daily java

Daily Java: If the part of the dough offered as firstfruits is holy, then the whole batch is holy; if the root is holy, so are the branches. (Romans 11:16)

You either are holy or you aren’t. There aren’t any divisions in your life where one leaves off and the other begins.

In the fourth century, the emperor Constantine believed that God had blessed him in a battle, so therefore, he would turn the Roman Empire into a Christian nation. To do this, he decided that everybody had to be baptized, whether they wanted to or not. The story was told of one of his soldiers being baptized with his sword arm out of the water. All of me for God except for my sword arm. It is for the emperor.

He had the idea that his life was divided into sections. He felt that if he was Christian he had to sit around and be nice all the time and couldn’t fight for his emperor. So he would leave the arm out of the Christian equation. It was for fighting. The rest was for God.

All of us feel that way to some extent. There are things we want to continue doing, so we separate them from our Christian life. Or at least we try to.

Everything we do is for God, no matter what it is. If it is wrong, then it is sin. But even so, if we are his, we are his. We cannot separate parts of our lives out and keep them to ourselves. We just try to move into his grace more fully.

When we were younger, we always talked about preaching for a church that was “light charismatic.” By that we meant one that had good music and lifted their hands when they sang and were excited to be at church, but weren’t wackos about it.

After we came into that relationship we call being baptized in the Spirit, we realized that one is either in the Spirit or isn’t. You cannot be “light” anything in Jesus.

In fact, Jesus said that He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters (Matthew 12:30). You either do or you don’t. You either serve or you don’t.

That means that our whole lives are in Jesus or none is. You are either a Christian or you aren’t. You are holy or you aren’t.

But I do stupid things occasionally. That is true. No one is perfect except Jesus and his Father. But the fact that you do stupid things occasionally doesn’t mean that parts of your life are not in Jesus. It just means that all sin and fall short of the glory (Romans 3:23).

Everybody has faults. When it comes down to it, it is the way we are made. If we didn’t, there would be no need for Jesus, his grace and his sacrifice.

Rather than trying to separate sections of our lives, we realize that we are all his and work to make those sections that are faulty better.

However, we know that God loves us anyway. That root of love makes us holy even when we are not.

We work, we live in the world, we mess up, but we are still children of God in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3).

And we are always holy.