Skip to main content

Flavored With a Little Bit of Jesus

"In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness."  Matt. 23:28

There are some things in this world that can never be faked.  One of them is peanut butter!  Peanut butter is almost sacred and should never be tampered with! 

On a quest to eat fewer calories, I made a spontaneous purchase while grocery shopping and bought a "Peanut Spread" that has zero calories, zero fat, and zero sugar.  Yep, you guessed it -- it had zero taste!  It tasted absolutely nothing like the real thing.  I couldn't even find a hint of what could have been mistaken as a peanutty taste.  It was probably the worst thing I've ever put in my mouth.

From the outside, it looked like peanut butter.  It's label claimed to have an unbelievable likeness in taste and consistency to the real thing.  It claimed all kinds of benefits of choosing to eat this product.

Unfortunately, this product couldn't taste like the real thing because it wasn't composed of the ingredients that make up the real thing.  After reading the fine print, there were no actual peanuts used in the making of  this "peanut spread."   It only claimed to use peanut flavoring in its production.

I'm scared that a lot of "Christians" are only flavored with a little bit of Christ, but are missing the main ingredient in their life that truly makes them a Christian, and that is Christ Himself.

We faithfully attend worship services and even Bible study classes.  We give financially when there is a need in our midst.  We offer up prayers for sick friends or loved ones.  We might even raise our hands in praise to the Lord. 

Jesus quoted the prophet Isaiah in Mark 7:6-7 when He said:
 
"These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.  They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men."

It scares me to think of how many people sit in the midst of church services week in and week out and honor God with their lips, but their hearts are detached from His.  You want to know why this scares me so badly?  It scares me because I have to look deep inside and ask,

"When has this been me, Lord?"

I know for certain that there have been many times when I have offered a prayer, or taught a Bible Study, or sang praises to God when my heart was far from Him.  I was a lot like that fake peanut spread.  I made it look like everything was alright, but on the inside, my heart wasn't where it needed to be.  I was just like Jesus said in our focal verse:  I appeared righteous, but I was full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

Can I plead with you right now? 

Search your heart.  Look deep inside and ask yourself if your heart is far from God's.  Ask yourself if you've been worshipping in vain by offering praises with your mouth and not your soul.  Ask if your prayers are sincere, or if they are merely a ritual.

Then do like David did in Psalm 139:23 when he asked God to search his heart.  He desired for God to examine the integrity of his devotion and see if it was honest and true.   Ask Him to show you if your heart is filled with Him, or if it is merely flavored with Him.

My prayer is that when you and I professes the name of the Lord with our mouths, that it will be a sincere reflection of what is in our hearts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Heartfelt Reflections of a Country Church

The smells, sounds, and people of country churches stir an emotion within me that is deep and powerful. For those who have never had the opportunity to experience this blessed experience, let me explain.   From the moment you step into the vestibule (never called a foyer in a rural church), you instantly smell the footsteps of every person who has crossed that threshold - the mother with a load of kids in tow, the farmer, the truck driver, the wayward child. If those paneled walls could talk, they would tell of grace and guilt and sorrow and joy that couldn’t be hidden on the faces of the souls that dared to cross that doorway. Those walls would write books of clinched fists, tears on the altar, and singing from the saints. The smell of the aged carpet, whose color may have caused an outright quarrel in a business meeting, the creak of the floor, and the golden memorial tags lead you to a nostalgic thing of days gone by - a pew, padded if you’re lucky.   As you wait for the ob...

I love my kids, BUT. . . .

"Schoolhouse Rock" was one of mine and my husband's favorite educational past times.  Bob Dorough, writer for "Schoolhosue Rock," was a genius when he put educational factoids to quirky music and cute cartoons.  From the preamble to the Constitution, to parts of speech, multiplication facts, how electricity works, and much more, Mr. Dorough slyly disguised learning and actually made it fun! Like all good parents, we passed this educational relic on to our kids.  One of our favorite songs from "Schoolhouse Rock" is without a doubt " Conjunction Junction ."  Its jazzy rhythm easily gets stuck in your head for the rest of your day ( sorry in advance! ).  This song teaches how conjunctions mechanically work in a sentence and what their purpose is.  The conjunction 'BUT' is one that we use all the time to connect two sentences or a clause to a sentence. "I like pizza,  BUT  I don't like olives on it." "I want to...

Taking the Mask Off

If I’ve learned anything over the last few weeks of wearing masks when going out in public, it’s that wearing a mask makes it hard to breathe.   The trapped air recirculating in and out gets thick and burdensome. The same is true for the invisible mask I wear on the days that I’m trying to hide the reality of what’s going on below the surface.   There comes a point when the air that has gotten trapped between my invisible mask and my unfortunate reality gets so heavy that ripping it off and gasping for a dose of fresh, life-giving oxygen is the only remedy.   ( Cue the proverbial mask selfie that everyone has had to take during quarantine. ) I think many of us frequently wear a mask, intentionally or unintentionally, to hide the reality of what’s underneath. We mask up to present a façade. A watered-down version of the true us. A suffocating misrepresentation of our current existence.  We’re all guilty.  One of my favorite person...