Frozen, Rusted, Chained, or Melted

I came across this article in SBC Life the other day and thought you might enjoy it. It was written by Charles Lowry and entitled Frozen, Rusted, Chained, or Melted...

When a young girl arrived home from school and told her mom that she was the smartest student in the class that day, her mom asked how that happened. "We wrote on the blackboard," the girl said proudly, "and I was the only one in the class that could read my writing." It is natural to look at life from our point-of-view. A chicken and an elephant were locked in a cage together, and the chicken told the elephant that they needed a few rules. The first was that they not step on each other. We, like the chicken, look at rules and decisions in a way that will best benefit us.

A teenager being interviewed for a job at a movie theatre was asked what he would do if there was a fire at the theatre. The boy said not to worry; he would get out alright. That is not what the boss had in mind. The boss was thinking that he needed someone to care for others. This is what God expected when He established the church. Many of our churches have adopted the chicken point-of-view. It is usually not a doctrinal problem---we don't know enough theology to argue about that---it is a people problem.

Some want it this way, others want it another way, and still others want it another way. How many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one because all he has to do is hold the bulb as the world revolves around him. We spend our lives looking for ways to disagree.

Our nature is to put others down to build ourselves up. An egotist is a man that spends so much time talking about himself that you have no time to talk about yourself. I will never forget a man I had in marriage couseling. I told him that he and his wife needed to be of one mind. He wanted to know which mind? Mine or hers? That is our problem. Which mind? Theirs or mine? That's the chicken point of view. The Bible says, "Let this mind be in you which is in Christ Jesus." That "mind" was able to forget about Himself so that we still remember two thousand years later.

I don't know anything about pianos but I am told that two pianos should not be tuned to each other. Instead, we tune each piano to the tuning fork. The pianos then would be tuned the same because they were tuned to the same tuning fork. You and I will never agree on all things, but if we can find the one purpose that we agree upon, we will not be in cross purposes. That's our job as churches and as a denomination. We should be in tune with the Mind of Christ. We can't be frozen together in formalism, rusted together by ritualism, or even chained together by conservatism. We have to be melted together by the love of Christ.

A couple adopting a child from an orphanage was drawn to one little boy and told him of all the things that they would give him---clothes, toys, and a nice new house. Nothing seemed to appeal to him, and they finally asked him what he really wanted. He replied that he just wanted someone to love him. that's what our world wants and needs.