Stand Out

I’ve been preaching and teaching about the life of John the Baptist for the past several weeks. I find him to be a fascinating person from the Bible. He lived a wild life. He spent most of his adult years living in the wilderness in Israel near the Jordan River, and when I say wilderness I really mean he pretty much lived in the desert. It was a brutal and inhospitable environment. He ate locust and honey as the staples of his diet and he wore clothes made from camel hair. The guy was kind of a wild man. He lived his life at his own speed and obviously didn’t care what other people might have thought about him.

I think we have a lot to learn from John. He teaches us many lessons, but the one I want to think about in this post is that he was different and he didn’t care. It was obvious that he didn’t fit in with the culture. He was a great preacher, but he had nothing in common with the religious leaders of the day in Israel. The people came to hear him because it was all so unusual. People were drawn by the stories of the wild man from the wilderness preaching and baptizing, but his message was what really captivated the entire country. The Bible tells us people came from Jerusalem, the small towns, and all over the countryside. He drew people from all walks of life.

He was radically different from anyone or anything that they had seen or heard. His message was challenging. He called people to repent of their sins because the Kingdom of God was near, and boy was it near. What I like was he was obviously comfortable standing out from the crowd. He didn’t want to be like the other religious leaders. He didn’t want to live like the average person. John knew who he was, and he was comfortable with that. Christians need to think the same way today. John didn’t need to conform and neither do we.

People naturally want to fit in and be accepted, but when that acceptance comes at the cost of compromising what the Word of God teaches us is right and true then the cost is too high. I really believe that Christians today need to come to the place of being ok standing out. We need to be ok with not blending into the culture around us. Christians all over the world today and throughout history have dealt with this, but it is something new for those of us in modern western culture. While the culture, what is acceptable, and even the definition of sin changes around us we must be like John and be comfortable being different. It is ok to not go along with the program. John didn’t go along with the religious program. He was a bit of a rebel, to say the least, and we are still talking about that rebel 2,000 years later. You need to get comfortable in your own skin and decide, like John, what you believe. Then you need to be willing to stand for that against the tide of culture. Plant your feet firmly in the Word of God as it is written and refuse to move.