That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that
ye, being rooted and grounded in love.
Ephesians, Chapter 3, verse 17.
I like the mental picture that I get when I think of
Christ dwelling in my heart. I break His
heart when I focus on making worldly choices.
I get caught up in looking at all the angles to save a dime, not
necessarily because I need to. It’s more
of an intellectual challenge to find my very best deal and it’s exhilarating to
find a bargain!
When I go to purchase things, I often look at all
the prices that are stamped on the items.
Sometimes they mislabel them, pricing an item considerably lower than
all the rest. I know it must be some
type of error but I’ve taken it to the cash register, exhilarated because I
have found this great deal.
I try to rationalize it in my mind, saying that it’s
the store’s fault for mislabeling things and they have to live up to their
error or it is false advertising. Then I
usually get a strong, intense feeling that I’m doing something against my
religious principals. I know that I’m
not being a good example of how God works in my life and I generally tell the
cashier about the price difference.
I say generally, because writing this has made me
aware that I just did this recently and I didn’t draw it to the cashier’s
attention. We were driving through Kansas
I feel terrible about this, because I feel like I am
being a hypocrite as I write this to you.
It just so happened that I still had the receipt. I just went to see if it had an address on
it, but it didn’t. Of course, that would
have been the chicken way out! It would
have been pretty easy to send this person $3.00 in the mail. It did have the phone number on the receipt,
so I called.
I apologized and wanted her address to send her the
money. (They don’t have mail service for
the turnpike businesses.) When she told
me that wasn’t necessary, I explained that I consider myself a Christian and
needed to live by my Christian ethics and I hadn’t. I knew there had been a $3.00 difference in
the price of the figurines and hadn’t brought it to her attention.
She told me not to worry about it, but I do—not
because of the $3.00. It bothers me that
I could find it so easy to backslide into old worldly ways when I think I’m
making great strides at being the person that God wants me to be.
This has been a very humbling experience for
me. Satan can sneak into our lives
through very subtle things and I let him do it without even batting an
eye! Fortunately, Jesus dwells in my
heart and lets me know when I’m not living the life that He wants.
Because this is an example of how I’ve applied this Bible passage to my life, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the whole meaning of the passage.
