You gotta love em!

Some of my favorite people in the world are new Christians.  They remind me of all the years I spent working in Junior High ministry.  You tell a Junior Higher to run through a wall and they'll try it.  You tell a Junior Higher that they just need to run at it harder...and they'll try that too.

I love the passion and excitement that I find in new Christians.  It is so refreshing because it seems that the longer I am in church, the more dour the overall atmosphere tends to be.  New believers are the life blood of the church. Show me a church that lacks focus for new believers and I'll show you a church that is dying a slow, painful death.

In today’s passage (I Corinthians 1:4-9) Paul talks about how thankful he is for what he sees in these believers that he was responsible for.  Despite their problems and their immaturity, they have everything they need to grow to maturity.  God had already implanted every spiritual gift in order to catapult them to growth and successful maturity.

I think we tend to undervalue the new believer.  We tend to disregard their zealousness and fervor because they don't have a lot of head knowledge yet.  Because they can't recite the spiritual laws or know the "Roman's Road" by heart we discount their ability to be used.  Obviously Scriptural knowledge must happen, but it isn't to be placed on a higher pedestal than the Holy Spirit living within each believer.

I have a friend at church that has been saved maybe six or eight months.  Yet she has jumped into serving and mentoring and being used in the gifts that God has given her.  She is tearing it up in the spiritual realm.  Most significant to me personally is that she is one of our greatest encouragers, shaming this Christian of almost 40 years!

Wouldn't it be interesting if we did church differently?  Instead of making people prove their "faithfulness" by sitting in the pew for several years, we immediately release them in partnership with other Christians to begin serving.  Instead of making new believers run through this man-made obstacle course to ministry...we show them the goal line and let them start running?