Living in the Spirit
October 30, 2015

Scripture Reading: Hebrews 9:11-14

For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God! –Hebrews 9:11-14

How do we identify dead works? Are they the routines we do through life whether they are accomplishing their purpose or not? Did they actually ever have a purpose? Are they something we inherited from our families or work or school that we do without thinking? Are they perfectly good activities that are not gaining the results desired?

I have been through a lot of management classes as a government employee trying to make government operate more like private business. The people who press these issues are missing one important ingredient: whether it is in private business’s mission statement or not its sole purpose is to make a profit. That singularity of purpose makes it easy, for example to walk away from a store, fire all the employees, and open another store somewhere else or drop the production of a product because it did not sell well but might have been of high quality even better than anything else like it.

The sole purpose of government is to provide for the common good. In a recession, while the economy takes a nose dive, public assistance programs increase, sometimes markedly, while their income source, tax collections, goes down. Government does not have the luxury of just walking away and saying we will see you when the economy turns around. I think we also would agree as tax payers that we want the best bridges for the long-trim rather than a trendy one that will have to be replaced sooner than later and hopefully before it collapses beneath our car’s weight.

Our purpose as children of God is to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Anything that separates us from that purpose is dead works. The challenge is to understand what it really means to love and then do it.

Prayer: Lord, you set examples of your love on page after page of our Bibles. Help us discern how your examples work in our world and then help us do it. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized 
Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council 
of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights 
reserved.