Tuesday, November 23, 2010

God, Apathy, and the Windows 7 Phone

One of my new favourite commercials is for the new Windows 7 phone (I'd never buy the phone, but the commercial is GREAT). This is the full, minute long extended edition of that commercial...


Ok...now that you are laughing and entertained, I'm gonna put a spiritual twist to this commercial. I find that, while we can laugh at these people in the commercial who miss out on life because they are so focused on their phone, many Christians do the exact same thing with the Bible. I know right...bold. But think about it. So many Christians go around, with verses in their head, stories, themes, ideas, whatever...all fine and good...but they never live them out. They never use those verses, stories, parables, ideas, lessons. While it's not like we are walking around with a Bible in our face, running into people and forgetting about our wives and family, we do seem to have a lot of "ideas" in our head, and not a lot of "action" in our life.
For example...we read the story of the Good Samaritan, or the passage about "I was hungry and you gave me something to eat", and we feel good about ourselves. We take something from the passage, we try to see Jesus in the homeless, in the forgotten, downtrodden, outcasts, poor. But instead of helping them, we walk by, give a smile and move on. Or, we read about love and acceptance, and see how Jesus hung out with sinners, hookers, drunkards, theives...and yet we stay in our small little cliques. We judge those who are different, we ignore those who disagree with us. We fail to comfort those who are mourning. We read the stories, we get the point in our head...but we don't do anything about it.
Like the commerical...we are missing out on life. Phones are supposed to connect people, and yet the people in the commercial are more disconnected then ever. The Bible is supposed to inspire us to action, and yet we don't act. By just reading the Bible, and doing nothing with our knowledge, nothing with the words, themes, ideas, parables, lessons, we are misuing Scripture. It becomes just a book. And I'm sure, God is looking down from heaven...seeing all of his so called "followers", who claim to love him, serve him, and follow him, and yet they do nothing. They are in their own little world (I should say, We are in our own little world, cause I'm including myself in this too), missing out on opportunities to love, opportunities to serve, and opportunities to show people the love of God...and he is yelling down at us, "REALLY?"
Look up from the pages of the bible. Look outside the windows of the church. Instead of walking around with your head focused on Heaven to see if Jesus is descending, look at the ground to see who you can BE Jesus For?
Anyway...that's just my opinion. What's yours?

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