Below is the transcript from the video.
This weekend, I was hiking, and God, of course, challenged me. He always gives me something to think about when we’re out together in the wilderness. The thought He challenged me with was “Am I wasting my time in Christianity?” You may say, “What? Are you wasting your time?” Yes, this is what He’s challenged me with. The question is, “Am I the real deal, or am I a fake?” Let’s look at what the “fake” looks like. God took me to His Word. What does a person who isn’t even a Christian look like?
Jesus said that many are going to come to Him and say, “Lord, didn’t we cast out devils in your name? Didn’t we do all these wonderful works in your name?” And He’s going to say “I don’t know who you are.” The fact that you do good works, the fact that you do miracles is not proof that you belong to God. If you’ve accepted Christ as your Savior, that is step one. You’ve got to go there first. You can’t depend on your own works—it has to be that salvation is a free gift from God. It’s by grace through faith, right?
He took me to Galatians chapter 5 where it talks about the people who will not inherit the kingdom of God. He says, “People who practice things like idolatry (which is making anything more important than God), hatred, jealousies, outbursts of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, envying, sexual immorality—if we practice these things, we will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Again, it’s going back to the fact that we cannot work to get salvation. We have to do it by grace through faith. “It’s a gift of God,” the Bible says. I start to feel pretty confident and think, “I’ve done those things, but I’m not practicing those things. I know that I belong to you.” God tells me, “Let’s go a little further, Kim. Let’s go to 1 Corinthians 13.”—which talks about love. It’s the love chapter, right? He says, “If you speak with tongues of men and angels, if you prophesy, if you have all knowledge and understand all mysteries, you have faith that moves mountains, you feed the poor but you don’t have love, you are nothing.” In other words, you’ve done nothing. Wow, Ok, now you’re hitting closer to home.
So I’m like, “God, show me the good news. Show me how to be real. You’ve shown me what the fake looks like. Show me how to be real.” Well, back to the words of Jesus, where He said in John 13, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you. This is the way people will know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another.” Of course, back to 1 Corinthians Ch. 13, which talks about what love looks like. “God’s love is longsuffering, is kind, is does not envy, it does not parade itself, it does not puff itself up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not think evil, does not rejoice when bad things happen to other people, but it rejoices in truth, believes all things, bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things and love never fails.” I was like, “Ok God I have got a long way to go. That’s not me at all and I have a long way to go.”
And then He took me, finally, to Galatians Ch. 5 where it says, “and the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, meekness, gentleness—against such there is no law.” That’s the “real deal”. If you’re wondering and struggling about whether you are the “real deal” as a Christian, like God was challenging me, think about your life today. Were the fruits of the Spirit pouring out of you? When people met you did they see love, did they see joy, did they see a longsuffering spirit, did they see kindness, goodness, meekness, gentleness, or did they see something else?
This has been a real challenge for me because I want to be the “real deal”. If I’m going to waste my time being a Christian then I want it to be “real deal”. Otherwise, what’s the point? What’s the point of even pretending to be a Christian if, at the end of your life, you’re going to stand before Jesus and He’s going to say, “I don’t even know who you are.” Right? Or at the end of your life, He’s going to say, “Look, everything you did was for nothing. You did it all for yourself. It was all for selfish ambition. You didn’t do it for me. You did it to be recognized, to be puffed up, to be esteemed of your peers—not of genuine unselfish love.”
I hope this encourages you. I know it’s hard, but we have to give this to God. This is something that we can’t do without the Spirit—that’s why they’re called the “fruits of the Spirit” because they have to come from God. My prayer for myself is that I will let the fruits of the Spirit live through me and that when people know me or see me, they can see Jesus. I hope this encourages you.
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