Last week I had dinner with 3 priests. One was from India and 2 were from Africa.
One of the men from Africa was a shepherd prior to his calling to the ministry. He shared the story of his conversion (he heard a Christmas sermon about the angels speaking to shepherds and how the Good Shepherd sacrifices so that His sheep can enter better pastures) and subsequent persecution he faced for becoming a Christian. This man was banished by his family and friends due to his new found faith in Jesus. He said that his old religion involved sacrificing animals to "lesser gods" and eating the cooked meat. At first he struggled with this and for a while he was still sacrificing after his conversion but refused to eat the meat because of Paul's lesson to the church at Corinth.
The priest's story exposed postmodernism and a twisted worldview many of us have today. Every time I have ever heard a Bible study group discuss Paul's lesson on food offered to idols, people always contextualize the lesson to fit their own lifestyle and circumstances (e.g. "should I eat a sandwich from a Muslim restaurant?" or "What if my favorite Chinese place has a Buddha statue?"). But I now know that today, in our modern world, there are people, in civilized cultures, still eating meat that has been sacrificed to idols.
The fact is that the lessons in the Bible are always relevant on their own and they written as God intended them to be. Our job is to obey them.To quote many a Biblical interpretation professor, "We must strive to understand the Bible, not overstand it."
Brothers and sisters, if we are going to see revival in our land and our lives, we must see things through God's eyes and get past our societal barriers and cultural blinders. We need open minds and open hearts to appreciate what God has given us (how many of us have been banished from our families for our faith) and we need to give Him more every single day.
