But we look good

Looking out my back window this morning I was watching a group of women golfers teeing it up on the par 3 behind our house. One gal in particular caught my attention. She had the standard golf attire with the visor, shoes, blouse and golf skirt. She teed the ball up and then stood behind it to get her line of where she wanted to hit it. She took a few nice looking practice swings and then approached the ball to hit. She took a mighty swing at the ball and it flew about 40 yards into the pond. You could tell she had no idea what the problem was.

It seems our Christian life so often is like that. We have our Bible, we attend church, we join a small group, we may even serve in some other way on the side. From the outside we look like a functioning Christian but then something goes wrong. We stumble or our kids get into trouble or our marriage falls apart. How could that happen, we were doing all the right things?

Like our golfer, there is more to Christianity then how we look. Christianity is not about how much we serve (although that is important), it's not about the Bible we have or how many times we make it to church. Christianity is about what Jesus has placed in our hearts. It's not rules and appearance it's surrender, sacrifice and becoming Christ-like. It's what we do when only God will know. It's taking what we have learned from the Bible and actually putting it into practice.

Our golfers problem was not her appearance, her swing or her golf knowledge. Her problem was a head problem. She couldn't transfer her book knowledge into actual practice. There are so many that know scripture but fail to put that knowledge into practice. Jesus looks at our heart not our Bible version. He looks at our walk and not our talk.