How Great a Salvation

My community group leader asked a very thought provoking question the other night that I have been wrestling with in my mind “ how great was your salvation?”

We were talking about Colossians 3 and how it calls us to have the flesh crucified and become truly dead.

I am led to ask was mine so great a salvation if there was not death to the flesh completely and absolutely?

I am led to believe as I thumb through the pages of the bible that the Christianity in our day and age is not at all what the apostles experienced in that first century church.

All of them had character and they obeyed and it was a joy to do so.

They were Spirit led in every facet and reached a world because of it.

I read the things Christ calls us all to be in the pages of scripture and I find we are not and all if not all are fully not what Christ intended them to be. Me as well.

This week I have been reading Martin Luther’s writings He likes to ask the question what does this mean?

I like his approach to questioning things.

But I feel much like Luther where I feel the church, in this case the American church has gone a crooked way. We need to get back to the narrow path less tread.

Sam Walter Foss in the following Poem paints that picture very clearly

One day, through the primeval wood,

A calf walked home, as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,

A crooked trail as all calves do.

Since then two hundred years have fled,

And, I infer, the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,

And thereby hangs my moral tale.

The trail was taken up next day

By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell-wether sheep

Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,

As good bell-wethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade,

Through those old woods a path was made.

And many men wound in and out,

And dodged, and turned, and bent about;
And uttered words of righteous wrath,

Because 'twas such a crooked path.
But still they followed - do not laugh -

The first migration of that calf.
And through this winding wood-way stalked,

Because he wobbled when he walked.

This forest path became a lane,

That bent, and turned, and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,

Where many a poor horse with his load,
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,

And traveled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half,

They trod the footsteps of that calf.

The years passed on in swiftness fleet,

The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,

A city's crowded thoroughfare;
And soon the central street was this,

Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half,

Trod the footsteps of that calf.

Each day a hundred thousand rout,

Followed the zigzag calf about;
And o'er his crooked journey went,

The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led,

By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,

And lost one hundred years a day;
For thus such reverence is lent,

To well-established precedent.

A moral lesson this might teach,

Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind,

Along the calf-paths of the mind;

And work away from sun to sun,

To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,

And out and in, and forth and back,

And still their devious course pursue,

To keep the path that others do.
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,

Who saw the first primeval calf !
Ah ! many things this tale might teach - 

But I am not ordained to preach.

I was at a bonfire a few weeks ago and I asked someone who had recently graduated what was the greatest thing he had learned over the course of college. He said it was to not compare himself to others. He learned a truly great lesson. We shouldn't let standards be merely because they are.

We have to go the path God calls us to, not the one bent all askew.

To His Glory alone,
JG