March 11, 2013 – Changing the World, One Person at a Time

The Message (MSG)
Romans 8:9-11
But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

I love this paraphrase of these verses from Romans from The Message. What a wonderful image…to experience life on God’s terms, delivered from “that dead life!” As Pastor Dave continues his Lenten sermon series on the seven deadly sins, I’m ever reminded that I will never turn away from all of those human failings – that dead life – without the holy spark of God within me. But my task is to fan that spark, to feed it, to nurture it. I need to turn away from envy and embrace gratitude. I need to practice patience and reject anger. And as I leave room for the Holy Spirit to grow in me, I will begin to experience the fullness of life that Jesus modeled for us all.

In the 1980’s, Apple Computer had an ambitious marketing slogan: “Changing the world, one person at a time.” I think that God, working in each of us through the Holy Spirit, has a much better plan to actually make that happen. Amen!

Betty Brunlieb Price

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Think Different, narrated by Steve Jobs