Saturday, 26 July 2014

Bad company corrupts good habits


Earlier in the year I was a little incensed at the weeds in my neighbours garden, why?



Because they were creeping over to my garden.
It reminded me of a verse in scripture:


 Do not be deceived: "Evil company corrupts good habits."


Now obviously, I can’t physically remove my garden from next door, what I had to do was take out the weeds as they came over. However, we are reminded in 1 Corinthians 15 of what evil company can do to us if we insist on being in their company. We are surrounded by sinners who are not saved (I was once a sinner in darkness, now I'm a sinner saved by God's grace) does that mean then that we are to take ourselves off somewhere where there isn't any? No, scripture tells us that we are in the world not of it, in other words whilst we have something to do with those around us we are not to do what they do. We don’t find their smutty jokes funny so why should we laugh at them, to be polite, no, we are not called to be polite we are called to be holy, that is, separate from the world in the way that they think about sin and ungodly living. Who you mix with, what you watch on TV and the internet, what we listen to on the radio, what kind of music we listen to, what kind of books we read all influences our spiritual life. If we spend most of our time doing what the rest of the world is doing, then our spiritual life will suffer.


We are called as Christians to be salt and light to the world and we can’t be light to the world if we are not walking in the light, Pamela talks about this in her blog, Glow in the Dark. We are to influence the unsaved and not the other way around. I kept weeding my garden I wouldn't let the weeds take hold, eventually my neighbour weeded her garden too so now it all looks lovely.


We cannot influence the unsaved around us if we are just letting their habits and sins spread into our own lives, we must be holy and let the light of Jesus shine through our lives showing others His wonderful grace and love.



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