You've Got To Keep Them Separated

Mike Hosey, An Elder

Have you ever taken strips of raw steak or chicken and mixed them in with your nice, crisp, beautifully colored raw vegetables, then put them into the refrigerator for a quick snack later?  Of course you haven’t!  Common sense tells you that your meats will ruin your vegetables. And you almost intuitively know that if you eat that “quick snack” without cooking it, then you could become deathly ill.

The reason is cross contamination.  Raw meat is seething with bacteria that will ruin a human being pretty fast.  If you place that meat in the midst of the vegetables, its bacteria will colonize on them, and make them unfit for consumption. You have to keep them separated!

The bible teaches this concept in many ways.  Perhaps the most notable way is found in 2 Corinthians 6:17, where we are taught to be separate and holy.  We are to be separated from the systems of the world.  We are, after all, not of this world.  Instead, we are simply in it (John 17:14-19).  If we don’t keep ourselves separated from the world, its sin, or its ways of thinking, then we will become more like it, and consequently, less effective for God’s purposes. But God clearly wants us to be in the world for a reason. He tells us so in that passage above. Jesus doesn’t pray for us to be removed from the world.  In His prayer to the Father, He says, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world.” Instead, He asks that we be kept from the evil one.  He then argues that we are sent, just as He was sent! That’s a great privilege! And it’s an ironic one as well.  We are not to be contaminated with the world by allowing its dangerous bacteria in us. Instead, we are to be like an antibiotic that invades and battles the bacteria in whatever host it has taken up residence in.  In our case that bacteria has taken up residence in the world God has created.  And he is using us as his antibiotic to reclaim it.

This idea of separation is found all throughout the Bible.  And Jesus is the pinnacle of that separation.  Consider that Jesus died and brought us the Holy Spirit, so that God’s people can be separated from the world. The church is then created from those people so that it can go back into the world as an instrument for God’s continuing redemption of a sin infected world. In fact, Satan should fear CROSS contamination in the world he has stolen.

Are you allowing God to separate you from anything so that you can be a part of that redemption?