DIFFERENT OR BLENDED?

The message was straight forward.

Nothing jinxed or minced.

What makes you different? What differentiates you as a Christian from other people? Are you so blended in that you have lost your unique taste and have become bland? Seriously, what does your conversation hold? Who do people say you are? In your dealings and conversations, do people get the slightest hint in taste and in smell that you are anything like the good news (gospel) you so profess or you are all daggers but bland?

It seems as though being blended is the new different because everyone seem to be so good at it. I have been getting this message for a long time in different ways but it seems as if my coconut head has a whole lot of water in it. But today I heard it again loud and clear, then I thought to myself, if truly I profess that I am a Christian but nothing in me shows I am Christ-like apart from what I say, then I must be deceiving myself. Here is what is written in 1John 2:6 “whoever says he lives in Christ (that is, whoever says he has accepted Him as God and Savior) ought as a moral obligation to walk and conduct himself just as He walked and conducted Himself.”

I am to conduct myself as Christ conducted Himself…meaning my standard is Jesus Christ! This should be every Christian’s standard by the way; just imagine every Christian everywhere having the moral standard of Christ, what a force we will be. But instead, we have made mere mortals our standard that we try so hard to live up to their expectation and acclamation, what a waste of life we have chosen to live!

The issue of identity crisis is the prevalent cause of the blended life and this is mostly prevalent in the Christian cycle, but it seems we know and speak about such matters so well that we have become cloned with the similitude of who we should be and not what/who we actually are. No wonder the Bible says in 1Corinthians 2:11 that “For what person knows the thoughts and motives of a man except the man’s spirit within him? So also no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”

To be consumed with the burden of trying to be like somebody else who is also subject to the same authority as you is a yolk you haven’t been called to bear. So is the burden of trying to blend in when you have been called to be different. One thing I have come to realize is this: if you abide in the vine (Jesus Christ), living becomes different so also is association. But if you live outside the vine and try to act different in relation to the Christian lifestyle, you burn out and you smell of the smoke.

There is but one way to be delivered from the blended life – understanding the love that Christ has for you. While you were yet a sinner, He died for you. When you decided to surrender your life to Him, His love was there. When you chose the path of being in the world and of the world (living the blended life), His love for you never changed. So, now that you want to make a decision to live a different life, His love will continue to compel you. Understanding the love Christ has for you will compel you to live life differently. The love will help you abide in Him and have such genuine and sweet relationship with Him that living the different life becomes an overflow of the relationship you have with Him.

I haven’t asked you to change your lifestyle or change your cycle of friends. The only solution to leaving the blended life is to Abide in the Vine (John 15:4). Abiding in the vine automatically creates a different lifestyle for you. Then, if there is a need for any outward change, you will know how to effect that change because the Holy Spirit will not only tell you what, He will help with the how to (John 14:26).

This is a call to you and I, to check our lives and be honest – are we living BLENDED or DIFFERENT?