A Portrait of A Christian

Husbands — love your wives as your own bodies. Wives — respect your husbands and submit to them. Children — obey your parents; honour your father and mother. Fathers — do not exasperate your children; make sure that they know the instruction of the Lord. Slaves — serve wholeheartedly as if you were serving the Lord not men.

Masters — treat your slaves in the same way; do not threaten them. It is not on what is due to me, but what I owe to others, and that is where the whole Christian ethic lies. Love is what we continually owe people. To every single human being we are in debt to love them. The boss owes every single one of his workmen love. The family member owes love to every single other member. In whatever form we meet men and women, perhaps they are members of our families, or our neighbours, some we have known for years while others we never met before providence had brought us together that very day, but we are to love them as ourselves.

It includes our bosses or our inferiors, and even our enemies — the people who want to do us harm — in whatever state you come across them you stand under an unqualified obligation to love them. What do we owe them and how can we discharge that debt? You can project the same emphasis into your relationship with God, because there again it is never a question of our rights as over against God, our right to happiness, our right to health, our right to possessions, our right to relationships.

It is a question of our continuing debt to love them and how we can discharge that debt. Boaz saw a righteous God, a rewarding God, a God of justice and rectitude, and that meant that Boaz was under obligation to respond with a lifestyle and conduct that pleased him.

That has little to do with our text except to show the ancestry of this word and the happy context it which our fathers used it. It was not to do with inebriation, and so we are told here that Boaz had eaten and drank with his family and his crew of men as the harvest had been all safely gathered into the barns, and at the end of a happy evening his heart was merry. Why am I pondering on this verse? We find Boaz here fully participating in the annual celebrations that marked the end of the barley harvest.

We find constant reference in the Old Testament to feasts and festivities. We read that corn and wine were considered to be gifts given by God to gladden our hearts. There had been years of famine that had driven Naomi and her family out of the land, but now those years have come to an end and the people are rejoicing that all the harvest has been safely gathered in ere the winter storms begin, and they were eating and drinking together.

Their hearts were merry. Why does the Bible have this sort of emphasis on milk and honey, on corn and wine, on feasts and festivals, on these people being merry? I would suggest that it means that we are being encouraged in our Christian lives to be fully and totally human. Now there are two problems as I see it in my intrigue with this whole question of a merry Christian.

How do we as Christians react? Let us look at it from this perspective, asking what are the great perils in this area? I would say that there are two dangers. Their religion, their existence and their whole philosophy is to drink — binge drinking, and teenage drinking. It is to have stimulation upon stimulation, to swallow pills and sniff lines of drugs, insatiation upon insatiation, an endless round of pleasure-seeking, indulging in their instincts and appetites, stirring them up by newer and more powerful sensations.

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That is their search, for the new drugs on the block because the old ones are no longer providing the buzz; that is their god, said Paul. They are worshipping their own bellies. As a result the fifth biggest killer today is liver disease. That is how this god rewards his followers. The Bible and the New Testament especially speaks out very clearly against that kind of lifestyle. It condemns the pleasure that degenerates, as Paul says, into excess. It condemns the pleasure that becomes idolatrous, where a man simply lives for that pleasure and it becomes his god.

It condemns the pleasure upon which a man becomes dependent, and to which a man becomes addicted so that he cannot live without this particular indulgence. Above all it condemns those pleasures that destroy self-discipline and that reduces our efficiency as Christian believers. The New Testament exhorts every disciple to pummel his body, and keep it in submission, and train himself like every true sportsman trains themselves. We are to exercise moderation and strict discipline in all those areas. Let your self control and graciousness be known to all men, Paul tells the Philippian church. Certainly Boaz was not neglecting that.

There is no hint that he was in any way intoxicated. I would suggest to you that that mentality producing such prohibitions again falls under the condemnation of the New Testament. For example, the apostle was instructing the Colossians and he warned them of the false teachers who were creeping into the church. They lacked all divine authority. They were an appearance of wisdom but in fact they were a false humility Cols.

Again, Paul writes to Timothy and he warns him how soon people would depart from the faith, and along would come hypocritical liars who would teach simple Christians the doctrines of devils. What doctrines are these?

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But you might as well start with his treatment of classic hymns on Hymns: A Portrait of Christ. The charismatic Green, with a fine understanding of arrangements and the assistance of producer Greg Nelson, also sparkles with three medleys on this collection of church staples. File this work under inspirational with a capital I. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

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Radio Online - Tony Evans - Portrait of a Christian Family, Part 1

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Implications for Christian Life

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A Portrait of Christ

The Ultimate Collection [2 CD]. People Need the Lord. For God and God Alone. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. More Than 50 Most Loved Hymns. Product description Brand New Amazon. To take Jesus seriously is to embody his example and vision of compassion and inclusiveness. A life with a social-political imperative involves political consciousness-raising about the way political structures profoundly impact human life.

Jesus was a social prophet:. One can make a very good case that Jesus was killed because he stood against the domination systems of his day and advocated an alternative social vision. To care about human beings means to care about devising more humane and just and compassionate social structures. Spirit , compassion , and the quest for justice are at the center of a Christian life that takes this portrait of Jesus seriously.