Bible Text: 2 Corinthians 5:17 | Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 2 Corinthians 5:17

What I’m about to mention is purely hypothetical. It couldn’t happen; it won’t happen, but it would be interesting if it did happen. Like what? OK, for a moment suppose that Paul, the rabbi turned missionary and evangelist, the one who wrote 13 of the 27 New Testament books, should come alive today and visit a few churches where you live. Let’s suppose that he walked up and down the aisles and sat in the pews along with the rest of us. He then talked with us on the patio, and got a feeling for what’s really happening in our lives and families.

Then—and this is where the situation gets interesting—he went to a few basketball games, a few hockey games, watched television in the homes of a few of the people he had met at church, visited the shopping mall, and simply interacted with the crowd hanging out at the local bar or pub.

Now here’s the bottom line: Would he see any difference in the people he had met on the patio of the church, as he sipped a cup of Starbucks and had a donut with them, and the ones at the game, the mall, or the bar?

Perhaps you may be thinking, “Hey, should there be any difference? After all, everybody has problems today.”

There’s one thing for certain. The people to whom Paul wrote those 13 letters were at one time no different from the ones who hung out at the public games, the markets, the baths, the drinking establishments, and the brothels of the first century. Walk through the ruins of ancient Ephesus and notice that the brothel, located literally next door to the city hall, was the largest, most palatial structure in the city. Go to Corinth and see the Temple of Aphrodite, the sex goddess, where a thousand prostitutes, operating as priestesses under the veil of religion—after all, if it is good, then God made it, right?—walked the streets and plied their trade.

Alcohol abuse, homosexuality, dishonesty, theft, and sexual abuse were rampant and had been part of the lifestyle fabric of those who were now in the church—at least in times past. To them Paul wrote, “Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers not male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.” But the real kicker is what immediately followed as he wrote, “And that is what some of you were” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). Then he adds, “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

Wow! There was a difference! Their lives had been changed, and what they were prior to their encounter with Jesus Christ was vastly different from the individuals they became.

One of the saddest indictments of contemporary Christianity is that there is so little actual difference between the lives of those at the bar and those who sit in church and drink their Starbucks on the patio.

A church is not a holy huddle, a small group of people who have withdrawn from the world so they are not tainted by “those people out there!” But they are ordinary people, redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ and changed by the Spirit of God.

As I think of the church, the bottom line is that none are so bad they must stay out while none are so good they should not come inside.

Frankly, the difference I would hope to see is joy, honesty, compassion, love, commitment to family, and values that reflect our faith.

There should be a difference. There is. Make it personal.

Resource reading: 1 Corinthians 6