Thoughts from The Bible

Thoughts from the Bible

Wednesday, 31 January 2024 08:53

Have You Started
Walking Yet?
by Joey Carroll Corinth Missionary Baptist Church

A meme popped up on my social media feed the other day that hurt my feelings a little bit, even though I laughed. It was a picture of Kermit the Frog with a disappointed look on his face as he gazed out of a window. And the caption above him read, “This marks the 11th year in a row that I didn’t make it to the gym.” Yep, it has been a minute since I made it out to the gym. In fact, these days my body and I have agreed to leave the gym for those truly committed folk and just be consistent at going for a walk.
The Bible speaks quite a bit about walking, though it does not mean the physical act. For the Spirit-filled writers of the Bible, they would often use the idea of “walking” to describe the way in which we live our lives. And for the Bible, that can only be in one of two ways. We either walk in the flesh, which is a reference to living a life to satisfy our own selfish and sinful desires, or we walk in the Spirit, which is a reference to living a life to the glory of God. As followers of Jesus, we are called to walk that particular way which glorifies God, and John helps us to understand that way in greater detail. 

One of the ways that John wants us to walk is in obedience to the commands of God. Hopefully you immediately recognize a problem. Oh how we struggle to walk in obedience to the commands of God. When the eternal Son of God, Jesus Christ, came to this earth and was born as a man, He walked in perfect obedience to the Father. Jesus kept every “jot and tittle” of God’s Law and met every righteous demand of the Law perfectly. Which for us is nothing short of the greatest of joys because we could never do that. We were born with the utter inability to meet the righteous requirements of God’s Law. So in the Gospel, God grants the perfect obedience of His Son to be given to us through faith in the person and work of Jesus. 

And once we have been born again through that faith, we are filled with the Holy Spirit, whose primary job is to empower us to walk in that newness of life we have received. In other words, when John tells us to walk in obedience, we are able to do so with an obedience from the heart.  As Sarah said last week, it becomes our joy to walk in obedience to the commands of God.

Another way that John instructs us to walk is to walk in love. As it turns out, the new commands of the New Testament are identical to the old commands in the Old Testament. As the people of God, we are to walk in love. Godly love, as described in the Bible, is the identifying mark for a child of God. And, it makes perfect sense if you think about it. My children share many of the physical attributes of both me and their mother. The good-looks all three of them share come from their mother, and two of them have my eyes, two my nose. And it looks as though my son may end up with my hair and that is not a good thing, since I lost all of it several years ago. But you can look at all 3 and tell who they came from. In a similar way, God is love, and when we are born again by the Spirit of God, we share in that attribute of God. We share in His love.

Now certainly that love grows over time, but it does grow. In fact, John says whoever continues to walk in hatred of his brother does not know God and continues to walk in darkness. Strong words, but words of truth nonetheless. As the followers of Christ, we must walk as He walked and to do so is to walk in obedience to God as well as in the love of God.