We Do from the Life Within
By Jon Walker
Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Romans 12:2 (MSG)
*** *** *** ***
On a warm and windy day in downtown Nashville, my friend, Doug, held the door to a building open for a woman coming in just behind him.
She said, “You don’t have to hold the door open for me just because I’m a woman.”
He smiled, saying, “I’m not holding the door open for you because you’re a woman; I’m holding it open for you because I’m a gentlemen.”
Regardless of what you may think of disappearing, old school courtesy, the point I want to make is this: we do things because of who we are in Christ, not because of who someone else is in life.
Who we are comes from the inside, from our Holy Spirit connection to God. We live and breathe and move according to that Spirit; we’re shaped by the God-life within us, not by the push and pull of the world around us (Colossians 3:5).
We open doors, if you will, because we are one with Jesus, not because of who someone else is or who someone expects us to be or who the culture thinks we ought to be. We “have received the Holy Spirit, and he lives within [us], so [we] don’t need anyone to teach [us] what is true” (1 John 2:27 NLT). We let ourselves “be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness” (1 Peter 1:15 MSG).
And when we open doors, we say, “I do this because I am a Jesus-one. I do this because Jesus-life is present in me.” We do not do because of an image of what we think Christians do, we do because we’re led by the Jesus-life that is stretching us toward a “well-formed maturity” (Romans 12:2 MSG).
If you’d like to receive these devotionals regularly, you can sign-up at www.gracecreates.com/subscribe/. Jon Walker writes from www.gracecreates.com. He is a Zondervan author, and the former writer/editor of the Purpose Driven Life On-Line Devotionals. This devotional is copyrighted 2009 by Jon Walker. Used by permission.
