Christ or culture?

We live in a society of extremes. Extreme rights, extreme lefts, extreme sports? Well maybe extreme sports doesn't fit but you get the picture. Christianity is no exception. We as Christians seem to get engulfed in a sub-culture that is filled with extremes. We will go to church 5 days a week, only listen to Christian music, only hang out with our Christian friends.We forget that Christ hung out with the lowly. He hung out with prostitutes, and tax collectors. He hung out with the outcasts.

I was taking back a years worth of bottles to the store the other day. I came across a guy who was asking for bottles that the machines didn't except. He wasn't begging for money, or asking anything other than the cans that people would end up throwing away anyway. My first thought was, "get a job lowlife." Seriously, I actually thought that. I just wanted to take my cans back without being bothered. I realized in the next moment what a prideful ass I am. I realized how high I hold myself. But then the reality hit me that I was no better than anybody else there. At any moment, life could hit us and we could be the ones asking for rejected cans.

Not only do we hold ourselves in high esteem, but we fail to see our own depravity. You see, we roll in the mud, yet fail to see that we are doing so. We ride these moral trains that we can't even uphold ourselves. We look at others and think, "I would never do that." Or, "look what a mess so and so's life is. Thank God I am not like them." We are the biggest pharisees of them all, and whats worse is that we don't even see it. We are too engulfed in religious things to really see who we are in the flesh. Take a look, its ugly.

Any one of us is capable of any amount of evil. We watch our television and rejoice when we see men like Osama Bin Ladan executed. Yet if we were born in the middle east, we may have been by his side.

In Christ we have been made new. I will say it again, IN CHRIST. Why do we continue to walk through life in this bullshit sub-culture, acting as if we have obtained something by our own efforts? I do this daily. I think I am better than you. I think that I am something really special, but I am not. We are all flawed human beings that constantly make a mess of things. Its time that we start giving credit to who deserves the credit, Christ. Because in and of myself, I am just another fool. A fool who has taken the best seat in the house, only to be asked to sit in the back row.