TO BE IN CHRIST – THE CARNAL CHRISTIAN (PART THREE)

TO BE IN CHRIST – THE CARNAL CHRISTIAN

(PART THREE)

  You say, I thought a carnal Christian was a backslider somebody for instance who used to go to church but has run off with somebody else’s wife! Oh no! That is only one kind of carnal Christian, and I would not suggest that you were that kind of carnal Christian.

  No, No! I am talking about some Sunday school teachers. I am talking about some Sunday school superintendents. I am talking about some Pastor in his pulpit. I am talking about some missionary on the field. I am talking about many ordinary average earnest Christians. They are wonderful people. You would love to meet them. They talk all the language of salvation and they mean every work. They say they are not hypocrites.

  They are overwhelmed inwardly with a sense of defeat, frustration, futility and bareness. When you meet them they will smile sweetly and they will mean the smile they give you. They will grip you by the hand and they will say “God bless you for passing my way”!

  They will thank you for all the encouragement that you have given them; yet as you thank them for the message you have just heard from their lips your very words of thanks will hurt them. They know what you do not know. They know that for years they have labored in vain.

  The fruit that has appeared to others has fallen, oh so often, so cruelly often to the ground only to rot immaturely and prematurely and never to produce.

  Story after story could be told of men and women who bravely doggedly out of a sense of duty, love and devotion go on.  Deep down in their hearts they are tired almost beyond endurance! Again and again they have got down by their bedside and cried out to God with tears in their eyes: God, you know how barren I am, you know how empty I am, and you know how stale I am. You know it and yet they do not know the answer.

  I wonder are you like that? At last the burden became intolerable. The men of the City came to the man of God, and they poured out the whole story. He said “bring me a new cruse and put salt therein”. They brought it to him and he went forth unto the spring of the waters and cast the salt in there and said this saith the Lord. “I have healed these waters; there shall not be from thence any more death or barren land”. So the waters were healed unto this day, according to the saying of Elisha which he spoke (II Kings 2:20-23). He went to the spring of the waters, for there were waters and he placed salt at the source. What does salt represent?

Pastor James P. Norman