (Acts 10:38 The Message).
Some Christians that I’ve talked to who are not doing what Jesus did—miracles and healing the sick and things like that—believe that because they are born again they are automatically baptized with the Holy Spirit. But they don’t speak in a tongue, which is only the physical evidence of this baptism, and never have. I come along and talk to them about the baptism and they think I’m weird, thanks. Jesus, in that day, spoke at least four languages; He spoke Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew and tongues. And Jesus was and is our model, our standard to live by. When we got born again what happened? We got full use of the name of Jesus and the seed of the fruit of the Spirit was planted in us, Matthew 1:18, this is not the baptism with the Holy Spirit.
The Christians whom I know who walk in the miraculous, who carry out God’s will for laying hands on the sick and seeing them recover, who perform miracles, obviously led by God, are the Christians who are baptized with the Holy Spirit. The Christians that I know who don’t do any of this are not baptized with the Holy Spirit.
Before I was baptized with the Spirit I read the Bible cover to cover because I thought I should, but I wasn’t getting one thing from it. My church didn’t even encourage me to read my Bible and no church that I went to did either, of course I didn’t go to any Holy Spirit filled churches because, well, that was taboo for me at the time. But then when I finally did receive this baptism everything from the Bible that I had read came to life in me and I was totally different. I wasn’t different just because I was born again, believe it or not, but when I received the baptism with the Holy Spirit I began growing and was totally different. The more I grew the more weird I because to the world, not that I acted spastic or did foolish things but what I did was different than what the world does.
I am writing a book called Prime Directive in which I have a captain whose name is Weird. It’s not because he does things that are so far fetched but simply because he is different. He’s also the best captain in the federation.
As you know, we still have the ministry site at http://www.bolim.org. Now we have a blog/bullitenboard site at http://www.freewebs.com/wtorborg. Of course, the games magazine/cyberzine is at http://gamespeopleplayok.tripod.com. Now here is the article of the month, I write more than one article each month but this one is selected to go in this e-mail.