Sheltered

"But test everything; hold fast what is good." - 1st Thessalonians 5:21 

The things that make you a Christian, are they your own? 

By your own I mean this: Your faith, what you believe in; is it just something that you've taken from your parents or from just watching other people? Are you trying to live a Christianity that's not really your own, that you've maybe just heard from someone and believed every word of. Or, are you striving daily to seek for yourself the King of Kings a.k.a. Jesus Christ and the truth in His word? Are you working at developing every part of what makes you a Christian rock solid; strong enough to stand in the storm? 

Do you have a sheltered Christianity, one where you just have taken what you grew up with and are ok with mimicking what you saw your parents or friends do, or maybe just believing everything you hear from everyone who associates themselves with God. Or are you working for a well rounded, tested and tried faith, one that is so because you take everything you hear and line it up with the perfect truth in the Bible, and You've laid out all the options and studied both sides and lived in them for a good amount of time and prayed for insight and wisdom and have been led by the Holy Spirit in choosing things for your foundation that can go into the fire and come out unscathed.

I know some of these words may seem harsh, but I've seen very close people to me in the past come crashing down because they put their trust in the wrong things turning them away from the One thing that loves them most. And my heart breaks for them so much.

What's wrong with a sheltered Christianity is that when something outside everything you've ever known to be the truth challenges your beliefs and you find out that you've been mistaken and that your faith has been built on sand, your whole world then comes crashing down before you.

I've heard close friends in the past say things about their faith with such conviction and wondered how they could be so sure about something when that style is all they've known, when they've never stepped outside their whole growing up bubble or box to see what else God says. Their faith has never been tested, they've only seen their one view of God, and I fear that when the time comes for the stormy weather that their house of cards will blow right over.

When we invest too much into something without testing it against the Word of God, when we trust something just because we always have, we can set ourselves up for giving that thing more esteem than it should have. When we invest more than we should into something that is created, we forget that the created thing is nothing without it's Creator. And anything that we place in higher regard than God's truth, whether we know it or not, becomes a god. And when we blindly put so much of ourselves into a god, we face the threat of when it fails us blaming God for failing us when we are actually confusing the god for God. 

Matthew 7:24-27 - "These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don't work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards."