While my classmates were musing about how there seems to be
a disconnection between what people who claim to be Christians say that they
believe and what they actually practice in reality, I decided to raise my hand
and weigh in with my two cents.
Instead of two cents, a comparison came out that, in the
end, turned out to be a fairly accurate evaluation (in my opinion!) of the malaise, the
non-active, life that some live.
It is like a hoagie.
Say you go to a restaurant and you are with your friend. The friend asks what you will order and you
say a hoagie. The menu depicts a
scrumptious heap of meat, onion, peppers, cheese, and tomatoes atop a thick
roll. It looks good. The friend assumes that you had the hoagie before
since your recommended it to him or her.
Both you and your friends get these scrumptious looking hoagies
delivered right to you in moments. Your
friend waits for you to begin, but you are stunned. You just recommended and ordered something
you have no intention of eating.
If a scrumptious hoagie is set in front of you, you eat it,
right? It could be said that those who
claim to believe and yet have never really practiced walking with Jesus is the
person who orders and perhaps recommends something (the belief without serious
intention to follow) without having any real experiential knowledge of it. A lot of people “order” or say that they
“believe” in Jesus, but the truth of the matter is that a lot of those same
people have not seriously intended to ingest His way so that it becomes their
way. Imagine the hoagie sitting there
and after a while it no longer looks scrumptious. Because hoagies are made and ordered so that
they can be incorporated into your body…making the substance of the meat, veggies,
and bread real to you.
What would it take to convince us that it is worth it? Why isn't God’s reality and God’s goodness
the most real reality of our lives?
Do you and I see in Jesus (and God, the Father), One who is
worth going after like a pearl merchant who had searched all of his life for
that one pearl and finally, finding it, thought it nothing to sell all that he
had in order to go and buy that one?
(read Jesus’ parable of the kingdom in Matthew 13)
