Our Beliefs: Personal Holiness
God considers His people to be set apart from the rest of the world. We are not to be of the world but to bring truth, hope, love, compassion and of course the Good News of Jesus Christ to the world. We at Drakes realize this is a difficult thing to accomplish, because the world is so alluring. In the Old Testament, we can see that God has a problem whenever we put anything ahead of Him. God told them to love Him with all their heart soul and might. He does not like things of the world to be above Him. So this is the challenge in this very busy, self-centered, evil world we live in. Can we live different than the rest of the world? Do we not watch PG or R rated movies because they would not please God? Do we treat people different when we are stuck in a long checkout line at the store? Do we manically weave through traffic to get to work on time?
You know living a holy life is challenging and we need all the help we can get.
So what is the church to do about someone that is living blatantly in sin, each day and does not show a desire to repent. Well, we are all called to holiness, but we need to careful in judging others. In Matthew 7 it tells us to look first at our life and then we can come to our brother in love. But to let a brother to fall into the condemnation of Christ because we were silent, then we too must face the Judge. Are some sins worst than others? All sin is bad, and all people have some sin in their lives. In the Old Testament, some sin had greater consequences than other sins, and some sins were called an abomination or perversion. So yes there is different level of sin, but we should not ever consider that our sin is better than his/her's sin. God wants us to deal with sin and not justify it by comparing it to someone else's sin. If you want to do a comparison, compare our sin, my sin, to Jesus. Ouch.