What Really Matters?

By: American Decency Staff

… What really matters?  What is it that matters so much in my life and in your life that it sets the priorities for everything we do?  Our Lord Jesus was asked essentially this same question and his reply was: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.â€ÂÂ  (Matthew 22:37-40) Here is what really matters – to love the Lord our God, to love his Son, and to know him personally as our Savior.  And if we love him, to do the things that please him; simultaneously to show forth his character of holiness and love in our lives; to be faithful to his truth; to walk day by day with the living Christ; to live a life of prayer. And the other half of what really matters is to love our neighbor as ourselves.  The two go together; they cannot be separated.  “On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.â€ÂÂ  Because we love the Lord Jesus Christ and know him personally as our Savior we must, through God’s grace, love our neighbor as ourselves.  And if we love our neighbor as Christ would have us love our neighbor, we will certainly want to share the gospel with our neighbor; and beyond this will want to show forth the law of God in all our relationships with our neighbor. But it does not stop here.  Evangelism is primary, but it is not the end of our work and indeed cannot be separated from the rest of the Christian life. We must acknowledge and then act upon the fact that if Christ is our Savior, he is also our Lord in all of life.  He is our Lord not just in religious things and not just in cultural things such as the arts and music, but in our intellectual lives, and in business, and in our relation to society, and in our attitude toward the moral breakdown of our culture.  Acknowledging Christ’s Lordship and placing ourselves under what is taught in the whole Bible includes thinking and acting as citizens in relation to our government and its laws.  Making Christ Lord in our lives means taking a stand in very direct and practical ways against the world spirit of our age as it rolls along claiming to be autonomous, crushing all that we cherish in its path. If we truly love our Lord and if we truly love our neighbor, we will ache with compassion for humanity today in our own country and across the world.  We must do all we can to help people see the truth of Christianity and accept Christ as Savior.  And we must not allow the Bible to be weakened by any compromise in its authority, no matter how subtle the means. This is especially so when those doing this call themselves “evangelical.â€ÂÂ  But we must stand equally against the spirit of our age in the breakdown of morality and the terrible loss of humanness that it has brought.  It will mean especially standing for human life and showing by our actions that every life is sacred and worthwhile in itself – not only to us as human beings, but precious also to God.  Every person is worth fighting for, regardless of whether he is young or old, sick or well, child or adult, born or unborn, or brown, red, yellow, black or white. It is God’s life-changing power that is able to touch every individual, who then has the responsibility to touch the world around him with the absolutes found in the Bible.  In the end we must realize that the spirit of the age – with all the loss of truth and beauty, and the loss of compassion and humanness that it has brought – is not merely a cultural ill.  It is a spiritual ill that the truth given us in the Bible and Christ alone can cure. [Taken from "The Great Evangelical Disaster" by Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer]

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