Hanging Out

Good morning and welcome in. Today we are going to take a look at a passage of scripture but before we do that I wanted to ask you a question.

Who do you spend your time with each week? Time is a precious commodity and each of us need to decide with whom you are going to spend it.  Are they people who sincerely believe in the teachings of scripture? Have they been baptized by full submersion in the name of Christ? Do they openly and unashamedly confess Jesus Christ as their Lord? Do they accept biblical truth as taught by Jesus and his disciples?  Who are you hanging out with on a regular basis? 

Before I became a follower of Jesus Christ I used to work at some really big manufacturing plants approximately 40 hours a week and more.  I knew almost everybody and hung out with them as we worked. As we worked  together we talked about marriages, friends, current events and things that we liked to do for fun on the weekend. All the co-workers became like one giant family together who were all joined as a group on the same projects.  I knew people from work far better than I knew my own relatives.

To this day I can never remember hearing anybody talk about Jesus or their faith at work or in the lunchroom. Perhaps if they had, the other employees would have gotten really upset for them preaching their religion at work.  The boss might have given them a few warnings and then eventually fired them.

There are so many people who profess to be Christian today who surround themselves with those who reject the beloved Son of God.

When you think about it, some people spend 3 hours a week at a church  to worship God and fellowship with other believers, but come Monday morning, they spend 20 to 40 hours a week fellowshipping at work with people who don’t share their faith at all.  They have different beliefs and religious opinions. That is an unequal yoke which needs to be eliminated from a person’s life if they are truly going to become a follower of Jesus Christ.

It all depends on who you hang around with most of your day. Are you surrounding yourself with people who believe in Jesus? Do they fear and love him?   Or are you surrounding yourself with people at the workplace or in the world, who don’t share your faith and beliefs? There are millions of other conservative Christians who believe the exact same way that I do.  

The more time that you spend with unbelievers the more you can be influenced by them. To truly be a Christian one must make the decision to have associations with those who truly believe in Jesus and call on his name out of a pure heart.

So, who are you surrounded by? Are you surrounded by believers or unbelievers? I’ve always said this and I’ll say it again, some of the closest relationships that you can ever have in your life are with those that you join together and work with.  If we truly are going to love God with our entire heart, soul and mind, we must  be able to come out and be separate from the world. 

The apostles preached the gospel to the world but if people didn’t receive it they were supposed to move on to the next person or town.  They didn’t join up with them.

You might see people from the community occasionally at the grocery store or at the gas station, but what I’m talking about is who do you spend the bulk of your time with each week? Is it people who call on the name of Christ or is it people who don’t believe in Jesus at all?

When I became a believer in Jesus Christ I truly wanted God to be a Father for me. I wanted him to be with me and near me. In order to claim the promise in the following passage, I left my good paying secular jobs and moved out into the woods in northern Minnesota in order to have more time with God and to have plenty of time available to hand down my faith to  my beloved children.  Over the years I became self-employed in order to obey God’s command. My entire baptized family worked side-by-side with each other to provide for our daily needs.

2 Cor 6:14-18

14 Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

15 And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?

16 And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

17 Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.

18 And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.

Jesus taught that if we truly love Him we will keep his commandments. Notice that the command of the Lord in this passage is to come out from among them and be separate.

Separate means the complete opposite of join.  Join means to put or bring two or more things together : to connect and to come together as a unit. This is what you do when you work alongside others day by day at a job. You work as a unit together to produce a product and help the company to grow.

Noah kept himself and his family separate from the world because he knew that its destruction was coming. This is how we truly become a part of God’s family because this is the promise one can claim from this passage. 

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was coming, and like Noah, Lot obeyed God and came out to be separate.  His wife loved the world so much she decided to go against her husband and tried to return to the city. She was turned into a pillar of salt because she displeased God.  Can you imagine if Noah’s wife did the same thing and left him before the impending flood?

When we obey this passage we show that we are a friend of Christ rather than a friend of the world. Abraham was called the friend of God and he kept separate by living out in the desert. He could have chose to live in the big city or he could have gotten a job in society but he separated himself from the world and its ways to be faithful to God. 

Moses is another example. He could have inherited all the riches that you could possibly imagine while he was in Egypt, but he completely turned away from all of it in order to be separate from the world and to please God.

Many years ago I was talking to a person about the Christian faith and they told me…. I’m not a Moses. They were saying this because at that moment they were incapable of separating from the world to live the Christian Life. 

Moses, Abraham and Noah are examples of men of faith who pleased God and did His will. This is the calling for a Christian.  They are to serve and to love God as they did.

In this world there is light and dark, good and evil and right and wrong. The thing that separates us from the world is the acceptance of God’s mercy and forgiveness in Christ Jesus. We are separated by biblical truth.  Remember that Jesus didn’t come to bring peace on the Earth but rather division.

Should I ask you just one question today, Who are you spending your time with each week?  Do they believe in the teachings of Christ? If not,  are you coming out to be separate from them? 

Who are you hanging out with?

Let’s think about those things for today and Lord willing I’ll talk to you some more tomorrow. Till then, bye-bye everybody.💖

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