With every passing day, year and decade, what is popular and trendy keeps veering further from what God would approve, and this shouldn’t be news to us. Barrister Paul, in his second letter to his protégé Timothy, predicted that people would become self-centred, proud, ungrateful, unforgiving, uncontrolled, and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
That means there will be moments when following God will make you look strange. There should be decisions you make that your friends don’t understand, especially those not in the faith. There will be opportunities you walk away from because they require you to compromise your convictions. There will be conversations where your silence makes you different, and moments when saying “no” makes you unpopular.
Don’t be too quick to assume that being different means you are doing something wrong. If anything, the believing man should occasionally find it strange when everyone agrees with him. By our design, we are counter-cultural. We are called to swim against the tide of societal approval and public opinion when that tide is flowing away from God, as often as that is.
It is not a call to arrogance, or a judgmental or deliberately difficult stance, We are not being strange for the sake of it, we are called to be faithful to a master.
Our standard is not what everyone is doing, it is not what is trending, it is not even what earns us applause most of the time. Our standard is Christ.
So, if following Him makes you strange sometimes, be strange.
Ironically, many successes in life would require your enduring being seen as strange, or unconventional, at least until there is proof that your path leads somewhere desirable or profitable.
Better to be considered strange by men and found faithful by God than to be applauded by everyone and lose your way in the process.
I’ll write you next week, think on these things in the meantime.
JACK, Sogbeye
God’s man
